Everything Incredible Is 99% Invisible

It’s easy to believe, and difficult to stop believing, that value is directly connected to visibility. We live in an attention economy, so our natural conclusion is that we belong to the degree to which we’re noticed and that our work is worthwhile only to the extent to which it fills up the confines of that same metric. It’s pretty easy to make the joke “I post therefore I am”, but inevitably a certain amount of the irony that observation implies covers a deeper sense of dread or paranoia that we aren’t doing enough, or doing something well enough, if we aren’t getting much of a response. Or at least that’s the case for me. A great deal of my rage against the machine comes from a desire to see certain storylines or injustices resolved in public and obvious ways, and for my own projects to become platforms. And both of those are massive distractions from the more meaningful and quiet excavations real life offers us.

Much like an ant hill, the world churning under the surface of human society is a rich tapestry of insane and intricate splendor. The further you non-invasively dig, the more the cross-section of our own machines and operations becomes a living portrait of both survival and our attempts to thrive. And the landscape view allows something like coal mining to become not just a harmful pollutant but also an incredible evolutionary step on a vast technological tree, and the perpetual availability of forks and spoons at the department store feel like a minor miracle. Everything might indeed be amazing if only because we’ve discovered ways to make all of these things exist at mind-boggling scale, and the creeping ache we sometimes feel for a far off place might, at least occasionally, be a symptom of our refusal to admit our present grandeur.

As an example of that refusal, I avoided the podcast 99% Invisible until this week because I have a relationship with recommendations such that the more someone tells me I need to check something out, the more I absolutely will not do that. I’ve dug around in why I’m like that and my only real discovery is that my relationship with recommendations is the same as Kanye’s views on airplane water bottles. Now I’m responsible for this other person’s great love for whatever the thing is. But I’m working on it, and so far my friends are right about pretty much everything. 99% Invisible focuses on the hidden design behind everything in the world, and after scrolling down for a couple of minutes through the episodes, they seem to go on forever. My friend Sean got me to listen to the newest one, “Player Piano”, this week and I have to admit publicly and loudly that the story it told felt semi-life changing. If you’re looking for something to pull you out of your shell, I strongly suggest taking this one for a 53 minute spin around your mental or actual neighborhood.