artists and gentrifications

How does a gentrification process start off? It starts off with the artists of course.

Land becomes expensive. Artists get displaced and search for cheaper options. They move in droves since their profession is very much ecosystem driven. It does not take long for the newly colonised area (e.g. Brooklyn in New York, Woodstock in Cape Town) to become cool and attract non-artist youngsters as well. At some point, everybody becomes aware of the new cool and the average appreciation (among the colonisers) of local cultural texture and old buildings etc decreases, and gentrification accelerates and starts to become more visible.

Gentrification often results in the destruction of what is beautiful. But that too is ironically caused by the artists' decisions. When artists look for new lands, they not only prioritise cheapness but also seek authenticity and vibrancy. In other words, they unintentionally cause the death of what they desire to feed on without disruption.

In short, gentrification is the process of the cool killing the genuine.

a sprinkle of diversity

In my experience, even the most liberal leaning individuals do not desire absolute, uncontrolled diversity in their social lives. They want a sprinkle of controlled diversity, just like Harvard trying to maintain a certain percentage of internationals in its student body. (When Harvard campus got dominated by Jews, the administration introduced non-quantitative arbitrary aspects to its admission process.)

I remember how bodyguards of a hip jazz club in Cape Town bounced black people once there were already "too many" black people inside. If you ask to the white patrons, they will all find this behaviour disgusting and racist. But if you remove the filter, most of them will leave.

asynchronous growth cycles

Modern marriages are based on the idea of mutual promotion of personal growth and what breaks them the most is the emergence of a major asynchrony among the growth cycles of the partners.

When one partner experiences an exponential growth in a certain area, he or she falsely believes that this will go on forever. But exponential growths never continue forever. Compared to linear growths, they are more thrilling, correct, but they are also more short-lived. 

This is the reason why traditional marriages are based on vows like "I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love and honour you all the days of my life."

Stasis may always be around the corner. You never know.

unsystematisability of chance encounters

Places that become renowned as (or designed from the beginning as) facilitators of chance encounters gradually lose their functionality. They get overcrowded by people who come there to meet new people. These networkers destroy the spontaneity element completely and replace chance encounters with plain encounters.

You want to experience beautiful and organic chance encounters? Just wonder around the city and keep your antennas open. Other wonderers with similar instincts and interests will inevitably cross your path.

divergence in top talent

Being a sloppy mathematician is a precondition for being a superb physicist. All the greatest ideas in physics involved huge discreet intuitive leaps. Mathematics always came later to bridge and formalise the gaps. 

Einstein doggedly went ahead with his gut feelings. It took him and his mathematician friends years to formalise his intuitional ideas about gravity. Feynman did the same thing in quantum mechanics. He went ahead with his path integrals which mathematicians have still not been able to make rigorous despite continuous attempts during the last seventy years. (Einstein and Feynman are not some random physicists. They are the best humanity could come up with in the twentieth century!)

What seems like a positive correlation in the middle talent range becomes negative at the top. Good math and physics skills go hand in hand until you reach the top echelon of each discipline. Best physicists are not mediocre but horrible mathematicians, and vice versa.

There are similar examples from other domains as well. I will provide you with two. I am sure you can come up with more.

• Good business and political skills often go hand in hand. This leads most people to mistakenly conclude that top businessmen can become top politicians and vice versa.
• Best performers on stage are timid and awkward in social contexts off stage.

dynamics of loneliness

Friends are divided into three circles: inner, middle and outer. Outer circle feeds the middle circle which in turn feeds the inner circle. All new inflow enters the outer circle first. Each circle suffers from a natural rate of entropy. The outer circle experiences the greatest flux while the inner circle is relatively stable.

What success and fame does is to destroy the middle circle by unleashing a tremendous hurricane blasting through all emotional blisters no matter how small. While the outer circle experiences a sudden cancerous growth, the inner circle (cut off from its supply of new blood from the middle circle) dwindles slowly at its natural entropy rate. Soon a deep sense of loneliness starts sinking in despite the presence of such a large number of people.

sharing as a sign of poverty

We used to have our own rooms to work inside. Then the walls came down and open offices became the new cool thing. We started sharing the same space with our colleagues. Now it is even worse. We share it with complete fucking strangers.

Everyone knows that shared offices do not increase creativity or productivity. They are only good for meeting new people. But no one is calling out this bullshit because the underlying truth is grim and mostly of economic nature.

Shared office spaces is just one manifestation of the increasing dominance of shared economy. True, sharing allows better use of resources, but there are many specific downsides to it as well. For instance, not sharing can be convenient and convenience makes people happy. After all what are we striving for? We do not seek greater efficiency for the sake of greater efficiency. We seek it for a little bit of convenience and luxury.

We are all wabi-sabi enthusiasts now, right? Permanence is illusionary! Why own anything while you can subscribe to everything?

I feel genuinely sorry for the next generation who will be inheriting our worthless subscription accounts. I am also afraid that with the greater data available, we will eventually turn ourselves into pure optimisation machines, seeking happiness in minute incremental shit.

Somehow we forgot that the biggest psychological benefit of getting rich is the ability to be more relaxed with deployment of resources, including the most precious resource which is time.

But it is not entirely our fault. Just look at this graph.

Source: National Bureau of Economic Research

People have started crowdfunding their medical expenses for God's sake! How can we still not see the truth?

Today everyone shares and freelances, not because our generation is intrinsically more creative, generous or entrepreneurial, but because we are poorer. This downwards economic trend has been ongoing for a long time. A temporary solution became available only now, thanks to the rise of mobile computing and internet.

Two personal advices:

• Culture is adaptive, not progressive. It is also blinding. So never fight with your parents over values. Our values are not inherently any better than theirs, they are just better for us to cope with our current conditions. I remember arguing with my father over this ownership vs sharing issue. Now I regret it. The ideas I was defending were not actually mine. They belonged to the collective cultural intelligence.
• Cool is what young people invent to create an alternative for something they can no longer afford. That is essentially why new neighbourhoods get gentrified and new domain extensions get endorsed every few years.

flow of culture

Culture flows from top to bottom, not from bottom to top. Here are some possible explanations:

• Hiring-decisions are either made by the top echelon or made by criteria determined by the top echelon.
• Once an organisation starts exhibiting a certain culture, applicants self-select themselves into it.
• Once people start working in the organisation, there is a tremendous pressure to conform to the existing culture.

Culture hardens as it scales. Hence the reason why you do not see values like openness and multiculturalism in larger organisations which need more social glue to hold people together. (Think of Google throwing out the coder James Damore for releasing a conservative manifesto.)

If you are a member of an organisation that you do not culturally belong to, try to limit the information flow as much as possible. That will hopefully decrease the cognitive strain.

hierarchy and testosterone

Hierarchies select for testosterone heavy traits. In a world where only the high testosterone people can rise to the top, decisions will be testosterone driven. Hence, if you want to make the world a little less aggressive place, you should start by making the internal structure of the decision making entities less hierarchical. But how do you proceed?

• Keeping the size of the entities small is one option. But competition and scale effects favour consolidation. Hence this will not work out in any sensible economic regime.
• Trying out non-hierarchical organisational structures like holacracy is another option. But these flat fantasies never last too long. None of the large entities can even hope to give them a try.
• Waiting for artificial intelligence to mature seems to be the most feasible option at the moment. AI will dramatically decrease the need for human decision making so that even the largest entities can be run like a small entity.

geometry of wealth

Ownership of space has always been the paradigmatic way of displaying wealth. (See the previous post exploring the relationship between power and void.)

In modern times the geometry of status spaces has changed thanks to the development of various enabling technologies that led to greater concentrations of people living in cities. 

Previously, the wealthy owned huge swaths of land. Now they own skyscrapers. This simple change of coordinates created impressive perceptional differences:

• Horizontal spaces could only be experienced tangentially by the outsiders and therefore looked small relative to their actual sizes. Vertical spaces on the other hand are completely exposed to the gazing eyes, revealing the full glory of wealth.
• Now the poor literally look up to the wealthy. What was once an abstract status hierarchy has acquired a physical form as well.