NEWS 08.04 (last week // I’m late)

A few things that caught my attention this (last) week.
Mystro is an app aiming to bring in more bacon for Uber and Lyft drivers
Mystro is designed to maximize profits for the ad-hoc, if you can call it that, industry of platform drivers. Based on filters, the app allows drivers to select the most profitable rides. The app in and of itself is a minor footnote in the history of software development, but what it points to is the advent of service layers on top of platform capitalism. We’re going to see and increasingly large volume of these services layers, and a particular vector is the service economy around the automated vehicle. Platform capitalism is the basis, to some degree, of the new economy, and we are going to see people learn to parasitically survive and profit in adding possibility, hacks, and new revenue streams.
Apolis, Monocle, and the branding of the ‘Placeless Aesthetic’
There’s a fair amount of press on LOT 2046 (Yes, I have a subscription. More on that some other time). on that some other time). Similar to the article that got a lot of burn Welcome to Airspace (also by Kyle Chayka), we are seeing a move towards an aesthetic that says “I don’t give a fuck” at the same time it says “I give all the fucks in the world”. It’s a world of the t-shirt with the perfect cotton weave nearly invisible to anyone save those in the know, and the wearer of the garment. Which is not to say that this is what LOT 2046 is. In fact, it’s nearly the opposite — clothing as a pure expression of brand and commodity, with none of technical nature of the non-brand perfection of, say outlier. The clothes are nearly unnecessary. It’s the way we feel for participating in the system, and by extension, to have the chance to engage in the emergent cool of cutting edge creative expression. Chayka’s phrase rings strong, “that fashion is less a one-time widget to purchase than a process that we participate in.” It’s the creation of an lifestyle ecology.
The LOT project gives us some feeling of co-creation, and as time goes on, the clothing wears your name, the objects move from general t-shirts to increasingly custom items that are emergent from the possibility that exists from being in proximity to global supply chains and intimate connections with nimble factories with lightening fast capabilities. The difference is coming, and though there is a veneer of similarity, the reach fearing vision of the founder is to create a network of commodities that are exactly tailored to the individual; homogeneous on the exterior, with core value being in the custom and the creation of difference.
I believe that this is a reverse co-option of the airspace aesthetic, the placeless. It’s at the creation, though, of an interior state of difference, not withdrawing, but detachment. Playing within the rules, but with a set of loaded die, perhaps. The placelessness trends towards a dangerous simplicity; while we want to feel at home , the feeling of alienation from surroundings, for feeling other, for traveling and standing out, sharpens our lens, enhances perception, breaks us from the typical day-to-day.
Because right now I’m really on this tip: The Apas Monolith Water Cooler Simplifies the Design of Hydration is a product from LOT 2046 founder Vadik Marmeladov’s incubator Ruki. Apas is the first product to emerge from the system, and we’ll see how things proceed. I don’t have a lot to say here, other than I’m curious to understand the funding model for the creation of connected hardware products; even if they are designed and manufactured close to the mothership of Shenzhen. I don’t have much to say on this one, other than the creative direction and expression are straight from the head of Marmeladov (see: here), and I’m curious.
Airbnb Designs a Toolkit for Inclusive Design
Less about the thing itself than what emerges. Another toolkit for design, another set of cards. Not in and of themselves “bad things”. Just a question of nature v. nurture, of training the inclusivity in v. what would it be like if design as a cukture was inclusive and diverse at its core. It reminds me of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies (are you kidding me, this 1997 web design is everything). Cards that were truly open ended, nearly zen koans of creative vector making, first published in 1975. They were likely the first of the school of the cards-for-designers toolboxes. You can draw a random card here (coincidentally enough I drew “use ‘unqualified’ people).
That’s all for this week, thx.

