Sustainability

I love her ideas~ not to conjecture on a slippery slope, but I can’t help wondering if on-demand consumption will be able to replace mass products in retail stores. I see it as being widely adoptable, pending multiple needs: accessible prices at scale, a rethinking of seasonality, and the move toward week-to-week production based on machine learning projection models that Nonoo starts to explain at 18:00. 
The conversation around clothing our own avatars is so interesting given multiple 3-D model artists being employed by brands during virtual fashion week to model the weight and movement of new collections. I agree that this could be mainstream in the near future if this modeling is available for more and more brands. The idea of biotech-informed material clothing production is also exciting and reminds me of the material ecology work of architect Neri Oxman, especially when Nonoo talks about lab-grown leather and synthetic silk.

Aesthetic Activism

Elaine Scarry’s ideas on transformational beauty as the work of lessening pain and injustice felt illuminating initially, and then too obvious, a framework already capsizing. And then I took a look off my page and came back… I feel a bit Zen? A Koan.

• Beauty emphasizes and empathizes the world; pain contracts the world and diminishes our ability to create and exist in the world
• Beauty in the 21st Century has been over-used by advertising, thereby conditioning our responses to beauty with consumerism; when we see something beautiful we want to buy it
• Beauty by way of Plato and Homer sees beauty as a way toward goodness and justice, ideals which are helpfully threaded by beauty – an ideal that exists and is able to be processed in the world of senses

Moving on to a brief point on queerness and utility

• Scarry writes about the theory of value and beauty as being so subsumed by consumerism, while in history it’s been so much richer of a concept in terms of value outside usefulness and the commercial sense
• Ocean Vuong brings this idea in parallel with queerness: “that’s the critique that we all get: That queerness is decorous, it’s not a utilitarian thing, and therefore has no value.” Source

I see my problem currently as a project of excavation. I need to exhume beauty from the muck of consumerism and restore in my mind some practice of enlivening that lasts (and is appropriately Zen). The sound of a single clapping hand.

I don’t believe in allyship. I want to believe in nonduality, and/or a process toward it.