Holesale Goods → Know-it-alligarchy → Reverse Manifestation

Hey Neighbor. On Monday afternoon, the managers of Monk’s, a Ravens bar in the northern Yucatan, were rewatching Sunday’s loss while playing “Frijolero” by the Mexican punk band Molotov at Dos Equis bottle rattling volumes and singing along.

“No me digas beaner, Mr. Puñetero. Te sacaré un susto por racista y culero. No me llames frijolero. Pinche gringo puñetero.”

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🇺🇸 This is not a newsletter about politics. It’s a newsletter about the social, economic, and consumer experiences of educated, white-collar workers. Unfortunately, given the amplification of class resentments by those in power, we can’t avoid political topics. We can, however, try to sneak up on them from behind.

→ Much has been written about social media getting handsy with the American body politic, but Google is rarely blamed for polarization or the rise of current “anti-elite sentiments.” It might be the worst offender. The search engine made it possible to “know things” without knowing people who know things, devaluing expertise both culturally and in terms of wages. Democratizing access to information is good, but de-contextualizing information… destabilizing. (READ MORE)

→ Trump signed an executive order “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” yesterday, dictating that new government buildings must respect “regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage. He also debuted a new illo of the White House that emphasizes the building’s palladian details, notably the alternating arch and triangular window hoods. Last time around, no one really reacted to his ban on brutalism. This time, the move will – coupled with The Brutalist’s Oscar campaign – make Marcel Breuer a resistance symbol even though his Wassily chairs are peak execucore [1]. (READ MORE)

→ Meta has rebranded coming layoffs as "non-regrettable attrition,” which is in keeping with Zuck’s decision to brand his soon-to-be-former employees as low performers in a rather obvious attempt to gain leverage over his current employees. This casts Meta’s history of employing H1B workers with revokable visas, who constituted over 15% of the company (which described itself as “H1B Dependent” in a federal filing) in a different light. Meta pays wants managers fearful of the C-Suite.

Upper Middle Research identifies readers with professional expertise and matches them with surveys and focus groups that pay up to $300 an hour (probably during lunch) and keep them abreast of what’s going on in their field.

Exploring the natural wonders of Mexican Costco.

I’m writing this in the front seat of a 2013 Ford Fusion idling at the edge of Costco parking lot, which would be wholly unremarkable if it weren’t for the cenote in the middle of it. The cavern mouth – 30 feet from a queue of carts – gargles Glacier Mint Listerine-blue water above a limestone esophagus snaking down toward Mesozoic shale or the underworld (depending on who you ask). I’m here because I’m vacationing in Merida and because “cenote in a Costco parking lot” has a specific appeal I’ve spent days struggling to unpack. Also, me gusta los hotdogs.

Roughly 10 years before I parked, Costco workers accidentally opened a 16-foot hole into a cave system. Roughly 66 million years before that, a meteor from beyond Jupiter struck a few miles north, killing the dinosaurs [2] and fracturing the Yucatecan bedrock, allowing water to seep in.

Of course, a bunch of stuff happened in the meantime. 

A Mayan priest dropped severed heads into Preston Windshield Washer Fluid-blue water. A conquistador slaughtered thousands upon thousands. Demand for agave fibre rope made Merida rich. A DuPont chemist invented a synthetic alternative. A Portuguese guy with dreadlocks opened a boutique hotel in Tulum. A party photographer from Nashville declared “Zacil Ha” Instagrammable. Cenote swimming became one of those semi-adventures that get sold in bulk. 

All of that was baked into the appeal of the Costco cenote, which remained a minor mystery until I watched a bunch of BMW-driving locals ignore it. The irony I had reacted to wasn’t really irony at all, just the superimposition of my two strongest and most contradictory consumer impulses: my desire for convenience and my (very Millennial, very Upper Middle) desire for experience.

Convenience is how we experience the moment. Experience is – not always but often – how we touch the past. To understand ourselves and avoid losing our shit, we need both. 

Which why there’s something singularly deep about the cenote known as “Ka Kuxtal” (Mayan sounds like Yiddish with heatstroke) in both a physical and historical sense. It’s about time – how we buy it and how we pass it. 

I’m sitting here thinking of that great Alan Bennett [3] line – “How do I define history? It’s just one fucking thing after another” – and how it’s not true. History is not one fucking thing after another. It’s one fucking thing on top of another. 

Looking down into the Gatorade Arctic Blast-blue water, you can see that. And it’s not sad or ironic or alienating at all. It’s reassuring. This too shall pass, but also… it won’t.

Anyway, I hope you’re having a good week.

→ The new Trump administration is using  Instrument Serif and Instrument Sans, a pair of fonts designed by Rodrigo Fuenzalida for the Instrument, a branding company that has worked with Nike, Sonos, Patagonia, Notion, Google, and the Eames Institute. (SEE MORE)

→ Twede's Cafe in North Bend,  Washington, where David Lynch shot the Double R Diner scenes from Twin Peaks is a friendly place that serves black coffee to passing fans and has a completely uncomplicated relationship to the show, which treated it with the respect it deserved. The cherry pie is unexpectedly tart.

→ Monoskop uploaded an old (and decidedly pervy) Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly written by Slavoj Zizek for some fucking reason. Some good stuff in there amid the barely legal pseudosmut, including this: “The only successful sexual relationship occurs when the fantasies of the two partners overlap. If the man fantasizes that making love is like riding a bike, and the woman wants to be penetrated by a stud, then what truly goes on while they make love is a that a horse is riding a bike.” The early aughts were gross but fun. (FEEL WEIRD LOOKING AT IT)

→ Ezra Klein of the Times and Derek Thompson of the Atlantic have a book, Abundance, coming out. Both are as sharp as they are prolific, but it says something frightening about the state of commentary that they’re willing to share a book cover. Big dicks don’t swing in unison.

→ Toadcore.

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→ Cui Bono.

→ We’re going to hear a lot about protectionism under President McKinley (Trump just renamed Denali after him) over the next few months. There’s no great McCullough-ish book on the guy, but the Hoover Institute interview with Karl Rove [4], who put out a bio in 2015, is interesting both on a historical level and on a revisionist historical level. (LISTEN TO IT)

→ Listening to earning calls is honestly a nice way to break up the podcasts.

→ The World Economic Forum put out its Global Risks Report, which force ranks threats to economic stability. Number 19 on the list is “Asset Bubble Burst,” which seems low at a time when the price earnings ratio is at an extreme high and Warren Buffet is moving to cash. The ownership class seems to be getting into reverse manifestation. (Numbers one, two, and three were state-based armed conflict, extreme weather events, and geoeconomic confrontation respectively.) (READ IT)

→ Good a time as ever to remember that people who borrow often benefit from inflation. That tends to be the 15th percentile-ish and up because of mortgages, but gets very extreme at the top.

[2] The dinosaurs died but were subsequently brought back to life nearby on Isla Nublar, which led to a bunch of other stuff happening.

[3] Alan Bennett has one big strike against him, which is that “The History Boys” made James Corden famous. It’s hard to come back from that one.

[4] Rove may have the most egregious fivehead in history. Just saying.