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.
00:18:39 · Ruby Justice Thelot
I think it's an example of Detournement, right, the sort of situationist practice of using an existing system. Usually it was for advertising in the 60s, but in her case LinkedIn and subverting it for artistic purposes. But I think what was interesting in Ruby's approach is that not only was this hilarious and very funny and also very thoughtful as to what does it mean to work a job in 2026. It was also a play in what does it look to have a job? What does it look to work? Ruby's character adopted what we can only describe as like officeware, right, the corporate girly if you will. So one of the things that I think this indicates is maybe a cultural fascination that we have with corporate. In many ways, we had such a long time we were no longer at the office. It was the pandemic. We were working from home. I think starting from 2023 we started to see the return to office mandates, right? People could no longer work at home. And suddenly in the trends themselves we saw a bubbling up of a lot of interest around the office as a mode of addressing. The first office siren post is dated around September 2023 right around the first sort of big mandate which was AT and T's mandate. TikTok itself had a return to office mandate. And so between 2023 and 2024 we saw a big rise in an aesthetic called office siren. We did a big we scraped a lot of the hashtags around corporate wear. We scraped Office Siren, Corporate Girly, Corp Gore, That Girl to see sort of like how many views the videos were getting. And we saw 85,000 posts for Office Iron with 2,600,000,000 views. Corporate Girly similarly had 64,000 posts with almost 600,000,000 views. And so there is definitely an interest, definitely an angoument towards I think the LARP of corporate culture and office wear, perhaps a sign of a recession if you will. But the all time views for Office Siren, Corporate Girly and Corpore as you will see in some of the slides that we post on the Instagram really generated a lot of views and people were quite interested in what does it mean to be in the office. I think that's connected to a lot of media around being in an office. There was severance that was quite popular at the time. We had Succession as well. These are all pieces of media that play on the trope, fascination we have in the West with The Office.
00:21:45 · Ruby Justice Thelot
So if you have a minute, highly recommend you go and take a look at the essay that Ruby Bailey penned for Mornings as well as the post on her LinkedIn itself where she is cosplaying as herself in these corporate contexts and essentially presenting this alternative reality but on a platform that is meant to be very serious. But at the same time it is sort of being overrun at times by slops. She is kind of playing on a lot of these tropes. Alright. It is time for our first deep dive of the day. I mentioned paratechnology. What is paratechnology? Paratechnology is technology that is meant to prevent us from using our other tech. Paratechnology exists because consumers, some of them, have a feeling that they are using the technology too much. That might be social media, that might be their phone as a general category, that might mean streaming, YouTube, whatever it is. What is interesting to me about paracognology is that it has become a consumer category. Our inability to get off of our phones has been now productized and is being sold to us with a lot of these highly successful products. What I was really trying to understand is why exactly it doesn't seem like para technology is having a moment. As a signal definitely saw quite a bit more ads around Brick, Opal, different certs that are meant to protect you from being on your phone. Try to identify, okay, what is the main cause of the failure? Which devices are the most popular right now and where do they slot in the grand shape of, okay, what are they actually doing? Because as you will come to see, as we will talk about in a bit, they exist on different quadrants, not all the different paratechnological devices do the same thing. When I first introduced the term, I think it was probably last year at a talk at Betaworks, the VC fund. The idea for pragmology was really inspired by the philosophy of Ivan Illich, the thinker and philosopher. There was a thought much like thisyou'll see the connection with Juan Atkins of courseof the techno rebel, how do we use our technology to our own benefits. Sometimes this technology allows us to gain that control back, to gain that sense of autonomy, that sense of self determination in a world where we feel a bit led by our devices.
00:24:44 · Ruby Justice Thelot
What's interesting about paratechnology is that it in many ways provides people the ability to of course go on about their day as I said in my anecdote and you know just start to they just you just can't go on social media essentially, right? So you can't do the thing that you're usually drawn to do in a moment of boredom, in a moment of of of quiet. You just have to sit or talk to your friend or do whatever else. The first data point that's very interesting is that the Pew Research Center, a lot of the data is going to be from Pew in the show because they do amazing work and research. Pew surveyed 9,050 adults The U. S. In 2020 and they found that about fifty three percent said that they spent too much time on their phone and that number jumped to seventy percent of people who were aged 18 to 29. Now out of these people forty five percent tried to cut back, meaning there was an intentional desire to pare back the person's use of technology. And so of that forty five percent only twenty five were successful. So the rise of paracetamology comes at a very good inflection point, a very good moment of convergence of multiple behaviors. The first is that people say they spend too much time on their phone. The second is that people say they tried to cut back. And the third is that only twenty five percent of people who try are successful. So this product, these services, this software is marketed to that 75% who did not succeed. And that's how that's where they operate. I think one thing that's also very interesting is that this overall aversion, of course, is not only present in individuals. Ballotpedia counted the number of states which had bans or phone limits in schools and only nine districts have policies that encourage 37 states now have a ban or a limit on phones in school. So this desire to control phone usage is not only existing at the level of the individual but also at the state level, at the department level, which I think is very interesting. This has been sort of heavily debated of course. You have perhaps seen the book Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt in which Jonathan makes the case that the phones have been a net negative for children. There is a lot of very interesting conversations happening right now around Haidt. I quite like the response that Dana Boyd had against Haidt's work.
00:27:51 · Ruby Justice Thelot
By and large what is very hard to do in a lot of these studies and people have written rebuttals and a lot of op eds trying to debunk or making a claim that they debunked a lot of the work that Haidt has done. It is really that phones are like most technology dual purpose and they can be used for good, they can be used for bad. There is a Tyler Cowen interview with Jonathan Haidt in which Tyler talked about the kids that he works with in Emergent Ventures and some of his granting or fellowship programs. And for many of these kids of course their early life success, their ability to of be Wunderkind at a very early age is driven by the fact that they had access to the internet and they could share their ideas. They could post on Twitter about their latest project, they got seen and of course were brought, started a company at 15 or 16. I think Haidt's idea is more that this is rather marginal and so the limit and the bans of course prevent these outlier cases from actually occurring and actually popping up in culture at large. Large. The other thing that's very difficult with this idea of the ban is that modern life is filled with phones. Part of why maybe paratechnology exists now and why it's become such a large consumer category is in part because we haven't let's say taught children, especially in my generation where like phones were just kind of broadened to our lives, on how to regulate our usage of the phones. And so much like we might tell a child do not eat too much candy or don't do too much of a specific thing, there may be room to learn or to build an educational curriculum on let's call it conscientious phone use, right? And that's I think the thing where that's maybe missing as part of the discourse. An outright ban does not acknowledge the reality that we have phones in the real world. If you spend K-twelve without a phone and then you get a phone as soon as you enter college, I think it is going to mess you up a little bit because the phone is extremely powerful in the good and the bad ways. I think something more conscientious is developing a healthy relationship with the phone. How do we teach a young child that like it is okay to want to watch a funny video on YouTube, but you should maybe just watch them for thirty minutes.
00:30:53 · Ruby Justice Thelot
How do we build the regulation, the self regulation, self discipline at an early age so that twenty five years later my friend doesn't need to have a brick. The brick exists because of the seventy five percent failure that we just saw in the previous statistics. And that is something that I think is learned. We learn a lot of things in school and a lot of these things are behavioral. They're about how to be a good citizen and being a good citizen maybe also now includes in 2026 how do you stay self regulated in an age of advanced technology. The Yondr patch that I just talked about, of course, eggs were very marginal in 2021. This is government records, right, from government spending from probably departments of education in US schools. In 2021, only $174,000 were spent on these Yondr pouches. These are pouches in which you put your phone, you lock them, put the phone away. The pouches were shipped to about 2,000 schools in 2023. It jumped to $2,130,000 and in 2025 they are now at $19,000,000 of phone pouches because these laws have spread. And so a big drive in sort of paratechnological adoption and the increase in the revenues of that area is driven by a lot of these government contracts. Okay. What's interesting also and why I advocate for a, let's call it, more conscientious, more holistic approach to our phone uses instead of these external devices or software is that when we take a look at the data, we take a look at how many people install the app and how many active monthly users there are based on... Okay. This is a little skewed because this is all installs. But based on all the installs we are only seeing 6% to 7% adoption on a monthly basis of these different tools. This is ScreenZen, Blankspaces and JoMo. There's a bunch of other ones but this is just to give you an example. Meaning out of all the people who are seeking control of their phones, of their applications, only 6% to 7% end up using the apps monthly. And so there is a big gap between intention and the actual success. So even if we are seeing an increase in the overall revenue of what I could only call the paratechnological industrial complex, it's still not being reflected in actual user behaviors. And so what this indicates to me is that we can buy all the bricks we want, we can buy all the software, whatever it is, we can buy a safe and throw the key into the river.