#Tim Enthoven

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Tim Enthoven | The New Yorker

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Tim Enthoven

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Tim Enthoven - Untitled, 2023

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SPECULATIVE SPECULUM

Based on the presumption that it is impossible to overcome the current system of capitalism, the exhibition completely dismisses the logical reality and stages a fictional revolution, driving the political remains into a legible narrative. Scientific analysis, pseudo-politics, esoterics, conspiracy theories, and Live Action Roleplay are shamelessly intertwined and thrown together as actors on a stage. The setting takes place in this liminal moment shortly after the fall of an old system – rooted in the disorientation and newfound potency of infinite possibilities immediately following. The surrounding scenery is purposefully misinterpreted, recontextualized and shaped to fit our story, with the speculum serving as a magical apparatus to examine an ever-changing body investigating its own obscure orifices.

Curated by Livia Klein & Kai Philip Trausenegger

Photos (c) Jorit Aust

(Right) Book of Maria (If Eye were Anding) - adO/Aptive

(Left) Cookie Cutter // Kai Philip Trausenegger (Mid) Du hast nur ein vorgespieltes Leben, kein Wirkliches; // Tim Enthoven

(Left) Sheltering from the Sun and Wind VI // Andreas Werner (Right) Book of Hunter, Book of Dido (If Eye were Anding) // adO/Aptive

(Mid-left) Book of Hunter, Book of Dido (If Eye were Anding) // adO/Aptive (Mid-right) Idle Knights // Isabelle Andriessen

Book of Hunter, Book of Dido (If Eye were Anding) // adO/Aptive

(Left) The Mad Abstract Dark Ground It // Andreas Werner (Right) Foreign Fine Girls, How Long Can You Go? // Chin Tsao

(Mid) Foreign Fine Girls, How Long Can You Go? // Chin Tsao

Idle Knights // Isabelle Andriessen

Idle Knights // Isabelle Andriessen

Idle Knights // Isabelle Andriessen

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Design for an A-Frame Garden Shed Garage, 2019

Tim Enthoven

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Tim Enthoven

Spaghetti Scene & Anti-Spaghetti Scene, 2018. Design for Jump Ropes, 65 x 100 cm, pencil, pigment pen, gouache and collage on colored paper. At West Bund Art Fair, Shanghai -artist’s site

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Untitled space proposal, i.c.w. Tim Enthoven

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MBTI Typing Index: INTP

Other types: INFP INFJ ENFP ENFJ INTP INTJ ENTP ENTJ ISTJ ISFJ ESTJ ESFJ ISTP ISFP ESTP ESFP

Scott ADAMS

Paul ALLEN

Woody ALLEN

Simon AMSTELL

Laurie ANDERSON

Wes ANDERSON

Christine ANGOT

Hannah ARENDT

Fred ARMISEN

Julian ASSANGE

Ari ASTER

Margaret ATWOOD

Richard AYOADE

Alison BECHDEL

Jocelyn BELL BURNELL

Tim BERNERS-LEE

BONG Joon-ho

Vitalik BUTERIN

David BYRNE

Magnus CARLSEN

John CARMACK

Michael CERA

Noam CHOMSKY

Jemaine CLEMENT

Ethan COEN

David COPPERFIELD

Robert CRUMB

Rivers CUOMO

James DAMORE

David DEUTSCH

Philip K. DICK

Joan DIDION

Esther DUFLO

Albert EINSTEIN

Jesse EISENBERG

Aurélien ENTHOVEN

Seth EVERMAN

Liz FONG-JONES

Jonathan FRANZEN

Karl FRISTON

Hannah GADSBY

Serge GAINSBOURG

José GONZÁLEZ

David GRAEBER

Robert GREENE

Andrew HALES

Demis HASSABIS

Alfred HITCHCOCK

Elizabeth HOLMES

Michel HOUELLEBECQ

Jim JARMUSH

Immanuel KANT

Katalin KARIKO

Jonathon KEATS

Ed KEMPER

Maria KONNIKOVA

Yorgos LANTHIMOS

Stewart LEE

Alan LIGHTMAN

George R.R. MARTIN

Kate MCKINNON

Ina MIHALACHE

Marvin MINSKY

Moby / Richard HALL

Alan MOORE

Dylan MORAN

Randall MUNROE

Elon MUSK

Isaac NEWTON

Tig NOTARO

BJ NOVAK

Orelsan / Aurélien COTENTIN

Larry PAGE

Chuck PAHLANIUK

Markus PERSSON / Notch

Steven PINKER

Terry PRATCHETT

Jean-Paul SARTRE

David SEDARIS

David SHRIGLEY

Nate SILVER

Aaron SORKIN

James SPADER

Bjarne STROUSTRUP

Tilda SWINTON

Terrence TAO

Nikola TESLA

Virgil TEXAS

Peter THIEL

Alex TURNER

Karen UHLENBECK

Cédric VILLANI

Lars VON TRIER

David Foster WALLACE

Bernard WERBER

Timothy WILLIAMSON

Nicolas WINDING REFN

Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN

Zach WOODS

Bill WURTZ

Mark ZUCKERBERG

 Other types: INFP INFJ ENFP ENFJ INTP INTJ ENTP ENTJ ISTJ ISFJ ESTJ ESFJ ISTP ISFP ESTP ESFP

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Tim Enthoven Design for a Bookcase (detail), 2019 pencil, gouache, pigment print and collage on colored paper, on panel 195 x 200 cm

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Affirmative Action: Does it Help or Hurt Minorities?

Illustration by: Tennery Carrtar

The debate on affirmative action remains to be widely contested issue across the United States. Given how the topic is made known in college admissions, students are often misinformed about the issue. Although the United States has made great strides in improving race relations over the years, affirmative action continues to be one of the most controversial policies in America.

Affirmative action might be one of the most divisive issue in the United States. It’s being talked about so much that it seems like the practice has always been around. But it just so happens that many Americans don’t seem to open up the conversation on this topic because it has to do with the issue of race that sparks a debate between both sides. Many Americans are two minded on the issue of affirmative action (Nittle, 2019). On one side, they recognize that the United States has experienced a horrifying history of racial discrimination that needs to be addressed. They believe that students, regardless of race or color, can and do want to learn more in college which brings people together from diverse backgrounds. Let’s take a further look into some of the pros and cons of affirmative action and answer on how both sides feel about it.

PROS:

1. IT ENSURES DIVERSITY IS IN PLACE

The policies in place for affirmative action reinforces diversity to be achieved and maintained in workplaces and schools. What this does is it helps create a community with like-minded individuals to contribute various ideas and culture that differs from their own. Diversity cannot be achieved when left to chance. The potential to interact with other people regardless of race and color should be part of the education system; which can alleviate a lot of problems that many students experience that comes from a segregated lifestyle (Regoli, 20 Principle Pros and Cons of Affirmative Action, 2015). Generally, the opinion of people is almost based on stereotypes and assumptions, however, with interaction, it would provide students to be better informed about other races and cultures.

Illustration by: First Advantage Consulting Firm (FACF)

2. IT HELPS INDIVIDUALS WITH ADVANCEMENT

Affirmative action has assisted many individuals that face a lot of disadvantages where there are not many opportunities that come their way often. With the reinforcement of affirmative action, they’re able to advance in areas where they otherwise would not be able to do so. The policy gives everyone an equal playing field. Individuals that started from the bottom, needs a boost, thanks to the contributions, of affirmative action. In general, it mostly involves minority students that usually come from low-income families (The Economist 2018). This means that they’re given the chance to attend higher education schools alongside white students as well. However, it is important to also consider that any hard-working minority students are just as skilled, capable as white students, but with the disadvantages that are currently in place, they’re not able to produce the same qualifications on paper.

Illustration by: Tim Enthoven

3. IT REIMBURSE MINORITIES OF PAST TRANSGRESSIONS ON SLAVERY AND OPPRESSION

During the founding of the United States, white people, the majority, were seen enslaving and oppressing people of color, Native Americans, and other minorities. Alongside with enslavement, they were considered nothing more than property to the white race, had their lands stripped away from them and subjected to brutal punishments and were denied fundamental rights of the Constitution. With affirmative action in place thanks to an Executive Order enacted by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, it provided a way to momentarily compensate the descendants of slavery and oppression for the wrong-doings suffered by their ancestors (Wikipedia, 2010). With the abolishment of slavery, it’s still important to remember that nothing can shield all individuals from the hatred that minority groups face in life.

Illustration by: Getty Images

CONS:

1. AFFIRMATIVE ACTION TENDS TO BE INCONSISTENT WITH THE VALUES OF MERIT

Affirmative action has put race as the main factor in employment and college admissions procedure, where it is best believed that the individual deserves to be in that position if they are qualified, regardless of color and race (Goldring, 2019). Additionally, it sometimes rewards minority groups with the perception that it can promote “reverse discrimination”. Reserve discrimination is discrimination against members of a dominant or majority group in favor of members of a minority or historically disadvantaged group (Newkirk II, 2017). It also makes the wrong assumption that affirmative action only favors non-whites on the assumption that every white person in the United States is well-off, and every person of color helps the upper and middle-class from minority backgrounds rather than the less fortunate.

Source by: CNN

2. IT LESSENS THE ACHIEVEMENT THAT MINORITY GROUPS OBTAIN

It demeans minority achievement. An example of this is the success labeled as a result of affirmative action, instead of basing it off the ability and hard work. Take, for example, influential figures in our society like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Colin Powell came from unfortunate circumstances but all of them achieved success through dedication and hard work. The same concept can be applied to minority lawyers and doctors. Too often, their successes and achievements have been degraded by other people that got into their positions through preferential treatment. Because of this, minority groups would then have to work harder to earn the respect of their majority counterparts (Yee, 2017). Additionally, it cans be considered as condescending towards minorities. By giving preferential treatment to individuals that seek employment and admissions to college, it can often be misinterpreted as being an incapable person to achieve anything on your own, so you need help to do so.

Illustration by : Kia Thomas

3. PERSONAL BIAS WILL ALWAYS BE THERE

Even with the Civil Rights Movement of 1954, affirmative action and other programs that are put in place to advance the minority class, there will always be a cycle where every issue or story put out in the public will always have the question of race being involved (History.com Editors, 2019). Rather than working around discrimination, some argue that the issue should be confronted head on so we can evolve as a society instead of putting a “band-aid” on it and passing it off. 

Source by: The EQ Development Group

FINDINGS:

With several examples of pros and cons discussing the topic of affirmative action, we learn that it brings advantages and disadvantages to both sides. It shows that promoting diversity is a positive contribution to society but it should not happen at the expense of others. The common objective that we all strive to achieve is equality in today’s society and given its circumstances, programs such as affirmative action may very well promote that diversity. However, as a society, individuals should want to be proactive and provide assistance for everyone. Overall, when it comes to affirmative action, there are instances where the policy is essential and times when it is unnecessary. There is no doubt that the technique of affirmative action can be questionable at times and there are also means that can easily be defended (Chemerinsky, 2018). Having a meaningful conversation of affirmative action focuses on how we, as individuals, can push each other to break the societal ceiling.

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israelfacts:

The Human Swap: How a single Israeli came to be worth 1,027 Palestinians

Israel and Hamas agreed a prisoner swap last month that saw 1,027 Palestinians freed in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. This week, New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren had illustrator Tim Enthoven draw every last one of them by hand for the cover.

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Tim Enthoven -  Design for an A-Frame Garden Shed Garage, 2019

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Illustration by Tim Enthoven

TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

Facebook is trying to copy TikTok, but this strategy may well signal the end of these legacy platforms.

— By Cal Newport | July 28, 2022 | Cultural Comment

Last month, Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s president of global business solutions, was asked if he was concerned about competition from existing social-media networks like Facebook. Chandlee, who spent more than twelve years at Mark Zuckerberg’s company before moving to TikTok, dismissed the idea. “Facebook is a social platform. They’ve built all their algorithms based on the social graph,” he said, referring to the network of links to friends, family, and casual acquaintances that Facebook users painstakingly assemble over time. “We are an entertainment platform. The difference is significant.” Chandlee appeared to be responding to recent moves made by Facebook. Last year, the company integrated a TikTok-style short-video format called Reels directly into its main app. Then, in an internal memo sent this spring, Tom Alison, a senior executive at the social-media giant, announced a plan to modify the platform’s news feed to focus more on these short videos, tweaking the algorithm to display the most engaging content, even if these selections are “unconnected” to accounts that a user has friended or followed. Facebook, it seems, is moving away from its traditional focus on text and images, spread among people who know one another, to instead adopt TikTok’s emphasis on pure distraction. This shift is not surprising given TikTok’s phenomenal popularity, but it’s also shortsighted: platforms like Facebook could be doomed if they fail to maintain the social graphs upon which they built their kingdoms.

To understand Facebook’s current danger, it helps to better understand its original success. In the spring of 2004, when my college friends signed up for TheFacebook.com, as it was then called, they did so because other people they knew were signing up as well. (One of the platform’s early killer features was the ability to check the “relationship status” of classmates.) By the end of 2006, the year in which Facebook opened to the general public, the service had already gathered twelve million active users. At that point, network-effect advantages made it hard for a competitor to emerge; two years later, when Facebook hit a hundred million active users, competition became all but impossible. Why would you join a new network dedicated to connection with people you know if everyone you knew was already on Facebook?

The next major evolution of this model of leveraging a social graph to create engagement was sparked by Twitter. Though it was launched in 2006, this short-messaging service didn’t achieve broader notice until 2009. This was the year in which Ashton Kutcher discussed Twitter on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” It was also the year in which the news leaked that a U.S. State Department official e-mailed the company, urging it to delay planned server maintenance so as not to interfere with planned pro-democracy protests in Iran. For Twitter, however, arguably the most important event of 2009 was not these publicity bonanzas but the introduction of the retweet button. This tweak, originally intended to simplify the common practice of manually cutting and pasting the text of interesting tweets, ended up transforming Twitter. By eliminating the friction required to forward a message to all of your followers, the retweet button created a fierce viral dynamic in which a single tweet could be amplified to a large audience in a short period of time, its readership expanding exponentially through the power-law topology of the Twitter network. This turned out to be a phenomenally effective method for surfacing the most engaging content floating around the platform at any given moment. This potential for sudden mass exposure also began to draw more influential individuals to the platform, further increasing the value of its content.

As with Facebook, the larger that Twitter’s social graph grew, the more attractive the network became. Pretenders to the short-message throne, such as Parler or Gab, struggled to get traction, as their networks lacked sufficient size and numbers of influential users to compete in a battle for attention. By 2011, Twitter, following in Facebook’s footsteps, passed the milestone of a hundred million users. Facebook, of course, noticed this new competitor’s fast rise and began to make adjustments. Between 2009 and 2011, Facebook increasingly moved its news feed away from chronological sorting and toward an emphasis on popular posts. Then, in 2012, it added a retweet-style Share button on its mobile app, enabling the Twitter-style exponential spread of third-party content through the network.

Both Facebook and Twitter were built on the same general model of leveraging hard-to-replicate, large social graphs to generate a never-ending stream of engaging content, a strategy that proved to be robust in the face of new competition and incredibly lucrative. It’s why, last month, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, had a market cap of five hundred and sixty-two billion dollars, making it the world’s seventh most valuable corporation. It’s also why Twitter, a smaller and more specialized social-media network, was still worth forty-four billion dollars to Elon Musk (before he changed his mind). Pseudo-monopolies of this type, however, cannot last forever. The past decade has been good for these social-media giants, but the sudden ascent of TikTok might turn out to be the disruption that finally ends their reign.

When you load TikTok, you’re presented with a short video, often well under a minute in length, filling your smartphone screen. When you’re ready to see something different, you swipe up, and a new video, selected specifically for you by the service’s recommendation algorithm, is pulled in to take over the display. If you observe a TikTok session over the shoulder of a practiced user, you’ll encounter a frenetic sequence of swipes, with most videos watched for only a few moments to assess their appeal, before being pushed away to sample what’s next.

The effectiveness of the TikTok experience is found in what it doesn’t require. Unlike Twitter, TikTok doesn’t need a critical mass of famous or influential people to use it for its content to prove engaging. The short-video format grabs the user’s attention at a more primal level, relying on visual novelty, or a clever interplay of music and action, or direct emotional expression, to generate its appeal. And, unlike Facebook, TikTok doesn’t require that your friends already use the service for you to find it useful. Though there are some social features built into TikTok, they’re not the main draw of the app. TikTok also doesn’t rely on its users to manually share content with friends or followers to surface compelling offerings. It assigns this responsibility to its scary-good recommendation algorithm. A 2021 investigation by the Wall Street Journal, in which reporters created more than a hundred TikTok accounts to tease out the basic dynamics of this suggestion logic, showed that the app can target a user’s interests with uncanny accuracy in as little as forty minutes of observation.

This rejection of the social-graph model has allowed TikTok to circumvent the barriers to entry that so effectively protected early social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. By separating distraction from social connection, TikTok can directly compete for users without the need to first painstakingly build up an underlying network, link by link. By all accounts, this attention blitzkrieg is working incredibly well. TikTok is estimated to have a billion active monthly users, a number it achieved in a breathtakingly short time, and according to some reports it boasts an average session length of 10.85 minutes, which, if true, would be far longer than that of any other major social-media app. Meanwhile, Facebook’s parent company recently lost more than two hundred and thirty billion dollars in market capitalization in a single day after the company announced that user growth had stalled. Analysts identified TikTok as an important factor in this slowdown.

These developments put traditional social-media companies like Facebook in a perilous bind. It’s obvious that, if they don’t make moves to arrest the flow of users from their platforms to TikTok, their investors will revolt and valuations will continue to fall. This explains Facebook’s recent transition toward short videos and algorithmic recommendations of content that doesn’t come from friend groups. Perhaps less obvious, however, is the longer-term danger in shifting away from the connection-centric model that has served the company so well. It’s unlikely, at this point, that a new competitor will ever again be able to build a social graph of a size or a level of influence comparable to those of legacy platforms like Facebook and Twitter—it’s simply too hard to start from scratch when these mature services already exist. It follows that, so long as these legacy platforms rely on their underlying networks as their primary source of value, they will retain a monopolistic protection of sorts within the broader attention economy. If they instead move away from their social-graph foundations to concentrate on optimizing in-the-moment engagement, they’ll enter a competitive landscape that pits them directly against the many other existing sources of mobile distraction—not just TikTok but also more bespoke and specialized social networks, such as the Gen-Z sensation BeReal, to say nothing of popular video streamers, podcasts, video games, self-improvement apps, and, for the somewhat older demographic to which I belong, Wordle.

This all points to a possible future in which social-media giants like Facebook may soon be past their long stretch of dominance. They’ll continue to chase new engagement models, leaving behind the protection of their social graphs, and in doing so eventually succumb to the new competitive pressures this introduces. TikTok, of course, is subject to these same pressures, so in this future it, too, will eventually fade. The app’s energetic embrace of shallowness makes it more likely, in the long term, to become the answer to a trivia question than a sustained cultural force. In the wake churned by these sinkings will arise new entertainments and new models for distraction, but also innovative new apps and methods for expression and interaction.

It’s here that I find optimism. The era of social-media monopolies has been unhealthy for our collective digital existence. The Internet at its best should be weird, energetic, and exciting—featuring both homegrown idiosyncrasy and sudden trends that flash supernova-bright before exploding into the novel elements that spur future ideas and generate novel connections. This exuberance was suppressed by the dominance of a small number of social-media networks that consolidated and controlled so much of online culture for so many years. Things will be better once this dominance wanes. In the end, TikTok’s biggest legacy might be less about its current moment of world-conquering success, which will pass, and more about how, by forcing social-media giants like Facebook to chase its model, it will end up liberating the social Internet. ♦

[archidose]

Design for a Bookcase, 2019

Tim Enthoven