Five Things: Spiral of Silence, Digital Nomads, Cabin Porn, Copenhagen, AOC
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
When you’re reading this, I’ll be on the Autobahn driving South from Hamburg to Vienna, which is a leisurely 10 drive. I’m going there to pick up our oldest daughter who’s wrapping up her studies at the University of Vienna. It’s pretty amazing what she accomplished in the last two years and I am immensely proud of her. Also, I am very happy that she sold her mattress to the next person renting her room, so I don’t have to haul it down four flights of stairs.
I am actually looking forward to spending all this time in the car, because I recently picked up a new habit. I matured from podcasts to audiobooks. My wife just had to suggest listening to audiobooks for a few years and then I tried it on one of my runs and was hooked. Now I’m listening to audiobooks all the time. Also, I found a Hebrew course on Audible and now when I walk the dog in the morning, I repeat Hebrew phrases. Also, I imagine people think I’m weird as I talk to myself, but I couldn’t care less…
The best part of the road trip will obviously be the drive back together with my daughter, where we will talk about everything we can think of.
Anyhow, please read these Five Things now!
What a ‘Spiral of Silence’ Can Do to a Democracy
When political speech is considered socially sensitive or politically dangerous, people are more likely to sit out protests, mute themselves online, and keep quiet in everyday conversation. These small acts of silencing may seem merely polite or indifferent, but they can easily spiral.
People sometimes take as many cues from silence as they do from noise. And because people interpret silence to mean quiet acceptance or approval of the status quo, they use it to inform their own decisions about whether to speak out. Silence begets silence, which begets further misunderstanding about what a society actually collectively believes or wants.
We need to say what needs to be said and we need to stay loud.
‘My mind was shrieking: “What am I doing?”’ – when the digital nomad dream turns sour
Initially, I adored the lifestyle. I worked my own hours, usually during the day, for a handful of clients. Come evening, I would hop on the back of a scooter and drive through plumes of street-food smoke to meet new friends on the beach and sip from coconuts. It all felt wonderfully freeing.
But somewhere around the midway mark of my most recent six-month trip, something happened. A whisper of a thought began to emerge at the back of my mind. By the final month, it was a pervasive shriek: “What am I doing?”
Can we please also talk about #vanlife and why this is really just a good idea for one summer?
How “Cabin Porn” Took Over the Internet
The appeal of Cabin Porn might seem obvious at this moment—dreaming of simple living is ubiquitous. While social media has turned to an extremist embrace of tradwife influencers selling us a romanticized image of simple living, mainstream publications—this one included—peddle in cabin porn. Sleek photographs of cabins are less obviously politically charged than raw milk and the return of measles, but both share the same seductive appeal, the aesthetic of yearning: an escape from late capitalism’s ceaseless demands of labor and attention.
Cabin Porn is as much the product of an internet culture that makes users long for escape as it was the early aughts, where performative irony coexisted with earnest nostalgia.
I love Cabin Porn and find it very soothing to think about living in a nice cabin somewhere, ideally next to a lake somewhere in the Nordics. And then I realize that I’d really miss my urban lifestyle… but the allure is huge.
Copenhagen: Bike City from Back in the Day
The Danish capital has become renowned as a “city of cyclists.” Or rather, as historian Martin Emanuel, shows, Copenhagen has returned to being a city of cyclists. A hundred years ago, the city already had an international reputation for its friendliness to bicycling. Since the 1880s, in fact, there has been what Emanuel calls a long-term “co-production” or “relationship between user practices and infrastructure provision.” It’s not so much an “if you build it, they will come” situation as it is an “they’re already demanding that you build it so you better” attitude. The twenty-first century “renaissance” of Copenhagen as a bicycle city has roots: a pre-existing infrastructural base and a heritage of motivated cyclists.
Copenhagen has been doing a lot of things just right. I need a cabin somewhere close to it.
Why Trump is terrified of AOC
The only Democrat who offers that on anything close to scale, at least until Mamdani’s win, is AOC. (And unlike Mamdani, who was born in Uganda, she’s eligible to run.) She has charisma, as evidenced by her widely-known nickname. The fact that she scares Republicans can work in her favor, because it reinforces her image as a fighter. And she will be able to defang Trump easily. Just look at how she dismissed him swiftly when he called her names last week, cheerfully posting, “Mr. President, don’t take your anger out on me – I’m just a silly girl.” She’s nimble because she thinks for herself, and her self-confidence draws other people towards her, making them trust her.
Hopefully the American democracy will still be around to see the pendulum swing back.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico