To Think Different, Read Different
Take the most subscribed 'Substacks' on culture—they feel like a version of the same popular topics.
But is that stuff of value, things you can actually use? Which begs the question—is there a good way of knowing things you can use? I’ve been asking myself this question more frequently as I dip in an out of essays and books.
On one hand, you can train yourself to ask better questions. Which is especially useful on topics that are right under everyone’s nose. Take the Internet, for example. We consider it infrastructure.
Like with the roadways, we rarely challenge the changes to it. But it’s a failure of the imagination (or pure laziness). Wondering about the premise could give you a new frame of reference.
So I asked on your behalf—Is the Internet a significant break from the past? And if so, how should we think about what we do with it?
On Value in Culture is a guide to the role of narrative, language, and art in how we organize, perceive, and communicate about reality. To support my work, take out a paid subscription.
5.35 billion people use the internet today—66.2 percent of the world’s population.1 Europe and North America are the regions with the highest use—9 out of 10 people are online.2 Just one out of four people go online in the Middle East and Africa.
The world wide web was a lifeline for many during the pandemic.3 But I argue that as more and more of the Internet is less than open and transparent, optionality4 has its costs. We can thank producers for the current infodemic.
So much of the dialogue of early days has become ‘content’ in a very narrow set of topics that floods the attention zone, away from many deserving others. Too much filler, too little nutrition—it’s a wonder how we know what’s going on at all.
Would we be where we are all discussing one news item on repeat, if ordinary people had actual power in social media platforms decisions?
The popularity of topics that range from burnout, productivity—two sides of the same issue—work from home, Elon Musk’s shenanigans, and those under the general banner of ‘The Current Issue’ overwhelms more interesting conversations.
For example, we rarely, if ever, talk about the limits of business (1), definition before consequences of artificial intelligence (2), institutional innovation (3). Beyond the hype we may be able to find saner, more nuanced treatments of things we care about (or should.)
I constantly tweak my reading list here on Substack—hence why I was perusing various topics.
Other under-reported things we could use include climate-change mitigation (preparedness and innovation), water in relation to life and land at the infrastructure (i.e. the Internet) and governance levels—both of which sit between culture and commerce in the diagram below.
My take on Brian Eno and Stewart Brand’s schematic, which underpins much of my work. The slower the change to a layer of civilization, the more opportunities to research and study the effects on adjacent layers and their pace.
Another diagram I use often shows how we can go from culture through narrative to distribution in a communication program. Awareness is our friend. Thinking tools are one way to have knowledge you can use.
To replace social media, which takes much more than it gives, I favor open platforms. Granted, community is much harder to do online. But you get tons of value when you commit to one (which might include paid support.)
Thinking about closed / open as a writer led me to an interesting conundrum—I don’t want to lose the direct relationship with readers, but at the current level of support (that means people who pay), I need common infrastructure.
I’ve tried a few partnerships in the last couple of years that didn’t pan out. However, I remain optimistic that when values and value align, people can get behind similar principles and collaborate with success.
The main concern is to regenerate resources, not own them. Cohesion and not competition is the way, it’s always been. To maintain the ability to create and recreate we use energy. Together, we can create more socially useful energy.
We can find points of leverage at the intersection of experience and expertise.
Philosophy can help us forge a new vocabulary to go beyond economic boundaries to feel and internalize the vitality of work, along with our ability to maintain value. But money is at the crux of all these things that don’t communicate with each other—policies, strategies, business models, priorities, etc.
I worked in financial services for fifteen years. But it occurred to me that though I gained a deeper appreciation of the nature of risk, I never looked into the history of money beyond the elementary. It’s never too late to learn.
Since books are the most complete form of reference, that’s where I turned to understand money. You may enjoy the essay I wrote about debt and the shadow side of wealth.
I also try to approach topics from different disciplines, though admittedly philosophy and literary arts are more my cup of espresso, to which I’ve added a healthy dose of history.
If writing original thoughts is a challenge, reading diverse material is even more so.
To think different, read different
Take for example the concept of normality. Something I would not have given much of a thought a few years ago. Is it limiting to think in terms of ‘normal’? As a thin concept, it doesn’t reflect the full spectrum of human potential.
However, the burden of justifying change rests on the people who question the status quo.
With that in mind, here’s a list of books I recommend:
1. How We Became Human by Tim Dean—social change has picked up dramatically with the disruption of continuity of culture (and class). We need more constructive questions about norms. So we can learn to push back on our unreflective sense of the world. Dean explores the intersection of biology, genetics, psychology and philosophy and how they contributed to forming a narrative morality at odds with the change in our current environment.
2. What's Normal?: Reconciling Biology and Culture by Allan V. Horwitz—a comprehensive exploration of the intersection of two bodies of thought we don’t normally associate. Given the persistent overuse of the expression ‘the new normal’ in the last couple of years, this is required reading. Rather than offer a neat framework, Horwitz reframes the cultural conditioning that made courage good and cowardice bad. Biological function and cultural dynamics are mutually impacted.
3. The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era by Lennard J. Davis—as is often the case, we look into certain questions when they impact us directly. The son of deaf parents, Davis discovered that disability is a socially-constructed thing. Normal is a relatively recent word. Except for Normal schools, which is where they taught teachers. The word comes from the carpenter’s L-shaped square tool. Davis says, '“narrative is a form of normalizing.” And so it is.
4. Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines by Jonathan Mooney — to continue with the exploration, we need to realize how we’ve conflated what is right with what is fact. The resulting worship of normality masks a more troubling idea, that different is deficient. The concept was created by a powerful system with an economic imperative to enforce the standard. Which is exactly the problem.
I’m grateful to Dr. Paul Mason for the reading list and more food for productive thought. His idioms of normality podcast should be required listening.
Internet use in 2024, DataRePortal. Compare to the digital report in 2022.
To get more granular, Southern Europe is at 90 percent, while Western Europe is 94.5, and the Nordic countries higher than America, which is 96.8 percent, at 97.6 percent.
Pew: 90 percent of Americans say the internet has been essential or important to them, many made video calls and 40 percent used technology in new ways. But while tech was a lifeline for some, others faced struggles. My mother would be among those who struggled. At the height of the pandemic, her service provider (Italy) disconnected her for weeks.
The value of additional optional investment opportunities after the initial investment.
Informative