RADAR
Curated with taste, commented with conviction.
Tech & Society
Every new medium breaks the world before we figure it out
In this interview, novelist Daniel Kehlmann draws a direct line between the printing press and today's information crisis: new media reliably generates waves of propaganda, confusion, and violence before societies develop the tools to make sense of them.
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The printing press didn't just spread knowledge — it first spread chaos. Kehlmann's point is quietly devastating: the Thirty Years' War, one of Europe's bloodiest conflicts, was partly a media crisis. People suddenly had access to an overwhelming flood of competing narratives, with no way to distinguish a serious text from a political hit piece. Sound familiar?
What's striking is the structural inevitability of it. It's not that bad actors uniquely exploited the press — it's that every new medium has a phase where the infrastructure of trust hasn't caught up with the infrastructure of distribution. Gutenberg before fact-checkers. Facebook before content moderation. TikTok before anyone agreed on what "real" looks like.
Kehlmann is oddly optimistic: societies do eventually build those structures. The chaos has an end. But his caveat is the one that stings — back then, it took thirty years of war and a third of Germany's population. We got the internet in the 90s and we're still mid-carnage.
The uncomfortable implication: we may not be living through a crisis of bad actors or broken platforms. We may just be living through the standard transition period — the one that always happens, always hurts, and always eventually passes. The question is what gets lost in the meantime.
Media & Culture
Fancy sneakers went mainstream. Nobody noticed because everyone was already wearing them
A documentary tracing sneaker collecting from niche subculture to global market, following collectors, designers and resellers across the US and Japan to chart how limited-edition kicks became simultaneously art object, financial instrument and everyday obsession.
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The film spends most of its time on extremes — the collector with 5,000 pairs in a storage unit he never visits, the riots outside limited releases, the machete found on the pavement outside a shoe store — and in doing so slightly misses its own story. The UPS man wearing chocolate Adidas is a throwaway line.
What actually happened to sneakers is quieter and more pervasive than anything the film's most colourful characters illustrate. The sneakerheadz subculture didn't stay a subculture that grew; it dissolved into everyday life. Luxury brands started doing design sneakers because their customers expected them to. Parents who never tracked a release date have strong feelings about their running shoes. The average wardrobe now contains more pairs than it did a generation ago, with no particular occasion attached to most of them.
The film frames this as a victory for the culture. It's more accurately the end of it as a subculture — and the beginning of something larger. When everyone is at least a little bit a sneakerhead, the culture stopped needing a name. As David Foster Wallace put it in his Kenyon commencement address: "There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'"