The Mineral Turn

Michelle Santiago Cortés on the rockness of the internet.

Earlier this year, the latest addition to the American Museum of Natural History–the Gilder Center–was revealed to the public. The stone facade was made with milford pink granite from the same quarry that supplied the museum’s Central Park West entrance. Inside, a five-story structure with cavernous contours takes inspiration from the American Southwest and, weirdly, the Manhattan subway. The @dank.lloyd.wright architecture meme account compared it to the inside of an ant hill. It’s bad for a building to look like a rock. But I remember when my family visited the museum. The gift shop had barrels of rocks I fiendishly stuffed into a velvet bag as souvenirs. Back home, I sorted them by size and color for fun. When I became a teenager, I learned that my museum haul included a few rose quartz and amethyst crystals, for luck in love and creativity, respectively.

New Age revivalism in the late 2010’s triggered a millennial crystal craze that honed in on the healing powers of rocks. Magazines wrote about how Kim Kardashian turned to citrine and rose quartz after a brush with violence in Paris. Wall Streeters spent $10,000 on moldavite. Gwyneth Paltrow insisted jade go, you guessed it, up the vagina. Crystal healing was both a pseudoscience and a religion. But most importantly, crystals were a multi-billion dollar industry.

Crystals were the perfect complement to the zero interest rate environment (aka ZIRP) pumping the start-ups of Silicon Valley, so named for the semiconductors used in computer circuits. During the crystal craze, it was often noted that quartz is the most common form of crystalline silica, otherwise known as silicon dioxide. “Media materiality is not contained in the machines, even if the machines themselves contain a planet,” Jussi Parikka writes in Geology of Media. Literally: it takes a lot of rocks and minerals to make computers and run the internet.

Both worlds–New Age revivalism and abstract, emerging technologies– emphasized the alleged powers of the human mind. Whether it takes the form of ingenuity or manifestation, desktops or altars, goal-setting or intention-setting, the crystal was a symbolic anchor for the myth that humans could transcend the world through mastery.

Parikka, a professor of technology culture and aesthetics writes about “the impossibility of detaching the political from the natural, the geopolitical from the geological.” Unlike crystals, we don’t harness the power of rocks. Instead, rocks transcend us: “Humans leave their mark, and the earth carries it forward as an archive.” We use crystals, but rocks use us.

On TikTok, rocks are an increasingly popular hobby. Tumbling videos demonstrate that every rock is a real treasure, all you have to do is grind away at its rough sedimentary exterior. I didn't care much for pottery until this especially stylish ceramicist on TikTok walked me through how relatively simple it is to harvest your own clay. This led me down the YouTube rabbit hole of rock hunters and rock hounds, a world of middle-aged white dudes with an avuncular enthusiasm for amateur geology.

This summer in Bed-Stuy, Dear Friend Books hosted a rock gathering that invited people to exchange or show off cool rocks. Dear Friend Books is the exact kind of dimly-lit bookstore selling semi-precious used books and $7 teas you would expect to host such a romantic event as a rock exchange. The gatherings are organized by @reallynicestones, an Instagram account run by furniture designer Gregory Beson that shares cool photos of just that, stones that look really nice. In theory, all stones are really nice, but @reallynicestones favors rocks that double as design objects: striped wishing stones, jagged architectural rocks, and smooth pebbles. (No rainbow bismuths or blushing rose quartz.)

Closer to the mainstream art world, an exhibit at the Center for Craft called NEO MINERALIA takes a speculative approach, conceiving new categories of “post-natural rocks.” If you read a lot about “the Anthropocene” (me, sorry) and shop at APOC Store (also me, apologies), you will–undoubtedly–fuck with these rocks. Ten artists from around the world presented their rock formations made up of plastic, e-waste, and even data. On Instagram, the show’s curator Oscar Salguero takes a grid-by-grid approach to showcasing these neo-minerals, not unlike @realltynicestone’s tribute feed. His show asks viewers to “read, feel, and listen to rocks in new ways.”

A similar mineral awareness is creeping into fashion. In June, Los Angeles boutique Maimoun released a series of eight “stoneware earrings” by “stone collector, curator, and portraitist” Avery Gregory. Of the original eight only two pairs are currently available. According to Gregory’s Maimoun page, the artist typically works in assemblages of found stone to create sculptures with a focus on materiality (a fancy word for rock-ness) that in this case, had been “translated for Maimoun into simple post earrings.” The collection included stones in graphite-gray, calcium green, and clay red. Some rocks were Flintstone-esque, others geodesic, with the occasional fossil swirl. Emphasis is on the unpolished, the mineral, and the austere. Now is the time for disciplined commitment to preserving the integrity of rocks.

The best thing about rocks is their rockness. The thing-ness of the thing that makes it thing. To consider the rockness of a phone or a computer is to hold its weight, feel its heat, smell its metal. Rockness isn’t mythical or transcendent, but it is much more than any singular human body can experience through her senses. Parikka, one last time: “Digital culture starts in the depths and deep times of the planet.”

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• GOLFCORE, VOLUME ONE, golfcore music from Drew Millard, who we interviewed about his book How Golf Can Save Your Life (Bandcamp)

• Introducing Martine Rose Sports Television (Dazed)

• A Safdie brothers documentary about… telemarketers! (Vulture)

• New Mitski single, “Bug Like An Angel” (YouTube)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• The Art of Co-Hosting, a short and easy read on the radical potential of alternative digital infrastructures (SFPC Blog)

• A Q&A about archiving the trans internet (The Baffler)

• The World’s Last Internet Cafes (Rest of World) |

  • I used to love my local internet café–you could get your phone screen replaced, recycle your e-waste, and meet friends for coffee all in one place. Perhaps a much-needed third place?

• From our Discord community: My Beautiful Friend, envy as a way of life (The Point Magazine)