Mediascape: 2025

[World] Accumulation, non-responsibility, and reframing.

🪄 A re-introduction

The media hourglass

I’ve always loved to dig into all sorts of media. It’s a routine that’s most prominent on weekends, or when I’m back in my hometown.¹ A focused but unbounded time, clicking on links and flipping through pages.

Only when I really have enough time and boredom can I do this. Everything comes with a trade-off, but I especially struggle to reconcile this one. When I’m busy and can’t keep up, I feel restless, like I’m turning a blind eye. I need to learn about [topic], said and thought everyone, ever. Busyness does not always equate to a lack of concern, but it can easily slide into apathy and inattention.

In some ways, media feels like an endlessly resetting hourglass. I’ve tried organizational software tools like Notion, Pocket, and Are.na; I’ve made long, plain lists in Google Docs. But saving things entails friction, and remembering and parsing what is saved doesn’t come naturally, either. More and more, I’ve realized: material starts slipping away if I don’t truly work with it, especially during the crucial time that it is made to resonate.

The goal

For Kneeslapper, everything that I wanted to focus on since the start still rings true! The 3 pillars will remain: cities, music, and Earth/world/culture.² I’m aiming for “Mediascape” to be a monthly series that falls under that last pillar — goal being, to share some of the most interesting present-day words that I stumble across, and a meaningful way of connecting them with larger themes.

My planned structure:

• At least 4 sections

  • Academia

  • Opinion

  • Technology

  • Art

• Up to 5 pieces per section

My current guidelines:

• Just quality, well-thought-out, and investigative stories that bring you closer to the rest of the world

  • Of everyday things

  • Of broad and ambiguous (human) problems

  • Of ongoing things that have been shaped by history

• At the moment, the written word and the occasional video/audio (subject to change!)

• Source-agnostic, but with a bias towards independent journalism

  • If you have any publication recommendations, do let me know!

• Things that help us learn

  • Range in the spectrum of ~academic~ writing

  • Convey a specific (and potentially new) POV / frame of mind / set of values

Disclaimers:

• This will be limited! (I am just a girl… trying to find needles in many haystacks)

• Mis- and disinformation are very real things which I hope to avoid but cannot guarantee

• I don’t adhere to strict dating; something that is relevant today might come from years ago

🪄 This month

Academia

I enjoy all of these essays because of how they walk the line between economic principles and humanity, tangibly showing the impacts that one of these camps has on the other.

In language, we can easily lose the underlying presence of humans. These essays bring people back to light: jobs through the lens of physical labor; inflation through the lens of the incarcerated; objects through the lens of to-be-organized possessions; prediction through the lens of human knowledge and interest.

• Sitters and Standers (The Pudding, Alvin Chang): On visualizing the two types of workers in America — starting with yourself.

  • The history of labor in America is defined by the least privileged people doing the least desirable work — sometimes by force.

  • The message is clear: When it’s convenient, we’ll celebrate this work. Every other day, we’ll treat people who do this work as bodies for labor.

• The Cost of Inflation in Prison (JSTOR Daily, Phillip Vance Smith, II): On the history and current state of prison labor.

  • However, the existing system limits the legal, meaningful options inmates are given to survive in prison, compelling many to procure daily necessities — such as feminine hygiene products — through illegal means.

  • When prices in the outside world rise, they rise in prison, too. However, we can’t apply for a better job or enroll in college to learn more marketable skills. Our wages are never raised.

• What Professional Organizers Know About Our Lives (The New Yorker, Jennifer Wilson): On author Carrie Lane’s exploration of the evolution of (gendered and professional) decluttering under capitalism.

  • Lane comes to see professional organizers as containers for our attitudes about work, what we fill ourselves with when we are unfulfilled, and what keeps us buying things that we don’t even have time to take out of their pretty boxes.

  • She has found people across the class strata who are overworked, and underwhelmed with what they have to show for it.

This has all happened as the size of the typical American home increased from fifteen hundred square feet in 1973 to twenty-two hundred in 2023: we somehow have more room and less space.

• Why prediction markets aren’t popular (Works in Progress, Nick Whitaker & J. Zachary Mazlish): On the reasons why savers (wealth-builders), gamblers (thrill-seekers), and sharps (analyzers) would not join prediction markets.

  • In many cases, individuals, firms, and governments do not just wish to know the probability of a future event. They would like to know the contingent probabilities around a cluster of events and actions and the reasoning behind those probabilities.

  • Instead, we must recognize that good information about the future is costly to come by, and we must be willing to purchase or create incentives to elicit that information. There is no epistemic free lunch.

Simply put, most things that we might want to know about the future aren’t much fun to bet on.

Opinion

I gravitate towards essays of a specific nature, which speak from very direct, personal perspectives. Below are accounts from a homeless man; a harm reduction worker; a Palestinian professor; and an incarcerated firefighter.

What I admire about these essays is how they implicitly call out the reader for a lack of understanding and, ultimately, fear. This is what I experience, and this is what I need you to know about it. They read like journalistic diaries, like a person reflecting out loud — or like investigative journalism, with the investigator being the author themselves. I wish these sorts of essays weren’t so rare. I either have to be lucky enough to stumble upon them, or have to go digging for them.

But it’s important to note, it is even more rare to hear from a voice that you typically would not hear from. Observatory hints of other perspectives often peek through:

But one thing about giving away free paraphernalia is that everyone does drugs. We go to the projects, we go to the suburbs, we go to the fancy high-rises downtown. We deliver to old guys and lesbian couples and single moms and yuppies in suits. We go to the Indigenous community in Phillips and the Black neighborhoods up north, the Somali projects in Riverside and the white gay condos in Uptown. We deliver, mostly, to people who have been marginalized, both because of their drug use and usually also prior to it. But the margins are vast. (Johnson)

Where are those people in the suburbs, the yuppies in suits, the Somali projects? What would they have to say?

• The Invisible Man (Esquire, Patrick Fealey): On a writer’s upbringing and his current everyday experiences with homelessness in America.

  • This is part of your rejection, this fear that it could be you. You deny that reality because it is too horrific to contemplate, therefore you must deny us. And the moneyed reject us because they know they create us, that we are a consequence of their impulse to accumulate more than they need, rooted in a fear of life and the death that comes with it. Nothing good comes of fear, only destruction, and America has become a society of fear, much of that fear cultivated to divide and control.

I play the guitar first thing every morning, songs I’ve written. The rest of the day, I flip it over and it’s my desk.

• On Delivery (n+1, Mitchell Morgan Johnson): On the evident gaps of harm reduction in theory (punitive) and in practice (enabling), as well as the stigmas behind certain substances, treatments, and the holistic concept of addiction.³

  • Poverty has a swing tempo and so does drug use. We try our best to meet these rhythms, and this means our intervention can end up feeling haphazard. Serendipitous rather than systematic.

  • The public fear of fentanyl is uninformed and alarmist, but more than anything it happens in bad faith, mobilized against drug users rather than on their behalf. Drug users tell us all the time that they’re afraid of fentanyl, too, not because it’s mysterious but because it’s so familiar.

The point of desire is its power to consume us, and drugs are that power made material. Drugs are widely feared, I think, because most people basically want to do them. . . . Of course, drug users want many things other than drugs — kids and money and housing and stability and to fall in love  —  things of which they are so often deprived as punishment for their poor behavior.

• Narrating Palestine (Evergreen Review, Refaat Alareer): On being a Palestinian son and father who deeply understands the (often obligatory) power of stories.

  • My usually multi-tasking mother dedicated her everything to the story when she was telling one. The story appeared on her facial expressions, in her tone of voice, and through her gestures, and added solemnity to her already radiant face. My mother believed in her stories.

  • It’s both selfish and treacherous to keep a story to yourself — stories are meant to be told and retold. If I allowed a story to stop, I would be betraying my legacy, my mother, my grandmother, and my homeland.

And in so many ways, the struggle in Palestine for land and rights has been fought metaphorically and verbally.

• Why Fighting California Wildfires Was the Best Prison Job I Ever Had (The Marshall Project, David Desmond): On finding pride in a firefighting position as a Californian prisoner.

  • We were only paid $1 an hour when actively fighting a fire, but the money didn't matter to me because we worked as a team. Sometimes we would stay at a fire for two or three weeks, and when we left, people would hold up thank-you signs. People would bring pastries, sodas or sandwiches to us. No one treated us like inmates; we were firefighters.

  • Being a firefighter taught me that there's nothing wrong with needing help, and it helped me see the unlimited possibilities of what we can achieve if we only work together.

Technology

As much as I like to read about technology and investing, it is easy for me to be skeptical of people talking about these topics. When you focus on innovation, speed, and revenue, some foundational questions get lost in the sauce, i.e., left out of the picture. Naturally so, but at some points, it shocks me.

When I read these essays, I find myself grappling with the normalization of certain attitudes, which is conveyed through the way people, quite simply, talk about things. Here, the use of AI to simulate real humans is essentially described as a method of “empathy engineering”; the entire continent of Africa as a target of investment; and the use of potentially lethal autonomous weapons as a way to get ahead in global weapons races.

All these essays’ titles are worded as questions — questions that can be answered in many different ways. It’s a reminder that everything is open-ended, and you won’t always get the answers you expect. Still, I probe for consideration of the most basic of questions, which I believe are unavoidable: who are we building for? How will it work, systematically, out in the world?

A weapon’s makers, after all, aren’t always in control of their creation once it’s out in the world — something the Manhattan Project scientists, many of whom had reservations about the use of nuclear weapons after they developed the atomic bomb, learned the hard way. (Scoles)

• Why Talk to Customers When You Can Simulate Them? (Every, Chris Silvestri): On using LLMs for marketing, copywriting, and generating insights about target customers.

  • The dark magic of LLMs means you can amalgamate all the text humanity has ever created and create the simulation of an individual’s desires.

  • I call this "empathy engineering." It’s a framework for using LLMs to understand your customers better than they know themselves, create messaging that converts prospects into customers, and ultimately build better products and services.

• Who cares about African unicorns? (Semafor, Yinka Adegoke): On the state of African startups in the midst of a global venture slowdown.

  • African unicorns are “symbolic of the ‘investiability’ of the continent,” [Amsalu, founder of fintech summit and angel investor] says, pointing out they have achieved these remarkable valuations in spite of economic challenges seen in some of the biggest African markets.

  • “We’ve already proven Africans can build valuable billion dollar companies at scale,” [Aboyeji, founder of investor firm] says. “The mission now is to prove we can build global technology companies that can consistently generate billions of dollars of profits at scale.”

• The Technology for Autonomous Weapons Exists. What Now? (Undark, Sarah Scoles): On the military’s evolving usage of algorithms and humans-in-the-loop, hypothetical and real-world situations involving autonomous weapons, how companies and governments fuel them, and the dearth of relevant international law.

  • It shows the commercial sector that the government will want, and is willing to pay for, autonomous technology. That promise incentivizes companies to start investing their own resources in developing relevant innovations . . .

  • Aside from the ethical argument that algorithms simply should not kill humans, legally, Hehir says, autonomous weapons undermine existing international law. “It’s difficult to hold people accountable,” she explained. If a robot commits a war crime, who is responsible?

  • But with the current lack of international regulation, nation-states are going ahead with their existing plans. . . . Ideally, according to Pahon, the Pentagon spokesperson, autonomous technology like the sort behind Replicator will exist more for threat than for use.

Shifting his drones’ algorithm from detecting and avoiding other drones or aircraft — features important for package delivery — to instead detecting and attacking them was almost as simple as switching a plus sign to a minus sign somewhere in the code.

Art

Crazily (to me), these essays articulate topics which have simmered in my mind for years. They explore how streaming services like Spotify have rattled the joy of purposefully creating, discovering, and sharing music; the increasing disregard for distinguishing human from mechanical ability; and the gentle lives behind musical tour de forces like Chris Martin.

As you can see, all very visceral things. For me, the secret sauce of these essays is how they so purely convey the importance of social relationships and cultural traditions without any explicit mention. Coupled with this is an urgency to preserve it all, in the face of potential flattening — by anything, from technocapitalism to internal emotional turmoil.

These higher-ups were well versed in the business of major-label hitmaking, but not necessarily in the cultures or histories of genres like jazz, classical, ambient, and lo-fi hip-hop . . . (Pelly)

In the context of debating profound and potentially harmful structures, it is interesting to see whether and how people hold back. People often have to speak with reservation or on the condition of something, in part due to their own entanglements.

The jazz musician asked me not to identify the name of the company he worked for; he didn’t want to risk losing the gig. Throughout our conversation, though, he repeatedly emphasized his reservations about the system, calling it “shameful” — even without knowledge of the hard details of the program, he understood that his work was creating value for a company, and a system, with little regard for the well-being of independent artists. (Pelly)

I am still not sure whether Bengio himself truly believes this. Later in the Q&A following his talk, he asked to revisit my question, and it seemed that he wanted to strike a more conciliatory tone and seek some common ground. But when he refused to grant that humans are more than task machines executing computational scripts and issuing the statistically expected tokens, I took him at his word. (Vallor)

At the end of the day, maybe we just need huge stadium concerts to help us.

What he is saying is this: radical acceptance — of others, of oneself; most especially of oneself — takes work, emotional manipulation even. Sometimes you need it writ large across a stadium of people. Sometimes you need literal fireworks. (Morris)

• The Ghosts in the Machine (Harper’s, Liz Pelly): On the ghost artists and production companies hiding in the shadows of Spotify’s “Perfect Fit Content” (PFC) program, which takes advantage of the exploitative business of stock background music, fueled by playlist editors and VC funding.⁴

  • In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening?

  • Spotify had long marketed itself as the ultimate platform for discovery — and who was going to get excited about “discovering” a bunch of stock music?

  • As he described it, making new PFC starts with studying old PFC: it’s a feedback loop of playlist fodder imitated over and over again. . . . The most common feedback: play simpler.

  • It is striking, even now, that these venture capitalists saw so much potential for profit in background music. . . . The industry has contributed to a massive wave of consolidation: different music-adjacent industries and ecosystems that previously operated in isolation all suddenly depend on royalties from the same platforms. And it has led to the blurring of aesthetic boundaries as well.

“I’m selling my intellectual property for essentially peanuts,” he said.

• (My favorite!) The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think (Noema, Shannon Vallor): On the rhetoric associated with imminent “superhuman AI,” and why it is harmful to overlook the unique scope of human brains, capacity, and intelligence — beyond computational abilities, beyond “economically valuable tasks.”

  • I was trying to get Bengio to acknowledge that there is a huge difference between superhuman computational speed or accuracy — and being superhuman, i.e., more than human.

  • According to this view, characterizations of human beings as acting wisely, playfully, inventively, insightfully, meditatively, courageously, compassionately or justly are no more than poetic license.

  • Maybe the moral and experiential poverty of AI will bring the most vitally human dimensions of our native intelligence back to the center of our attention and foster a cultural reclamation and restoration of their long-depreciated value.

  • We are in danger of sleepwalking our way into a future where all we do is fail more miserably at being those machines ourselves. Might we be ready to wake ourselves up? In an era that rewards and recognizes only mechanical thinking, can humans still remember and reclaim what we are?

Of course, attempts to erase and devalue the most humane parts of our existence are nothing new; AI is just a new excuse to do it.

• How Coldplay Became Bigger, Happier, and More ‘Coldplay’ Than Ever (Rolling Stone, Alex Morris): On Chris Martin, the frontman and alchemist of Coldplay for nearly three decades, his simultaneously loving and lovelorn worldview, and how he lives “in service to the music.”

  • “There’s music flying around,” he says of that time of night, though, truth be told, “songs pop up everywhere. They wake you up, songs. They’re always a surprise to me. Sometimes the title is way ahead, and it’s waiting for the song to come, the right song. There was about six shitty ‘Viva La Vidas,’ and then the actual one.” He says most great songwriters feel this way, that the craft, the discipline, is in simply paying attention and waiting for what arrives.

  • Martin had arrived with a gift for me, a bound collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, which he’d mentioned in New Zealand when he was talking about how he loved “being lost in a dream world,” how he was “as obsessed with Mary Poppins as I’m with Radiohead.”⁵

  • And few bands are as conscientious about pairing up with and promoting younger artists from all over the world. . . . “Sometimes he seems like a kid in a candy store when it comes to music,” Shakira had told me.

He seems to hum with a sort of Zen energy, like a person coming off a fast.

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🪄 Author’s notes

On themes:

1. Accumulation: From physical household items to background music, pursuing “more” has led to odd ways of overconsumption, stimulation, and labor.

2. Non-responsibility: We’ve experienced a dire inability to assign and take responsibility, both as individuals and as groups, particularly for complex (and frankly scary) issues like homelessness and weapons of mass destruction.

3. Reframing: Whether they know it or not, people are masters of reframing things in more positive lights, although contexts vary — take the consistent emphasis on the benefits of AI, or Chris Martin, who strives for all-encompassing empathy, even for his haters.

On learning:

I keep thinking about the draws of fiction versus nonfiction when it comes to learning about the perspectives of other people, especially when that perspective is strictly different from your own.

I read a lot of nonfiction essays, which takes patience. I wonder whether the general public has this patience in the absence of virality — but I can’t put my finger on why I question this in the first place. There is evidence that people actually do love these perspectives, especially when it is tragic. Take the famous words from Franz Kafka and Anne Frank; settings of meditation and prison; etc.

Fiction, though, arguably lets you step into other people’s shoes in an “easier” manner. And then there are interviews, which bring you directly to the person.

In a way, I’m just hunting for secrets that help me feel a bit more intertwined with the rest of the world. I guess my goal is to play around with enough forms of media such that I find them, and in turn, empower people to engage in the forms that mean something to them, too.

Something is successful if it redirects your attention, if it makes you feel part of something.

Stories teach life even if the hero suffers or dies at the end. . . . stories whet the much-needed talent for life. (Alareer)

On writing:

I learned that I get very invested in the music I listen to while writing. It may or may not slow things down. This month saw jazz all the way through. I am now very aware of avoiding those ghost artists on Spotify and the like, and you should be too…

Everything feels more permanent in writing.

Why doesn’t Substack allow for underlining or different font colors? :(

Shoutout to some new friends in NYC who have been so open to idea-bouncing and writing together :)

Done: Made it through one of my historically least favorite months (January, if that wasn’t clear).

Doing: Finding new recipes (I’m far from a chef).

To do: Learn new instruments (there’s a long list).

Thanks for tuning in — and there’s more sunlight now. xo

1. I can get really bored.

2. Still debating what to really call this last one

3. Drug policy — actually a huge interest of mine

4. For more, Pelly also wrote a book!

5. I relate a surprising amount with this man. Is it because I listen to so much of his music??