The Auteur and the Ghetto

Auteurs, AIs, and the Ghetto Archipelago

Many people today think AI will lead to personalized film and TV. They say everyone will just design their own movies, or commercial systems will create personalized products. This might be plausible for a subset of the population, maybe even a large subset, but ultimately high culture is competitive—it’s about recognition, so personalized content won’t appeal to auteurs or appreciators.

The people who excel in domains of high culture, the people who take these things seriously, in every generation, are ultimately waging war against each other. It's a competition for mindshare, a battle to control how the rest of the world values, feels, and thinks.

There might be personalized media, but it will be an archipelago of ghettoes. More likely is multipolar tribal warfare, where dominant creators lead their audiences into particular self-referential cinematic universes, and culture becomes a matter of growing your tribe’s aesthetic-political-economic dominance over the other tribes.

Top artists and top aesthetes will not want to make or consume personalized art but they will want to go infinitely deep into their own tribe’s tastes and have it take over the others.

How to Get Married (As a Man)

If you’re a man struggling to find a wife, you need to find a girl and tell her you are going to marry her. Many women have no idea what they want. They want to be told, and they want to see you fight to follow through.

I’ve said this to guy friends before, but it’s dead-serious reality only came through to me recently. I made this argument to two beautiful women—in their 30s, one married, one single—at a party last week. Their eyes lit up with immediate recognition and they both said I was 100% right. Gentlemen, I’m telling you, this is the way.

Modernity Has Not Abolished Cruelty, We’ve Perfected It

We abolished slavery, but made the average man more slavish (see my recent Nietzsche on the Pride of the Philosopher).

We abolished torture, but now 14-year-old girls torture each other to suicide.

We abolished intolerant public judgments of sin, but now we have progressives who, under a banner of tolerance, judge their enemies more fiercely than any 19th-century preacher.

In short, we claim to have abolished many cruelties when rather we have only diffused them. And, what is worse, dissembled them.

Charlotte Perriand’s Study Room in the House of the Young Man

I like the the Study Room in the House of the Young Man, presented at the Universal Exhibition of Brussels in 1935 by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand.

The space was designed to support both physical and intellectual exercise.

Perriand joined Corbusier as an interior designer in 1927.

"In every important decision there is one option that represents life, and that is what you must choose," she once said.