I’ve been working on animated and fully responsive floral borders. We’re close to having all the pieces needed to browse the web as an illuminated manuscript.

Strong plus one to this. But before we will be able to step into this new artistic mode we will first look backwards. I think it will be similar to how following the industrial revolution we had the arts and craft movement before we had bauhaus.

Our almost 3 year old has become very interested in “bad guys.” We had a talk about how there are real bad guys who want to hurt people and how we have to be brave and stop the bad guys. Now he wants to bring his imaginary gun everywhere so if we see a bad guy he can shoot them.

Lean into the LARP

I’m incredibly excited for this!

Morris maxing generative floral borders

Taste is kind of like an aesthetic prediction market. The challenge is to draw a line in the sand before the position becomes obvious to others. Once an expression or story becomes widely validated the challenge of discovery is gone, along with the risk and glory. It switches from being elusive and intangible to becoming a known cultural substrate that composts into future taste making.

This is the moment to do the exact opposite and bolster access to tradition and craft. Husbandry, woodworking, stone masonry etc should increase in visibility. One should be able to traverse the tech stack as they move through the city. The way to gracefully step into the future is by holding the past.

The type of institutions most equipped to steward models are likely churches, and I suspect we will see different schools of alignment emerge: Catholic alignment, Mormon alignment, etc.

We are going to experience a remarkable neo-romanticism in the next few years. Every one, on all sides is yearning for this. Can you feel the undercurrents of it building now?

The department of the interior hired Woody Guthrie to travel the Columbia and write songs about the infrastructure build out along the river. Elon should hire Adrianne Lenker to tour star base, giga factory, etc and write songs in reaction to the experience.

Pierre Menard: Sculptor of Prometheus. The thing that is remarkable is not the statue itself but the fact that it emerged in this moment.

There is a cultural awkwardness to art which affirms hope, and virtue today. This is the reason megalopolis was panned so harshly. Greatness and progress are as illegible today as Gustave Courbet’s work was to the academy in the 1850s. And this is why Prometheus is a monumental achievement.

We are still living in the Protestant revolution

Let’s look at two threads from history: 1. The French revolution produced a religion of reason which culminated in Robespierre’s post-Christian rationalist cult. This collapsed almost instantly and failed to provide an adequate spiritual framework for the new political order. 2. Contrast this with threads from the Protestant revolution. A key innovation of Luther was that worship should not take place in monasteries, but rather should happens through service and craft in the world. Serving God to him meant serving neighbors, creating useful products, and building for the community. This unleashed a powerful culture of discipline, stewardship, reinvestment, and productive enterprise. This can most dramatically be seen in the work Quakers like Abraham Darby who created the largest iron foundry of his time. He and many others were directly inspired by their spiritual practice to invest in industry and in doing so sparked the Industrial Revolution. The much more interesting question is not what comes after Christianity, but rather how can the past 2000 years of Christian philosophy guide us in this moment? How might we rediscover the idea of a “calling” in a post-labor world? What does stewardship mean in the face of agi? How might we act with the same mighty spiritual convictions as the quakers whose faith echos in industry world still today?

“Create an image of what the world would look like if I were in charge based on my tweets.” Looks like a family and craft oriented settlement on Phobos.