Welcome to 📡 reporting from RADAR. Every other week, community curators will surface the best of the best — from the cultural constellations we’re watching emerge to behind-the-scenes build updates as we embark on our journey to discover, incubate, and deliver better futures.
Wavelength is a space for updates, member articles, ponderings & wanderings, fun experiments and — of course — more signals. So subscribe below to keep up with our signature brain massaging magic, straight to your inbox. 🔮💜
Signals Spotlight
1_The Politics of Detail
spotted in #aesthetics, #daily-signals
Recently we’ve been thinking about the politics of detail and what it means for the aesthetics that inform our future. From re-evaluating our own personal taste biases to considering aesthetic choices as a deeper political and social indicator of power.
When it comes to ‘detail’ on one side you have advocates for the death of detail, believing detail is a facade of beauty, a lazy solution which leads to ornateness and extravagance for the sake of it. This is where society has evolved: beauty has lost out to utility, our cities are made of glass, concrete and coldness…and as a result of the pandemic, we’ve really seen this shine through.
For others, detail is the champion. It’s a freedom of expression which turns the ordinary into beautiful, elevates the everyday and gives objects — and places! — personality. Across the globe, it feels like our move to minimalist design and modernist architecture has stripped away our countries' unique aesthetic identities, reducing everything to a lowest common denominator that feels like it came from a starting kit.
It’s a perspective that’s been adopted, and warped, by far right politicians whose criticisms of modernism hinges on the destruction of a ‘superior past’…not really cloaking those their nostalgia for colonial rule and a pre-WWII era.
But let’s lighten the mood and talk horror movies, eh? This very conversation has translated into the architecture we see throughout the genre. Where once we used gothic creaky stairs to create a sense of fear, we now represent our horror in a world of glass and steel. Just like politics, the horror is all in the detail.
Ok, even lighter now, we promise.
It feels like detail and minimalism are harmoniously thriving in the cluttercore aesthetic: “What’s fun about cluttercore is it REQUIRES personality and specialized interest in order to work and it celebrates radical individuality.”
Cluttercore seems to marry the freedom and expression of detail with the thoughtful intention of minimalism — an ideology we can get behind.
🔮💭 Which aesthetic are you placing your bets on to win the culture war? Will our future be clean and minimalist? Will it re-embrace aesthetic detail? Or might it split the difference and embrace the chaotic good of cluttercore? How might the politics of our present and past disrupt the design of the future? And will you ever look at an ornate bench the same way again?
2_ A post algorithm era for creativity
spotted in #ai-algorithms, #art, #media-brands, #daily-signals
The myriad implications of DALLE have been on many of our personal radar’s for a while now, but we can safely say that it's truly entered the mainstream (and probably your twitter feeds) by now — which reminded us, wasn’t creativity meant to be the final frontier? The thing that made us human? Something that the algorithms couldn’t beat? Something that couldn’t be automated?
That’s getting harder and harder to argue as we enter the post-DALLE and Deepfake era. From countless threads featuring the work of DALLE-2 to every next meme posted by seemingly any and everyone using Dalle Mini, it seems clear that we’re moving into a post-algorithm era of creativity — one where design is truly democratized because no/low-creativity tools (much like the no-code/low-code movement) are around every corner.
Similar technological shifts have shaken up creative industries before — typesetters replaced by computers, architects' maquettes usurped by 3D visualization tools. But in all of these cases, there was very little question that new tools for creativity were tools for us. Today, the question looks a bit different: is software becoming creator?
How will this challenge our perceptions of the value of creativity? What does it mean for illustrators and 3D designers when AI is designing magazine covers? Or for creative strategists when the joke of a Chief Metaverse Officer actually starts briefing in campaigns?
What does it mean for IP? What does it mean for digital artwork? For NFTs?
From tech that help us describe the perfect color, replicate voices, do research and write poetry, the suite of tools that everyday users will soon have at their fingertips is kind of unimaginable.
But who knows — maybe real skill and craft still sits at the intersection of human and machine, requiring human hands to ‘make moves’ and wield the magic of instruction to bring a vision to life. Or maybe we’ll just stop caring, as long as we can write the tweet or code easier, or edit the imagery for the next blog post.
Either way, we see a line in the sand being drawn right now, a shift from a pre-creative algorithm era to a post-creative algorithm era. Are you ready?
🔮💭 With access to unlimited creativity, what would you build? Where would you stop? Would there be a bridge too far? And how would all of this access change your relationship with art and design? Would you check if something was ‘human-made’ before you interacted with it? Would you care?
The Best of The Rest
From urban planning in the metaverse, to smelling the metaverse. Watching athletic sponsorship get reinvented for the web3 era while we ponder the ramifications of caviar bumps becoming a thing? Why not. While we’re on the topic of food…psychedelic snacks turn out to be anti-depressants in disguise; an ice cream topping you can wear; and ancestral agriculture from our friends Thirsty Thirsty. And a post-COVID world where Netflix & TikTok swap spots, and we all get our rollerskates on? Count us in.
Pulse Check
Focus this Week: If you spend just one hour with RADAR this week, jump into RADAR’s Mega Resource Doc and add your favorite resources to the community. Our intention is to fight bias, burst our own personal filter bubbles, and power our research process along the way. So jump in the doc and add 5 of your faves — even if you’re not a RADAR member, we’d love to hear from you!
Squad Updates:
In the Comms Squad…we’re about ready to publish pieces on our first product launch (the Signals Extension) and V1 of our research process. With launch around the corner, we couldn’t be more excited to share this process with the world!
Over in Research Squad…No one panic, but we’re T-3 weeks to launch! The squad has been busy rounding out our end-to-end research process: finalizing the SuperCurator role and responsibility, locking in a scoring rubric to fight subjectivity, and getting everything ready to produce the first-ever RADAR research & foresight report through our community.
In Incubate, we’ve now reached an end-to-end incubation process, including models for fundraising, venture, and building products of the future. Check out the #Incubate channel to watch a recording of our last jam session if you couldn’t make it.
Governance is busy getting our first critical proposal passed as we set our first partnerships in motion and begin to release funds for the research process. As part of our mission to Make Governance Fun, we’re operating a bit more like a co-op (and also looking for suggestions on a governance rebrand!) — join us!
And last but not least, over in Product Squad, our first beta testers are playing around with the Signals Extension and we’re making progress on a V1 of our Futures Protocol with Diamond DAO. This is step one of our Proof of Futures NFT for members, and we couldn’t be more excited!
Upcoming Events:
We’re kicking off our research process with SuperCuration starting July 11th — look out for community voting shortly thereafter as we embark on our first-ever research brief.
We’ll be having our first Solo Signals Session next week. Stay tuned for details and updates on how you can get involved!
Our friends at TwoPlus have an awesome cohort coming up in July and we’re sending a few of our human radarz to participate.
Planning on being at ETH Barca July 6th-8th? Or ETH Paris July 19th-21st? You might just see a few of us there!
This week’s 📡 reporting from radar was written & curated by @Fancy and edited by @keels223 — with so much gratitude to everyone who inspired the content with their amazing contributions including @victoriafutures, @adina, @kairon, @alpal768, @andreac, @dwayne "the jock" ronson . . . and anyone else we missed!
Not a part of RADAR just yet, but feeling the FOMO? Join us here.