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In Short, When I've a Smattering of Eno's Oblique Strategy

You'll say a better Major-General has never tabbed at ye.

December 21st, 2021

Brian Eno talked to Evgeny Morozov for Morozov’s new project “The Crypto Syllabus,” which aims to be “a distributed think-tank… without any ideological commitments to the ‘creator economy’ or the emancipatory power of ‘web3.’” That meshes well with his past criticism of tech “solutionism,” and Brian Eno certainly thinks NFTs aren’t the solution to anything, but maybe the best strategy is to read this interview obliquely, via the blogs.

Infinitesimal gradations

Russell Brandom at The Verge pointed out that “Eno seems like the perfect artist for the NFT era,” with his background in both technology and algorithmic art, but noted the interview was with “(…Evgeny Morozov, of all people)” and Far Out Magazine’s Tyler Golsen parenthesized that it was published in “The Crypto Syllabus (of all places).” I’m not sure why we should be surprised by either (of all facts). Vulture’s Devon Ivie taught me that Eno’s full name is “Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno,” and remembered that Eno composed the Windows 95 startup sound, which added value by complicating the easy assumption that such an artiste couldn’t be swayed by mere money. Robin Murray from Clash was the only one to quote Eno’s best line, which was:

The idea that Ayn Rand, that Nietzsche-for-Teenagers toxin, should have had her whacky ideas enshrined in a philosophy about money is what is terrifying to me.

It was also blogged by Bill Pearis in Brooklyn Vegan and Elizabeth Scarlett for Louder who both put up perfectly competent posts that are, as Eno once said about good ambient music, as ignorable as they are interesting. But I would never ignore an interesting opportunity to deploy some more oblique strategies.

Get your neck massaged

As Yanagihara herself has admitted, [A Little Life] represented an attempt to engineer a situation in which suicide is not only justified but possibly advisable.

By that benchmark, A Little Life is a blazing success. You may have loved it, or you may have hated it, but if you’re anything like me, you spent the entire second half begging the main character to please, for the love of God, kill himself already.

Incredibly, this is as positive as the review gets. The rest is a delightfully detailed and derisive pan of the new novel.

Mute and continue

Newsweek: “'Pandemic's Wrongest Man' Alex Berenson Sues Twitter for Suspending His Account.” Hilariously, Berenson’s suit contains a charge of “unjust enrichment,” which argues that by not suspending him sooner, Twitter unjustly enriched itself with profits made while he was violating Twitter’s rules. This case will be thrown out so hard that SpinLaunch engineers will point to it as a proof of concept.

Short circuit (If eating peas improves virility, shovel them into your pants)

Daisuke Wakabayashi and Mike Isaac report that the people who built web2 are now abandoning it in droves to hoover up the money being dumped on web3 by the same VCs that previously dumped the money they hoovered up building web2.

While employees generally accept a smaller salary at tech start-ups in the hope that the company’s stock will hit it big one day, workers at crypto start-ups are provided “liquidity,” or the ability to cash out their shares, much earlier. Often, they can do so in the form of trading their company’s cryptocurrencies

No way this could go wrong, keep shoveling those peas into your pants everyone!

Simple subtraction

These hallways do not exist. The Assassination Gap: “I think we would be justified in looking back at recent decades and asking why there were so few high-profile assassinations.”

Idiot glee (?)

Don't be frightened to display your talents

The ham sniffers of Andalusia are groaning under the Christmas season demand for expertly sniffed hams.

During low season, in February, Mr. Vega will smell 200 hams a day, he said. Now at the climax of demand he is whiffing 800 loins a day—that’s 3,200 sniffs. He is strained, he said, “at the limit of human possibility.”

Honor thy error as a hidden intention

Jonestown Intensifies: The Q cultists of Dallas are now “Drinking Toxic Chemicals from A Communal Bowl” according to the Dallas Observer. In the New York Times, Davey Alba reports on what Q is now, more than a year after the last official Q drop, and the news is not great. Just like Trumpism, “in some ways, it is now woven even deeper into the country’s political and social fabric than it was 12 months ago.”

Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics

Do nothing for as long as possible

Today’s Song: The Pixies, “Debaser”

~ I am une tab Andalusia ~

Turn it upside down

˙ǝɹǝɥ ɯoɹɟ ɹǝʇɥƃᴉɹq sʇǝƃ ʎɐp ʎɹǝʌƎ ¡ǝqᴉɹɔsqns ǝsɐǝld 'ʎpɐǝɹlɐ ʇ,uop noʎ ɟI ˙sqɐ┴uᴉʎɐpo┴@ puɐ 'sqɐʇ‾ɐʞɟ@ ɹǝʇʇᴉʍ┴ uo ɯ,I

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