Editor’s Note
Earlier today my friend Gordon Brander shared his brilliant essay Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile? In the lead-up to that essay, Gordon posed that same question to other contributors to the Flux Collective. As I thought through my response, I was reminded of a polarity I had been thinking about deeply earlier this year.
The internet has an unstoppable drive to remove friction. To date, this removal of friction has primarily manifested itself as huge gains in customer convenience. Convenience comes at the cost of creativity. It is what clear-cut logging is to an old-growth forest. Far less dynamic, but far more efficient to operate in.
Much of the way we talk about user experience today is actually in service to convenience. We talk about stripping the friction out of a user experience in the same manner that Frederick Taylor talked about managing out the inefficiencies in manufacturing. Tasks are measured and then optimized so that they can go from browsing to cart to checkout to your home as quickly and frictionlessly as possible.
Convenience has a bedfellow and that bedfellow is centralization. By bringing all operations under a single domain, centralization paves the way for more convenience. Centralization enables a single destination. A single user interface to learn. A single password. A single payment wallet. A single expectation of trust.
Decentralization by contrast is creativity. Creativity is messy, it is rarely a straight line. Creativity is not efficient. It is a little good, hidden inside a whole lot of bad. Most creative professionals always play with a problem for much longer before they try to resolve it.
However, because decentralization like creativity is unconstrained, over many revolutions, it ultimately has a much better chance of solving novel problems becomes it is able to map the entire morphospace of possibilities vs. constraining itself to the most probable paths.
So we are now introduced to our key tension: Centralization (convenience) needs decentralization (creativity) in order to uncover the disruptive ideas lurking in the unexplored dark corners of possibility, but decentralization (creativity) needs centralization (convenience) in order to bring those ideas to the mainstream.
In a Daily Update from earlier this week, Ben Thompson touches on a contemporary example of this phenomenon with crypto. Crypto with all of its ponzi-like messiness, its jpg, and its inefficiencies is at the frontier of creativity today. And it is its decentralized nature that is empowering that creativity. There is no beurocracy restricting the ideas for crypto to only the project most likely to succeed - pixelated jpgs of punks likely would never have seen the light of day. But, at the same time, still, only about 14% of Americans own crypto right now and many of those own crypto through Coinbase - a centralized identity place for searching, purchasing, and storing crypto. For new creative crypto projects such as Loot, mainstream access is much more difficult.
This was also my answer to Gordon’s provocation. Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile? Simply put, by the time the iPhone came around the creativity of the web needed to be more centralized in order to reach a wider audience, and the App Store on the iPhone was the force that emerged to fill that need. By creating a centralized, frictionless place to safely discover, preview, purchase, and review software, the App Store was able to take the web mainstream. When the iPhone came out, the desktop did not have that place. And by the time it did, it was already too late.
So what is the take-away from all this? Besides being a fun concept to turn around inside my head, a key lesson is that neither creativity nor convenience is ultimately superior. Without creativity, our search space would be significantly constrained and progress would slow to a halt. But without centralization, our most creative ideas would languish in obscurity, inaccessible to the masses.
Another takeaway is key takeaway is for crypto enthusiasts. In Ancient Chinese philosophy, yin and yang is a concept of dualism, describing how obviously opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another. Crypto may indeed be a new technological epoch, but the forces of centralization are strong. In fact, they are the yin to decentralizations yang.
What I’m Listening To
This week I’m listening to 2 recently spiritual jazz albums that are destined to be regarded as masterpieces:
Inspired by the spiritual jazz of the 1970s and shaded in with vocals, bop, and hip-hop, the Munich-based quartet Web Web has released three albums and an EP of remixes prior to Web Max. With Web Max, they’ve teamed up with the composer, musician, and rapper Max Herre whose production is critical to achieving the vibe they’ve achieved here.
Also critical is the A-list cast of special guests that includes harpist phenom Brandee Younger (whom I covered in this newsletter earlier this year), Heliocentrics tenor saxophonist Ben Abarbanel-Wolff, Ethio-jazz legend Mulatu Astatke, jazz giant Charles Tolliver, and the late great Yusef Lateef.
Through these contributions, Web Web and Max Herre “summon the spirit of ‘70s jazz while keeping it contemporary through beat-oriented productions”. Altogether, Web Max is one of my favorite jazz albums of the year. Listen here.
The other recent release I can’t stop listening to is Nat Birchall’s, Ancient Africa. Hailed by Gilles Peterson as “one of the best musicians in the UK”, saxophonist Nat Birchall is a hidden UK jazz treasure. For well over a decade, the Manchester composer, saxophonist, and multi-instrumentalist has released some of the most standout jazz recordings to come out of any region, as well as some great contemporary dub alongside Al Breadwinner.
With Ancient Africa, Birchall has outdone himself. The six-track record blends together spiritual melodies and Coltrane-style solos, with African-influenced percussion. The result is an album that “captures the spirit of John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and others” while pushing the sound of spiritual jazz forward. Listen to Ancient Africa here.
What I’m Reading
This past Labor Day, as I am wont to do anytime we head out to the Point Reyes National Seashore, I stole a few minutes from our agenda to stop into my favorite bookstore on the planet Point Reyes Books. The power of Point Reyes Books rests both in its charm - it is a foundation of the community - and its ability to, in relatively few square feet, help readers discover books they might not find elsewhere.
Every time I step into Point Reyes Books I come away with a magical gem and this time was no different. After exhibiting incredible self-control (I do not have any free room on my bookshelves) I eschewed the many books piquing my curiosity and settled on a small, pocket-sized copy of How to Walk by Thich Nhat Hanh.
Measuring at 4 x 0.34 x 6 inches, How to Walk is part of a charming series of books from Zen Master, Thich Nhat Hanh, that explores the foundations of mindful meditation. Through short, simple musings, the Zen Master shares how slow, concentrated walking while focusing on in- and out-breaths allows for a unique opportunity to be in the present.
That the opportunity to be in the present is so unique is something I’ve been turning around in my head for the rest of the week, because we are in fact, physically only ever in the present, but consciously we rarely are. Being present puts us on the frontier of consciousness, but instead of being there, we are almost always narrativizing the past or future. We spend time ruminating on what could have been or imagining what will be, but this behavior is an anti-pattern. Specifically, when spending a lot of time envisioning the future we believe we are setting ourselves up for success. Like the basketball player mentally rehearsing hitting clutch free throws at the end of the game, by spending so much time in the future we think we are preparing ourselves, but key differences exist between our futures and the free throws that are being mentally rehearsed.
Specifically, the game of basketball is what the neuroscientist David Rangel calls a “kind learning environment”. In “kind learning environments”, patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid. For example, in golf or chess, a ball or piece is moved according to rules and within defined boundaries, a consequence is quickly apparent, and similar challenges occur repeatedly. Drive a golf ball, and it either goes too far or not far enough; it slices, hooks, or flies straight. The player observes what happened, attempts to correct the error, tries again, and repeats for years. That is the very definition of deliberate practice, the type identified with both the ten-thousand-hours rule and the rush to early specialization in technical training. The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better. “Kind learning environments” are predictable and thus well suited for mental rehearsing.
But most of us do not operate in “kind learning environments”. Instead, most of us operate in what David Rangel calls “wicked domains”. In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both. In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons.
“Wicked domains” are also complex, that is agents inside of the system dynamically react to both the actions of other agents, but also the emergent outcomes of those interactions. All this makes “wicked domains” virtually impossible to predict, but here we are, spending most of our waking hours trying to do exactly that.
This prediction in the face of almost insurmountable odds of being correct has incredibly pernicious implications. In effect, we set ourselves up to be, at best constantly distracted by comparing the lived experience against the imagined experience and, at worst, constantly disappointed because the lived experience does not measure up to the experience we imagined.
We would all do much better to stop spending so much time mentally preparing for an unpredictable future and instead follow the instruction of Tich Nhat Hanh, spending more of our time at the frontier of consciousness - walking and reveling in the way the light comes in on a particular day, how the breeze feels against our face, the way music sounds or the pressure when your foot touches the ground.
To learn How to Walk, pick up your copy at Point Reyes Books.
Worth Your Time
The Last Glimpses of California's Vanishing Hippie Utopias (GQ) - Half a century ago, a legion of idealists dropped out of society and went back to the land, creating a patchwork of utopian communes across Northern California. Here, GQ offers a glimpse of their otherworldly residences—and the tail end of a grand social experiment.
The fashion exec’s guide to the metaverse (Vogue) - “One could argue that Fortnite is already one of the largest apparel companies in the world. $3-5B/year, predominantly in the sale of [purely cosmetic] virtual outfits. That exceeds Prada, Fenty, D&G, many more” - Matthew Ball - featured prominently in this explanation of the key technologies and projects most influential to fashion across digital clothing, mixed reality, gaming, NFTs, and beyond.
How Gaming Will Change Humanity as We Know It - (Bloomberg) - The economist Tyler Cowen explores how crypto makes it much easier for virtual in-game currency to be converted into real-world currency and the challenges that poses for regulators.
The Education of a Part-Time Punk (New Yorker) - A beautifully written essay by Kelefa Sanneh on learning to look for new music to love at the edges by DJ’ing at a college radio station. “We still take music personally, because we still listen to it socially: with other people, or at least while thinking of other people. And, historically, the moments when everyone seems to be listening to the same songs are the moments when some people are brave and immature enough to say fuck this and fuck that and start something new, or halfway new. That will probably always sound like a good idea to me.”
Off-White - Virgil Abloh, an icon of our time
This week was one of those weeks where several independent threads intersect simultaneously in a way that can only be described through the word “serendipity”. On Tuesday, I read in the Vogue piece (shared in Worth Your Time) that Virgil Abloh, the designer of Off-White and artistic director of Louis Vuitton men’s, had tapped Matthew Ball to help create a virtual fashion line that lives in the meta-verse.
On Wednesday, while researching creativity I came across another Virgil Abloh reference (the connection had still not yet been made) while researching the MAYA principle. The question is what is the optimal deviation from an existing design in order to be considered “most advanced yet acceptable”? While researching other fields like contemporary art and fashion I came across Virgil’s 3% rule: never taking a design more than 3% from its original form.
And then yesterday (Thursday), while working heads down on a project, I let a playlist on WorldWide FM I had been listening to run into the next show. A few songs into the show I had to stop what I was doing and look up, “who is this DJ? The songs he is playing are fire"?”. Sure enough, it was Virgil Abloh.
However, at that point, I still hadn’t put the two together. It was only when searching to learn more about this mysterious DJ who had crafted a playlist that had so caught my attention that I discovered the serendipity.
The DJ Virgil Abloh who I was searching to learn more about was, in fact, “the Andy Warhol of our times”. The “Karl Lagerfeld for Millennials”. I was fascinated. I had, of course, heard his name before. As noted above it had come up independently 2 other times this week, but I guess it had never quite registered.
So this week’s feature is Virgil Abloh “menswear’s biggest star”, “a modern-day renaissance man” and one hell of a DJ. Cheers to you.
“Defining the gray area between black and white as the color Off-White” is the all-encompassing motto with which Virgil Abloh proposes menswear, womenswear, and a seemingly endless stream of collaborations with the likes of Levi’s, Moncler, Nike, Warby Parker, and Ikea. If Off-White gained traction through Abloh’s role as Kanye West’s creative director as well as Pyrex Vision, his short-lived T-shirt project from 2012 that became a surprise streetwear phenomenon, Abloh has since established himself as the type of multidisciplinary designer whose output resonates widely with everyone from suburban kids to artists like Jenny Holzer and Tom Sachs. The fact that he entered into fashion unconventionally—he studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before earning his master’s degree in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology—helps explain how he uses Off-White to deconstruct and reconstruct youth culture, graphic design, art history, semiotics, and luxury. His respect for Raf Simons and Martin Margiela is no secret, yet more and more, Abloh is establishing a visual vocabulary of his own, stretching his high-impact diagonal stripes and quotation marks surrounding all kinds of branding into a realm that confidently bridges streetwear and directional fashion. As an LVMH Prize finalist in 2015 and an invited guest of Pitti Immagine Uomo 92 in 2017, his efforts have been acknowledged by organizations that recognize impactful design. With Off-White headquartered in Milan, where it is part of the New Guards Group, and with stand-alone stores around the world, Abloh spends much of his time in transit—and that’s not even accounting for a constant schedule of DJ gigs and speaking engagements at academic institutions including Columbia University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Still, his home remains Chicago, where his wife and two children live, and near where he grew up. And so it seems fitting that among the many ambitious endeavors on Abloh’s horizon is a solo exhibition at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, scheduled for 2019.
See all Off-White Collections here