Thank you for this elegant metaphor for culture. You have synthesized our common experiences and created a new way to visualize something more meaningful. I will be looking for archipelagos that don’t celebrate football or Christmas.
Awesome! I’ve often brought up the analogy of a federalized system. But I love your picture of archipelagos and now you’ve created a manifesto-essay about Substack and how it should view itself in the wider bustle of the inter webs.
The difference between the spectacle of pageantry and theatre of ideas is that of motive. The former is played out for the group reinforcement of power structures, the latter for the open questioning of them 🐈⬛
Give up on "grand ambitions"? You can't mean it. Continents can always arise or come into view by any archipelago. Yes, counter tyrannical and monopolistic ambitions and terrain, it seems is what you mean. Why not go harder for truly grand revolutionary ambitions and terrain?
Archipelagos are "less pleasing" than circles? Your thoughtful post seems to argue that they are more pleasing.
Parts of Substack are a kind of people's media at its best, as are parts of social media and independent media in general, made increasingly possible by the epic dispersal of the computer-camera phone, the "smart" phone. This technological shift may have kicked off the new populist age - pseudo/fake populists like Trump and Biden/Harris, progressive populists like Bernie & the "Squad," chaotic populists like Luigi Mangione and the would-be Trump assassins, and the many duped "populists." The people's media is a progressive populist media at its best. Meanwhile, the universal culture of the handheld, call it uni-phone, encompasses and engenders the whole range of populists, so-called.
This is a novel populist time, marked by the unprecedented ability by far to instantly and vastly record and distribute life, and also to instantly recreate life and vastly distribute that too. Of course the corporate-state financialization, spying, profiteering, and propagandizing arms are booming too, including through the new decentralized media - counter to the best efforts of the people's media, the people's cultures, people's organizing, and people's actions. It will take the best and most determined of the many people's archipelagos to overcome the deadly force of Empire that continues to sit, seemingly impregnable, at the center of things.
But it tended to turn into a few big islands and the small ones sank beneath the waves.
Substack seems to have the potential to maintain islands with self-selected inhabitants who are willing and able to have conversations without centralized control. Maybe. It's still early!
Crystal clear observation of recent popular culture that pushes unworthy pawns in center. Everyone's selling something. Numbers replace quality. Numbers drive celebrity, not talent. I choose a worthy, wise,and talent-filled archipelago instead of the sidelines of the pop circle with, as you say, blank-faced dancers moving around an overproduced and underwhelming talent. Life's too short. Choose wisely.
Thank you for this elegant metaphor for culture. You have synthesized our common experiences and created a new way to visualize something more meaningful. I will be looking for archipelagos that don’t celebrate football or Christmas.
It's kinda like: where do you want to spend your vacation time, in air-polluted Athens or sailing around the islands.
A wonderful and useful perspective. Thank you.
Awesome! I’ve often brought up the analogy of a federalized system. But I love your picture of archipelagos and now you’ve created a manifesto-essay about Substack and how it should view itself in the wider bustle of the inter webs.
Culture flows from 'cult' - either the cult of false gods, or - what?
I was aged 18, at a convent boarding school in the UK when the news of Kennedy's death came through.
I wrote a sonnet about it some years later from my old school magazine, which I will copy out here if you like.
You are correct sir.
I wonder whether the archipelago can hold against centripetal pressure, and your compelling metaphor withstand reality. I hope so, of course.
(Culture as you describe it overlaps a lot with ritual, too, it seems. But that's another post, I guess.)
The difference between the spectacle of pageantry and theatre of ideas is that of motive. The former is played out for the group reinforcement of power structures, the latter for the open questioning of them 🐈⬛
Give up on "grand ambitions"? You can't mean it. Continents can always arise or come into view by any archipelago. Yes, counter tyrannical and monopolistic ambitions and terrain, it seems is what you mean. Why not go harder for truly grand revolutionary ambitions and terrain?
Archipelagos are "less pleasing" than circles? Your thoughtful post seems to argue that they are more pleasing.
Parts of Substack are a kind of people's media at its best, as are parts of social media and independent media in general, made increasingly possible by the epic dispersal of the computer-camera phone, the "smart" phone. This technological shift may have kicked off the new populist age - pseudo/fake populists like Trump and Biden/Harris, progressive populists like Bernie & the "Squad," chaotic populists like Luigi Mangione and the would-be Trump assassins, and the many duped "populists." The people's media is a progressive populist media at its best. Meanwhile, the universal culture of the handheld, call it uni-phone, encompasses and engenders the whole range of populists, so-called.
This is a novel populist time, marked by the unprecedented ability by far to instantly and vastly record and distribute life, and also to instantly recreate life and vastly distribute that too. Of course the corporate-state financialization, spying, profiteering, and propagandizing arms are booming too, including through the new decentralized media - counter to the best efforts of the people's media, the people's cultures, people's organizing, and people's actions. It will take the best and most determined of the many people's archipelagos to overcome the deadly force of Empire that continues to sit, seemingly impregnable, at the center of things.
The original blogosphere was archipelagoic.
But it tended to turn into a few big islands and the small ones sank beneath the waves.
Substack seems to have the potential to maintain islands with self-selected inhabitants who are willing and able to have conversations without centralized control. Maybe. It's still early!
xoxo
thanks for introducing me to different sight of perspective
Crystal clear observation of recent popular culture that pushes unworthy pawns in center. Everyone's selling something. Numbers replace quality. Numbers drive celebrity, not talent. I choose a worthy, wise,and talent-filled archipelago instead of the sidelines of the pop circle with, as you say, blank-faced dancers moving around an overproduced and underwhelming talent. Life's too short. Choose wisely.