Upstream #203
raging 😡, tube 🚇, sound + colour 🎨, agentic era 🕵️, dvd 🕺.
Hey. Right. So. Nearly there. Engage landing gear. We’re bringing it home. Celebrated a big birthday and put together our annual quotes. Might be the last one this year. If it is, have a good one, and see you next year. If not, we’ll chat again.
“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral”.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
culture // raging 😡
Luigi Mangione, a privileged 26 year old, deeply unhappy with the US healthcare system (calling them parasites in his manifesto) plotted and murdered the CEO of United Healthcare. He carved the words “deny”, “defend” and “depose” on the bullets he used, which he believes (as most do) reflect the strategy of the US healthcare system. In a manifesto he wrote “Many have illuminated the corruption and greed” in the system, “Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty”. The Blind Boy shared some anti-capitalist empathy, highlighting the hypocrisy of labelling him a terrorist, while US corporates and the US government do far worse. Mangione meanwhile, has become a folk hero and disturbingly, a sex symbol. Also, sidebar but rage bating is also thing in the attention economy. But is Mangione the start of a move against the untouchables. Australia just approved a law to ban social media for under 16s. A new UK doc "Swiped - the school that banned smartphones" ran a 3 week digital detox in a school and found that many kids consider their phone “their life”. Reminds us of that amazing Peter Finch speech, I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore, he goes on to say "we know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms'. That was 1976. Has anything changed?
brands // tube 🚇
This story about the London Underground maps was great. When they first made tube maps, they began with scientific precision. But they were utterly useless, because they were way too detailed, and difficult to understand. Then an electrical draughtsman suggested the now famous Tube map. He slimmed down the detail. He understood that humans don't need precision, but clarity. Being right, isn’t as important as being understood. Which is mostly about what you leave out, not put in. Communication is choice. Strategy is sacrifice. But we struggle with choice and end up saying everything. And nothing. Like that classic Apple vs Microsoft video from 2006. They butcher something, to say nothing. Simplicity is a lever. Do you use it?
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creativity // sound + colour 🎨
Have you heard of Wassily Kandinsky? He was a Russian painter, born in 1866. He was a lawyer and professor of law in Moscow University, before devoting his life to painting. He had a thing called synestehesia, where experiencing one sense, activates another. So when he heard sounds, he saw colour, and when he saw colour, he heard music. For Kandinsky, every colour had a feeling, a sensation and a sound. He went deep on exploring colours and forms and their psychological and spiritual effects. His famous piece Composition 8, is a wonderful exploration of colour and interactive geometric forms. It's both dynamic and calm, aggressive and quiet. We don’t give colour enough consideration or time. But as Kandinsky wrote in 1912 "Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another. To cause vibrations in the soul”. Amazing.
technology // agentic era 🕵️
Lot’s of AI agent news to discuss. Google are launching a whole suite of AI tools and naming it the “Agentic Era”. Where AI doesn't just respond, but acts. They’ve introduced Gemini 2.0 their updated AI model which is faster and directly integrates with search, and Project Mariner and Project Astra, which are universal AI agents that use Gemini in slightly different ways. Synthetic AI agent research is also gaining momentum and coming for focus groups now. Qualitative research with real humans is being replicated with machines. Stanford researches trained GPT4o with 1,000 people, replicating personalities and behaviours. These AI agents were then tested against the original participants across various psych and behavioural metrics. Results showed up to 85% accuracy in mirroring the participants’ responses. Even marketing celebrity Mark Ritson had an agent made for him (RitBot) by the WFA. Fed it with his data, it responds in an alarmingly similar way to his distinctive style (look from 26 mins). Meanwhile Open AI released Sora, their text-to-video model (US only for now), so get ready for an AI content explosion. AI is speeding up. Brace for impact.
Five random (ish) things:
watching // dvd 🕺
Not massive Coldplay fans here tbh, but this video for the launch of their new single is really lovely. A tribute to the legend Dick Van Dyke, who’s turning 100 this week. He’s still got it. Pretty amazing improvisation from Chris at the end too. Enjoy!