Hello from Mysore, India. We're going to spend most of the month here winding down what has been an epic year.
The last two weeks have been whirlwindy - intentionally so. We had people (two friends, their two kids, one grandpa) stay with us over Friendsgiving weekend and took them on a rain-soaked whistle-stop tour of Singapore. The girls had a ridiculously good time! So did the adults.
This friendship is a great example of how terrible we, as humans, are at evaluating the future potential of relationships. The origin of this story is that one of them and I attended the same grad school. I wouldn't have categorized us as close back then. We hung out, but that was it. We moved to NYC at the same time, but not much changed. Cities like NYC and LON are fractal in nature - they are populated by a million mini-cities that suck you in - social whirlpools that are much stronger than any glue of shared background. We stayed peripherally informed about each other's lives through a common friend.
Then Veena and I moved to the other side of the world - to Singapore. That's when we became friends as family units, not individuals. They visited us from NYC with a wee baby. We found oursleves on much firmer common ground than ever before - disillusioned by corporate malarkey, wanting agency over our own time, being baffled by the infirmity of social-media-parenting. We saw them on our world tour earlier this year. And here we were, seeing them for the SECOND time in the same year despite living on antipodes. None of this would have happened if we had held on to preconceived notions of what this friendship should or could be.
Family relationships have a blueprint - there are things that culture and society tell us they should be - they are loaded with expectations, and hence, disappointments. Maybe we are saddling our friendships with the same? Perhaps, one of the ways out of the loneliness epidemic isn't finding more avenues for connection but allowing the ones we already have the breathing room to take whatever form they organically choose.
Gautam Ramdurai
DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONTIER
What's been going on at snowbird
The last project of the year is now wrapped. Pens down for the rest of the year. Got a lot planned in 2025 - will share more in Jan. One thing I've been thinking about a lot is snowbird's digital footprint - do we need an Insta page? One on threads? Bluesky? How cringe can we get on LinkedIn? Today's five finds dig into this.
THE FINDS
It's also been a particularly messy year for social media. Hollow punditry was quick to declare the US elections to be simultaneously the TikTok election, the Substack election and the podcast election.
I quit Twitter the day it became X. As millions followed suit this year after the US elections, I was paying attention to how this trend shaped in Asia. Not all of it was political.
What X does at the extreme end is what is happening across a wide range of platforms. The biggest word of 2024 is a profane critique of capitalism first coined in 2022. The Macquarie Dictionary, the national dictionary of Australia, has picked “enshittification” as its word of the year.
"The market demands geometric growth. Companies want the number to go up. As Silicon Valley has run out of wonders and innovation, it has turned to mining its existing customer base by making its products worse. If you’re lucky, they’ll sell you the cure. Most of the time they’re just trying to make a sale."
This means, even the content we create has to be servile to this enshittification. This very newsletter felt it. Substack is filled with posts about "how to make it big on substack" - and don't even get me started on LinkedIn. It's filled with blowhards and cliché peddlers with sage advice such as "managers should care for their employees" -> garnering 376bajillion likes.
This week's finds explore what is happening with social, how our relationship with it is profoundly different than even a few years ago, and what could be a way out:
- CONTENT MACHINES “Cultural producers who, in the past, may have focused on writing books or producing films or making art must now also spend considerable time producing (or paying someone else to produce) content about themselves and their work.”
- CREATIVITY DEAD? Kyle Chayka made this point years ago (he wrote Filterworld based on this) - “Everything looks the same, sounds the same, is the same.”
- EVERYONE'S A SELLOUT The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from 9-to-5 middle managers to astronauts to housecleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand.
- NEW RULES Has gems such as"Rely on nothing you can’t take with you" and "screentime has become a colosseum where everything is in competition with everything else"
- MORE WEBSITES! the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.
This is precisely why the home for this newsletter moved from Substack to being hosted closer to home (via Ghost). This is why we won't be posting content just to keep up with the algorithm. In 2025, this newsletter, and the site will be home base to find us - we'll repost everything on substack and linkedin and threads and whatever new things comes our way. Each of those do not guarantee this relationship we have with our readers. And all of them want more. In Matt Klein's recent interview with Douglas Rushkoff, he talks about this "spin cycle" of the algorithm wanting more from us.
The best way to get off the algorithmic treadmill is to interrogate our relationship with it, and see which parts we can reclaim. It's the same as it is with friendships - we need this relationship we have with you to have room to grow - we write to have a conversation with you - and we hope that stays the same.
Have a wonderful end of the year. See you in 2025!