Making Connections #8: When Live Culture Moves Online
The development of remote collaboration tools never led to a diaspora from expensive, overpopulated cities because when you leave the city you leave culture. The live music, the live sport, dining on any global cuisine every day of the week.
But when live culture moves online, you no longer need to live near culture to experience it.
Where my favourite DJs would be playing sets in NYC and Ibiza, they’re now livestreaming:
The Met is doing the same.
NBA stars are raising money for relief organisations by livestreaming NBA 2K20 tournaments.
The best boutique gyms — from Psycle to Barry’s — are opening up their workouts to everyone on Instagram Live.
Shanghai Fashion Week live-streamed to 800 million active users in partnership with Tmall, allowing designers and brands to present their upcoming collections to consumers who could buy directly.
Online recordings of culture have existed for a long time, but the community feeling of livestreaming is different.
You feel like you’re sharing something unique with the other viewers, a moment in time where you, the host, and the rest of the audience can feel the full spectrum of emotions together (usually through emojis 😂).
In many ways this represents adults catching on to what teens have been doing for years through Twitch and cross-platform multiplayer games like Fortnite.
This shift is particularly relevant for individual creators, who can use livestreaming as a way to engage their fanbase and earn more from their craft.
Pre-isolation, Boiler Room brought DJs new audiences without needing clubs as middlemen. Meanwhile, Instagram opened up art and photography to consumers. I can fall in love with a piece of art, slide into the artist’s DMs and commission a piece directly, no gallery required.
Livestreaming takes this experience from passive to active, and in the process opens up new revenue potential as creators monetise shout-outs, receive tips, and hold auctions.
One of the clearest examples of this is in the Adult industry:
OnlyFans already enables adult entertainers to gain independence, but now we’re seeing virtual strip clubs where dancers can earn in 5 minutes online what would take 8 hours in a club.
Isolation is helping adults adopt what kids already know: the online world is shifting from passive to active, from asynchronous to synchronous, and there’s a huge opportunity for creators to use this shift to earn more from their craft.
Some beautiful writing:
Arundhati Roy on the situation in India
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
Rachel Heng shares her experience of the cultural foundations of racial inequality - from privilege in Singapore to inferiority in America:
"Yet when I take on the label of person of color in America, an uneasy tremor still runs through me, the feeling of being a fraud. Did I not grow up as a member of the racial majority in a country that in many ways offers greater social mobility than the US itself? For the first eighteen years of my life, did I not have the privilege of being the racial majority, of not having my abilities and personhood called into question on the basis of my race?"
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo
I enjoyed this book more than any other I've read in years. It's the story of a 12 British women and investigates ideas of race, gender, and class across the generations. By connecting the stories together, the author shows us how each person justifies their beliefs and actions, and how they appear to the outside world. Each woman has dreams and ambitions, and her life is shaped through a combination of personal action and societal boundaries.
Lifestyle:
100 Thieves is building the lifestyle brand for gamers
Luxury, Extravagance and Maximalism in Drake’s Toronto home
Outlandish Palm Beach luxury: for when you’re bored of people 2 weeks after isolation ends: Lilypad floating cabin
Totally Random
Banksy’s working from home and his wife hates it
“In the last 45 days, CruiseCompete.com, an online cruise marketplace, has seen a 40% increase in bookings for 2021 compared with 2019, said Heidi M. Allison, president of the company. Only 11% of the bookings are from people whose 2020 trips were canceled, she said."
One Australian guy gets back to basics - 24 hours of running and doing things:
As always, I’d love to hear from you, please reply with your thoughts. If you enjoyed the newsletter, please share it: