Where Will The Pendulum Swing?

The new 'Wavelengths' board game that I've been obsessively playing over the holidays has inspired this framing. I share three key spectrums that I'll be watching closely this year.

Aaaah this is huge! I have been toying with the idea of starting a substack since last year and got carried away with overthinking pretty much everything lol. It’s really been a long time coming.

In any case, I’m glad you’re here - take a read, join the discussion, or simply enjoy!

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Newton’s third law of motion states that “for every action (force) in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

A closer interrogation of my 2023 Roundup reveals this to hold true for culture, where major shifts in culture are often accompanied with shifts in the opposite direction. Take for example, hyper-optimization versus slow living; the eat the rich narrative versus social media celebrating fiction; or the mechanical reproduction of the self versus collective internet culture.

Thus is life, isn’t it? One big paradox that we attempt to make sense of despite knowing that our perceptions are just slivers of reality, influenced by the communities we choose to be part of and now, warped by the algorithms that amplify our echo chambers.

Nonetheless, I’d like to embark on this endeavor by sharing three spectrums that I’m attempting to make sense of in 2024.

1. What will we choose to optimize?

Last year was the year of AI. AI was the media darling that dominated the majority of our boardroom meetings (and group gatherings and family chats) with its potential to supercharge our life.

But it was also the year that catalyzed deeper reflection on what makes us human. Faced with a super-intelligence, we had to consider big questions like “What does it mean to be a human being? What’s unique and defensible about us vis-a-vis superintelligence? What will it mean for our future when we’re no longer the smartest thing on the planet? What is a just, good society when superintelligent AI exists?”

2024 feels like a momentous year where we reconsider what we truly value, and in turn what we choose to optimize.

At one end of the spectrum lies ‘going fast’, where we optimize for efficiency and convenience. This panders to the dominant narrative of our hyper-optimized culture, where we aspire towards a frictionless life, consequently lapping up any shiny new thing that can oil our engines.

In his book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman offers a different perspective: “smoothness, it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it liveable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities… Convenience, in other words, makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what’s most valuable in any given context.”

It’s easy to be seduced by technology’s promise to liberate us from the trouble of having to do things ourselves, be it wracking our brains to write an essay or ploughing through dozens of links to find the information you need.

But there is also value in enduring a slow or difficult process.

For instance, in a wonderful piece ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the Internet, Ted Chiang highlights how the process of writing and rewriting and rewriting trains one’s skills in articulating oneself, and producing something original; “Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting, and that’s one of the things lacking when you start with text generated by an A.I.”

Friction is a key part of learning. In this convenience economy, I hope we learn how to embrace that.

2. What’s the new vibe online?

Last January, Weber Shandwick's Tom Beckman predicted that ‘eat the rich’ would become the dominant cultural narrative where “people and brands will celebrate social realism”.

With the recession still looming over us and the world growing ever more uncertain, it makes sense that our aspirations are no longer to emulate the wealthy who are left unscathed. Instead, we choose to double down on amplifying what’s real and most human. On this end of the spectrum, we can expect the internet to become the vessel for the portrayal of realistic human experiences, be it the underdog story arc, the importance of perseverance, or yearnposting that conveys mundane, melancholic truths about life.

Simultaneously, we also witness the rise of the absurd.

The complete opposite of celebrating social realism, it’s characterized by exaggeration, surrealism and fiction. Think about virtual influencers like Lil Miquela who have become hyperbolic representations of our social presence, the rise of the NPCs, and the surrealist marketing stunts that have quickly become one of the new tactics in brands’ marketing playbook.

So the question here is, will social become a mirror that we hold up to reflect real life, or will it become a funhouse mirror that we use to escape reality and have a laugh at?

3. Will we become more self-centric or community-centric?

Sure, we are inherently self-centered creatures.

But social media has amplified that feeling of us being at the centre of our own universes, where it’s become second nature to posture ourselves online in hopes of amassing likes and comments.

It’s not new news that we constantly extend ourselves on social media. But what’s new is the meaning and value that we now confer upon our online personas.

A few years ago, an online persona was merely a byproduct of one’s fervent sharing of what’s on their mind, their latest life milestone etc. But today, it’s become a “[commodity] that could be developed and cultivated”.

Thinking back, perhaps the first symptom of this shift was friends starting to plan out their feeds, and aspiring towards a cohesive aesthetic feed. We started to take notice of the overall image that we were projecting, and sought ways to curate and edit that — regardless of how long we took editing pictures on VSCO or scheduling images ahead of time to get the perfect grid.

With the rise of the creator economy and therefore more opportunities to monetize one’s online presence today, the self has become a dominant form of cultural currency. We are constantly signaling our identity, keenly awaiting for recognition, and potentially, monetization from the attention received.

On the other hand, we see collectives spheres of influence emerge. Here, it’s about being part of something larger than yourself, and working towards a broader, shared vision.

metalabel has been a visionary in this realm, where they’ve developed projects encouraging multi-player creativity such as Lonely Writers Club which I had the opportunity to be part of. We spent three Zoom sessions engaging in a warm, open discussion of our journey as writers, our ambitions for the future, and how we can take the next step to accomplishing it. Even today, the Discord remains a source of inspiration and motivation to keep writing (partly the reason why I’ve made it here on substack!).

Another standout example would be collective media, a collective “made up of the new wave of consumer social founders who are committed to re-imagining and building our next generation of social spaces.” It consists a myriad of apps — from collective curatorial network startupy to social search engine diem — that aims to unlock deeper connection, greater utility and freer play.

In essence, this end of the spectrum captures a movement towards creating an internet that feels less like a stage, and more like a cosy sofa.

So what do you think? Will social continue to champion the self as the key unit of exchange, where self-commodification and self-parading ensue? Or will the cosy web take over, where social gets more communal and collaborative?

Now, let’s sit back and watch where the pendulum swings.