"ain’t no such animal as an instant guerrilla." looking back on a project from 2 months ago and thinking how on earth did i do this

i recently came back from a month-long trip to south east asia and since, my brain has turned to mush. since then i’ve started and completed a freelance project, moved house, went to my cousin’s wedding and doom scrolled a beguiling trench of homogenous gen z insights substacks. my partner and i then had a conversation about how much this is annoying me because there are only so many hypefied trend report-style hot takes one can consume on what’s cool. the allure of peeking behind the gatekept wall is no longer appealing because it is literally everywhere. ubiquity = mainstream. pop culture is a reaction to what’s happening right now in the world and atm it feels like pop culture is insights reports. the way my partner gets around it is simple: he does not care.

“Cultural production in the third millennium is totally flat. The information we make and share travels through media that lack hierarchy or centrality. There is no principal authority, no recognized arbitrator, and no centralized archive…. Nowness and flatness are not just conditions affecting the present. They have colonized other times too. The ability to view vast volumes of data and records from the past, as well as grasp a variety of positions on the future, means that there is no longer any meaningful separation between other eras and our own. Indeed, history is today understood as a kind of alternative present, still happening somewhere else.” – Jack Self, THE BIG FLAT NOW

before i went on my trip, i was staying at my mum’s house in cricklewood whilst plagued with stress-induced ibs (absolutely not the one) eventually solved by digesting copious amounts of pineapple flavoured thai probiotics with delightful, very happy, packaging design. i was working on a self-initiated project that i felt compelled to make, staying up til the early hours of the morning working on the html and fully reverted back to teenage introversion slumped in bed with only a dusty lamp for light. in short, it’s a customised tumblr site and its description goes like this:

today it seems like everyone is a cultural theorist/critic (probably myself included sigh) hence the inundation of trend reports flying into my inbox at any given hour. and even though i worked on this project intensely a mere 2 months ago, my current headspace is certainly not surveying existing anything… let alone the philosophy of technology. all i want to do is cuddle my boyfriend and puppy and watch reruns of peep show.

coming back to london, i feel myself being pulled back away from the sticky memories of visiting family in ipoh or watching the world go by from a balcony in saigon’s district 1. i’m spun straight back in the eye of the hustle where individualism reigns and survival is to submit to the rules of ultra-capitalism. the result certainly kicks in my toxic productivity. pre-holiday i was contemplating the paradox of the ai’s design vs philosophy after all. no wonder all the creative agencies are doing whatever they can to keep head above water by publishing ridiculous thought leadership pieces on linkedin / yet another trend report X “whatever that agency’s edgy positioning” / think pieces using arbitrary af data to back up lofty insular creative industry tête-à-tête.

Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần, ‘III.X_UNREALIZED UTOPIA’

^^^ I went to this exhibition in Saigon and this breakdown of collective consciousness helped articulate what i felt existing in se asia as opposed to the west. basically… personalism not individualism.

i don’t know if it’s possible to slow down in london so i don’t blame any of us in this whirring tornado of information. geddit any way you can right. i only really find it possible to slow down when i leave london and have a physical geographical divide between going 100mph and whatever else my dopamine-hungry brain can slow down to. it took getting bent like a pretzel 3 massages a week to even start to detangle my specific corporate hoe stress. i’m amazed by the work i can produce, even when not being able to switch off is the price to pay.

so i leave you with contradictions that i picked up 2 months ago. the dichotomies actually work for a multitude of things you may be going through right now. and i leave you with this:

“Not all speed is movement. . . . If your house ain’t in order, you ain’t in order. It is so much easier to be out there than right here. The revolution ain’t out there. Yet. But it is here. Should be. And arguing that instant-coffee-ten-minutes-to-midnight alibi to justify hasty-headed dealing with your mate is shit. Ain’t no such animal as an instant guerrilla.” – Toni Cade Bambara