Issue 6: Feel! Feel! Feel!

How we watch war: “WarTok,” as New York Magazine writer Matteo Mobilio calls it in his recent piece, is an emerging phenomenon in the Ukraine, where young folks are using Tik Tok’s advanced video production capabilities to document their lives as soldiers and civilians alike. Mobilio describes the footage: “The videos are often short and fly by too quickly for any meaningful context or verifiability, leaving you to revel in or reel from a cacophony of explosions, machine-gun fire, and dancing soldiers, each clip seemingly more absurd or disturbing than the last.” I am personally taken by the way in which teens are using the kind of wry, super-dark Eastern European humor that I know and love so well (because it is in my DNA) to process experiences that, for many of us in the West, are unimaginable. Never underestimate an algorithm’s design: Watching just one of these videos will send one on a doomspiral into the techno-mediated hell that is war, today. Related: Former New York Times tech reporter Taylor Lorenz writes about “scammy” Instagram accounts capitalizing on the war.

Designers United for Ukraine is a new Discord whose name says it all. Here’s an invitation link.

What’s art for?: Whenever I lose faith in art, which is pretty frequently these days, I turn to Howard Zinn’s Artists in Times of War, a slim volume from 2003 — Bush years! — about the role of art in society informed by speeches he gave around that dark time. I continue to find it restorative and I hope that you do, too.

Vibes check: I keep catching myself using the word “vibe” as both an adjective and verb in all manners of context, including while I lead meetings at work, which is rather embarrassing. I gleefully read New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka’s exemplary musings on the neologism’s meaning — viewed through the lens of Tik Tok, naturally — back in the Spring of 2021 and again at the turn of the new year. Chayka really nailed it, tracing the actual definition of the word while contextualizing it culturally. I personally identify most with the vibe as a sort of intuition — a feeling enacted, together. Are we still vibing? I would like to believe that we are.