Intro
Another week of “real life not playing along with your plans” made me miss the last week’s post. I knew returning from my trip to Van on Sunday evening would make things busier on Monday but unexpected stuff and surprises like your fridge deciding to show cryptic errors which are not included in the manual made the day (and the following day) a bit harder to manage.
Thankfully things are calmed down and even though I still have so much to do this week, at least today goes on without any surprises. Which means I can write and publish the Weekstarter.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission Control
Inbox: 90
RSS Reader: 3944 (Yes, I know.)
Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 1
- Making sure all the admin work and other chores handled and nothing is slipping through the cracks is a priority after the last two weeks. Especially because I’ll be in another city next week.
- Spending time on the workshops I’ll do at the next week’s project to make sure they’re all set. This is going to be a new one so it needs some extra care.
- I should put some time aside to do some maintenance on my feeds (as in RSS, podcasts, newsletters etc.) so that I don’t feel like Manfred Macx waking up in a panic and trying to catch up with the moment.
- I’m also taking notes to do some more regular blogging as well and thinking about other things I can put here. Feel free to ping me if you have recommendations or things you want to see from me.
Check my Now page if you want to see what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
If you’d like to collaborate or need services, Tuhaf Studio is accepting new clients. For speaking or panelist opportunities, contact London Speaker Bureau Türkiye. To support my work regularly, you can contribute through my Patreon.
Don’t Take the Black (Mirror) Pill
Hype and optimism in many aspects of life gets criticized a lot — mostly for a good reason. Hype and optimism is a dangerous thing and it can blind you pretty quickly. But there are so many good things written about it, like Johannes Klingebiel’s guide.
Instead, I want to look at the other side of the coin and talk about how we should be critical about doom as well. Because it’s spreading like wildfire and people are much more comfortable about it.
This train of thought started last Thursday, when I was invited as a panelist at an event about alternative media in Turkey. Most people there gathered to talk about how to improve things and build better things but of course some people I know who loves selling doom was there as well.
There’s one person who especially loves this and sadly he was a panelist on another panel as well. His shtick is a classic: talk about how bad everything is, regularly point out political change is a must for things to get better, than start talking about how important his work is because he’s doing it in a situation like this. I’m surprised by the fact that I’ve seen him use the same formula for over a decade with just minimal updates and people still take him seriously.
But this is the power of doom mentality. It makes everyone feel desperate and powerless, and you can use that feeling to make your bare minimum effort look like a major work. Plus, no one is allowed to criticize you because everything is doom’s fault or you can’t do it because of that.
This is why most people are drawn into doom mindset. It takes all responsibility away from you and allows you to get away with bare minimum. You can’t do anything big because everything is awful. Someone else is trying to do something better, you can wear them down by constantly criticizing them for trying to do things made by the doom. Doom mindset allows you to do nothing and be the best person around at the same time.
You can see the examples of it everywhere. Just as there are people who lives by the hype, there are others who can’t live without the doom. Both are dangerous because main goal for both of them to take away your agency by either making you surrender it to the hype or the doom.
When I started writing these down, I remembered an article I’ve read earlier this year on Black Mirror by Louis Anslow.
“Black Mirror is more pessimism porn than Plato’s parable, imparting to its audience a tacit lesson: fear the future more than the past. Fear too much technological change, not too little. It is an inherently populist narrative – one that appeals to nostalgia: intellectually we understand the present is better than the past in large part due to scientific and technological change, yet emotionally and instinctually we can’t help but feel this time in history is different, that the future can only get worse.”
Which is a great summary of the doom mindset in general but when you read it, you can see how the current popular tech criticism we see all around is practically the same. Anslow calls it a populist narrative —and he’s right— but it’s also a literally conservative narrative because it’s only focused on conserving things in a made up ideal state.
This is why I felt the need to write about it. Hype tries to make you believe in a future ideal state and forces you to surrender all your agency to it. Doom tries to make you believe in a non-existent past ideal state and forces you to surrender all your agency to it.
This is why, no matter how comforting their narratives sounds, never trust the hype and never trust the doom. That fake comfort is not worth it.
Song of the Week
I enjoy listening to the drums in any song and can be a little obsessive about it. When I find a song like this putting drums at the center of it, it only takes a single listen for me to get obsessed with it too.
Reading Log
I’ve finally started reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks after hearing good things about it from multiple friends. I can see why even though I’m only 80 pages in. You can expect a dedicated blog post about it as soon as I’m finished.
“But here’s what fascinates me: [YKK] didn’t get there through aggressive expansion or undercutting competitors. They got there by being better. By obsessing over a component most people never think about. By treating the humble zipper not as a commodity, but as a craft.”
The Company That Zips the Globe | YKK’s Ninety-Year Obsession
“What we pay attention to is increasingly and systematically designed to appeal to our passivity or, in the worst cases, to our lack of thinking. We end up in a world where hubris is taken seriously, and serious issues are ignored as “too deep.””
The Hollywood Originality Edition – Why Is This Interesting
“The algorithmic upper class doesn’t just get better prices—they get better everything, negotiated by superior neural networks while they sleep.”
The Negotiation Nation – Dré Labre
Outro
So, that’s all from me for this week. Let me know if you like this newsletter and have any notes for me.
Take care of yourselves!
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