Curated Chaos - vol.10 🛸🌍🌐🧠👁️
Transmissions from the global brain
Time for some more mind-expanding miscellanea!
Serving suggestion: Pick 1-3 links that pique your interest. Nonchalantly discard the rest.
What can our thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness?
Michael Pollan explores how attempts to map consciousness reveal a strange terrain where thoughts often emerge before language, and expose how little we truly understand the architecture of our own minds.
Go deeper: A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness
Send in the clowns
Angie Meltsner shares her thoughts on the cultural significance of clowning.
Pair with: Fun isn’t trivial
Encrusting the tortoise
Everyone’s talking about taste, eh?
Douglas Brundage argues that AI has exposed the hollowness of a culture that confused curation, reference literacy, and minimalist consumer aesthetics for genuine artistic vision, revealing that real taste emerges from the friction of actually forming a point of view.
Skittles made a gaming controller that’s also a classical flute
“The idea came from the world of challenge gaming, where players intentionally make games harder by creating their own absurd rules or controllers,” Ashley Gill, VP of brands and content marketing, tells Muse. “When we looked at that community, it already felt very Skittles: chaotic, playful and pleasantly perplexing.”
A feral guide to marketing
“You probably will not be able to predict what goes viral. If it were easy, everyone would do it. It’s much better to instead just put out everything in high volume, and then notice which of those things does better, and then gradually shift your attention to things more similar to those. You must grow towards the light like a tree; put out many branches, feel out what gets more rewards, and then pump more energy into those leaves. You cannot plan something super complex in advance. You must release yourself into the winds and let your process emerge slowly, in constant conversation with your environment.”
Well said, Aella.
What if our ancestors didn’t feel anything like we do?
As someone long interested in the universal dimensions of human experience, I’m not predisposed to accept historian Rob Boddice’s claims about the unknowability of the emotions of the people who preceded us. The implications get quite dark, quite fast. Nevertheless, this was a thought-provoking read.
Pair with: On recovering a forgotten sense — Nicolas Campbell’s exploration of the imaginal, its loss, and its possible return.
Corduroy Psychedelia: On Boards of Canada, hauntology, and the PBS unconscious
A beautiful meditation from SEREPTIE on 80s childhood sick days, our changing media landscape, the nature of memory, and disintegrating postwar visions of a utopian future.
Anti-dystopia
Johannes Kleske investigates the “third way between preemptive surrender and blind hope” where we constructively rebel against circumstance regardless of the long-term prognosis. A very timely read.
Finally, a fun and trippy web-toy…
Go on, have a play with EZ-Tree!
