Interruption Nostalgia
Sunday Edition #26: Also, Cozyweb Animals, Ranked Choice Voting, and some 2010s electro pop.
Welcome to the Sunday Edition where I share interesting articles and links alongside what I’ve been up to!
Cigarette & Friction Nostalgia
In the trend of going offline, people look for reasons to log off.
In New York recently, after a man sent out flyers asking people to smoke a cigarette with him, hundreds of people, in typical New York City fashion, showed up.
Gen Z’s vice of nicotine is slowly tipping back into what
calls “Nicotine Nostalgia”.Perhaps no other year can serve as reference of vice being back than 2024, the Zynconomy boomed, cigarette bouquets and parties abounded, while an entire generation seems to moving on from vaping. The trad movement has infiltrated stimulants, we made a meme to best visualize this earlier this year and no surprise it went viral. They say nostalgia is a powerful drug, perhaps even more than nicotine, counterculture to the demonization of cigarettes of the past decades, disguised around conventional, which is what made Marlboro campaigns so alluring, an ally to the common Alpha-like man, equal parts American and productive, a form of nicotine nationalism.
In some sense, it’s a yearn for a form factor that actively promotes a break. While disposable vapes do “burn out”, the slow burning away of a cigarette is more visceral.
I don’t think any return to cigarettes will be a long-term trend, simply because it’s counter to a stronger modern trend of maxxing health. It’s moreso getting sober + Gen Z following Huberman + Bryan Johnson + experimenting with Chinese peptides.
The bigger signal to pay attention to, isn’t a desire for a return to an old vice like cigarettes, but rather, a reason to turn off the doomscroll and be more present. It’s less a nostalgia for cigarettes, but a nostalgia for the momentary bliss of an interruption. *Everything* happens in your screen. Your work, your love, your friends, your bank, your media, your DOOM, and your parasocial relationships to Instagram dogs. The lowest hanging fruit for what people might want when they want to go offline is simply to unbundle what they already have, *away* from the medium of their screens. The simple somatic experience of physically moving from space-to-space feels good because it interrupts the loops. Add GLP-1s in the mix, and people would simply *want* to physically move.
To quote Kurt Vonnegut:
“(talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”
Cozyweb Animals (and Canon)
Speaking of animals.
has a great article on the concept of Cozyweb Animals, an extension on Hiroki Azuma’s “Database Animals” of the 1990s. A Database Animal, in a world that’s lost grand narratives, invents purpose through the act of collecting and cataloguing.The database animal thus lives post-historically: an intelligent, technologically equipped creature for whom cultural life is no longer narrative but combinatorial, and for whom emotion is managed through cataloging information.
But now, in the 2020s, with Discords, Telegrams, etc, the Cozyweb Animals extends this practice into forums of cynical social games around niche interests.
But cozyweb animals live in post-history. Everyone references the same archive. The once-exclusive references of tastemakers now circulate as endlessly reposted content, divorced from the social distance that once made them meaningful. Hierarchies flatten. What emerges in their place is not distinction but peer burden: the obligation to maintain and stay responsive to one’s fellow cozyweb animals.
…and:
Irony becomes proof of belonging: we are all in on the joke, which is to say, we are all still here. In Bourdieu’s world, taste differentiated; in ours, it stabilizes. What began as cultural capital has become affective labor. To be tasteful now is simply to endure the feed without leaving it.
And this social labour to the collective archive is a response and need for self-regulation.
The cozyweb animal can be seen as the next iteration of that process, a collective nervous system of self-regulating individuals, banding together to preserve equilibrium in an overstimulated, uncertain informational environment.
I feel like it describes quite well why many online communities develop seemingly strange shibboleths. Because when the rest of the world feels chaotic, online spaces, not anchored to anything strongly IRL require more appeals to ritual, inside-jokes, and canon. Which is why, I think, fandoms are so notoriously sticky about canon. If appeals to canon disappeared in fandoms, then the community would just invent more naval-gazing canon about itself.
Ranked Choice Voting in Democratic Primaries
At the moment, I think mixed-member representation is the best electoral system for legislatures. Select from both party lists + direct regional representation. But, many democracies are far from this and many are even further away from it due to entrenched systems of power. It’s really hard to imagine to me that the USA would voluntarily give up its entrenched systems for a more representative form of government. That being said, there are tools that within that system gets you closer to that idea. While I think approval voting is the more superior one, ranked-choice voting has gotten appeal and support in some parts of the USA. Notably, there’s been a scoop and rumour that the Democractic party wants to introduce ranked choice voting for its primaries. This would be amazing. It would reduce “strategic” voting. Surface the candidate most of the populace are excited about. It would create more coalition building during the primaries, which would effectively give the party more ability to advocate their respective internal platforms. Here’s hoping.
What I’m Up To
🏃 Running - Post UTCT Cancellation
Still a bit sad that my race had to be cancelled an hour in due to the wind, but I have been back at it. Keeping in maintenance mode for now as I figure out what races I want to tackle next year. What was notable was how sore I was, even though I only ran 10km of the 35km trail race. Table Mountain trails is no joke. A lot more elevation and technical compared to what I trained. Lessons in there!
📺 Watching - Pluribus, Erin Brockovich, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
When I’m visiting my parents, I often watch a mixed bag of films with them. Case in point was watching Erin Brockovich and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio. I enjoyed both. Watching Erin Brockovich just made me sad again about the story that Lucasfilm simply ignored Steven Soderbergh wanting to make a Ben Solo Star Wars movie. :(
🎶 Listening - Prince Rama - Your Life In The End
A great soaring electro-pop track! It does also have peak mid 2010s energy to it. Innocent nostalgic optimism before we entered the permaweird (which I always ascribe to starting when David Bowie died). Great song for driving here in the Southern African summer! :)
That’s it for this week, friends. Hope you get to enjoy a lovely sunset!
Simon