Editor’s Note
I’m working on a big piece about the study of hip and how it can be used a lens. How hip is similar to novelty in that it is ephemeral. As more people adopt the trend or become aware of the novel phenomenom, the trend ceases to be hip and the phenomenom ceases to be novel. It is now well known. How just like something cannot be both well-known and novel at the same time, neither can something be mass market and hip at the same time. A piece about how hip requires non-conformism, but is not a synonym of non-conformism. Instead, hip requires a talent, a capability. And it requires an audience. While simply disapearing from society is an act of non-conformism, it is not an act of hip. Similarily, while society has begun to conform to the idea that all humans are created equal, rebelling against that idea is not hip. Instead, hip is an enlightenment era ideal and points in only the direction of progress. Actually perhaps the best way to think about hip and novely may be through the classic Diffusion of Innovation curve.
Where the curve exists within whatever the given overton window is at the time and hip, or non-conformism or novely exists on the tail where "Innovators” rest. The tail that points in the direction of progress. Hip is a game theoretic approach. In domains where you’re a novice, the optimal strategy is conform (by mimicking). In domains where you’re an expert, the optimal strategy is to not-conform. It is this second arrangement that pushes the bounds of a any field. Moves it out of equilibrium and shifts the overton window slightly over.
Hip is a phenomenom that compounds. It stands on the shoulders of giants from previous generations to continue to shift the overton window over slightly. NWA was hip by pushing the overton window on the dangers black men faced from the police, but also stood on the shoulders of Public Enemy who had already helped redefine the genre by ushering in aggressively pro-Black raps that were intelligent, socially aware and politically charged.
In this way hip works similarly to the formula espoused by the man commonly credited with creating the field of industrial design, Raymond Loewy. Loewy created some of the 20th centuries most inconic designs: The Air Force One logo, the Coca-Cola bottle, the Shell Oil logo, the US Postal Service logo, the Greyhound logo through an approached he called the MAYA principal. Maya is an abbreviation for “Most Advanced. Yet Acceptable.” which means that Loewy sought to give his users the most advanced design, but not more advanced than what they were able to accept and embrace. Loewy believed that:
"The adult public's taste is not necessarily ready to accept the logical solutions to their requirements if the solution implies too vast a departure from what they have been conditioned into accepting as the norm.”
My lens is that hip is a cultural MAYA. It is cultures mechanism for forward progress. Without hip, everyone would conform to whatever the given standard was at the time and culture would find equiliberium there and just sit. But there it does not sit, because of hip.
I’m still working on how to best apply this lens, but I’m here to work out with you dear reader. I hope you join me on this journey.
[Note: But not next week. Next week I’ll be heading to Yosemite for a 3-day backpacking trip for my Birthday. Look forward to seeing you the week after!]
What I’m Listening To
Throughout his career, Gilles Peterson has played a pivotal role in promoting genres such as jazz, hip-hop, and electronic music. Starting his career at pirate radio stations Radio Invicta and K-Jazz, Peterson later went on to host Mad on Jazz on BBC Radio London in 1986–87, and became known on the London circuit as a DJ specialising in the new breed of "acid jazz", drawing on the jazz, funk, Latin fusions and Brazilian music of the 1970s.
In March 1990, Peterson joined London's first-ever dedicated jazz station 102.2 Jazz FM at its launch, but was dismissed for anti-war comments about the Gulf War. So, in 1991, Peterson joined Kiss FM in 1991, where he played acts as diverse as Josh Wink, Gang Starr and Horace Silver in the on his "Vibrazone" shows.
From 1998 to 2012, Peterson moved his talents to his BBC Worldwide show on BBC Radio 1, continued to present a wide range of music that may be new to its young audiences. The show always presented a combination of new, older and often very rare records from the late 1950s to 1980s. After 13 years, he started a new three hour program on BBC Radio 6.
In 2016, following the success of the Gavnd Theft Auto V in-game radio statio, Peterson, alongside Biiler Room co-founder Thristian Richards, launched a new global music-radio platform named Worldwide FM. Since the launch, the station has gone out on the road broadcasting across Europe, the US and Asia, with pop-ups in Amsterdam (ADE), Los Angeles (How We Do LA), Marseille (Le Gallette), Milan (Jazzmi Festival), Paris (Le Mellotron), Tokyo (HMV Shibuya), and closer to home, at the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair (Somerset House).
This is only a portion of Peterson’s entry in Wikipedia. There are entire others sections on the record labels he has founded (Acid Jazz Records, Talkin’ Loud, Brownswood Recordigs and Arc Records) and the clubs he has played (basically all of them). All of which is to say, Gilles Peterson has one of the most honed tastes for jazz, funk, soul, reggae, hip-hop and world music on the planet. And over the past year, in addition to the dozens of other music curation activities he undertakes, Peterson has been blessing us with The 20 - hours of music where he explores the definitive tracks across a range of movements and subgenres.
Listening to this mixes is like mainlining perfection and has been one of my favorite pandemic activities. Highly recommended!
From Brit Jazz to Post-Dubstep to Two Step Soul, listen Gilles Peterson present The 20 here.
What I’m Reading
In the prologue to The Premonition, Michael Lewis writes “I like to think that my job is mainly to find the story in the material. I always hope that story will wind up being more than what I think it’s about - and that the reader will bring to it his own sense-making apparatus and find meanings in it missed by its author”. Lewis felt The Premonition, was about “the curious talents of a society, and how those talents are wasted if not led. It’s also about how gaps open between a societies reputation and its performance”. I also found multiple meanings.
The Premonition is primarily based around a case of medical renegades who warned for years that something like COVID-19 was bound to happen. There is Charity Dean, the California Health Official. Doctors Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, who were part of the pandemic planning team in the George W. Bush administration; biologist and MacArthur “genius” Joe DeRisi; and Bob Glass, the scientist whose 13-year-old daughter’s science fair project (an agent based model that used data from previous pandemics to simulate the effectiveness of different interventions) became the basis for the “social distancing” model of disease control.
The first thing that struck me about each of these characters is how lucky it was for them to be in the place they were at in the first place. These weren’t epidimeologists who spent their entire lives studying pandemics, instead each of them, were sort of plucked from obscurity for this moment. Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher were brought into the White House pandemic planning team after W read The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Plague in History and became freaked out when he found the US had no plan in place if another pandemic were to strike. Prior to joining the pandemic planning team, Mecher had been in charge of making hospitals safer.
For her part, Dean was a local Santa Barbara health official before being promoted to state health official and it was her experience working on a tuberculosis outbreak in 2014 that helped her prepare for COVID-19. While it almost goes without saying, that the entire pandemic response strategy might not have happenend at all were it not for Bob Glass daughter’s science project, the agent-based model that showed the effectiveness of social distancing interventions like closing schools.
The second meaning that I found in The Premonition was how it was an ode to systems thinking and ethnography. I found the entire book to be one big, flashing advertisement for Thinking in Systems, but one example in particular stuck out to me. When using Bob Glass’s agent-based model to simulate different interventions, Carter Mecher was amazed at the effectiveness of one particular intervention: closing schools. Why was this Carter thought? So he took a trip to a school and measured the distance between desks. Next, he took a ride on a school bus, noticing that most kids were three to a seat. In short, Carter used analytics/simulations to uncover a “what” - the most effective intervention was closing schools and then conducted ethnography to uncover the “why” - kids are dirtier than adults and are in much closer quarters when in school.
Another great quote from Carter had to do with an anecdote about his work inside the VA, creating a new kind of institution he called a Learning Exchange. “People in an organization learn,” said Carter. “They’re learning all kinds of things. But they aren’t learning what you are teaching them. You to go a formal meeting. The important conversation is not in the meeting. It’s in the halls during the breaks. And usually what’s important is taboo. And you can’t say it in a formal meeting.”
The final pattern I teased out from The Premonition was just how universal, systems not rewarding bravery, are. Most of the books we read, talks we listen to, movies we watch, discuss the importance of creativity, first principal thinking, courage, when in fact the systems we inhabit don’t reward that at all. They reward covering your own ass. The systems we inhabit say the want one thing, but reward the opposite. When discussing the United States pandemic response, Lewis characterized it as “a system was groping toward a solution, but the solution required someone in it to be brave, and the system didn’t reward bravery. It was stuck in an infinite loop of first realizing that it was in need of courage and then remembering that courage didn’t pay”.
In my experience, this “infinite loop” is a universal pattern. Schools discuss the value of creativity, but reward the exact opposite in rote memorization. Organizations say they want innovative thinking, but reward the exact opposite in executing the lowest hanging fruit. And emergency response systems require bravery, but reward covering your own ass.
It is both incredibly infuriating and what makes this book so good. You can read The Premonition and find your own meaning here.
Worth Your Time
The Cooperation Economy (Not Boring) - The Cooperation Economy (Not Boring): The internet is enabling the unbundling of employer and employee. To date, that unbundling has looked like a whole bunch of freelancers, but the optimum arrangement might actually look something like liquid super teams. Groups of individuals who organize themselves to take on a specific problem. Think the Avengers. This essay explores the forces behind that and what it might look like.
Caugh in the Study Web (Cybernaut) - From Lo-fi live streams to accountability partners, students native to social media are appropriating social media for a surprising new purpose: to help them study.
Orthographic media (Robin Sloan) - Social media is an orthographic camera. All events are standardized, no matter how big or small, delightful or traumatic, to fit the same mashed-together timeline.
The internet didn’t kill counterculture, you just won’t find it on Instagram (Document) - To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self. So what does today’s counter-hegemonic culture look like? It’s not particularly interested in being seen—at least not in person. It gets no thrill out of wearing leather and a mohawk and walking past main-street shops, which are empty now anyway. But it does demonstrate a hunger for freedom—freedom from the attention economy, from atomization, and the extractive logic of mainstream communication.
Designing Digital Economies w/ Gabriel Leydon (Invest Like the Best) - Building digital economies inside of games is much more difficult than your typical internet business, but has the value of far less constraints. In games you can build mechanics such as "heroic spending" i.e. spending money on something you selfishly desire but has the added benefit of making you appear altruistic. The key is embracing that all the goods inside of video games are fake.
How America Fractured Into Four Parts (The Atlantic) - In an adaption from his new book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, historian George Packer traces how America fractured into 4 competeting narratives: Real America (Trumpism), Just America (BLM), Smart America (urban professionals) and Free America (Ayn Rand).
