flâneur

Graciela Smet

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on the atlas — 22

highlights — 87

  • Because if you look at some modern trends, say for example, the discourse of secular monks, whereby a young American man will go: I’m going to eat these specific macros, I’ll have 200 grams of protein, I’ll spend two hours on the bike — that’s a guy with no friends. That’s a guy who’s prioritizing optimizing his physique. And he’s not building friendships. He’s not building rapport. He’s not becoming a funny, charismatic guy.
    Opinion | How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart - The New York Times
  • The best things in life — love, skill, interest — compound over time. But they only compound if you let them. If you commit. As you go deeper you build your competence, your insight, your network, and your confidence in the decisions you make. You get to play your own game. This isn’t to say that exploration is worthless. As a child, as a student, as a human being, you should dabble. You should wander. You should sample everything life has to offer. But at some point, you have to pick a piece of fruit. You have to grab it and dig in.
    Option Rot
  • The internet’s voyeuristic lens has amplified this optionality mindset. We can peek into countless different lives and paths, living vicariously through them — all seemingly perfect and possibly within reach but never achieved. Echoes of “I could do that if I wanted to” ring in your head.
    Option Rot
  • This is the optionality trap. It whispers to us in the voice of reason: Keep your options open. Stay flexible. The world is changing too fast to commit. And so we float. We dabble. We optimize for a future that never arrives.
    Option Rot
  • While everyone wants to see an eclipse, no one really wants to see your picture of an eclipse, including yourself.
    Images of unphotographability - by Rob Horning
  • I wonder if people photographed the eclipse for similar reasons. One could begin to fall into the bottomless well of contemplation about the significance and fragility of our place in the universe, or one could take a picture to stand in for that idea, to have something more practical to do. It’s not like the image itself will be compelling in its own right.
    Images of unphotographability - by Rob Horning
  • I take pictures of the ocean not to see what the ocean looked like but to express my mood at that moment in a gesture, to modulate it, to tell myself I am having a subjective experience, an encounter with reality, that I want to put a frame around and set aside.
    Images of unphotographability - by Rob Horning
  • the sublime is sublime because it exceeds representation, defies it, confronts our puny understandings with phenomena we can’t fully assimilate
    Images of unphotographability - by Rob Horning
  • defer our “real” living to another more propitious time that never quite arrives.
    The Art of Living - by L. M. Sacasas
  • The stuff of life is our bones and flesh. We may be more than bone and flesh, but we are not less.
    The Art of Living - by L. M. Sacasas
  • those who wish to live as creatures and those who wish to live as machines
    The Art of Living - by L. M. Sacasas
  • if the constraints of a medium of art appear self-evident—the canvas is only so large, the instrument plays only a certain range of notes—what are the limits of the medium on which the art of life plays. Indeed, what exactly is the medium in view?
    The Art of Living - by L. M. Sacasas
  • We are out of sync with everything on earth and even with one another. There are 7.7 billion human beings and counting, each of us possessing a kind of inner clock, a unique expression of lived time. For Homo sapiens, time is strange not only because it is relative, as Albert Einstein and others revealed, but because it is subjective; it is not only biological, like the clocks of flowers and trees, but also psychological. Our personal experiences of time are inconsistent, mutable. In childhood a month can linger for an eternity; for someone in middle age, a season unspools at a disorienting cl…
    Out of Time | Lapham’s Quarterly
  • As new modes of manufacturing developed, time itself was systematized and commodified.
    Out of Time | Lapham’s Quarterly
  • For most of our species’ existence time was a local affair, noon established by the sun’s place in the sky, a fluid movement from east to west. It was not something set by the clearly delineated time zones we now inhabit. O’clock is a contraction for of the clock, a vestigial reminder that there was a time when clocks were novelties and clock time obviously foreign, an interloper not yet internalized as the societal default.
    Out of Time | Lapham’s Quarterly
  • Part of the difficulty of addressing the climate crisis has to do with different timescales operating simultaneously. End of the world, end of the month. There are so many clocks and so little time: economic clocks, physical and chemical clocks, nature’s innumerable biological clocks, our inner psychological clocks, and collective cultural clocks. It’s a temporal cacophony, a disorienting polyrhythm. To figure out how to move forward, we should pause and delineate the different tempos we dwell within.
    Out of Time | Lapham’s Quarterly
  • It’s hard to identify with something so empty at its core.
    Welcome to AirSpace | The Verge
  • Just as a gentrifying neighborhood starts to look less diverse as buildings are renovated and storefronts replaced, so economically similar urban areas around the world might increasingly resemble each other and become interchangeable.
    Welcome to AirSpace | The Verge
  • desirable places should be both specific enough to be interesting and generic enough to be as convenient as possible, consumed quickly and easily — equal parts authentic and expendable
    Welcome to AirSpace | The Verge
  • All places, in one place. Imagine traveling across continents in a pilgrimage to the headquarters of the company that helps you open your house to strangers only to find yourself — at home.
    Welcome to AirSpace | The Verge
  • Airbnb became an interactive lifestyle magazine.
    Welcome to AirSpace | The Verge
  • The interchangeability, ceaseless movement, and symbolic blankness that was once the hallmark of hotels and airports
    Welcome to AirSpace | The Verge
  • “Is the contemporary city like the contemporary airport—‘all the same’?” he asks. “What if this seemingly accidental—and usually regretted—homogenization were an intentional process, a conscious movement away from difference toward similarity?”
    Welcome to AirSpace | The Verge
  • Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started.
    Welcome to AirSpace | The Verge
  • technology is also shaping the physical world, influencing the places we go and how we behave in areas of our lives that didn’t heretofore seem so digital
    Welcome to AirSpace | The Verge
  • Digital platforms like Foursquare are producing “a harmonization of tastes” across the world, Schwarzmann says. “It creates you going to the same place all over again.”
    Welcome to AirSpace | The Verge
  • i am making sure to eat a square of dark chocolate during my depressive episodes so they’ll sound sexy in my memoirs. even when i am ostensibly at my lowest, i am still filtering my experiences through the eyes of a consumer; the desire to editorialize our own experiences (to romanticize the unseen, to live for our biographies) has become an autonomic facet of womanhood as unavoidable as breathing.
    standing on the shoulders of complex female characters
  • What even is “on brand” for me? Books, cats, plants, thrifted clothes, furniture from Facebook marketplace, glasses, short hair, a general distaste for the sweltering heat of summer, throw pillows. Not on brand: selfies, absurdly large water bottles, any home decor item that doesn’t absolutely match the aesthetic of my apartment, weekends spent fishing, writing poetry.
    I’m Done With Living 'On Brand'
  • Ultimately, by donning childlike attire, we are merely indulging in a harmless act of dress up. Women already get dressed with the knowledge that every element of their outfit will be under scrutiny, consciously or not, so I think they can be afforded the delight of assuming a fictional character.
    Your Honor, I'm Literally Just A Girl <3
  • She is cute, capricious, and most of all, she is not deliberately sexy.
    Your Honor, I'm Literally Just A Girl <3
  • the girl gives us a model for living that goes through, rather than around, the legacy condition of surveillance capitalism, platform capitalism, or simply late-liberal capitalism
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • The Total Girl’s Guide to Survival would include: how to perfect your exterior representation and diffuse it until it’s everywhere, and until you can live well inside the space shielded by your own image; how to take pleasure in the image, in the content, while unhooking its power over life; and how to be realistic about illusion so that you can license the Real to take root beyond its purview, in its lee
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • to consider the girl as a specific technology of subjectivity that maxes out on desire, attraction, replication, and cunning to achieve specific ends
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • In her concept of machine envy, she proposes that “advanced technology doesn’t necessarily embody the all too familiar tropes of servitude or existential threat, but rather, presents a viable, aspirational model of how to be. Artificiality not only feels more desirable but also more tangible than the real.”
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • beautiful-princess Bible verses carved into my brainstem like lovers’ initials in a tree trunk.
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • Hatred of the girl mistakes girlification for consumer culture itself: the admittedly well-founded paranoia that any remaining selfhood has been scraped out to make room for more ads and that any desire we experience has been routed along deep grooves of persuasive marketing
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • You could say that platform-determined behavioral design, with its vectors of attentional capture leading to the illusion of monetary reward, is simply forced feminization. To wish to be perceived, desired, and rewarded for cultivating that desire is the default setting for participating in digital culture, making all of us “girls online” regardless of gender.
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • Sorry boys, but you’re girls, too. What really makes up gender, Long Chu writes, is how you respond to being female. Living as “male” is to live in horror of ever being a girl
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • Wanting the “perfect build” or “personality,” anyway, is textbook girlified. Wanting to be seen doing it—well, even more so.
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • As a symbolic-consumer subject, she is the default condition of vulnerability that touches us all—creatures caught in a web of total exposure, vying for both privacy and visibility. Privacy, to retain some semblance of agency; visibility, to access money, respect, and basic rights. To be a good girl, you have to pass muster in the system of eyes. You have to feed cash into “feminization” to be both real—convincing, relatable—and not-real, alluringly ideal.
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • We are experiencing the “inhuman or posthuman version of cyberfeminism, where patriarchy—by relegating women to the status of machines, objects, or NPCs—accidentally creates an unpredictable and potent affinity between women and technology.
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • The girl is an inhuman category. “Girls are closer to the machinic condition,”
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • Every ordinary person has to, in some way, pay attention to their semipublic image, even if that image is one that resists appearing on a platform.
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • Young-Girls are “beings that no longer have any intimacy with [themselves] except as value, and whose every activity, in every detail, is directed towards self-valorisation.”
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • Tiqqun describes the Young-Girl as less of a person, and more of a force. She is a “living currency,” a “war machine,” and a “technique of the self” driven by the “desire to be desired.” Her state is what coheres a society that has been empty of meaning and ritual since industrialization.
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • “The female [is] any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another,”
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • Consider that the girl is a symbolic category, unfixed from biological sex or social gender.
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • As a term, “girl” is polarizing: feared for how tightly it connects youth and desire, reviled for its infantilizing, passivity-inducing properties. On the face of it, girlishness is simply dismissed as being frivolous, immature, unmasculine, disempowering, reductive. At worst, the girl is an apolitical neutralizer of direct action. At best, she is simply enjoying herself with the junk society has given her. In either state—harmless or neutralizing, hedonic or willfully ignorant—the girl becomes an attractor of hatred, envy, and fear. As opposed to mainstream narratives of female empowerment an…
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • Haters will say that the girl has no access to individual agency and political autonomy, and is therefore an enemy of serious activism—or seriousness, at all. Lovers will reply that the girl is simply emptied of traditional humanist traits to make room for something else. She is closely networked with other minds, with an intelligence that is intuitive, cunning, and sophisticated, yet maligned and dismissed because it is little understood.
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED
  • As for man, once the king of the online condition? “Hit him with your car!” says head bimbo Chrissy Chlapecka with heavenly vocal fry, to the tune of 4 million TikTok hearts. It’s a girl’s world now; we’re just living in it.
    Everyone Is a Girl Online | WIRED