Last Call for summer readings. I’ll be taking applications up until August 19, then taking a break and launching my fall offering in September.
This is your chance to get deep insight on any growth prospects or conflicting choices that you’re facing this summer.
Email zeitvillemedia@protonmail.com for a little PDF.
These are one-hour audio recordings, delivered to you by email. This is not a drive-thru service, so please be patient with the process.
My ebooks can be purchased here, if you like what I discuss in these newsletters.
Welcome to the third and final act of our summer adventure.
It’s been a wild intellectual journey so far, and August brings our main themes to a fever pitch.
Here are the themes we’ve dealt with: an overwhelming amount of contradictory or paradoxical perspectives; a cultish attitude that all the dots connect to a singular Answer; or conversely, a conspiratorial attitude that nothing adds up and therefore we’ve been tossed to the dogs, unable to create meaning for ourselves.
A strong sense of showbusiness runs through both takeaways—the overly optimistic cultish attitude and the overly pessimistic nihilistic attitude.
One camp can’t help but think that every new data point reaffirms their perspective. We examined this in the previous newsletter, where Raw Milk Cultists turned an assassination attempt into an example of why THEY are Right and True and Good. They took a historical event and made it about. . .milk.
The other camp believes that America is all staged now, but feels drained of any ability to shape events into memes: “What do I matter, when it’s a rigged game?”
The issue with both responses on this pendulum swing is that they ignore the central teaching of our summer adventure: we have a chance to see a picture of our personality mirrored in the ways we gather knowledge.
We can learn a lot about ourselves through the WAYS in which we learn.
HOW someone tries to go from lost to found in a sea of data tells you a lot about their core archetype.
This is the adventure in essence: Are you a magician who weaves data together? Are you an ideologue and a dissident who likes to toss out superfluous information? And so on.
This summer, we are learning how to become capable of expanding our horizons without falling prey to the tempting illusions of fantastical cultism or the deceptive peace of nihilism.
The middle part of this journey took us down nostalgic rabbit holes. No doubt many of you had a conversation or a flight of fancy sometime in late June or July, which took you down memory lane. Maybe you had a craving for a childhood food that you associate with summer. It felt fun, adventurous.
The whole purpose of that second act was to assure you that you will be okay this fall, as the final embers of an old empire turn to dust.
It’s hard when old things go away, as they inevitably will this fall, but they won’t be the old things you want to keep around anyways—things like the faded idols of a once great media empire.
Instead, you’ll have a connection to the old things that truly matter, in your memory.
August is a nice follow up to this rather moody middle passage, and I’m highly confident that this will be a wonderful month for creatives, dreamers, artists and entrepreneurs. Business activity could pop off, new ideas could be workshopped, networking could thrive and artistic or romantic displays of passion could inspire new awakenings.
True, this brings an element of the unorthodox, and that may inspire polarizing moments. “Workshopped” is a key word here. Nothing will be exactly ready for primetime. Expect a bit of messiness and sloppiness. Going back to the drawing board may be necessary. Iterate but don’t expect perfection.
Perhaps you fall in love with someone who is from a different tribe and you have to navigate some social fallout. Perhaps your business idea puts a spotlight on you in a way that makes you look like a black sheep in front of peers. “Just conform! It’ll be easier!”
Yes, there’s creative friction—but consider the alternative of sitting on the sidelines and conforming.
As we discussed in the previous newsletter, those who DON’T wish to use this summer adventure to know themselves—but instead prefer to project their identity onto external narratives and cross their fingers for a viral “win”—these people may find themselves having an apoplectic fit in August.
I use the word “apoplectic” very intentionally. When someone finally reaches their breaking point in this summer storm of paradoxical data, not even they can anticipate what’s next.
There’s an unpredictability to this third act—when people snap, they SNAP.
As a result, we need to be aware of the 3D material manifestations of this disruption in consciousness. “Blowing a fuse” could be quite literal. Rolling blackouts or brownouts; hot mic situations; “accidental” cuts to live news feeds; flash crashes in markets; trading or social media platforms facing outages, etc. etc.
Messy, indeed. Naturally, we’ll also see a lot of stimulus -> reaction type situations, where heavily edited portrayals of a multi-faceted situation are made in order to trigger a specific emotional response.
Likewise, a big feature of August is people REJECTING certain conditioned responses and making an overt display of their disgust.
This theme of radical rejection is how our entire summer story is getting tied together:
If we began in June with a growing awareness that events weren’t adding up, then transitioned into July where these trends coalesced around neverending “old” issues—the Trump dynasty, the Biden dynasty—then August is like a blowout, in which these old issues demand to be framed in new ways.
And it’s all largely up to us!
The media empire will furiously try to shape mass amounts of data into stories that jive with the old world. Part of this is an unconscious desire on the part of the collective to not think for itself.
It’s just a larger cult dynamic that is going away, and spiraling down into hyper-local niches now.
So, at the same time, a weakening stranglehold is giving way to an interesting renaissance in the West, where each person becomes their own news station, giving those who participate in that patchwork world access to a range of perspectives previously prohibited.
Yes, some of those perspectives are trash, but not all—and you have to admire the sheer scale, giving the individual unprecedented power to stitch together meaning on their own.
It’s a new revolution in the 2020s, on par with Gutenberg and the printing press.
But the old won’t go down without a fight. . .
Let’s dive in.
Heat Wave
We love Trump, we hate Trump. We love Biden, we hate Biden. You’ve already seen this happen where sympathy welled up for Trump after the assassination attempt, then sympathy got drummed up for Biden when he decided to drop out of the race.
It’s all very coordinated, where each team gets a point or a cookie so it’s all “fair and even” until the media can hit a pace where it feels like it’s directing people towards a predetermined narrative.
But things are getting away from the media. The world is too jagged and nonlinear and unpredictable now—not to mention that a lot of people are fired up, throwing their own distrust and distaste for the media into the mix.
As a result, collectively, we’re in a place where it seems like anything can happen.
We’re not often used to this. Not saying that media brainwashing is great, but it has had an effect of homogenizing reality and keeping it stable and synchronized, so that we all feel like we’re sitting under a Big Tent together.
In a way, media has become our priest—our intermediary between our localized lives and our greater sense of truth or meaning.
With that relationship being disrupted, many have taken it upon themselves to become neo-priests, seeing holy meaning in pools of dairy, like when Raw Milk Cultists discovered that Corey Compertore, the man killed at the Trump rally, was a raw milk guzzler himself (just as one example).
Indeed, with the breakdown of the media stranglehold, the whole act of divination is being outsourced to your average fringe theorist with an internet connection.
You may not know much about their history, like public figures of old—but they have a “vibe” and that’s enough for someone to follow them down a rabbit hole versus tuning into CNN.
It’s a frustrating and confusing process, but ultimately a good one, I think. As people take to social media to share their perspectives, there will certainly be some intellectual deception or self-deception happening. But it represents a leap away from an old ethos, when to make sense of a turbulent time, many turned their eyes to a broadcasting conglomerate.
For this newsletter, I want to take a look at “Medium Cool” which is a film about the media’s role in the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The film’s title is of course a reference to Marshall McLuhan, a media theorist who concluded that books are “cool” mediums because they need to be heated up by the consumer, whereas radio is a “hot” medium that immediately stimulates (think of the role that radio played in spreading violence during modern inter-tribal African wars).
Thus, “medium cool” news is heated up just enough for you to be spoonfed a worldview, but still cool enough for you to believe that you reached the conclusion yourself.
It’s a smart title referring to how media paces us towards predetermined takeaways.
It follows a journalist in Chicago, ultimately climaxing at the August 1968 Democratic National Convention. Yes, we’re having the 2024 DNC in Chicago starting August 19, when “coincidentally” the Full Moon is set to drop (I’ll have a newsletter out then, of course).
Bizarrely, at the 68 convention we also saw a Democrat Vice President take the nomination from the incumbent Democrat President.
So let’s dive in.
Stealing the Show
John Cassellis is our protagonist in “Medium Cool”—or perhaps it’s better to say our antihero. We’re introduced to John by way of violence. He hunts down bloody and salacious stories, knowing the citizens of Chicago can’t look away, much like the nation can’t look away from the general turmoil of 1968 when the Vietnam war was raging.
But he’s not a person you exactly hate, even though you question his profession. He’s charming, works hard and has a big loft apartment that would make modern day hipsters swoon. He’s unmarried, preferring to date Ruth, a nurse who we assume he met through a news story.
On assignment, John discovers a group of preteen boys messing with his car. When he goes to chase them, one of the boys leaves behind a caged pet dove. When he and Ruth go back to his place after a date—she suggests a movie, but he takes her to a violent roller derby event—Ruth asks him how people can just idly film violence while not trying to stop it.
It’s a damning question that resonates strongly with our culture in which senseless acts are plastered all over social media.
John snaps at her. “How the hell should I know? I’m just a cameraman.”
To release the tension, he starts to tickle Ruth. She laughs and tries to escape, running naked through his apartment. In the commotion, the dove is released from its cage. John takes Ruth to bed again, and the fluttering dove finds a place of refuge, watching the two lovers.
Interviews reveal that this scene was largely improvised, and spontaneity runs through the movie. Fact and fiction blur.
It teaches us that a viewer can escape the media cage, only to fall into a media operation of one’s own. A prophecy of the echo chamber age.
The dynamic between Ruth and John feels playful and liberated—this is the era of “Free Love” after all—but the observing dove suggests that, for John, everything is a production, not unlike our widespread selfie culture of today.
It’s up to us, the audience, to decide how much of this is a bad thing.
Ruth seems happy, and John doesn’t treat her poorly. Likewise, John seems happy with the arrangement. But there’s a sense of unease, like you want the characters to go a bit further—to test the boundaries of their world a little more.
Sometimes detachment is not enough. Meaning wants to be made, not staged.
John—ever the curious investigator—tracks down Harold, the owner of the dove.
Harold, the preteen boy, is the son of Eileen, a single mother who has moved from West Virginia to Chicago. Eileen is chipper and has a “can do” attitude. She may not have supermodel looks like Ruth, but she’s a caring person whose face lights up with sincerity. Of course, John falls in love with her because she seems “real”—perhaps unlike the narratives he cooks up.
Harold observes their budding romance, and like any confused kid, decides to run away for the day. Eileen, distressed, stumbles out into Chicago to look for him. She’s all done up in a nice yellow dress—the color of caution.
The 1968 riots in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention have gone down in history as violent and impactful. The filmmakers knew that Vietnam War protestors were showing up, but they perhaps did not anticipate the scale—nor the magnitude of the police response.
As Eileen wanders through a park, we see actual mobs of people fighting with police. A canister of tear gas flies towards Eileen, and we hear one of the film crew members yell “Watch out, it’s real!”
The film crescendos at one of the most memorable lines of the 1960s: “The whole world is watching!” This is what protestors yelled as big media were covering the event.
But what about today? It’s extremely doubtful that we’ll have some kind of Big Tent event like this.
And even if CNN/CBS/NBC/ABC/FOX try to cook up a blockbuster spectacle, it’ll be sliced and diced a million different ways by the time it hits social media.
Today, the whole world is NOT watching the same event.
Instead, there are as many events as there are people. Everybody is watching something different—seen through the lens of their own reality tunnel.
As a result, there probably won’t be a collective moment surrounding this year’s DNC. If something outrageous does occur, it’s likely to be followed shortly by yet another outrageous event that steals the show. It won’t be similar to how the 1968 DNC summed up the 60s.
Very likely what we’ll see is some drama leading up to the event, then some kind of flashpoint—perhaps even just an intellectual disagreement—that takes centerstage.
But just as likely to follow is a dissection that will have people making statements that range from “this is the end of the Democrats” to “Trump has his work cut out for him this November.”
But which takeaway is true?
Radical Refusal
The deeper truth is that REFUSAL is in the air.
That’s a good thing, because it helps with the individuation arc behind our summer story.
For example, you don’t have to take any of those lines at face value. It’s not about Trump. It’s not about Kamala.
At the time of writing this newsletter, I’m in transit. Moments flash by the train car window.
These moments tend to run together, blending from cityscape to suburb to some forgotten parking lot.
But occasionally a rare moment sticks out—something wholly unexpected.
In a bog there appears a cluster of pink and white flowers—fighting for beauty in a momentary slice of space and time.
This is much like the opportunity we have in August. It may press itself upon us quickly, and involve some element of risk that pushes us to embrace our individuality.
Longtime readers will know this opportunity is an echo actually of previous Augusts—the “Bold and Gold” August of 2021, the radical connections of August 2022 and last year’s rather harsh “August of Love.” You can search my newsletters and Twitter feed freely for more on those.
So at any rate, we’ve been having rather impactful Augusts for some time now in the 2020s, pushing us to express ourselves fully and without reserve. Relationships have been affected in the process.
2024 is no different in that regard.
I wouldn’t be surprised if many of you have unusual sudden attractions to a certain person, product, place or business proposal.
Like being shot out of a cannon, you may feel the need to act or speak—but beware censoring yourself out of doubt, out of a need for perfection. “The messiness of it all, it’s too much to risk,” you might think.
In this moment of self-reflection, consider the moments of selfie reflection that others may choose instead.
A curated projection of selfhood that is risk-free, purely packaged and vacuum sealed. Plastic.
It may even make you jealous, oddly enough. “If only I could self-delude as much as them. Then I could truly believe I’ve found the Answer, and could get back to reclining in my chair, watching the world unravel precisely as expected. I could see the image of Mother Teresa in a glass of raw milk, I could see the Buddha in a crumpled piece of polyester-free clothing.”
But you have your own view to whatever next “boom” moment is about to drop in August.
Think of all the potential you’d be robbing others of, if you were to keep quiet.
Your perspective could be the puzzle piece that tips someone else over from uncertainty into epiphany.
And wouldn’t you want the same from others in return?
Call it the new golden rule of the new knowledge age: seek from yourself what you would seek from others.
In this act of charity, the moment becomes yours. So speak. Stand your ground.
Individual but not alone, you can look out into the landscape, neither confused nor cultishly deluded—simply ready to bask in the feeling of new horizons unlocked.
Last Call for summer readings. I’ll be taking applications up until August 19, then taking a break and launching my fall offering in September.
This is your chance to get deep insight on any growth prospects or conflicting choices that you’re facing this summer.
Email zeitvillemedia@protonmail.com for a little PDF.
These are one-hour audio recordings, delivered to you by email. This is not a drive-thru service, so please be patient with the process.
My ebooks can be purchased here, if you like what I discuss in these newsletters.