TPO#14: A Happy Coinciding
This is The Purposeful Object, a newsletter about modernity and living the good life by Navneet Alang. This issue of TPO: some thoughts about... well, purposefulness; some food links to keep you hungry; and finally, some quick thoughts on a new sort of mobile device.
A lifetime ago, in the heat and foment of 2008, I had a dreamy, idyllic fling with someone who, my friend group all agreed, seemed to be an almost impossibly magnetic woman. Alas, she moved away at the end of the summer and, in an ill-fated attempt to have her think of me in her new city, I made her a muxtape.
That's not a typo.
Muxtape was a short-lived service that let you create an online mixtape by uploading a playlist of MP3s and then giving it its own domain — you know, rememberme.muxtape.com or imgoingtomissmakingoutwithyou.muxtape.com. It had a certain sort of romance to it: people with no technical knowledge at all could create a tiny little spot on the Web to share with others. It was cute. I probably don't need to tell you it shut down because of Napster-esque legal trouble.
I'm reminded of it because of the email I got above from 8Tracks, a similar service that, somehow, not only still exists but sort of relaunched. It has an almost charming retro feel now — user generated content with a comment section underneath, what! — but what feels most jarringly out of place in 2020 is the intimacy of it. Here is a personalized email to tell you someone engaged with something you had a hand in putting together.
I think it's important to not fall into the trap that occurs as you age: thinking that everything from before was better. But I do find it harder these days to find intimacy online. Social media, more than just being noisy, collapses so many different social functions into the same practical and psychic space that intimacy feels like a pipe dream. It's just a natural effect of the expansion of the digital: as it got bigger, the small got harder to find.
Why am I rambling about this? I'm not 100% sure. But I think it has something to do with how "deliberateness" — that is, to choose something specific and purposeful (hey!) — melds with something like "resistance": choosing to push back or avoid the broad, alienating products of modern capitalism.
In the context of the digital, it's about finding specific alternatives to the tech giants (while, of course, keeping in mind that this is a temporary, personal measure not meant to substitute for broader structural change). And in life in general, it's about what I personally struggle with immensely: making conscious decisions that are meant to point one's own life in the right direction practically, but also morally — things that for me might be about, I dunno, eating less meat, making better shopping and transportation decisions, actually confronting anti-black racism and so on. You have your own list of these, I'm sure.
It feels funny to come round to purposefulness as an ideal almost by accident, especially from an online playlist. It feels stranger to think about trying to make conscious, deliberate decisions to "make things better" at a time many people are starting to run out of steam; the pandemic is starting to take a slow, cumulative toll, I think.
But so much of the contemporary digital economy is predicated on reducing friction, automating, aggregating, and swallowing other things whole. But rather than only either promoting some idea of anti-capitalist resistance, or some sort of self-help-y thing of "find your home," I'm wondering if there is instead a sort of useful confluence there — that in making space for the small and specific, one also resists the totalizing homogeneity of 21st century capitalism? And that in doing so, one connects oneself more firmly to the principle that most seems to manifest the good life: purposefulness?
Edit: I don't really remember putting this "playlist" together (such as it is) but it's mainly just about the song "Midnight at the Movies" by Justin Townes Earle who, sadly, passed away this weekend.
Edible Ephemera
A few takes on specific food things:
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Cathy Erway goes deep on the grocery store rotisserie chicken — not just its ubiquity but also its hidden costs. This probably won't come as a surprise, especially if you've got a Costco membership, but they're essentially loss leaders to get you in the store.
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In the delightful Whetstone Magazine, Vidya Balachander dives into the pungent, sulphorous resin, popular in Indian cooking, which I would call hing, she calls perungayam, and what in English is called asafoetida.
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Soleil Ho writes on "pho pizza,", an experiment by Domino's in Vietnam, and in doing so pokes at the way in which the perfectly legitimate concerns about appropriation often devolve into boring, pointless fights over purity or authenticity.
Duo-over
That subtitle is very funny to me and likely no-one else. It's a joke about Windows Phone! Anyway! If there's one thing that fascinates me almost as much as fusion cuisine, it's shifting computing paradigms — how computing changes in response to new interface methods like touchscreens, styluses, and so on. Predictably then, I am faaaascinated by the upcoming Microsoft Surface Duo, a foldable phone-esque Android device with two distinct screens.
The above video has notoriously hyperbolic MS exec Panos Panay going over some of the ways in which the device works, and if you can get past the marketing speak it's super interesting.
A tiny UX/UI detail that stood out to me: you can pair apps and pin those pairs as icons on the home screen, meaning that if you pair, say, an email and a todo app, they'll open as a pair each on their own screen. Why is this is so intriguing to me?!
That's it for this round, friends. Among the best things about writing this newsletter (which I genuinely love!) has been hearing from you. Feel free to drop a note (as long as you don't expect a super fast response!) Until next time...