Cultural equivalent of Keynesian aggregate demand fueling by building “infrastructure” of roads and bridges nobody needs. Because the point is seeking meaning through building not the building itself.
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Replying to
yeah I think any "movement" big enough to leave a trace will contain fakes and waste, sometimes even a lot of them...there's a certain aestheticization of Chunky World which is inevitable but isn't core, y'know?
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there are definitely leading practitioners of Chunkiness Rhetoric who are dead wrong on the facts.
Like, *too* wrong to become influential at anything except content creation.
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but overall my sense is that whoever shakes out becoming influential in this decade is going to have a strong Chunky World frame.
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"World"-yness: A sense of oneself, or one's project, as "realistic" and "normal".
Central not peripheral. Balanced not eccentric. Universal not parochial. Objective not partisan. Fact-heavy, opinion-light.
Aspiring to represent "the whole world".
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"Chunkiness": a disposition towards blunt, forceful movement.
Discrete not continuous. Definite not ambiguous. Active not contemplative. Robust not delicate.
Tends to be masculine-coded.
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You turn to "world-yness" when you get the feeling of seasickness from too much *imbalance* and you want something steady and grounded. The party's been too wild and you want to sober up.
You want "back to basics", maturity, reality, an unclouded view. The original, not a riff.
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There's a trend of wanting the "world"-y thing now and starting to grope towards it, because times are weird and scary.
There are a lot of ways to go "back to basics" though, and a lot of opportunities for people to articulate their own versions of what "basics" are.
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as to why I see a trend of "masculine-coded" or "tough" vibes coming out ahead, I don't know, I just see it a lot since 2020.
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like, what I see is not "the ultra-macho rule the world," but "the median is shifting to be a little tougher/blunter"
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Replying to
I think we agree about everything except whether or is primarily a cope theater or primarily adaptive
Putin is exhibit A for cope theater. Make Russia RelevantAgain by crudely bludgeoning Ukraine into submission. Very macho, entirely maladaptive.

