Erik Stinson
I was born at a Seattle Washington hospital in December of the year 1987, to my mother, Julia, and father, William. My mother was math and science teacher. My father was a mechanical engineer for an airplane manufacturer.
LIVE: It’s about to rain in NYC
City of books. City of power. City of finance and fashion and media properties. Don’t give in to fear, gentle children of the world wide web.
Soros And The European Poetry Crisis
Billionaire hedge fund manager and democracy advocate George Soros recently received the social media equivalent of a standing ovation from the world of finance. Instead of remaining in charts and data, or even in their value synthesis re: analyzing Europ’s sovereign debt crisis, he did what few money men had (and none in his position) done: he effectively used a metaphor. It was the kind of poetry that moves markets.
“Bubble” is a common enough term in popular finance, but it lacks a quantitative definition. It’s an existential state, or a spiritual one: a bloating, a swelling of the imagination glands (Dickensian?), a cultural feast that becomes a fiscal implosion. We fondly remember the Tech Bubble. We feel the presence of ghosts and of animated furniture (Marx?). Here’s what Soros wrote about on his personal blog (yes – indeed dear readers) . To be completely fair, he was reblogging his speech from the Festival of Economics in Trento Italy – but this is what “went viral”:
Web Purchase Is The Purest Narrative
On my adventures in corporate American marketing, I’ve come across a literary form that I believe is the purest, most perfect expression of human desire, passion, tragedy, longing, comedy, and love. In modern user experience design and eCommerce, this form is known as “Call To Action.” In its most common form it’s a digital image of button, with copy. It appears at the end of a poem about a product. When you see the button, you understand everything that there is to understand about your relationship to capital markets, to objects, and to human labor. Shorter than the novel, more emotive than the poem, and far more popular than the TV serial, the CTA is certainly in a golden age.
Erik Stinson—
Does someone you know “get a boner” when they write?
If so, which “boner”?
And if so does that someone feel they need a “meat log” to write?
23
The company writes a novel per year
The ancient art of the annual report. A book written to ensure investors that their money is safe, that work is being done, profits cleared, America marches forward to the beating of motion of the Invisible Hand of capital. Whether you’re a non-profit, a .EDU, a religious organization, or a major bank, everything is smooth and calm between these pages baby. It’a all less relevant now of course – investors need daily information, not yearly. But there is still something very nice about the idea of an annual report. The plot is always the same, the characters are mild, their decreasing quality of life is the small repetitive tragedy. These are the stories that organizations want to believe about themselves. I believe them.
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June 28th, 2012 / 11:43 am
June 28th, 2012 / 11:43 am
TOM CLANCY: POETRY OF DAD’S DEATHSTATE
>> INTERVIEW <<
Clancy predicts a totally unfunded secret intelligence agency that publishes eBooks that go on to predict the state of war and peace. He is the cultural side of the police state – the non-state state. He predates Jack Bauer by decades. He invents a protomasculine character haunted by the cold war, in seamless transition into the near-warless future. The 90s never died, they just killed. Every dad read this shit and every dad wondered what would need to be done in a worse-case scenario. Wife, kids, house, Xbox, netbook, and cruise missile. Tom Clancy’s next book will be about the war that hasn’t happened yet. The big war. The quiet war that lasts forever. Drone strikes like cymbal crashes. Cyber attacks by children in China. An Etsy dirty bomb. The the hyperpoliticical bedroom radicalism of London’s East End Tumblr scene. He only wants to tell us that we are never safe from stories of violence and instability. There is always the threat that our lives might need to mean something: quickly, violently, profitably.
Erik Stinson—
One of the truly great content creators of our literary era, Shoenice, written up at Motherboard/Vice.
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What the Facebook IPO Means For Young Writers
Nothing Left To Buy:
A detailed analysis of the Facebook IPO:
i’m the only finance writer without any understanding of desire. i’m soft like the sound of a dead freeway or the jam band that plays in a warehouse above the impossibly cute shopping district. all the helpful selling colors. this is china in the future. the TVs are 40% thinner in 2050. american is 40% thinner. there are fewer white babies. people want things like food that is free from toxins and movies with uncompromising ethnic super heros. little kids want to grow up to be anything. anything at all would be better than youth. education today is like an expensive prison for brilliant young interns with no tasks to complete. there’s nothing but screens showing images of other screens. jean baudrillard’s nephew was right about that french restaurant – it’s really delicious if you can get a reservation by email. no i can’t give you the email sorry. i was asked not to.
Midtown Skin 5/5: The Executives
5.
I just put in my fucking laundry. I put everything together in one load. There was a girl next to me. She came across the place, put her clothes next to my clothes. I kind of wanted to giver her my business card, I had nothing interesting to say. She was a typical dreamgirl.