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Wolf Tivy

30 Jan, 9 tweets, 3 min read

Our aesthetic culture in all areas is defined by an extreme conservatism of form right now. Simple lines, flat design, tight greyscale pallets, and aestheticized poverty.

Extravagence, complexity, flair, joy, and fun would be very powerful if done well right now.

But maximalism needs discipline, meaning, and skill, or it just becomes a gaudy and messy LSD-core. The difference between complexity and entropy is virtue.

Have we lost the skill or cultural depth to produce or appreciate complex visual meaning?

Here's what complexity looks like done well. Very different aesthetic philosophies. All religious, all overflowing with life and virtue. All very different from modern minimalism.

This isn't some "retvrn to tradition" thing. None of these is the aesthetic of the future, but they are at least suggestive of a larger space of possibility. Let's make some predictions. What is the aesthetic of the future?

Color. Bright colors are going to come back in style hard as people get bored with drabness. At first, this will be building on the blank canvas of modern greyscale pallets. Flashes of life in grey post-apocalypse. Maybe we re-learn how to do larger pallets?

The key to larger pallets is that color is real, useful, meaningful, while still fitting into some overall scheme that has a harmony to it. This is hard, which is why I suspect skill.

Stepping out of prediction and into prescription, I don't think industrialized mass culture will go anywhere, but I do think there is an unusual amount of clout to be picked up by hiring artisans to go beyond airport culture. Extravagent beauty is undervalued right now.

Artisanal extravagence can't be purchased transactionally though. The market doesn't sell it yet. You have to develop and support a micro-movement by patronage and superior taste. Long term relationships. Maybe that's why it isn't happening.

But it could happen.

If you have means: develop taste, form long-term patronage relationships with artists, and create the beautiful aesthetic of the future.

Please.

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More from @wolftivy

Wolf Tivy

@wolftivy

1 Feb

It's interesting that the emerging principle of legitimacy of the regime is that its subjects are morally compromised by various intersectional bigotries. Not "we are leading you to a great future" but "you have no right to complain and are probably a bad person".

Is this similar or different from past essentially stagnant regimes?

Like a cruel inversion of aristocracy. A moral gradient from rulers to ruled, but negative instead of positive: the ruled are especially depraved and deserving of oppression, rather than the rulers being especially enlightened or virtuous.

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Wolf Tivy

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5 Nov 20

Want your team to write good software? Put in a time-delay killswitch on event processing. If any event blocks the process for more than 5ms, crash with a BSOD.

5ms is plenty. But demands for computation grow without finite bounds until DISCIPLINE is imposed.

ENFORCE hard realtime 60 frames per second. All updates and redraws finished and flushed every 16 ms or CRASH.

This counts for startup too. If your program isn't responsive within 5ms of startup, CRASH you're FIRED.

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Wolf Tivy

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5 Nov 20

It's clear our current paradigm for how to achieve civilizational progress doesn't work anymore. Maybe it exhausted it's gains, maybe we lost the true thing.

Either way, what comes next?

Six ideas:

One: we need to consciously think in terms of purpose hierarchies more. Society at its best is a holistic collective project, and it's parts can be understood as functional parts towards our missions. This has limitations, but we currently completely neglect it.

Two: justice is closely related to institutional functionality. It is not just consequentialist. It's about the institutional standards of excellence that get us where we want to go. Currently, justice has no grounding, and institutional functionality has no moral legitimacy.

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Wolf Tivy

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4 Nov 20

Unless the family is the economic apex predator, the human race will not achieve our potential.

Replacing the family with more modern forms of economic apex predator institutions created the modern wealth and power we have, but it has come at the expense of fundamental capital stocks.

In maoist terms, we have to find a way to manage this contradiction.

Here's what happened: when families were top of the food chain, the economy could only reproduce biologically.

The modern transition mobilized people to work outside of family contexts, which caused the demographic transition and decentered human life.

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Wolf Tivy

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29 Mar 20

So how do we beat infectious disease? It's not with hospitals. Hospitals at best take the edge off, a bit. It's a virus. What can they do? Nothing, until you're choking on pink froth. And even then, there is little they can do.

Maybe we'll get some miracle drug or miracle vaccine. But these things seem like an ideological cope, not how infectious disease actually gets beaten. We like the story of shiny modern technology that lets us change nothing about how we live. What if it's fake?

What actually works to beat infectious disease?

1) Hygiene. Masks. Plumbing. Handwashing. Calibrating your disgust sensitivity. Social distancing during outbreaks. Cleaning public surfaces, using better materials. Waving instead of handshakes.

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Wolf Tivy

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14 Mar 20

Our political problem is very simple:

Lovecraft was really on to something. He KNEW something, or, by unspeakable means, came to know it.

The underlying theme of his work is the frightfully transient position of old New England, thereby of civilized man overall, in the story of the cosmos.

Lovecraft's old New England was a beautiful and comfortable reality. But it was under terminal assault from both the past and the future. It stood on land much older and more mysterious than was comforting, and very obviously was not surviving modernization. Horrifying transience

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