Thanks for this letter! I was excited by this as potentially a good entry point to share with a few particular people. A few musings I had about the coming shapes of windows and islands, shared for fun and in case they happen to resonate: personally, I expect waves of numerous meme windows as we move towards more hyper-personalization and then waves of increased uniformity as certain ai-generated windows (frames for looking at society) emerge as particularly salient and powerful. Maybe in your metaphor, the numerous small windows are part of the archipelago, and the large salient movements are tsunamis or tropical storms that occasionally submerge and remap them. Very evocative, and to me reassuring that if one isn’t finding a home on one island, there are wide seas to explore.
Nice extension, thanks! Tide pools, storms, and tsunami are definitely fun to think about adding. If the shoreline is acceptability, then these waves would probably correspond to cancellations like #meToo, whereas if the shoreline were popularity (then reef for acceptability, continental shelf depth for thinkability?) then they would probably correspond to the big movements of fashionability like the hipster mania of the 00s-early 10s. (If implementation, then revolutions!) My personal practice with these extended images is to try to always develop a few balanced contrasting extensions in parallel, as suggestive precursors and intuition wells for explicit and definite theories. Images that are too extended alone, especially if taken too literally rather than figuratively, often turn into weird, warping influences.
I like how you put this: "as befit a libertarian ideology, the idea was that the politicians should be supplying messages in response to some pre-existing, autonomous popular demand." I think we both picked up on how ideology infects the metaphor itself. You took it much further, which I enjoyed!
Thanks for this letter! I was excited by this as potentially a good entry point to share with a few particular people. A few musings I had about the coming shapes of windows and islands, shared for fun and in case they happen to resonate: personally, I expect waves of numerous meme windows as we move towards more hyper-personalization and then waves of increased uniformity as certain ai-generated windows (frames for looking at society) emerge as particularly salient and powerful. Maybe in your metaphor, the numerous small windows are part of the archipelago, and the large salient movements are tsunamis or tropical storms that occasionally submerge and remap them. Very evocative, and to me reassuring that if one isn’t finding a home on one island, there are wide seas to explore.
Nice extension, thanks! Tide pools, storms, and tsunami are definitely fun to think about adding. If the shoreline is acceptability, then these waves would probably correspond to cancellations like #meToo, whereas if the shoreline were popularity (then reef for acceptability, continental shelf depth for thinkability?) then they would probably correspond to the big movements of fashionability like the hipster mania of the 00s-early 10s. (If implementation, then revolutions!) My personal practice with these extended images is to try to always develop a few balanced contrasting extensions in parallel, as suggestive precursors and intuition wells for explicit and definite theories. Images that are too extended alone, especially if taken too literally rather than figuratively, often turn into weird, warping influences.
really appreciated the thoroughness with which you attend to the metaphors we use to conceptualize this topic. very nicely framed.
Thanks! I liked your approach, also, https://substack.com/home/post/p-171992808
It included a great description of what I referred to here with "the Islands suddenly sinking."
I like how you put this: "as befit a libertarian ideology, the idea was that the politicians should be supplying messages in response to some pre-existing, autonomous popular demand." I think we both picked up on how ideology infects the metaphor itself. You took it much further, which I enjoyed!