Drew Austin

There’s a set of writers and newsletters that I’ve drawn quite a bit of inspiration from over the years and Drew Austin’s (DA) Kneeling Bus is one of them. It sits at the intersection of technology and culture and consistently offers up angles and ideas that never would have crossed my mind but seem obvious in retrospect. Beyond the newsletter, Drew is a writer and urban planner who lives in Brooklyn. He posts his stray thoughts on Twitter and contributes longer essays at sites like Real Life. - Noah (NRB)Drew here. I don’t really play video games anymore but I’ve become increasingly fascinated by speedrunning in recent years. A speedrun, if you’re not familiar, is the practice of beating a video game in the shortest possible amount of time (the current record for completing the original Super Mario Brothers game, for example, is just under 5 minutes, and players still compete to shave fractions of seconds off of that time. Wikipedia elaborates: “Speedrunners often have to reason about the game differently from the way that ordinary players might. Speedruns follow gameplay routes that are planned out carefully and often involve disarranging the intended sequence of events or skipping entire parts of it. Other speedruns exploit programming mistakes, or glitches, that a skillful player can exploit to their advantage.” One popular type of glitch that players utilize involves “clipping” through walls, a time-saving action that normal gameplay doesn’t allow. The practice of speedrunning is remarkably expansive; as Harry Gowland wrote in a recent issue of Dirt, “you can speedrun anything,” even non-games like the calculator app on the Nintendo Switch console (counting to 1,000 by frantically clicking +1). “If you add a layer of interactivity to almost any program, someone will try and speedrun it.” You can probably speedrun Microsoft Excel. OK, I just googled it—you can.Why is this interesting?There are many ways of looking at speedrunning: a game within a game that mocks the latter’s actual objectives; a deep exploration of a digital environment’s contours; or a supreme waste of time, intentionally pointless outside of its own context and even dumber than the overarching game itself, a nihilistic statement that forces us to question the ultimate purpose of anything. It’s games all the way down. Like so many other recent cultural events—WallStreetBets and meme stocks are a notable example—speedrunning demonstrates that anything can be turned into a game, whether it’s meant to be or not. Even games themselves can be turned into other games. In a world where our experience is increasingly mediated by software, seemingly every facet of life is abstracted as bits and thus feels more gamelike; speedrunning provides an eloquent expression of that. The logic of games increasingly pervades culture, a phenomenon Sean Monahan calls gamer bait, and anything arrogant enough to pretend it’s not a game, such as the stock market, simply entices the masses to expose the fallacy all the more aggressively. Acknowledging the game does little to preempt this either, as speedrunners demonstrate, overwriting the stated objectives, imposing their own terms, and glitching across virtual space. We’ll be speedrunning Robinhood soon.Despite its apparent superficiality, speedrunning presents a unified worldview, a logic that can be applied to any environment, a principle that transcends any specific game: Everything is topological. Game environments provide an ideal space in which to learn and grapple with its implications. Arbitrarily traveling from point A to point B as quickly as possible, whether skiing or speedrunning, requires a maximum understanding of the landscape being traversed. In a 2020 Baffler essay, Evan Malmgren wrote, “To play a video game is to embody a sequence of possibilities in an engineered, enclosed micro-reality…(Speedrunners) are less like marathon runners than explorers charting the hard limits of a man-made environment, whether they’re searching for sequence breaks to skip sections of games, planning optimized movement paths, mining for glitches to clip through walls, or practicing the mechanics of lightning-fast menu navigation. Speedrunners don’t simply go fast. They are the cosmologists of sandbox universes.” Perhaps, as our lived experience becomes more digital and more gamified, these exploratory efforts will prove to be relevant beyond the boundaries of the environments being speedrun—not just games within games but basic research about the texture of reality itself. (DA)Chart of the Day:Via The Economist. (CJN)Quick Links:Watch McLaren F1—Inspired Gordon Murray T.50 on the Track (NRB)Video of John Boyd (inventor of the OODA loop) delivering his “Patterns of Conflict” talk (NRB)These Librarians Really Hate Little Free Libraries (NRB)[Sponsored Link] If you’re at a SaaS company, check out Variance. It’s a tool to help grow customers (some people are calling it a PLG CRM). If you have questions or want to try it, get in touch. (NRB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Drew (DA)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Speedrunning Edition

There’s a set of writers and newsletters that I’ve drawn quite a bit of inspiration from over the years and Drew Austin’s (DA) Kneeling Bus is one of them. It sits at the intersection of technology and culture and consistently offers up angles and ideas that never would have crossed my mind but seem obvious in retrospect. He’s a fun Twitter follow (more on that) and a contributor at Wired. - Noah (NRB)Drew here. I don’t like the word "shitposting,” for reasons I’ll explain below. Regardless of how I feel, though, everyone seems to be shitposting these days (including me). Usage of the term has grown steadily since it emerged around 2015; now, VCs and other people with serious professional reputations proudly align themselves with a form of content that is decidedly un-serious. The definition of shitposting is elusive, and seems to be continuously evolving. It’s tempting to simply say that “we know it when we see it,” but surely we can do better. The Urban Dictionary says shitposting is “ironically posting something which to the average person looks just like a cringy or weird or stereotypical post conforming to a norm, but is intended to mock, insult, or amuse.” A lower-ranked entry defines the shitpost as “a post that contributes nothing of value toward a discussion.” According to Wikipedia, it’s an aggressively bad or trollish post meant to derail a discourse. Jonathan Libov defines a shitpost as “a joke that, taken at face value, inverts your actual opinion.” We’re getting closer.Why is this interesting?I’ll venture a more precise definition: Shitposting is posting that is completely detached from one’s real thoughts and beliefs, in the interest of being amusing. It may invert those real beliefs, or it may happen to align with them, but the point is that it doesn’t matter at all—shitposting is completely decoupled from them. In its proper form, shitposting reveals nothing about the shitposter. It’s trolling without the bad intentions.Here’s why I don’t like the word: because to me, shitposting is just “posting.” I’ve been on Twitter long enough to remember when it was the platform you used to announce what you ate for lunch. The feed wasn’t algorithmic back then, and hardly anything ever went viral. Early on, Weird Twitter emerged, a cohort of proto-shitposters who seemed like the first users to actually understand how the site was meant to be used. @Horse_ebooks may have been the greatest shitposter ever if not for one critical problem: it wasn’t a human (until, somehow, it became one).This is all ancient Twitter history. There was no such thing as shitposting back then. But in the decade that followed, Twitter became more important and users became increasingly self-aware—almost certainly too self-aware. Twitter wasn’t just a place for jokes and mundane observations anymore, but also for serious activities like networking, following the news, and broadcasting one’s own earnest takes. Hence the notion of “shitposting”: what you do on Twitter when you’re not being productive by advancing your career or becoming informed. Today, shitposting is an aspirational ideal for people who recognize what’s been lost: a momentary respite from Twitter’s LinkedIn-ification. But the word itself also affirms that excessive seriousness by implying deviance from the site’s supposedly correct usage. Today, people in tech claim that shitposting is good for your career—and this is why they shitpost!—which means that shitposting, when acknowledged as such, is not cool.Nevertheless, you need to understand shitposting, even if you don’t like it. Twitter’s most important user, Elon Musk, is the quintessential shitposter (although he has never tweeted the word himself, which paradoxically makes him a better shitposter). It will increasingly define our collective experience of the internet. Everything is becoming more like shitposting.Shitposting is a digital way of being—perhaps a way of gaining followers, or a career strategy, or just a form of amusement. But its greatest benefit is psychological. The Zen-like detachment that makes shitposting possible is an ideal posture for protecting oneself from the worst aspects of Twitter and the internet more broadly: cringe earnestness, bad faith arguments, unexpected anger. The best shitposters attain the Epicurean ideal of ataraxia, or imperturbability, which cannot be achieved by avoidance (logging off) but only by finding a better way to approach what is unavoidable, as the internet increasingly is. In other words, the best shitposters don’t care.More importantly, the best shitposters don’t shitpost. They just post. (DA)—WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.Creating value in the net-zero transition. As more institutions step up in their commitments to achieve net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, new business opportunities are emerging. Explore how decarbonization is transforming portfolios, operations, supply chains, and the economy at large. Now’s the time for bold moves; a new article can help companies to spot green growth opportunities and take action.–-Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Drew (DA)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).