Timber frame raising

Rising in the wary summer sun

Both of the shifts can be tied back to two things: the rise of hip-hop and the growing popularity of digital music production, or recording on computers.

“The Death of the Key Change” by Chris Dalla Riva.

[Elon Musk’s] bigger problem is that he does not seem to know what he bought. There is little hope of Twitter becoming a “common digital town square,” as he put it in a recent letter to the advertisers. Instead Twitter, like all social media, is a “discourse-themed video game”. Specifically, it is a multiplayer online battle arena, where competing networks of accounts (informally led by influencers and blue checks) do battle. Luckily for Musk, there has been an enormous amount of experimentation with this genre of online games over the past few decades, and there is a clear winner of a business model: freemium with micropayments.

-Jon Askonas in this smart piece for Unherd called “Elon Musk doesn’t understand what he‘s bought.”

The distinctively modern feature of totalitarianism is that it combines a radically artficialist ideal with a radically organicist ideal. The image of the body comes to be combined with the image of the machine. Society appears to be a community of all whose members are strictly interdependentent; at the same time it is assumed to be constructing itself day by day, to be striving toward a goal—the creation of a new man—and to be living in a state of permanent mobilization.

Claude LeFort, “The Question of Democracy” in Democracy and Political Theory (1989).