Frictionless isn't Fictionless

[00:01:33] Brian: Hello, and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Brian.

[00:01:39] Phillip: I'm Phillip. And before we get going, Brian, today is kind of a special day. This is as we're recording this a couple weeks in advance, we're queuing up a bunch of content. Don't go anywhere. It's going to be a killer episode. But we were having a discussion in the preshow about how hard it is not to talk about newsworthy topics.

[00:01:59] Brian: Well, some newsworthy topics are evergreen, and then a lot of newsworthy topics are the news of the day.

[00:02:08] Phillip: But, you know, why spend an hour of your time listening to a podcast that talks about two week old news? I get it. So today, we're going to do a little bit of an around the horn of things that we've been consuming. I think it really will give you some context. Right, Brian? Around some of the things we're thinking of as you'll be listening to this. Also, remember it'll be a few days after our moment event. So if we saw you there, it was great to see you. I haven't seen you yet. And this is Phillip from the past speaking to you in the future. So, hey, we do have a piece of content, Brian, that comes out two to three times a week that is about the news. So if you want that, that'll be up to date. You can go check it out. It's called Future Commerce Insiders and Future Commerce, The Senses, and those are two pieces of email that you can get if you subscribe for free at FutureCommerce.com/Subscribe or join our premium membership, Future Commerce Plus. And you can get ad free versions of podcasts like this and our After Dark, which is bonus content that makes its way to a private feed just for you. And you'll get some bonus stuff along the way, including discount on merchant print and access to our LLM. So lots going on there. Brian, what's on your top of mind and top of the agenda? What are some things that we could chat today on this the Tuesday after Memorial Day?

[00:03:32] Brian: You were telling me about something that caught your eye you've been kind of obsessed with lately, and that is the futurism movement. I think that could be really interesting to get into, and I think that will play into some other things that I've been getting into as well. So maybe we start the conversation there. Futurism, that fascist movement from... {laughter}

[00:03:53] Phillip: A great place to start. Actually, hard left turn into fascism. Let's talk about how I got to this book because I think that's interesting. That's actually yeah. As many do when I turned to fascism, I didn't go looking for it explicitly. It found me. No. {laughter} I have been on a couple of occasions within the last month, I have been going to this place that sells gelato. It's a nice restaurant. It has multiple locations. There's one in Palm Beach. It's called San Ambrose.

[00:04:29] Brian: Also on the path to fascism. Mussolini.

[00:04:32] Phillip: Gelato is, some would say, the accelerated path to fascism. It is Italian. They kinda made it...

[00:04:39] Brian: Exactly.

[00:04:40] Phillip: What it is that we know it to be today. No. So we go to this place called San Ambrose. There are a few locations in New York, Palm Beach, Milan, that sort of thing. And we went there recently. I had a business lunch with some friends. So Nick Mohnacky from bundleIQ, a longtime partner of Future Commerce, he and I and... Oh one of our Future Commerce learning teachers, our instructors, Brian from surefoot, Brian Schmitt, he was there at this lunch too.

[00:05:14] Brian: Nice.

[00:05:14] Phillip: Anyway, so we get some gelato. After lunch, we got some cookies or something. San Ambrose is such a vibe. But right next door to San Ambrose in this really high-end shopping, outdoor shopping, plaza is a little bookstore. Okay, I'm going into... This a long journey I want to get you to where the frame of mind. It's a little bookstore called Assouline which is you know, a very large art book and sort of coffee table book brand.

[00:05:44] Brian: They're so cool

[00:05:44] Phillip: So cool. And if you collect the coffee table books or art books, you're familiar with them and their competitor, their, I would say, probably much larger competitor, Taschen. And so you go into a store like that. You spend enough time in a store like that or you search for those books in a couple of places. I don't want to say that I was in Assouline and then finding the books on Amazon because I would never do that. {laughter} But if you were to do that... If you were to do that if you were to do something like that, you would probably wind up in a specific search segment.

[00:06:27] Brian: Are you calling me out right now? Is that what you're doing?

[00:06:30] Phillip: No. I'm not. I'm saying hypothetically. It's a hypothetical.

[00:06:35] Brian: Hypothetically. Hypothetically.

[00:06:37] Phillip: If one did do that, and they were shopping the endless aisle, then you might find yourself into a segment where you're going to get retargeted a bunch for books like this. And that is how we actually wound up here because Taschen has a sale going on a couple times a year. This is kind of a thing that was really, like, a well kept secret a couple years ago, but now they just buy paid search ads for it. And I bought this book because it had a cool title.

[00:07:06] Brian: Show the cam.

[00:07:08] Phillip: I'll show the camera. That's if you're on our YouTube, you can see it. It's called Futurism. It's Tasheen, and it's an art book by Sylvia Martin. And it is a pretty awesome overview of the futurism art movement from the early 20th century and runs from, I don't know, some somewhere around, I don't know, 1899, maybe 1900 to about 1940. And by no means am I an expert on any of this, I picked up an art book and read it for two days. But I think there's some really interesting stuff that's parallel to the world that we live in right now. And in particular, the fact that this movement which has a lot of things that I think would be objectionable and contentious, especially, like, glorification of war. War is the only salve for what ails society. It's the great antiseptic.

[00:08:12] Brian: Futurism.

[00:08:13] Phillip: Scary stuff. Futurism. Join the movement. But the leader of the fascist... Almost said it again. The futurism movement and the art movement in particular was Filippo  Tommaso Marinetti, and lots has been written about this gentleman. Really loved himself a motor car speaks of it very sexually. But I thought there were some really interesting points. And in particular, this is the conversation. In his, I think, 1905... What's it called? In 1905, he wrote a manifesto, and, you know, normal people write manifestos, so that's not a cause for concern at all. Very normal people. But he basically talked about a new way of looking at the world, and I think that this is really interesting in particular that he talked about museums and libraries, places of collecting and preservation must be destroyed. He declared museums and churchyards were one in the same for him. Tear it all down. And this idea of passatisme, which is an obsession with the past that signaled everything backward about his country, Italy, would be supplanted by futurism. And I can read other passages, but I think just generally, it sounds a lot like effective acceleration or the beginning of a movement where people are railing against a prevailing nostalgic posture that culture has of looking backwards, and they are aggressively trying to pull the culture into looking forward. It feels very much like a Future Commerce thing to talk about.

[00:10:03] Brian: It is. No. I agree. I think it's an important topic because while It's Time to Build came out what, how many years ago now?

[00:10:13] Phillip: Two years ago? It's the Marc Andreessen manifesto.

[00:10:16] Brian: 2020. Four years ago.

[00:10:18] Phillip: Oh my gosh.

[00:10:19] Brian: Four years ago, that was released, and Marc's really leaned into effective accelerationism.

[00:10:23] Phillip: Mhmm.

[00:10:24] Brian: Since then it's interesting. I think we talk a lot about food as well, food and bev at Future Commerce. Written some articles on it.

[00:10:37] Phillip: Well, you definitely do. Yeah.

[00:10:39] Brian: Allison Roman, speaking of VISIONS, which already happened at this point when you're listening to this. So clearly food and bev mean a lot to us. They also meant a lot to Marinetti. He even had a Futurist cookbook, which was as someone put it, a very serious joke except for it wasn't. Yeah. It wasn't really a joke. His disdain for pasta was well known.

[00:11:11] Speaker3: I mean, as a gluten-free, gluten-intolerant man, I'm sure you relate.

[00:11:15] Brian: No. I think it's the opposite. I adore pasta and look at it with extreme jealousy. Anyone who doesn't believe in pasta doesn't believe in the future that I want. My response to Marc Andreessen's It's Time to Build is that I wrote a little piece back in 2020 called It's Time to Build Things That Last. And I think that [00:11:46] one of the dangers of futurism is that it's let's throw everything good out, and replace it with whatever isn't that. Let's not look to the past to inform the future. Let's not enjoy things that we've had, and there's a dichotomy and also a distrust of things that people found to be good previously, and a belief that things can and will be better in the future no matter what, so we should just not even look to the past. I think that there's a lot of danger in this way of thinking about the future. [00:12:32]

[00:12:33] Phillip: Oh, sure. But I don't know that just saying that alone is enough to absolve us of any consequence that may come of this conversation.

[00:12:40] Brian: That's true.

[00:12:42] Phillip: So we have very, very clear parallels I think in the ecommerce industry.

[00:12:51] Brian: Yes.

[00:12:51] Phillip: Not the web commerce industry. I think we've been very critical of web as a channel for buying that has sort of come to its ground to a halt in its pursuit of improvement or any sort of technological innovation with the rare exception, Walmart Realm being one of them maybe. Walmart Realm might be a great example of a futurism art experiment that kind of throws away any tradition of the past in the way that we shop. But if you look at how others, Brian, have talked about things like live stream shopping, it definitely, with the exception of like a QVC parallel, they really, really want to try to do away with any notion that the traditional form of catalog-centric shopping is a thing that we should revere. There's a future coming when we do away with all of that. Right?

[00:13:51] Brian: Yeah. So true. Yeah. I think there's a whole set of people out there that think that the way that we shop is going to not reflect the past at all. And, you know, in the world of effective accelerationism, we should be able to just think about what we want and buy it with our minds. So that's obviously looking way far ahead, but I think the closer we get to thought to purchase, the closer we're getting to futurism, the futurists, that whole movement's look at how things should be purchased. Connection of mind to desire and bypassing middle people, middlemen. That idea of, like, removing their human connection or human points of human touch through the process of connecting desire to object is the ultimate aim of futurism, as a movement, look at commerce, in my opinion. Remove all friction, remove all humanity, remove all things that would block the connection of person to object.

[00:15:31] Phillip: There's a pseudo-spiritual thing I've been jamming on lately that may have an interesting orthogonal tie into this. It's really been bothering me is how much spiritual discipline, take a faith, pick a faith... Doesn't matter what it is. Pick a system of belief and generally with rare exceptions, maybe the satanic church, with rare exceptions what they ask is to be self-sacrificial or to focus on self-discipline. So not giving into base instincts and desires. Right? Denying yourself. This is not a thing that we talk a lot about in commerce, self-denial. Although, a recession definitely is a form of denial.

[00:17:02] Brian: CAROL, what about CAROL?

[00:17:04] Phillip: Yeah. The CAROL. Right? Can't Afford My Rich Old Life. If you can't afford to live in this world the way that you used to or at the level of opulence that maybe you used to, then, yeah, you are now a CAROL. But that's not necessarily self-denial it's you know your base instincts, and you said it, you mentioned the piece earlier like we are sensory beings who consume. That's what we do. We consume experiences. We consume yes, things, food... We acquire that's what we do. We also consume ideas. Funny, consumption is still at the center of both the futurism movement and other movements. It's like the consumption of the future as an idea becomes a new form of future as an idea becomes a new form of consumption that it's co-creative though. It's like we're going to create the future as we're consuming the very idea of it, and you can't do that by building on the past. We have to do away with the past.

[00:18:02] Brian: Well, this plays very well to Angelica's piece for Insiders recently.

[00:18:07] Phillip: Angelica Frey who wrote for Insiders recently. Yeah.

[00:18:09] Brian: Yeah. And at the end of that, she talks about how, in many ways, when we look to the future, we're not actually looking to the future. We're looking to a nostalgic vision of the future that we had in the past. So it's not even like, actually, when we're saying why aren't things the way that we thought that they would be, that in it of itself is a form of nostalgia.

[00:18:38] Phillip: Actually, to be really precise about that, that's a really interesting point. So over on Future Commerce Insiders is our series of essays that kind of directionally, you know, point us towards things that we see happening in the world. And most recently, Angelica Frey, who's a friend of the pod, if you will, talked about this WGSN had a sister institution Coloro, who talked about forecasting and kind of forecasted the 2026 color of the year, which I think is really strange because that's a couple years before it actually gets... They're way out in front, I guess. How do you know what the color of the year is going to be in two years, Brian? Well, the Coloro knows, and it's called Transformative Teal. And quote, "This blue-green shade is cooling, calming, and restorative with a transformative and regenerative character inspired by redirecting our efforts to find collective and novel solutions for our planet." [00:19:47] What's really interesting here is that our modernist futurism is dystopic, But retrofuturism was optimistic. So we can be nostalgic for the past's vision of the future, which I think is its own interesting dichotomy. I [00:20:07]f we create the future that we know from popular culture and we're busy creating that, that's the Star Trek and the Jetsons and all those things that we know, that generation grew up with that and those are the people who have the capital and they have the positions and the power now and they can create that future. What comes next? I don't know. Transformative Teal {laughter}

[00:20:29] Brian: I also think that they... No. No. No. Along those exact same lines, I think that when we remember the past vision of the future we say, "Where is that future?" That's typically an optimistic look at the future from the past. But then when we read dystopic versions of the future, we're often like, "Look how close we are to that." There's a level of...

[00:21:00] Phillip: It's true.

[00:21:01] Brian: Man, these people who predicted a dystopic future they got it. You know? When we see an optimistic picture of the future, it's almost always, "What happened to that future?"

[00:21:19] Phillip: Okay. So hold on. You're saying something really interesting, and I'd love to explore that. You're saying that real futurism or you're delineating a difference between a dystopic futurism actually being an exaggerated version of the present, whereas retrofuturism or optimistic futurism was an actual glimpse of what technology and humanity would be like at a future age. I think that's interesting.

[00:21:51] Brian: Well, no. So I'm not actually saying that. That is a rabbit hole that we could run down if it's true, but actually, I was talking about feelings of the present related to views of the future.

[00:22:01] Phillip: Oh, you're talking about feelings?

[00:22:02] Brian: I was. Yeah. No. I was talking about the feelings of present people related to the two forms of literature about the future. One was dystopic, one was optimistic. We're always saying where is that optimistic future that we wanted, and we're always saying, oh, we relate so much to this dystopic future that was talked about. Whether or not we're closer to either one of them, that's another question altogether, but as related to feelings about previously created visions of the future, we're more inclined to associate with dystopic or call out dystopic views as correct. Whether or not they are is another debatable question.

[00:25:34] Phillip: Let's talk about reducing friction. So let's take that to a logical end. Let's say that we do remove these interfaces. Right? So let's say that Blink to Pay and Apple VisionPro is a retinal or some sort of low-friction way of authorizing a payment, working backwards in a future where, you know, the gaze is something that you really have to be mindful of.

[00:26:03] Brian: Right.

[00:26:03] Phillip: So for instance, the Apple VisionPro right now, its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness because where you focus your eyes is highly, highly important because that is your cursor. But what you learn about yourself very quickly when you first use it is that you don't often look directly at something, which is interesting.

[00:26:29] Brian: Yeah.

[00:26:29] Phillip: For instance, if you're astute and you've been watching this on YouTube, you'll see that my eyes dart around to all kinds of things, especially when I'm thinking. And so the way that you fix your gaze on something often could have a material outcome in a world where there's low friction purchasing. That sounds like it comes back to a spiritual discipline around things like carnal desire and averting your eyes and averting your gaze so that you have to exercise some discipline over the things that become morally reprehensible or spiritually corrupt.

[00:27:08] Brian: It is a really interesting point, and I have to bring up McLuhan as a part of this as well because he talked about how...

[00:27:14] Phillip: We almost made it through a whole podcast. It was great.

[00:27:16] Brian: I know. Almost. Technology shapes us and also requires us to change how we operate as humans. And so when the knife became a technology, we had to be more mindful of how we used our hands when we had a knife in it, and there were knife handling techniques. By the same token, we just do whatever we want with our eyes in many ways, and I think you made a really good point about disciplines around what you look at. There's a sort of religious connotation around looking at things, sometimes certain religions or certain aspects of religion require self-discipline around using your sense receptors in a way that is...

[00:28:12] Phillip: Be careful little eyes what you see.

[00:28:13] Brian: Right.

[00:28:14] Speaker3: Be careful little ear what you hear. Right.

[00:28:17] Brian: Because it could affect you as a result. And so when you have a tool that all of a sudden can enact the things that your sense receptacles could no longer do, like, your hands are also sensory receptacles, they're tools for you to accomplish things and to receive information. Now that we have a tool that actually turns our eyes into even more than a tool than just, you know, things that go into us, we have to pay attention. It's very, very, very, very, McLuhan, McLuhanite.

[00:28:58] Phillip: Yeah. McLuhan-coded.

[00:29:00] Brian: McLuhan-coded.

[00:29:00] Phillip: McLu-y-han?

[00:29:00] Brian: To think through exactly how that will affect our bodies even to the point where we will train our eyes to act in a certain way, and the way that we look at each other and other things will be affected as a result of having to get used to fixing our gaze on specific things.

[00:29:25] Phillip: I would say and we adapt to those environments. Right? Like, so advertising, they say, has diminishing returns because you become ad blind. We've become pretty good at sorting noise and signal in lots of ways. You become acclimated and all senses go through this. Like olfactory senses. So you smell smoke or you smell a perfume for long enough, you become nose blind to it because you need a heightened sense of alert for things like smoke. So to sense when danger is coming, we adapt to those sort of environmental changes. That is who we are and what we do. I think this is really interesting because we actually don't ever think about those macro adaptations and evolutionary traits as having applications in everyday human behavior and design around that behavior. And that's why the new platform shifts are so important because it requires us to rethink the way as senses have greater depth and meaning, like, where you look becoming a cursor, that's an important piece of realizing humans don't actually look directly at a thing very often especially things like a keyboard. I think that's really annoying actually. Yeah. That's a whole other topic.

[00:30:51] Brian: That'll have to change.

[00:30:53] Phillip: Sure.

[00:30:57] Brian: I think this does get back to what we're talking about with eliminating friction because what we're talking about is adapting around our bodies to get to a specific outcome faster. And again, with less friction. I think that this is... Eliminating friction. This has been a long discussion on Future Commerce, but [00:31:31] the end game of eliminating friction is a specific kind of future that a specific set of people out there are looking for where certain activities are eliminated from intervention in any way or requirement for a human to be involved. [00:31:56] And the end game of futurism, of a "positive" view of futurism is that not only would I look at something, it'd be ordered or think about something and it'd be ordered, but then robots make and fulfill that thing for me, and that humans never have to touch any part of that process.

[00:32:18] Phillip: {laughter} I want to show you something. One of the really interesting things about the futurism art movement is the way that they incorporated brand new artistic mediums, like, things that weren't considered artistic mediums yet. So photography, cinema, and these things were brand new. Right? So what is interesting about it though is how pieces of contemporary art at the time were pushing the boundaries or realizing these effects that things like cinema and photography were having on traditional mediums. One of these is a good example of a piece that is reinterpreting the tradition of painting that comes from... So you'll see this on the YouTube, but basically, there is a piece here. Let's see if I can get it to focus. So I'll sort of describe it for the people who are listening but this is called Chronophotograph which is from 1886 by Etienne-Jules Marey and sort of predated the actual literal futurism movement, but kind of incorporates this idea of how the painting tradition was being reimagined and being informed by these other technological advances. So it wasn't just, okay, we are getting rid of the old ideas, but we're still using the old mediums. You see, it wasn't like we're only adopting new mediums to express this artistic idea. It's that we're abandoning the concepts that those mediums used to enable and inhabit, and we're going to change the way and the structure and the content that goes on that medium. And that I think is also very modern in the way that technology changes old mediums like, I don't know, television.  Does television become more shopping-centric? Web commerce. Does web commerce because of spatial become more depth-oriented? And we have spatial dimensions within the web? How do we get there? I think it's really interesting.

[00:34:42] Brian: Yeah. It also begs the question on the originality question in general. Just like with the different mediums, like food was one of those things as well. And in the cookbook, he had, like oh, it was, like, 11 rules for what was required for a perfect meal. And rule number 2 was absolute originality in the food, and this got me. Rule number 5, the use of the art of perfumes to enhance tasting. Every dish must be preceded by a perfume which will be driven from the table with the help of electric fans. This is mind-blowing.

[00:35:29] Phillip: {laughter} Yeah. Experiential.

[00:35:35] Brian: Experiential at the highest level except for it, like, would totally get in the way of the food. I think what's interesting about this sort of movement and how it would affect commerce now, if we tried to apply it, is that it often tries to jump past the steps that are required to do something completely new, which is often when doing something new, you have to learn about the past to get to the next thing or you can't even accomplish something new. So I would almost argue that the originality argument for, you know, how this would play out in commerce is we would create things that either didn't work or would be influenced by things that already existed. It just would be a question of what. What? The idea you mentioned, you know, there's a group of people out there that want to move to a 100% livestream shopping. Let's abandon all ways that we've shopped in the past and just move to a livestream modality for shopping. But that's actually not really a net new way of consuming the world. It just looks like it.

[00:37:08] Phillip: Right. Yeah. Oh, okay. So on that point, actually, everything that we're talking about is, you know, these soirees, the salons that they would hold, the futurists, the dinner parties. I think he had a magazine called, like, Poiesia. It sounds like a lot like what we do. {laughter}

[00:37:35] Brian: Yes. No. No question. It's a lot like what we do.

[00:37:38] Phillip: Sounds a lot like...

[00:37:42] Brian: But there were a lot of salons back then as well.

[00:37:46] Phillip: There's nothing new under the sun. That's the thing I'm trying to say.

[00:37:49] Brian: Yeah. Well, yeah. We're not doing anything new under the sun. That's for sure.

[00:37:53] Phillip: No. I don't think nobody's doing anything new.

[00:37:55] Brian: We're giving credit where credit's due. I think that he was doing the exact same thing that a lot of people had done throughout the course of 19th century, and just trying to do it in a completely new way without paying homage to the fact that the very structure by which he wanted to run a dinner was actually unto itself a medium from the past. I find a lot of these, like, very idealistic futuristic visions to be way less original than people give them credit for, and usually, they don't end up working in the end.

[00:38:39] Phillip: No. For sure. Especially when there's a world war that bridges or a couple world wars that bridge the whole of a movement that's underpinning under, you know...

[00:38:49] Brian: Bridge? How about fuel? I think that futuristic visions often end up fueling massive conflict or problems, and so, yeah, I think I'm against idealism in general. If I was going to take a stand.

[00:39:09] Phillip: Wow. You know what's a... I actually reached for this a minute ago when you were talking about something, and it's in my hand now. So now we're going to talk about it. I don't know that it's directly tied in, but there is a progression of things that are happening. Not trying to reference the news, but Neuralink is holding a competition right now for compression, trying to bridge a gap for more human machine interface. They're looking for their second human patient for their first live trial. It reminds me of this piece that I think we referenced in The Multiplayer Brand, written by quntm. This is an anthology of short-form science fiction. And it's called Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories. A lot of short stories. Really interesting, but there's a piece in here called Driver that is written in, like, the style of a Wikipedia entry that I believe is available for free anywhere. I just happened to buy the book on Amazon. This is kind of where I think a lot of things are heading of it opens in a Wikipedia style of "AL Hall 1 is a snapshot of the living brain of site reliability engineer, Lucas James Hall who lived from 2029 to 2059, created on August 28, 2051. Hall was created with the intention of functioning as orchestrator software and used an organic workloading industry to concurrently manage large numbers of other virtual images by fine tuning workloads and choosing suitable motivation configurations. It is the earliest image to have been created for this purpose." And then it goes into, you know, what would typically be in a Wikipedia entry about the experience of what it's like to work with this AL Hall 1 snapshot and how you can drive it to insanity. You can put it into too much workload. When he wakes up, when you start it from a cold start, he believes that he is actually Lucas James Hall, and then you have to reorient it and convince it that you're on its side and that you're a friend, and there are evil variants of this. And, basically, you know, there's a lot of really interesting experienced live time maximum thresholds that you find for the neural map of an organic brain. It's like emotional coercion. Really wild. It's such a short story, but it's really worth reading. I think that this is also talking about the futurism aspect is that, I don't know that you can actually just talk about like okay what are the interfaces of the future? Okay what are the experiences of the future? Can we just dream of... We have to actually like this is an act of fiction. This is an act of creation. I think that there is a future that can be written that is an artistic act. And that is where I think that the futurism movement is really interesting is that thinking about cautions around the future in the terms of the way that art presents the future can be both positive and negative, and we can learn from those things. I think that's interesting.

[00:42:46] Brian: I do. I think that's interesting as well. Presenting the future in different lights from an artistic and aesthetic and an emotional and vibe perspective is actually more of I think this is what we're getting at the beginning of the show. The vibes are actually as important as anything else, and this is why I ended up writing the response to It's Time to Build that I did because I felt like there was a certain vibe to what Marc was saying, and I felt like it actually didn't reflect what we, at least in America, had the ability to execute on in a meaningful way that was going to be good for people in the end. The vibe is, let's just go build this cool stuff. Well, it's like, okay. That's great, but you're not taking into account the things that we could actually do right now that would make a big difference, that are not easy things to do. Marc's right on the build front. I am pro let's go change commerce. Let's go change our future together. Let's go build things. But [00:43:58] if the future is gleaming cities with flying cars, I'm not entirely sure that that's the future that I'm looking for, which is a specific quality of life. It is a specific set of things that I hope for, and I think that there are ways to get there here and now that we could be investing in and taking big swings around that would make a meaningful difference for commerce and for the general populace. [00:44:31] And maybe commerce is the fastest way to what Marc really wants, and I think that's something else that's largely lacking from the effective acceleration movement. There is a way to get after this that involves markets and commerce and fair exchange between two parties or multiple parties. I think it's blatantly missing the commerce angle, which I think is weird.

[00:45:11] Phillip: Maybe it's just not that interesting to most people, especially science fiction authors. We have credits in the future and replicators. That's all I know, and those things, may or may not already exist on some small level already. Although, I would love a flying car. Although, I don't know that I would love a flying car as much as a way to be able to navigate the planet Earth without having severe turbulence that kills people in flight now. That would be cool.

[00:45:49] Brian: Sheesh, man.

[00:45:49] Phillip: Let's end on that note.

[00:45:50] Brian: Well, we should just... Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. We should just go with my vision of the future, which is inflatable vehicles, which could fly or go on the ground. As I talked about in our After Dark episode. There's a huge case for safety improvements due to scientific advancements in materials, and it would require a massive aesthetic shift in the way that we think about what mobility is. And I don't feel like anyone's painting that vision of the future. I think that there's a much more exciting vision of the future that I could paint for people if they wanted to change the things that didn't seem as cool.

[00:46:34] Phillip: Maybe not as cool, but there are things that I think will continue to bring scientific advancement that we've never talked about on the show, but I hear a lot about in other sort of veins of futurism. For instance, AlphaFold3 protein folding predictive models for protein generation. There's a whole leap forward in organic and genetic chemistry, and this far afield from my area of expertise. But I think that that predictive model for being able to create new substances and new therapeutics and new genetic therapeutics. These things could be huge, and it's not just happening in organic chemistry. That's going to happen in every industry. So I don't know. Do we have a theoretical limit in the future for computing, for material sciences, for chemistry and organics? I don't know. Not within our lifetime for sure. Those seem exciting.

[00:47:43] Brian: Those do seem exciting. I will say this typically with first movement on things like that, there's often a downside or a backlash or something that goes wrong that comes along.

[00:47:59] Phillip: Definitely. There's going to be horrible things that happen for sure.

[00:48:01] Brian: There's going to be horrible things that happen as a result. I'm talking about future movement with things that already exist today that could be retransformed due to aesthetic vision. And until we have a change in aesthetic vision, we won't be able to get to, I think, the types of things that we want to get to as a society. I know I'm talking in broad strokes, so go listen to After Dark.

[00:48:33] Phillip: I'm not tracking there, but I will say I don't know that what you're saying is this, but if there's a series of progressions where things that were relegated only to large enterprises and corporations that required a monumental amount of effort of lots of people moving backwards to being able to be accomplished by smaller and smaller amounts of people, maybe by individuals, then maybe there's a future where it is an aesthetic shift because it's the will of the individual and not necessarily the consensus of a committee. So maybe those aesthetics become highly individualized, highly personalized, and meant just for a very specific mode of transportation that works just for people like me. I don't know.

[00:49:18] Brian: Maybe. That's not exactly what I'm saying. I'm saying that we've built a vision of the future based on old technology that's produced specific aesthetics. And in order for us to move forward as a society, we'll have to have a mimetic wave around a new aesthetic that will, to us at this moment, look stupid. That is actually...

[00:49:46] Phillip: Yeah. Walmart Realm. That's that. If you want to take one example.

[00:49:48] Brian: Yes. Yeah. Yes. A 100%. Yeah.

[00:49:53] Phillip: It will look stupid because Walmart Realm objectively is kind of stupid, but maybe not in the future in a very specific type of application that we can't even begin to... I mean, that's one bad example.

[00:50:09] Brian: No. I mean, that's actually a good example. There are a lot of things that people think look stupid that are the thing that will push us into the future. And that's what I'm getting at is that we don't understand the aesthetics of the utility of the things that we have, and that will have to change in order for us to move to the next phase of advancement.

[00:50:37] Phillip: Well, I think that we will see that in media first before anything else and potentially in shopping personalization because I think that GPT 4.0 is the beginning of a deluge of built-just-for-me content that really can't be shared or experienced by anybody else. Like, why am I listening to 4 billionaires on the Ill in podcast talking about things that they think are interesting like poker, which I don't give a rip about when I could be listening to them talking about me and my life and my calendar and the things that I care about and why something might be interesting there. A deeper level of a personal, you know, parasocial relationship.

[00:51:20] Brian: You are talking about extending their personalities to be applied to your life through...

[00:51:27] Phillip: Forget that it's them necessarily because I think that there's all kind of, like, challenges and name image likeness around that. But what if it was just, hey, I came up with a really great prompt that created a podcast on the fly for me that I'm really digging, and it's people that I like? And that won't make any sense to you because I dig those created beings that live only in this podcast that I've created.  I don't know. That seems very possible in the very near future. And we are prattling on now for ages and ages. I think it's time to wrap it up. This is the most After Dark type content that...

[00:52:07] Brian: Totally. Come subscribe to After Dark if you want to hear me talk about the inflatable future that we have.

[00:52:15] Phillip: I love it. Thanks for listening to this episode of Future Commerce. Find more episodes of this podcast at FutureCommerce.com, and get on the mailing list. We'd love for you to join us in the bigger ideas that we put into succinct thoughts with a couple thousand words wrapped around it. This has been a fun hang, but you can get even deeper with other people in our circle who write these long-form essays and editorials. You can get that at FutureCommerce.com and also our newsletter at FutureCommerce.com/Subscribe. It's called The Senses, and we make sense of this week's news and context in the future. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Future Commerce.