Wasted Love
How do we PassionPit our lost loves to better our future through fun, fly-wheeled, collaborative products?
NostalgiaCore
I was reading an interesting article from Yana Yuhai about that feeling of nostalgia where time appeared to stand still:
While she highlights that growing feeling and community, I believe her solutioning is inadequate. The whole movement around taking “time” to breathe better, slow down, etc, when we are working in a “paid by the day/paid by the hour” world screams like an awareness squeeze guilt-tripping.
Indeed, one aspect that she missed is the playfulness of our childhood. As adults we conform way too much for fear of other's people disapproval. At the heart of Nostalgiacore is fun. A much better solution is to make our days more fun.
Where are those amazingly immersive experience that we had in front of our Atari? (For me the last time was on the Wii).
How can we create such systems that not only remind us of our childhood but expand on it around multiple axis while keeping fun authentic (not an exponential smoothing gaming algo where we are always seeking the next hit/loot as a way to keep people paying).
Where are those companies?
Where are organization’s objective functions of bringing authentic fun back? That is what we miss the most.
Dead and Gone
Our “digital” life gets polarized a lot. Maybe our digital assistants could be programmed to answer our needs better? Create new solutions, products that lead to moments like we all had Karaokeing or bowling together on the Wii.
I was discussing this with a colleague; I reminded him that the vast majority of open source projects on GitHub (the “quantity” currency for hardcore nerds) die. Some, on Blockchain, follow the same pattern. A slow, painful death due to a variety of causes.
Around the same time I was watching the Eurovision 2025 contest. I highly recommend you listen to the emotions that the Winner, JJ conveyed to us.
It dawned on me that ‘Wasted Love’ applied to many fields of work:
A web designer that creates awesome designs that don’t find an audience
A game writer who gives up after writing the engine
A serial entrepreneur who keeps bootstraping new products while moonlighting and finally gives up.
All these morning pages from and for love are massively wasted passions.
Bringing Fun Back
So, how to contribute our passions, our skills to connecting (through a hybrid decentralized approach?) to the current organizations and platforms that control the algos that run our "digital wellbeing and fun".
These platforms goals are obvious: Cater their algo to the masses. (Reach!)
How can we contribute to making the digital world better and more connected to our needs and planet need?
Let’s start with people who have that vision and are planting and watering their seeds to a “better future” by getting it done now.
Watch and listen to that amazing art piece by Brandon Roberts on Andor Season 02 - Episode 03 (Harvest). This new musical style he created (let’s call it Chandrilla-E-Jive) is worth extending.
How do we remix his amazing new genre?
I highly recommend you watch Andor (both seasons) for his RetroCoruscant Aesthetics and his great track and its relatable political narrative.
The Australians have a great product in Synthony. Scaled musical experience. Huge Orchestra improving the original hits.
How do we go from that Synthony concept to the next level where people, with digital assistants, contribute live to the concert. Can you imagine a collective ‘knobing’ to a better, live augmented rolling wobbly bass on this Arpeggiated bass beauty by Georgio Moroder:
If you need to learn more about Wobbly Rolling bass, head to this curated playlist I penned:
And, How?
Why do we have this habit to pray/ask others? What "Big, Beautiful Bill' we will need to pass to "solve" this problem?
But…
‘It seems hard!’
Is it? Is the word “Product” scaring us? How many “brands” are on this page? How many products?
’We need a lot of money.’
Plenty of platforms to raise funds on passion drive.
’I have nobody’
The Gig Economy is alive and well. Even Airbnb is getting on it.
DAO
Can we create a Creative DAO to solve some of these challenges as a way of organizing through “interests” what we need help with (either pre-emptively or through asks) ?
The strength of a DAO/Collective is to fill the gaps rapidly.
Create
How do we contribute our "petite pierre" to getting back that feeling that most of us lost since our childhood?
We have creative platforms that are easy to use, access (Canva …)
We have AI Tools and Agents (ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek) that are bridging the gap to the masses for Pictures, Videos, Games.
Publish (or Perish)
How do we elevate each other through the publication of our creative process (even if it’s not exactly an opus …. yet) ?
I continue to be hugely optimistic about technology.
