links — Lowe Dillard

Some objects from across the web. Mostly articles and essays + a handful of short videos, albums, podcasts. Things I enjoyed reading or watching or listening to or thinking about.

I send out some good links from time to time. Let me know if you want them.

9.24

The Desperation of the Instagram Photo Dump – New Yorker
”No one wants to be judged on just one photo when that post will be appearing in the same feeds as those of professional influencers and glossy magazines. Social media is no longer meant for connecting with friends; it is designed almost entirely to facilitate the following of brands and the monetizing of personalities.”

8.24

“Emily in Paris” in the Late Streaming Era – New Yorker
”The company’s goal is not just to spark viewers’ interest with original programming but to sustain their attention so that they will view more ads. This puts Netflix one step closer to digital platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, which run on the sheer volume of content, regardless of its quality.”

On Fakes – Spike
”Now that no one believes what it says on your T-shirt, the dupe has superseded the fake. Dupe is a term, not for a fake, but a parallel product, an open homage, a substitute for those who can’t afford the designer original.”

7.24

The Trump Assassination Attempt Meets the Internet’s Brain-Rot Era – New Yorker
”Twitter used to feel like part of journalism’s ‘first rough draft of history,’ a real-time record of current events. Now, as X, with its content moderation gutted and news articles deprioritized, the platform is more like a particle collider chaotically remixing bits of content to produce the most attention-grabbing memes.”

Kanye West Bought an Architectural Treasure—Then Gave It a Violent Remix – New Yorker
”’I know how to make perfect, but that’s not what I’m here to do. I’m here to crack the pavement and make new grounds sonically and in society—culturally.’”

6.24

The secret digital behaviors of Gen Z – Business Insider
”If Gen Zers want to answer a question or learn something new, they might turn to a search engine, but they're acquiring new information mainly via their social feeds, which are algorithmically pruned to reflect what they care about and who they trust. In short, they've created their own filters to process an onslaught of digitized information. Only the important stuff shows up, and if something shows up, it must be important.”

For Gen Z, music is its own social media – Fast Company
” Spotify realizes that today, users aren’t just sharing playlists; they’re sharing statistics, obscurity scores, even self-roasts. They’re markers of identity, articulated through music. That is the market that these music-sharers are capitalizing on, be it through mainstays like Spotify or micro-companies like Obscurify. Gen Z increasingly wants to share their taste with the masses. The internet, it seems, is their stage. “

5.24

The New Generation of Online Culture Curators – New Yorker
”Perhaps the best way to think of these guides is as curators; like a museum curator pulling works together for an exhibition, they organize the avalanche of online content into something coherent and comprehensible, restoring missing context and building narratives. They highlight valuable things that we less-expert Internet surfers are likely to miss.”

3.24

It's Obviously the Phones – Dirt
”The fact remains that even with the financial crisis, even with the lack of third spaces, we could all still be experiencing the company of our friends and family at home for free, and we are choosing not to. The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Time Use survey shows that we’re even spending less time with our spouses and children in favor of being alone. It’s because we’re on our phones, instead.”

A Different, Messier World – The Drift
”Queerness is, or could be, a practice based in connection, one diametrically opposed to the loneliness of American life. Online, queerness is often no more than a word, one that does little to change our ever-more-isolating circumstances.”

2.24

Teen Subcultures Are Fading. Pity the Poor Kids. – NYT
”Subcultures in general — once the poles of style and art and politics and music around which wound so many ribbons of teenage meaning — have largely collapsed. What teenagers today are offered instead is a hyperactive landscape of so-called aesthetics — thousands of them, including everything from the infamous cottagecore to, these days, prep. These are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy visual pablum.”

1.24

Elizabeth Goodspeed on the importance of taste – and how to acquire it – It’s Nice That
”Taste is the product of devouring ideas, images and pieces of culture not because someone you respect likes them, but because you simply can’t look away. Developing taste is an exercise in vulnerability: it requires you to trust your instincts and preferences, even when they don’t align with current trends or the tastes of your peers.”

10.23

What was 'replying'? – Dirt
”Social media encourages us to think of every thought we have as interesting; it makes everyone else feel accessible, and therefore disposable; it exposes us to endless bad actors, hardening our hearts and compelling us to suspect the worst; it rewards vulnerability, but also incentivizes defensiveness; and, most cogently for the purposes of this essay, it has birthed a distorted and unprecedented form of communication known as the Reply.”

09.23

The lost art of watching a fashion show – Washington Post
”Runway shows have gotten heavy with ideas. Designers will name-drop art, commerce, capitalism, politics, obscure historic figures — you name it — backstage, and it is usually impossible to make the connection between a designer’s stated inspirations and what you see in the clothes.”

Lost in the Machine – The Cut
”These days, fewer and fewer designers are focused on fashion. They are focused on something else, like creating collections around a new seasonal theme — say, the 1940s — while repeating feminine dress shapes and suit silhouettes that people have seen before.”

07.23

Dream of Antonoffication | Pop Music’s Blandest Prophet – The Drift
”Antonoff’s hollow maximalism is the empty bigness, the simultaneously brash and ignorable ubiquity, of pop music itself in the age of streaming. And his whispery minimalism is the sound of nothing less than the enforced modesty of pop music itself, its retreat from style into pure sensation.”

06.23

Is Ssense hurting the cool-clothes ecosystem? – Blackbird Spyplane
”Lately, I’ve been hearing more and more grumbling, and even doomsaying, about Ssense from people behind independent stores… If you ask them how Ssense has affected their business, they’re likely to let frustrations spray: complaints and grievances that, in their telling, reflect a giant headache at best and an existential threat at worst.”

Why Sarah Jessica Parker Keeps Playing Carrie Bradshaw – The New Yorker
“Freedom comes from preparation,” she likes to say.

On Just Doing It with Perfume Genius – The Creative Independent
”I just make shit. 90% of doing anything is doing it. Not to sound self-help-y, but when people are asking me for advice, my first thought is, you should just do it. You beat so many people already if you just actually make a finished thing.”

05.23

How the NBA's 2005 dress code policy changed fashion – @claytonchambrs

Ford Tough – Airmail
”Somebody asked me, ‘What are you going to do during your two weeks?’ I said, ‘I’m going to go to my house in New York. I’m going to be in my underwear and a dirty T-shirt. I’m going to eat bowls of cereal. I might not take a bath for three or four days at a time. I’m going to stare at the ceiling. I’m going to watch stupid television, and I just want to be left alone.’”

Design Studio List – Elizabeth Goodspeed

04.23

A.I. Pop Culture Is Already Here – New Yorker
”To put it another way, execution may have been democratized by generative A.I., but ideas have not. The human is still the originator, editor, and curator of A.I.’s effects. “

In attack of phones – Dazed
”Individual identities have become commodified. I think the big problem of the smartphone is that it turns us all into units of consumption or units of production: we’re producing our own identity, we’re consuming other people’s identities. Your identity suddenly becomes something that has enormous commercial value.”

02.23

Relentless Nostalgia Is Numbing Our Brains – NYT
”I can only speak for myself, but this lack of innovation, the numbing repetition of entertainment and social media, may be breaking my brain. It’s harder to have new ideas when everything is pulling you back to the past — not in a way that inspires, or draws from a well of keen emotion, but in a way that rewards you for just repeating or reliving it.”

01.23

TikTok's obsession with anti-aging comes to a head – Mashable
"A lot of beauty trends today are all about getting the skin in real life to look as filtered as possible, which generally means no deviation in tone, or texture, poreless, wrinkle free, no fine lines, just sort of this flat, reflective, shiny glow, which is not what a face looks like. That's what a phone screen looks like

When Did We All Become Pop Culture Detectives? – NYT
”Intense scrutiny has never been incidental to life as a public figure, but in our age of disinformation, when facts are fungible and nothing is what it seems, the discourse about celebrities and their work seems to have shifted from criticism to full-on forensics.”

12.22

I Can’t Stop Thinking About This – New Yorker
”On the Internet, where attention is the currency, obsession has become a default register. If something doesn’t wholly consume you, occupying your brain in spite of your desire to forget it, it is presumably not worth talking about.”

The Rise of Celebrity Vulnerability – New Yorker
”Today’s celebrities, though, do not suffer from exhaustion so much as grapple, painstakingly and publicly, with their own mental health. And these periods of grappling no longer threaten to derail the art—the process of caring for one’s mental health is the art.”

11.22

Why Is Everything So Ugly? – N+1
”All that is solid melts into sameness, such that smart home devices resemble the buildings they surveil, which in turn look like the computers on which they were algorithmically engineered, which resemble the desks on which they sit, which, like the sofas at the coworking space around the corner, put the mid in fake midcentury modern.”

Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny – Blood Knife
”A body is no longer a holistic system. It is not the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure during our brief time in the land of the living. It is not a home to live in and be happy. It, too, is a collection of features: six pack, thigh gap, cum gutters. And these features exist not to make our lives more comfortable, but to increase the value of our assets.”

10.22

The HGTV-ification of America – The Atlantic
”Newness, in this way, has become a shorthand for all kinds of things that buyers and renters typically want in a home but don’t always have the expertise to spot: quality, cleanliness, safety. Does the roof leak? What do we know about the wiring? Will the landlord fix the air-conditioning quickly if it breaks? Don’t worry, they just renovated; everything is brand new.”

Generation Amazing!!! How We’re Draining Language of Its Power – LitHub
”We may be often confounded, but we are hardly ever without something to say. The internet, the great proliferator of communication, incentivizes no one to be speechless. If you’re not talking, you’re not there, so the more frequently you speak, the more real you are. Stop talking and you disappear.”

9.22

Nothing Is Cooler Than Going Out to Dinner – The Atlantic
”You can digitize access to reservations, but the proper dine-in experience itself must be had in the physical realm, and that inherent resistance to digitization has made them even more salient status symbols to an even larger group of people…Restaurants are only so big, nights are only so long, and dining out is expensive.”

Kate Berlant Can’t Hide Any Longer – NYT
”In more than two decades as a critic of live performance, only a handful of times have I stumbled upon an artist so radically different, so thrillingly alien, that it scrambled my sense of the possible. Kate Berlant was one.”

8.22

Nathan Fielder Is Out of His Mind (and Inside Yours) – Vulture
”If Nathan for You showed how easily we could be deceived, The Rehearsal explores our eagerness to deceive ourselves. ‘I often feel envious of others,’ Fielder says in the voice-over. ‘The way they can just believe.’”

Rediscovering desire in a panopticon of virtual pleasures – Document Journal
”The illusion of perpetual connection has become a barrier to the experience of physical closeness. After all, why meet up if you’re getting your emotional needs met from afar? … There’s a loss of distance and mystery, of both risk and reward. We cannot begin to close the gap between ourselves and another person if we don’t believe one exists.”

Dangerous as the Plague – The Baffler
”The project of the right today is not precisely that of the Nazis a century ago. But both movements held in common a desperate desire to control bodies … This is why the fate of abortion rights is so inextricably intertwined with gay rights, why attacks on trans people are attacks on us all, and why laws against miscegenation and laws against sodomy have so often fit hand-in-glove.”

Delivering People – Real Life
”What matters to understanding the media and advertising industries is not so much whether ads ‘work’ or have some other particular social effect in themselves … but how those audiences are made and sold: What are the means for packaging, measuring, and valuing them for exchange?”

7.22

Heterosexual Vortex – Astra
”No relationship, queer or straight, is exempt from self-delusion, from the maddening gap between the grandiosity of desire and the banal details that can extinguish it.”

Design System Checklist – Arda Karacizmeli, Dmitry Belyaev, Steven Baguley
An open-source checklist to help you plan, build and grow your design system. This website is a collection of best practices to help you build extensive and robust design systems wherever you work.

6.22

Is There a Difference Between a Cult and a Brand? – AIGA Eye on Design
”Cults, in this way, are just like brands, built around developing a coherent identity, complete with codes, imagery, and language that paint a clear worldview and ideology… Nearly every cult uses the methods of branding to gain followers and every brand — whether they admit it or not — strives for a cult-like audience.”

Fashion Has Abandoned Human Taste – The Atlantic
”As creative industries become more consolidated and more beholden to producing ever-expanding profits for their shareholders, companies stop taking even calculated risks… Stores stock up on stuff you might not love, but which the data predict you won’t absolutely hate.”

A community arts project and home for stories from the Asian Canadian diaspora – here-there audio archive
”How can we celebrate the diverse histories and lived experiences of the Asian Canadian diaspora? This project strives to amplify community voices, facilitate meaningful conversations, and enhance public awareness of the diversity and nuance of the Asian Canadian experience.”

Prison tapes – Dirt
”In terms of flattening of culture, I really thought there would be some kind of niche, weird channels that I missed out on, and as a result that I'd have to go download this Quibi or whatever. I thought Quibi was a thing, and I'm like, ‘Fuck. I'm going to get out, and Quibi's going to be everywhere.’“

5.22

BeReal and the Fantasy of an Authentic Online Life – The New Yorker
”The difference between BeReal and the social-media giants isn’t the former’s relationship to truth but the size and scale of its deceptions…Be it on Instagram, TikTok, BeReal, or elsewhere, users cannot help but perform a version of themselves that has been idealized or augmented for public consumption.”

Sonic architecture – Dirt
”We’re mad the city is loud, we’re mad we can’t concentrate, we’re mad we can’t sleep. We’re mad because everything in modern life seems designed to manipulate our emotions to spend $30 on something–why not this stylish app?”

Sick of Myself [2017] — Real Life
”If all the content on Facebook is tailored to suit the company’s construction of who we are, then consuming it is like consuming a coherent version of ourselves. It also reinforces the idea that the best place to glimpse your stable social identity is on Facebook.”

4.22

Patrick Carroll’s Vision of Eternity – Gayletter
For Gayletter’s 15th issue, I wrote about wildly talented clothesmaker Patrick Carroll. Patrick’s knitwear project Summon Elemental is more of a collection of tactile poetry than it is a fashion label. It’s filled with rich references and seems to transcend time, culture, and place.

”Patrick’s creative output simultaneously acknowledges his pain while leaning into his pleasure. It’s somber and sensual, funereal but somehow fun. Yet beyond the emotional complexity, Patrick’s vision for the project remains simple. He wants the clothes that he makes to be worn (really worn) for a long, long time.”

Too many places are STERILE and TORCHED — let’s make them COOL and FUNKY – Blackbird Spyplane
”In year ~15 of the fetish for ‘clean lines’ and ‘understated elegance,’ I wanna hang for hours in a FRUMPY, MISSHAPEN, INVITINGLY INELEGANT place … during which time I would never even think to take out my phone and let the feed know I was there.”

All Advertising Looks the Same These Days. Blame the Moodboard – AIGA Eye on Design
”It’s as if there’s a hidden network of identical references hiding behind every photo—each shot finding inspiration in the aesthetic components of the last, like an elaborate game of telephone.”

The Noom paradox – Vox
”The fight between Noom and its critics is part of a larger cultural war that has begun to play out over the past 10 years over how we should think about food, weight, bodies, and health.”

Pop Music’s Nostalgia Obsession – The Atlantic
What explains our love of throwback sounds right now? Are we comfort-listening through hard times? Or is the industry just finally able to see (and monetize) a type of listening we’ve always done?”

Friends as technology. – Default Friend
"… it’s more than just the immediacy of internet communication allows for this kind of ‘always-on’ relationship. if it’s deeper than that, if our friendships are treated like a kind of technology themselves.”

3.22

Innovative, Spirited, Resilient—Ukraine’s Electronic Scene Stands Tall – Pitchfork
“‘Currently we are all being bombed. I have no idea what my life is going to be like tomorrow and how much longer I have, so it felt appropriate to share an archive of my 2010-2019 works, in case I never get to do that when I’m old.’”

What if jobs are not the solution but the problem? – Aeon
“So this Great Recession of ours … is a moral crisis as well as an economic catastrophe… it makes us ask what social scaffolding other than work will permit the construction of character – or whether character itself is something we must aspire to.”

2.22

Streetwear Is Dead – NYT
“‘It has become an integral part of fashion, and is there to stay,’ he said. The real meaning of streetwear, after all, is simply what is worn on the street. Which is everything.”

Sex and Suits at Gucci – Harper’s
”It was an expression of Hollander’s thesis that the suit isn’t just the perfect garment, but Western culture’s premiere fashion achievement.”

The Life-Changing Pleasure of Dressing Your Age – GQ
”… there are great joys to be had for the much older—or just thirty- and forty-somethings who feel disconnected from the relentless churn of trends being pursued by Gen-Z.”

Unremarkable Clothes – Angela Nagle
”Why would we begin to deliberately choose uninteresting and unflattering clothes? My intuitive sense is that it has to do with pessimism and a sense of pointlessness in communication.”

1.22

The Death of the Muse: Emily Ratajkowski and the Right to One's Lens – Look Alive
”…the cheap tools and lightweight distribution channels of social media have emboldened us to seek an unprecedented degree of control around the way we appear to others, both in a material, photographic way, and as a larger, nebulous person-concept.”

Money in the Metaverse – New Yorker
”Virtual worlds, it seems, also train players to be eager, expectant, and constant consumers… Taking cues from today’s tech ecosystem, [the metaverse] will probably be privatized, centralized, and financialized, with rampant artificial scarcity.”

attending to the other – Jasmine Wang
”The art of attention requires, among other things, an openness to being moved and transformed, the development of language, and the resistance of algorithmic life.”

Lizzo Goes Down A Tech-Enabled ‘Rabbit Hole’ In New Campaign For Logitech – Forbes
The latest campaign work from my brilliant, wildly talented team at Virtue Worldwide.

Body unbuilding: on cuts, stitching and anarchitecture – Architectural Review
“Over the past few decades, then, conceptions of gender have changed irrevocably, from binary to multiple; from a centring of physical embodiment to the spatialising of identities; from definitive to fractal.”

A Diary in Alphabetical Order (A to C) – NYT
”All of this seems like the culmination of some searching in my life — but that’s just the way I look at life, full of beginnings and endings.”

What If We Just Stopped Being So Available? – The Atlantic
”For one thing, having multiple obligations and priorities means that we are, all of us, in a perpetual state of delay on something, and apologizing for that fact feels like having to apologize for your standard mode of being.”

Ami Colé Fills a Void In Black Beauty Products – NYT
”She watched Black women walk out of [her mother’s] salon a bit healed, if not armed with a veneer of self-esteem and several bags of Kanekalon braided into their hair. Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye wanted to replicate that experience for those who were not content with what cosmetics companies offered them.”

Adele’s Worst Selling-Album Is Still the Year’s Biggest Record – Bloomberg
”With abundance comes fragmentation. Even with the boom in streaming, the audience for the biggest albums is shrinking.”

Suicide risk and social media: is it a landmine or a lifeline? – Psyche
”For some of us, social media will be a lifeline… For others, it will be a landmine… For most, it will be both, depending on when and how we use it. These are the nuances that get lost in an average.”

12.21

Can Parties Help Us Heal? – NYT

Alana Haim Surprised Everyone With Her Movie Debut. Even Herself. – NYT

How Ewen Spencer’s iconic photos of the Skins cast encapsulated a generation – It’s Nice That

11.21

Authoritarianism and the Cybernetic Episteme, or the Progressive Disappearance of Everything on Earth – e-flux

The metaverse explained – ArsTechnica

‘Moral molecules’ – a new theory of what goodness is made of – Psyche

Zuckerberg’s Meta Endgame Is Monetizing All Human Behavior – VICE

10.21

Why Arrival Looks So Different After COVID-19 – LitHub

People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much – The Atlantic