I’ve been thinking a lot about the old internet recently. You know, the one from the 00’s. When you coded your own website, your limited bandwidth positively challenged your creativity, and you knew most of the people in the various forums you hung out it.
It appears I’m not alone in my nostalgia — look at what Sari is doing with Sublime, Tyler with Perfectly Imperfect’s PI.FYI, Seed Club’s Internet Explorers, books on LAN parties, and MSCHF’s ASCII Theatre. What does this mean? Who knows, but it might be something to do with our human need of familiarity, comfort and safety as a response to what’s happening around the world right now. Either way, it’s got me percolating on the idea that we should reintroduce some of the Protein OS designs from a while back (shoutout to anyone who remembers this):
Anyway, it’s been 6 months since the last Supplement, so here’s a few things you might have missed: we closed our Discord, opened a new Protein Studios in the English countryside, released a Future Creatives report with D&AD, and recorded podcasts with Nearfield and Sam Walton from Hole & Corner. January is finally behind us and Pluto is in Aquarius, so let’s get on with the links shall we?
Will x
P.S. We’re trying a new format for the links this month, so please let us know what you think.
LINKS
- Sean Monahan’s diagrams of the decade
- Elon’s Neuralink has completed it’s first implant
- Gen Z’s are making libraries cool again
- Rob Abelow on the music fandoms
- Is fashion having another John Galliano moment
- Matt Klein’s META Trending Trends is an especially essential read this year given he’s included a reflection on what’s changed since 2018 … in short, not much.
- Our friends at RADAR have made a visual trends radio as well as a snazzy field guide to the future
- Future Days is happening in Lisbon if you fancy it
- Do you over or under?
- Vacationland have been Looking Everywhere for 10 years (and still haven’t found it)
- Have you ever wondered who owns what in the music industry? h/t Cherie Hu from Water & Music
- You AI girlfriend probably won’t last
- Variant Fund on progressive ownership models
- Other Internet on crypto’s three body problem
- The State of Beverages by Snaxshot is an immense piece of work
- Non-Fungible Plants (NFPs) are real plants with NFTs stored in their DNA
- Li Jin on points programes
- Why do people collect things?
- How your creativity changes as you age
- Greg Bresnitz on decentralisation and desire
- What happened to Williamsburg?
- What 2023’s fringes will mean for 2024’s mainstream
- /brandnew is Boy Club’s one-day summit on the new internet
- Buckmnsiter Fuller’s 1969 operating manual for spaceship earth
- A call for more friction in digital culture
- Seed Club cohort 07 is open for applications
- Dezeen on how The Sims stays relevant
- Ai vs AI
- The rise of techno-authoritarianism
- Here’s 19 ways to (hopefully) make money as a writer
- Ray Kurzweil is sticking to his predictions: AGI by 2029, Singularity by 2045
- An interview with the AI Marge Simpson
- Have you been trained by the AI machine?
- Post-identity design aka brands, politics, and technological instability
- Brain Lehrer on what happened to the new internet?
- And in case you were wondering, this is approximately where we are in the skinny vs baggy pant cycle:
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SMALL PRINT
Protein is a place where people and ideas grow. We do this through our global community, agency, and studios. We believe we’ve all got a responsibility to think and act bigger than ourselves and that good growth can only be achieved by balancing purpose, profit, and progress.
Yes, we really have published 700+ issues 👀 of this newsletter. The first Protein Supplement was sent on 17th September 1997 to 14 people and (other than a few breaks over the years) has always aimed to distill what’s happening at the intersection of culture and technology into a concise and accessible digest. If you’re interested in digging into the (incomplete) archive, you can here.
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