00:00:00 · Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:00:00] S0: And so in this counterintuitive way, this radical way, I think there should be phones in school because we should learn from an early age how to regulate and use them conscientiously, healthily, and holistically. Because if we prevent kids from using them from K through 12, then I think the results are very evident in adulthood. They have not developed the strategies, the psychological strategies, to not use this highly addictive tool that is a phone. Hi, and welcome to this... Today's episode of Media Studies, a show about media, culture, and Today we begin with a bit of sad news. Two pieces of sad news. The first, of course, which you perhaps have seen in news is the passing of Juan Atkins, the pioneer, the godfather of techno. Juan was born in Detroit of course, the birthplace of techno music. But one of things that is so amazing about Atkins is how much of a great thinker he was about the future. I think this week was very productive culturally because many people were asking the question who invented techno. It can feel sometimes like people in Berlin did but in fact of course it was invented in Detroit. And Atkins was not just a lover of music. He loved space, time travel, aliens, UFOs. He was watching Star Trek, Star Wars and Red Asimov. He actually met Davis, the guy he made Cybotron with and they were discussing Alvin Toffler's Future Shock together. And to me a big part of what is so special about techno music is that it takes Toffler's idea of techno rebels, those people who wield technology for their own creative empowerment as an alternative between just doomerism or blind optimism. It is the more sensible, empowering option that when we use technology and bend it to our will to make our world better. Famously, and I quite like this anecdote, they wanted to call the music High-tech Soul and they named it Techno Music after one of the tracks on the record and that became of course the birth of this global movement. I think part of Atkins' clairvoyance, his ability to make this radically novel music was because there was something festering, growing in the soil of post industrial Detroit. You could still hear the echoes of the now closed automotive factories and those reverberations of the machines making of course the cars and whatnot of the bygone industry. It is in those echoes that techno was born.
00:03:07 · Ruby Justice Thelot
And so we mourn his passing today of course. I highly recommend you read Jeff Mills' obituary, or his eulogy rather that he wrote about Atkins. It is beautiful and so heartfelt. Jeff Mills, of course, another great legend in the techno scene. It's very interesting because this is one of these amazing synthesis between technology and art, right? This music was born of the rather sometimes radical or like transgressive uses of specific instruments and was made I think to sound like the future or like the future that Atkins envisioned and that Jeff Mills envisioned and that all the great people in Detroit envisioned. The second bit of so much sad news is we got a rather sad Instagram post. Know you see black text on a white background on Instagram. It's never good. Coperni, the fashion brand that had been around since the early 2020s of course has announced that it would cease operations. Coperni occupied a very interesting place in the cultural landscape because a lot of their runways featured very interesting innovative use of technologies, right? I have gotten here a list of some of the most interesting moments of the Coperni runways. You will remember of course the spray on dress September 2022, that was for spring twenty twenty three and Bella Hadid walked on and she was sprayed by this almost robotic arms and whatnot. They had the Boston Dynamics robot in March 2023 and the robots became a character and in many ways the runway was about this human machine relationship. The Swipe Bag that was turned into a CD player in September 2023 kind of took the internet by storm. As we now talk more and more about this idea of music hardware as fashion, you will hear an interview coming up soon where we talk about this quite actively with the guest. The leitmotif of our dear friend Nick Sousi, Fashion hardware is, music hardware is fashion. In 2023, three years ago, I think Coperni was at the forefront of that and presented that on the runway. Then there was the Air Swipe bag, this the same kind of silhouette of their bag, but now made fully of air. Right? They worked with scientists from NASA, to compose a silica air gel, so it was, like, 99% air. There was the Ariel Swipe Bag, their collaboration with Menna and the Ray Ban glasses that they brought onto the runway. Lastly, this I thought was really, really cool.
00:06:14 · Ruby Justice Thelot
In October 2025, worked with HaiQ, this company, to introduce probiotics and prebiotics in the clothing themselves. Almost as if when you are wearing the clothes, as you are wearing them, they release skincare. It is like active care for the body. So they tried a lot of things. They tried to introduce to present essentially how technology could be integrated with culture over the last couple of years. It sadly of course didn't fully work, but I thought that it was an overall strong effort and think we will remember a lot of these moments as strong cultural moments. I took a look a little bit at the overall interest for Coperni. We will be dropping a few slides on this on Instagram today. I think part of the issue that we saw is that they were really able to cease capture the zeitgeist on the occasions when they had a big moment on the runway. And so you see big spikes in interest in the Google Trends around some of these moments. Alas, carrying that into a long duration, long standing business is another thing. You can have these moments. You can have the interests be punctual but the ability to convert those eyeballs, convert that interest into an enduring business is something else. And so I think we will mourn the creativity and innovation that Coperni brought to Paris and I am excited to see what the creative directors do next. Alright. Now, onto our signals. The first signal is from this very fun piece from Radhika Jones in the New York Times. Radhika, you might remember her, she was the former editor in chief at Vanity Fair. She penned a guest essay in the New York Times entitled Why I Still Own a DVD Player and You Should Too. It's been really interesting to see this sort of rise of analog technology happen all over culture. You see now with the wired headphones coming back, right? You see it with the return of the iPod as a popular device. You see it with the return of the analog camera in an age where our phones have a lot of megapixels. And so one of the things that I think we have been picking up on for almost ten years now is this slow comeback of analog technology. Oftentimes this return of analog technology is meant as a way for people to regain control of a part of their life that they care about a lot. Jones in the essay talks about her family buying a DVD player, starting to buy DVDs and how of course there is a bit of nostalgia now, right.
00:09:25 · Ruby Justice Thelot
She remembers the time when she used to have a DVD player. Fundamentally there isand it's kind of funny because in the article she talks about the back and forth between her and her husband and trying to find out what the password is for this streaming service, her having to change the other password on the other one and her husband never knowing exactly when or how to connect to their different services. And I think one of the very interesting things that's been happening across the digital age is what she calls shadow work. Shadow work is the unforeseen additional labor required to maintain our technology. And so if you have five streaming services, you now need to remember five passwords. You now need to do 2FA or do PASKey. There are all these additional things you have to do to maintain your digital hygiene in check. And I think the return of the signals we are seeing towards the analog are desires for simplicity. And I think we are talking a lot about that, a lot of articles, of TikToks about the return to analog. Later on in the deep dive we take a look at whether or not it is substantiated across different industries. Importantly, I think some of people feel a lot in the space of media is really that a lot of these libraries they have temporary holds on different IP or franchises. If you like a movie it might be on Netflix for one or two years and then it might disappear. So in part the return to CDs and DVDs is also a desire to own one's media and not be at the mercy of whatever deals or licenses that different platforms or streaming services might have. Importantlyand Jones mentioned thisshe is not a Luddite. By and large she enjoys the benefits that technology offers her. There is a specific arena of her life, namely movies, which she wants to regain control over and she has chosen to go analog to have full autonomy in that. That is her comfort, right? So she wants to regain autonomy in that specific zone of her life. So we will talk a little bit more about this in a few minutes. Another signal which I think is people will relate to this quite a bit. I was out with my friend and he said I am sorry I can't look. We were looking for maybe something, some kind of pop up whatever was on Instagram. Said can you look for the address on Instagram? He said I can't. Am bricked right now. And I was like wait, Hold up. What do you mean?
00:12:35 · Ruby Justice Thelot
And he has this device called a brick, which is on his fridge, which prevents him from using his social media platforms, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok. And so in order to reopen them, he needs to go and tap his phone on the brick in order to unbrick his phone. Similarly, you go to certain clubs now and they put stuff in yonder pouches. They close them up. Concerts, there was a Phoebe Bridgers concert which forbade people from having phones. More and more people are buying things, downloading apps, even sometimes little time safes in order to prevent themselves from using technology. This is a concept that I have been calling paratechnology and it's a signal that we have been tracking. Paratechnology is technology that prevents you from using other technology. It's a little circular but that is really I think a big thing we are seeing come back more and more. People have tried many times to put a little timer or do whatever it is, try their own ways of controlling themselves but faced with their inability to be disciplined around their phones or their apps they are offshoring, they are outsourcing a lot of this discipline to other devices like the brick or like different apps like Opal or not which we will talk about in our second deep dive today. The last signal for today is a little counterintuitive. As creates a sort of creativity explosion, right, as people are making all these movies, memes, generated images, generated video both from genius to slop in the spectrum, we are seeing something interesting happening in the let's call it luxury space. Apple, Prada, Hermes have decidedly chosen in their most recent campaigns to work with, let's call them artisans or artists or craft forward creators who either paint the set, make all the different special effects by hand like practical style. Hermes works with a lot of amazing illustrators or sculptors to make their vitrines, right, a lot of their merchandising. And so as AI becomes more prominent, one of the things that gains in value quite a bit is the ability for some of these brands to say, Okay, we can do this of course, yeah. We have seen some cool campaigns online But we have worked with an artist that spent three weeks making a single sculpture for one of our stores in Tokyo or New York.
00:15:36 · Ruby Justice Thelot
So I think we will start to see what I can only call a K shaped culture where at the high end we will have a lot of craft forward campaigns, editorials, the goods will be manufactured by hand. And on the other side of the K we will see a deflationary pressure. Things are going to be cheaper but there will be more mass produced. So what happened with the economy I think will also repeat in culture. And we are already seeing the first inklings of that with these signals in the resurgence of craft in the luxury space. You will recall of course at their big launch Apple had a wonderful advertising video and one of the first things they did afterwards was show us the behind the scenes and how every single thing was made by hand. And Apple by and large is an AI company, right? They have Siri. They are providing us with Apple intelligence and whatnot, but they still choose to provide that value to the customer yet also show that they care fundamentally, they are putting the money where their mouth is and showing that they care about Kraft by and large. Alright, one of my field notes today which is quite fun is the recent piece in Morning by Ruby Claude Bailey which is about LinkedIn, you know, the amazing platform where your friends from high school and college post their job updates. I think LinkedIn is having a little bit of a moment right now. People are really liking it's quite good for lead generation. I have seen a lot of people lean into LinkedIn and that is what Ruby Bailey in that piece does. So she decided to make this like extended durational performance on LinkedIn. So she created this character who admittedly looks like her but is made with AI and the character works atwell her, she works at the same Twist at this company, but is presented in these boardroom environments, in these meetings, in these corporate situations, but all of the images are AI generated. And it starts to drum up quite a bit of interest on the platform, which I think is fascinating. And so Ruby keeps on posting, people are engaging, she talks about the different awards she has won, the awards are fake, but the work that the company does is real and she is just continuously blurring the line between fiction and reality on a platform which is decidedly real and decidedly serious.