The Missive #67

The promise and danger of speed. Collaboration. Cooking. 🎵All good things will die, and that'll never change. 🎵

Nov 20

My friend’s neighbour gardens into the night in inner-city Melbourne.

Welcome back to the November Missive. It’s been a year since I brought back this newsletter after a two year break(down), and it’s lovely to see so many newbies on the mailing list.

Now that Twitter is in chaos, this is the main way that I’ll be sharing my writing and thoughts. If you enjoy reading this thing, please forward it on to anyone else you think might like it.

“We still bite at the clickbait, but it doesn’t taste so good. Something is wrong. We feel it intuitively and the numbers validate it. We’ve maxed out on clicks and swipes—and especially with pandemic controls and lockdowns coming to an end, it will be even harder to keep people scrolling mindlessly.”
— Ted Gioia, “Has the Internet reached peak clickability?”

This tweet is a perfect summation of my personal growth over the past 5 years:

Geneva @cartoonfuntime

eventually you too will get bored of public vulnerability and become interested solely in making your apartment nicer

As the Covid lockdown years move from the windscreen to the back seat to the rear-view mirror, most workplaces are desperately trying to get employees back into the office under the guise of collaboration.

I love working in multi-disciplinary teams with other people. I also love working from home where I am set free from noisy open-plan offices and given space to left to think, sketch, pore over spreadsheets, and write. Fortunately, my career change into technology and UX has allowed me to do both these things.

This article debunking “collaboration” as the holy grail of work is a fantastic read. It also got me thinking about my years of playing music with other people. As a child, I was instructed to spend hours alone practicing my instrument or writing so that when I came together with others — usually a teacher or a band/orchestra — I would have my skills and ideas honed into muscle memory, ready to actually truly collaborate with the other musicians. This approach to work is a no-brainer for me. When I think of myself playing guitar alongside a drummer, I think “fun”. When I think of myself trying to practice my guitar scales while a drummer practices rudiments next to me, I feel anxious. “Sharing a physical space with other people” isn’t collaboration.

Speaking of collaboration: comedians Jane Turner and Gina Riley had been collaborating with each other for nearly 20 years before they created Kath & Kim. I loved learning that the show was nearly cancelled before it aired, and how their suburban lives fueled their creativity.

Jane Turner: We wrote at my place after school drop-off in the morning. We’d go like the clappers for two to three hours, generally brainstorming, talking about trends, what’s in the news, what’s going on in our lives.

Gina Riley: Jane and I would sit in a room – always at her house, it never worked at my house. We tried to be grown-ups and go into an office once and we just sat there looking at the screen going, “Nup, nothing’s coming.” We had to be where things were happening, schools were calling us, her kids were there sick. That domestic environment was really important.

— Karl Quinn, “Kath & Kim, an oral history: How an Aussie classic was made - and almost wasn’t”

It’s been five years since the Australian referendum about legalising same-sex marriage. When I think back to that time, I remember feeling grumpy and bitter. I’ve always wanted to get married, but as someone who has been in relationships with men, women and non-binary people, I hated that I could only get the legal privileges of marriage if I chose to marry someone with “male” on their identity documents. The whole thing was stupid, unnecessary and borne out of political cowardice. So, what does that embarrassing period in Australian history have to show us about the upcoming decision about recognising Indigenous Australians in the constitution?

“[Noel Pearson] said the campaign for recognition of Indigenous Australians in the Constitution would be more difficult than the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey. Indigenous people, he said, were "not popular" and "not personally known to many Australians", which could affect the referendum's chances of success.
"For those who wish to oppose our recognition it will be like shooting fish in a barrel. An inane thing to do — but easy. A heartless thing to do — but easy."
He is right. It will be like shooting fish in a barrel because of the racism inherent to the colonisation experience that has not been reckoned with.”
— Patricia Karvelas, “Five years after the same-sex marriage plebiscite, does it hold a lesson for the Indigenous Voice referendum?”

“In modernity, our lives unfold quicker. Stasis is shorter. The accelerated pace of change has embedded catastrophic risk into our precarious world, as most systems are designed for gradualism, evolution by creeps, not evolution by jerks. The world can change in a second, but it can also break in a second.”

— Brian Klaas, “How The World Sped Up”

(((Christian JB))) 🚜---Z @christianjbdev

Vonnegut on "Howl", Ginsburg's 'I saw the best minds of our generation destroyed' poem. Makes me laugh.

“We are seeing the natural endpoint of startup culture - the death of the aspirational dream of learning to code and building the next big, sexy company. Tech is no longer populated by weird dorks that have used their smarts to grow from obscurity to luxury - every hero has outstayed their welcome, devoured by their hubris, greed, and desperation.”

— Ed Zitron, “The Death Of The Boy Genius”

Listening

My October and November playlists
The Down Round podcast — yes, it’s two guys talking about tech and culture, but it’s a fun listen.
This two-part interview with Kate Reid on The Imperfects podcast. Kate is the founder of iconic Melbourne croissant bakery Lune. I had no idea she was a literal rocket scientist whose love affair with pastry helped her recover from an eating disorder.

It’s been cool to see These New South Whales go from joke band to multimedia brand, pumping out mockumentaries, podcasts and post-punk. This is my favourite song from their new album. “It’s gonna take some time / all good things will die, and that’ll never change / and still the sun will shine, always after your time / and that’ll never change”.