Following the publication of Ruby Justice Thelot’s SEED, Aesthetic Stagnation, and learning he was going to be in town from New York last week, we jumped at the chance for him to lead our first in a new series of LECTURES. We were kindly hosted at Ashley Saville, the eponymous gallery at 193 Fleet Street, which opened in May this year to much acclaim. You can read the write up here.

In case you missed it, our STUPID REPORT is now live [INDIVIDUAL membership required] and make sure you take our STUPID TEST to see what type of intelligent you are. There's also two months of SEEDS for you to catchup on and we've been digging in the archive - revisited Kyle Chayka's SEED from 2015 - which feels more relevant now than ever.

Enjoy.

SEEDS

Surveillance Chic
What happens when constant surveillance gets dressed up as a fashion flex?
Protein XYZAlexi Gunner
Hot World Bummer
Heat is no longer background noise – it’s shaping culture.
Protein XYZPhilip Teale
The Sportification Of Everything
Sport is evolving from personal performance into our newest social infrastructure.
Protein XYZMaaike Schutten
Festival Fatigue
How brands can be a vital support act, instead of trying to steal the show.
Protein XYZProtein
Neo-Neo-Orality
An extract from our Stupid REPORT on the importance of wonder, uncertainty and the revival of the oral tradition in the AI age.
Protein XYZProtein
Age Defying
Why growing old is a luxury.
Protein XYZProtein
Stupidly Successful Brands
Best-in-class examples of brands embracing the strange, sensory, and of course, stupid.
Protein XYZProtein
The Pleasure Recession
More Vice, More Life.
Protein XYZProtein
Windows Of The Mind
Why are writers publishing their conversations with AI chatbots?
Protein XYZSophia Epstein
Grey Area
A conversation with Al Hassan Elwan and Ruba Al-Sweel of POSTPOSTPOST on the publication of their second printed volume.
Protein XYZProtein
Vulture Culture
Everyone wants to be culturally relevant, but what even is culture anyway?
Protein XYZClive Martin
Aesthetic Stagnation
The economics of aesthetics, cultural debris, and how to visualise the future without just regurgitating the past.
Protein XYZRuby Justice Thelot
Sounds Of The Season
The songs and sentiments of SEED CLUB’S summer.
Protein XYZProtein
Re: Fwd Thinking
Email began as async correspondence, had a stint as a status symbol, gave way to instant messaging and birthed the newsletter boom. Now we’re circling back to mail worth waiting for.
Protein XYZJulián Medrano Hoyos
Linguistic Homogenisation ≠ Kinda Chic
Why vocabulary is becoming dominated by labels rather than descriptors.
Protein XYZProtein

ARCHIVE

First published in Protein JOURNAL #14 in Feburary 2015, this piece examines the burgeoning fusion of the virtual and physical world. Kyle Chayka explores the apps Recho, which enables someone to leave a sound in a specific location for another to find later; Slight, which allows users to write a digital message and pin it to a physical spot; and Hi, where people can “create textual portraits of the places around them”.

As a result, he predicts a future where physical experiences are intensified by virtual ones, with this emerging technology creating a more physical internet. As Alexi Gunner’s Surveillance Chic, Mariella Agapiou’s Fourth Spaces and Tyla Jurgen's Rewilding The Internet demonstrates, 12 years on, Chayka’s prediction has become entrenched in reality.

The Internet of Places
A new wave of apps are bringing digital interaction into the real world. Rather than looking at your computer to see the next stage in the evolution of the internet, you should be looking out of the window.
Protein XYZKyle Chayka

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SEED CLUB is our decentralised research community where 450+ handpicked strategists, journalists, and cultural curators sow and grow all the SEEDS every day - identifying, analysing and explaining signals in culture. As a contributor you also have the opportunity to collaborate with Protein AGENCY on client projects as well as connect and learn from an incredibly diverse, smart and entertaining group of humans. Apply to join here.