Westenberg.
Field Notes on Now.
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Position or Perish: The Narrative Blueprint
Avis was losing $3.2 million a year; and they'd been unprofitable for thirteen straight. In 1962, they sat at number two in American car rental, well behind Hertz, with no plausible path to catching up. Robert Townsend, the new president, hired Doyle Dane Bernbach and asked them
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Fear is information.
The motivational industry has built any number of small empires on the notion that fear is a problem to be either managed, suppressed or out-manoeuvred. Fight the fear, etc. The
The war between fast and legitimate is here
The European Union took four years to draft the AI Act - with OpenAI shipping GPT-4 to a hundred million users in two months. By the time Brussels finalised its
Emotional regulation is a dying art.
There was a time when adults could feel something without screaming at you about it. We could disagree - hard - in a meeting and walk out with our faces
Outrage is letting someone else set the frame
William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Morning Journal in 1895 - and immediately started running stories designed to make his readers furious before they’d finished their breakfast. The
On wintering.
The winterer is out of the loop; they're not maintaining a position because they don't have a position to maintain. They can do work that takes longer than a quarter, longer than a year, longer than 5 years, because nobody is auditing the line item.
The Loop: everything has happened before, and everything will happen again
We keep replaying the same human mistakes -bubbles, strongmen, scapegoats, and panics -because the operating system in our skulls hasn’t updated in ten thousand years.
Why prediction markets are a sure sign that our civilisation is in decay
Prediction markets are the clearest single sign our civilisation has entered a late and decadent stage. The reason isn't that they're new or sinister. It's that the case for them is defensible, the technology works, the outputs are useful, but the long-term effect is corrosive anyway.
How we lost the living Now
Before 1840, noon in Bristol happened about ten minutes after noon in London, and nobody much cared. The railway needed a common minute or it couldn't run - and that common minute is now a common nanosecond, shipped in real time.
I truly hate mostpeopleslop
In 2006, Joe Sugarman published a book called The Adweek Copywriting Handbook - and an axiom stuck... "The sole purpose of the first sentence in an advertisement is to
Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
In June 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte marched 685,000 soldiers into Russia - the largest military force ever assembled in European history up to that point, and one of the largest
Optimism is not a personality flaw
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik - and the United States lost its collective mind. Newspapers ran headlines about Soviet nuclear weapons raining from orbit, and schools