Search Results for: Premium mediocre

The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial

August 17, 2017 By

A few months ago, while dining at Veggie Grill (one of the new breed of Chipotle-class fast-casual restaurants), a phrase popped unbidden into my head: premium mediocre. The food, I opined to my wife, was premium mediocre. She instantly got what I meant, though she didn’t quite agree that Veggie Grill qualified. In the weeks that followed, premium mediocre turned into a term of art for us, and we gleefully went around labeling various things with the term, sometimes disagreeing, but mostly agreeing. And it wasn’t just us. When I tried the term on my Facebook wall, and on Twitter, again everybody instantly got the idea, and into the spirit of the labeling game.

As a connoisseur and occasional purveyor of fine premium-mediocre memes, I was intrigued. It’s rare for an ambiguous neologism like this to generate such strong consensus about what it denotes without careful priming and curation by a skilled shitlord. Sure, there were arguments at the margins, and sophisticated (well, premium mediocre) discussions about distinctions between premium mediocrity and related concepts such as middle-class fancy, aristocratic shabby, and that old classic, petit bourgeois, but overall, people got it. Without elaborate explanations.

But since the sine qua non of premium mediocrity is superfluous premium features (like unnecessary over-intellectualized blog posts that use phrases like sine qua non), let me offer an elaborate explanation anyway. It’s a good way to celebrate August, which I officially declare the premium mediocre month, when all the premium mediocre people go on premium mediocre vacations featuring premium mediocre mai tais at premium mediocre resorts paid for in part by various premium-mediocre reward programs.

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Survival of the Mediocre Mediocre

April 24, 2018 By

I have a theory about why the notion of an arms race between human and machine intelligences is fundamentally ill-posed: the way to survive and thrive in an environment of AIs and robots is not to be smarter than them, but to be more mediocre than them. Mediocrity, understood this way, is an independent meta-trait, not a qualifier you put on some other trait, like intelligence.

I came to this idea in a roundabout way. It started when Nate Eliot emailed me, pitching an article built around the idea of humans as premium mediocre robots. That struck me as conceptually off somehow, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on the problem with the idea. I mean, R2D2 is an excellent robot, and C3PO is a premium mediocre android, but humans are not robots at all. They’re just intrinsically mediocre without reference to any function in particular, not just when used as robots.

Then I remembered that the genesis form of the Turing test also invokes mediocrity in this context-free intrinsic sense. When Turing originally framed it (as a snarky remark in a cafeteria) his precise words were:

“No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I’m after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.”

That clarified it: Turing, like most of us, was conceptualizing mediocrity as merely an average performance point on some sort of functional spectrum, with an excellent high end, and a low, basic-performance end. That is, we tend to think of “mediocre” as merely a satisfyingly insulting way of saying “average” in some specific way.

This, I am now convinced, is wrong. Mediocrity is in fact the sine qua non of survival itself. It is not just any old trait. It is the trait that comes closest to a general, constructive understanding of evolutionary adaptive “fitness” in a changing landscape. In other words, evolution is survival, not of the most mediocre (that would lead to paradox), but survival of the mediocre mediocre.

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Ribbonfarm is Retiring

October 10, 2024 By

After several years of keeping it going in semi-retired, keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) mode, I’ve decided to officially fully retire this blog. The ribbonfarm.com domain and all links will remain active, but there will be no new content after November 13th, 2024, which happens to be my 50th birthday. There will be one final roundup post before then, and perhaps a shortish epitaph post. And the main page will switch to a static landing page. But after that date, this will effectively be a museum site.

I’m not personally retiring of course (I neither want to, nor can I afford to), but this WordPress blog is. Sometime in the next few months, I’ll figure out how to move it to a lower-cost archival hosting model, probably as a static non-WordPress site, simplify the design as befits a retiree, and put up some sort of museum-like landing page with self-guided tour maps, a little museum shop selling books, directions to the service entrance for AI scraper-bots, and so on. If you get your updates via the Mailchimp newsletter, that will be shutting down sometime in the next few weeks. So if you’d like to continue hearing from me, sign up for my substack (fair warning: It’s not a blog, and both the contents and style are distinctly different from what you’ve been used to here).

But in the meantime, in what is going to be the last significant post on here, let’s look back on what has been a 17-year journey.

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Intellectual Menopause

August 15, 2024 By

I ran across the alarming phrase intellectual menopause a few months ago in John Gall’s Systemantics, and it naturally stuck in my brain given I’m pushing 50 and getting predictably angsty about it. The phrase conjures up visions of a phenomenon much more profound and unfunny than the more familiar one we know as midlife crises. It sounds much worse than merely buying a sports car and chasing younger women. And if you chase down the idea, it turns out it is worse. And sadder. And unfunnier.

Anyway I got curious, and started digging. Turns out this was rather hard to do since this rather obvious turn of phrase surprisingly has no usable footprint in either Google Trends or ngrams. Some tedious wading through the shitty Google search results turned up the earliest usage I could find in H. L. Mencken’s 1917 book A Book of Prefaces. The phrase occurs within a merciless evisceration of a semi-autobiographical novel called The “Genius” by a writer I’ve never heard of, Theodore Dreiser (emphasis mine):

“The ‘Genius,'” which interrupted the “trilogy of desire,” marks the nadir of Dreiser’s accomplishment, as “The Titan” marks its apogee. The plan of it, of course, is simple enough, and it is one that Dreiser, at his best, might have carried out with undoubted success. What he is trying to show, in brief, is the battle that goes on in the soul of every man of active mind between the desire for self-expression and the desire for safety, for public respect, for emotional equanimity…“The Titan” is the history of a strong man. “The ‘Genius'” is the history of a man essentially weak. Eugene Witla can never quite choose his route in life. He goes on sacrificing ease to aspiration and aspiration to ease to the end of the chapter. He vacillates abominably and forever between two irreconcilable desires. Even when, at the close, he sinks into a whining sort of resignation,…he is always a bit despicable in his pathos. …As I say, a story of simple outlines, and well adapted to the Dreiserian pen. But it is spoiled and made a mock of by a donkeyish solemnity of attack which leaves it, on the one hand, diffuse, spineless and shapeless, and on the other hand, a compendium of platitudes. It is as if Dreiser, suddenly discovering himself a sage, put off the high passion of the artist and took to pounding a pulpit.

…It is almost as if he deliberately essayed upon a burlesque of himself. The book is an endless emission of the obvious, with touches of the scandalous to light up its killing monotony. It runs to 736 pages of small type; its reading is an unbearable weariness to the flesh; in the midst of it one has forgotten the beginning and is unconcerned about the end. Mingled with all the folderol, of course, there is stuff of nobler quality. Certain chapters stick in the memory; whole episodes lift themselves to the fervid luminosity of “Jennie Gerhardt”; there are character sketches that deserve all praise; one often pulls up with a reminder that the thing is the work of a proficient craftsman. But in the main it lumbers and jolts, wabbles and bores. A sort of ponderous imbecility gets into it. Both in its elaborate devices to shake up the pious and its imposing demonstrations of what every one knows, it somehow suggests the advanced thinking of Greenwich Village. I suspect, indeed, that the vin rouge was in Dreiser’s arteries as he concocted it. He was at the intellectual menopause, and looking back somewhat wistfully and attitudinizingly toward the goatish days that were no more.

My reaction to this passage was, for the most part, OUCH. And “attitudinizingly” is a solid word.

I asked ChatGPT, and it was wrong about the origins of the phrase, but did find me an interesting usage from 1944, in The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolley, another book and author I’ve never heard of:

Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising. Those whom the public criticizes most, usually end up as full-blown mediocrities. A writer who has produced a respectable body of work and still writes on may be past his prime. He may go into a decline of intellectual menopause, producing more and more of what he does best with less and less feeling until the mechanical becomes habitual and the habit becomes invincible.

Fortunately, these don’t resonate at all. While I occasionally experience the temptation of “donkeyish solemnity,” I rarely surrender to it. I don’t feel much of a need to “attitudinize.” And mechanical refinement of technique is definitely not me. But I felt there was a germ of something real here, so unwisely, I continued drilling for my own nerve.

***

I stumbled across the most useful sense of the idea (and simultaneously hit a nerve in myself), in a 2019 article, John Ransom: The Cycle of Commitment, by Michael O’Brien, about a minor 1920s poet named John Ransom, who was apparently a founding figure in a rather sadsack 1930s literary-political movement called Southern Agrarians. This gang of a dozen odd writers produced a manifesto in the form of a collection of essays called I’ll Take My Stand, which leads off with Ransom’s contribution, an essay called Regenerate but Unrepentant. Ransom also apparently also drafted the Statement of Principles which was the basis for the discussion that led to the volume. The only name I recognize among the contributors is Robert Penn Warren, who is not an author I’ve read much of, or particularly admire.

But if intellectual menopause is a thing, John Ransom was probably the clearest case of it.

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Hello Again, Seattle

June 14, 2023 By
This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Regenerations

Last week, for the 11th time in my adult life, I made a long-distance move to a different city. But for only the second time, it is to a city I’ve already lived in: Seattle. And the first time doesn’t really count, since it was for a year-long break from grad school I always knew I’d be back from.

When I left Seattle for Los Angeles 4 years ago, in June 2019, the intent was to stay a year, and decide where to go next right after my fellowship at the Berggruen Institute ended, with a return to Seattle only one low-likelihood possibility among many. At the time, I wrote about it in my post Regenerations, the fourth installment in a straggling decade-plus blogchain chronicling my moves. Then the pandemic happened, one year turned into four, and a city I thought I’d just pass through as a longer-term tourist turned into the venue of a significant life chapter. I was 44 when I left. I’m 48 now, a few months from 49, and less than two years away from the big 5-0.

But though it took longer than I expected, I’m once more in that familiar (and at this point, rather tiresome) liminal passage, having left one empty apartment behind, living out of another, with my stuff (now in 1.5 containers rather than 1) in transit somewhere in the containerized ether.

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A Dreaming World

August 4, 2022 By
This entry is part 13 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

I haven’t written a truly interesting general trend piece since approximately 2017, when I wrote Premium Mediocre. I don’t count Internet of Beefs (2020), since it is less of a trend piece, and more of a “there are no more trends” end-of-history type argument. The closest I’ve come is probably my Superhistory, not Superintelligence essay on AI (on the Ribbonfarm Studio newsletter). But though large in scope, that’s more a reframe essay than a trend piece. Another close-but-no-cigar piece was the pandemic-themed first chapter of Clockless Clock, my serialized book-in-progress. Again, large in scope and sweep, but more metahistorical than historical.

But it’s not just me. If it were I’d conclude that maybe I’m just growing old and worse at this game. Thing is, I haven’t even read a truly interesting general trend piece in the last 5 years. One that makes me feel attuned to the fate of the world. I’ve read many insightful essays about specific topics like Covid or Russia, slice-of-the-local-zeitgeist impressionist pieces, subtle technology analyses on things like AI or crypto, good explainers on why certain specific things like the real estate boom or the chip shortage are happening (and how to bet on them), ambitious manifestos about the way the world ought to be or become, but not truly interesting general trend pieces. And I think there is a reason: we are living through a liminal, dreamlike period of world history marked by what I’ll call psychohistorical tenuousness.

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Domestic Cozy: 13

January 25, 2021 By
This entry is part 13 of 13 in the series Domestic Cozy

Kyle Chayka, author of The Longing for Less, a 2020 book on the rise of minimalism, has an interesting feature in yesterday’s NYT Magazine, How Nothingness Became Everything We Ever Wanted, exploring the thesis that a “self-obliterating” tendency of retreat was already at work before Covid, and was aggressively accelerated by it.

Signs of a culture-wide quest for self-obliteration appeared everywhere in the time after my first float. I walked by an exercise studio whose sandwich board commanded me to “Log out. Shut down. Do yoga.” REI marketed a garment that “Feels like nothing. And that means everything.” In a January 2020 column about omnipresent noise-canceling headphones and the desire to block out our surroundings with constant sound, The Economist argued, “The shared world is increasingly intolerable.” Friends were picking up the paperback of Ottessa Moshfegh’s best-selling 2018 novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” about a young woman’s drugging herself to sleep as much as possible in order to emerge into the world anew. “When did staying in become the new going out?” asked a 2020 ad for Cox internet I saw during the Super Bowl, depicting a family frolicking in their living room wearing virtual-reality goggles, in an eerie precursor of what was just around the corner.

For years, an aesthetic mode of nothingness has been ascendant — a literally nihilistic attitude visible in all realms of culture, one intent on the destruction of extraneity in all its forms, up to and including noise, decoration, possessions, identities and face-to-face interaction. Over the past decade, American consumers have glamorized the pursuit of expensive nothing in the form of emptied-out spaces like the open-floor plans of start-up offices, austere loft-condo buildings and anonymous Airbnbs. Minimalism from the Marie Kondo school advocated a jettisoning of possessions that left followers with empty white walls. This aspiration toward disappearance made luxury synonymous with seeing, hearing, owning and even feeling less…

Quarantine has been widely regarded as a radical break in our daily lives and the ways we interact with the world, but in truth it’s simply an overdose of the indulgences a certain segment of the population was dabbling in already. We’re a little like kids caught with a cigarette, forced to smoke a whole pack at once.

The article quotes me and Domestic Cozy (Kyle interviewed me a few months before the pandemic started, and this feature obviously went into an extended development mode to accommodate the pandemic), and rather hilariously anoints me a “thinkfluencer’s thinkfulencer.” Which is kinda appropriate for this blogchain in particular, since I self-consciously set out to explore this particular bunny trail in an inception-optimized drip-feed form rather than trying to distill a viral-intent long feature out of it myself. Domestic cozy is a tortoise among hare-like memes.

Kyle’s thesis is an interesting mash-up of the longer-term minimalism trend that’s been his primary interest, and the more recent retreat trend. It’s not quite the same as either Domestic Cozy or what I’ve called waldenponding, but adjacent to, and somewhat at odds with, both. Maybe there’s a Venn diagram like this here. It’s not quite right, but close enough.

Domestic cozy is nihilistic, but not naturally minimalist I think. In fact there are strong elements of maximalism and hoarding to it — cozy furniture, too many pillows and blankets, maximalist kitchens, overfull pantries, overstocked workshops, and so on.

But the materialist maximalism does serve the obliterating function Kyle’s talking about, in sealing out the outside sensorily, and minimizing it as a source of dependency. So he’s right about that part. To the extent he’s also right about the existence of a parallel minimalist, eliminativist tendency, the two intersect in interesting ways.

In a way, the material minimalism he’s talking about is an older tendency; one that fits more naturally with premium mediocrity, since it assumes a lot more capability latent in a broader public environment. It’s hard to be a minimalist nomad living out of a laptop bag when airlines, Starbucks and AirBnB are operating in lockdown mode. But on the other hand, if you’re willing to kit out an RV or van like a self-sufficient spaceship, this is a great time to be doing non-minimalist nomadism.

The reason it gets confusing is that in a networked world with deep dependence on complex systems extending from your doorstep to China, minimizing connection and minimizing possession end up in a tradeoff. Rent and own occupy different positions on that tradeoff curve, but the point of the curve is to still shape your exposures to and dependencies on the world beyond your immediate control. Some buy more things to minimize connections, others rent more things as a service to minimize possessions. You can have a lean supply chain and fat household, or a fat supply chain and a lean household, but right now you have to have fat somewhere, or you’re at serious risk. The only non-retreat option, lean-lean is risky.

But though minimalism is perhaps more premium mediocre, the nihilism Kyle calls out is definitely more domestic cozy. There is a hopelessness there that was not there in premium mediocrity.

There’s something really dead-end like about all these trends. The thing about losing interest in the wider world is that there is no guarantee the wider world will also lose interest in you. What they say about politics (“you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you”) is true of the ultimate superset of politics — nature. The world is reeling from multiple ongoing calamities, and only a tiny fraction have the luxury of retreating from it all. Those who lack that luxury are not going to be exactly happy about it. One way or the other, you will eventually have to pay for retreating from the world.

I’m going to call this blogchain archived, since it’s sort of done what I wanted it to do, in terms of helping catalyze a particular conversation. I’ll add any other significant builds by others, but my thinkfluencing of thinkfluencers work is done here.

Nostalgia for Network Effects

January 21, 2021 By

The reality of the Biden inauguration hasn’t yet sunk in. It’s not exactly a return to anything resembling normalcy or even a new normalcy (and I don’t expect such a return even after Covid is behind us and Trump is forgotten), but it’s definitely an unmistakeable phase shift to a new regime. Perhaps this is the official first day of what I’ve been calling the Permaweird.

Looking back at the last 4 years, something striking leaps out at me: the big thing that’s been missing in my life since the Trump inauguration — and which hasn’t magically returned today — is some sort of network effect in my activities. A sense of a snowballing accumulation of meaningfulness over time.

Now, on the first day of the Permaweird, I find myself nostalgic for network effects, and wondering if I can ever tap into them again at a personal level.

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New E-Book, and a Portfolio Update

May 21, 2020 By

I have a new Kindle ebook out: Breaking Smart Archives: Selected Newsletters, 2015-19. This is a sequenced selection of 32 of the better essays from the Breaking Smart newsletter from the last few years, covering the period between the original 2015 Breaking Smart essay collection on software eating the world (also available as an ebook), and my recent pivot of that whole project to a subscription newsletter for serializing my longer projects.

As I’ll be the first to admit, the collection is weirdly choppy, both in form (a mix of essays and twitter-style threads), and content. But it was oddly satisfying to put together (thanks to Alex Wagner for his help), and I did my valiant best to impose some sort of coherent thematic structure onto it.

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A Text Renaissance

February 24, 2020 By

There is a renaissance underway in online text as a medium. The Four Horsemen of this emerging Textopia are:

  1. Roam, a hypertext publishing platform best understood as a medium for composing conspiracy theories and extended universes.
  2. Substack, a careful and thorough ground-up neoclassical reconstruction of the age-old email newsletter.
  3. Static websites, built out of frameworks like Jekyll or Gatsby (full disclosure: a consulting client).
  4. And finally, Threaded Twitter, a user-pioneered hack-turned-supported feature that has wonderfully revitalized the platform.

I want to take a stab at lightly theorizing this renaissance. And also speculating, in light of this renaissance, about what might be the eighth and penultimate death of blogging. And the future of books. So it’s going to be a sprawling, messy hot take on the State of Textual Media. Or at least a simmering take, since I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a year on the backburner.

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