Archive for category Rambles
Valves, Grids and Soundproofed Condos
In the 1980s, James Burke hosted a BBC documentary series with the charmingly understated title The Day the Universe Changed. It was a look back at what Burke considered key moments in the ‘progression’ of ‘mankind’ – two words that, even a short 30 years later, one can hardly use without the scare quotes.
The clip above is typical, both in its bombastic rhetoric, but also in what might be its anachronism: it says the power that led to space travel is chief among humanity’s achievements, even more so than the microcomputer, a claim that might either not be very accurate – or perhaps be very prescient. The episodes all focus on one key insight, and hit all the things you’d expect for an unabashedly Eurocentric show: the Renaissance, the scientific method, Darwin, Einstein and so on.
Still – though these now seem equal parts obvious and worthy of critique, as a child I remember the thing that fascinated me most was there might be a day that changed the universe. In part, I dug it because it was reductive: it gave me simple things to hold on to and say “this one thing here changed history”. But what also set my mind-a-turnin’ (that was how we spoke in Essex in the 80s) was the idea that an entire swirl of historical change – a massive, overlapped network of consequence and upheaval – might be triggered by the events of one day. That the show never said it did was, I think, a bit too subtle for my kid brain to grapple with. I just dug the concept.
Of course now, as an adult, I can’t abide by that kind of reductionist approach because it just feels dishonest. Part of this has to do with the subjectivity of the choices involved in picking one thing. If the printing press was so crucial, it’s hard not to think of all the things that went into its creation. Who figured out how to refine iron? Who invented the cog? Or the roller? Or the pulley? Didn’t all these things count too? It all moves toward a kind of infinite regression.
But it does make me wonder if sometimes there aren’t small, obscure and overlooked inventions that allow for the things we now take for granted – some seemingly insignificant thing without which things like microcomputers or spaceships or genetic engineering couldn’t exist. What if the cog was the very core of what made us human?
The importance of small parts of larger networks is something I’ve wondered about in the past. For some reason while living in the Irish countryside, I spent a rather silly amount of time wondering about an ‘invention’ for use in green homes. A given house would have its own power generation like solar and wind, but at the point the house connected to the electric grid, there would be a box that would dynamically adjust the flow of incoming electricity. When a house was making enough, it would stop accepting power from outside, while on a cloudless, windless today (or whatever) it’d open ‘er up, so to speak. The mysterious device (‘box’ being the extent of the technical details of my imagining) would be this tiny yet crucial thing to help popularize green power, because it would make it easy and seamless to slowly switch.
Of course, something like that probably existed then. And I’m almost sure it exists now, though I don’t even know how to search for it (what would it even be called?*). But the only reason I remember it is because it was the start of me waking up to the idea that in the messy network of relations that is modern society, sometimes the things that help are those that control the flow of stuff between people and the social and economic structures they are a part of. You need valves for how you connect to things. Sometimes you want more, sometimes less; it’s the control the valve gives you that helps.
That issue is one that stuck with me. And it seems few areas are as in need of innovative solutions to help make sense and order out of chaos as cities. Among the plethora of challenges facing urban areas are how to solve a growing conflict between the luxuries of suburban living and a vision of sustainable urban life.
Now, to many people, the suburbs aren’t a ‘luxury’ at all; they are punishment, or a form of voluntary excommunication. But something urbanites often overlook is that much of the middle class suburban struggle is the fight to get your own space. Think about it: for so many, like immigrants and the working poor, the long march to ‘get a detached house in the ‘burbs’ is a dream because for years, ‘they’ (by which I actually mean ‘we’) have fought to move out of crowded, clustered living spaces in which others’ lives impinge on yours to finally have your own backyard and a house that can be as loud or as quite as one wants. The ‘emptiness’ of the suburbs is precisely the appeal because you have carved out a place for yourself where you an in more control of how much the overwhelming complexity of modern life affects you. You’ve found a valve for the flow of society into your life – and it’s one that isn’t tenable any more.
This is what you give up to live in the hustle and bustle of a city. You share space with people. You share their noise, you share their smells, their traffic, their activities. For some of us, this is a worthwhile sacrifice. But for many I know, it is not.
Which brings me to soundproofing. Yes, I know, that was rather circuitous, but here’s what I mean. For reasons of both economics (here’s a great interview with Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi on the subject) and sustainability, mass suburban living is no longer possible. As a result, we now need to figure out ways to mitigate the downsides of living in cramped, urban spaces like condos and apartments so that more and more people will want to live there.
So why are people not focusing on soundproofing? It seems innocuous, even silly; but the capacity to live one’s life freely of invasion by others’ sounds is a major part of what makes one feel in control of one’s space. Imagine how much less annoying condo life might be if you would never have the sounds of others’ lives invading your space, sleep and day-to-day existence.
Right now, the reason no developer really is pushing it is the obvious economic factor. But it seems like one of those ideas that could start in the luxury market and work its way down. It’s difficult to imagine it could add more than $10,000 to the price of a half million dollar condo to build in soundproofing material to the walls and floor. Push it, and make the windows and doors soundproof, and you might creep up to $15-20k. But even in 10 years, that’d surely halve, if not more. Moreover, costs could be signficantly reduced if the insulation currently used by builders were simply changed to one with soundproofing qualities.
We need to find a way to mitigate the downsides of urban living to make it more appealing to everyone. While I can already envision people who’d snarkily say something about the ‘sterility of boxes disconnected from the world’, it’s a naive view. In many places – especially somewhere like Toronto, that is seeing massive growth in downtown density and condo buildings – some solution is needed to make the inevitable difficulties of downtown living less inevitable. And maybe expanding the environmental, economic and social benefits of urbanization might be helped along by something as insignificant and unimportant as a bit of foam between walls.
*What would a box be called that ‘directs’ energy and was invented by me?… Why, The Navigator of course! Heyyo!
Banksy, Buying Fair-Trade at Walmart
Andrew Potter – the guy who wrote The Authenticity Hoax and The Rebel Sell – has a great post on the reaction to that Simpsons Banksy intro, one that puts forth what I think is actually a vital and necessary response to current North American leftism.
Writing about artistic rebellion against capitalism, Potter smartly and astutely points out that the kind of parodic, ironic critique exemplified by Banksy’s Simpsons intro relies on the idea that dissent ‘from within’ is important. But Potter argues that “dissent doesn’t threaten capitalism, because capitalism does not require the sort of conformity that the dissent purports to subvert”. To wit, contrarian reactions against capitalism are often assertions of individual freedom and intelligence more than anything else, and can easily be commodified: don’t buy this corrupted thing, but this organic, local, well-sourced thing instead.
But in something like Walmart’s recent announcement that it will start sourcing things from local farmers, anti-capitalists often respond by dismissing them out of hand because of a perception that moves perpetuated by market concerns cannot possibly be good. As Potter writes:
Capitalists absorb legitimate critiques in ways that actually make the world a better place. As I argue in this essay looking at No Logo ten years on, the mainstreaming of old critiques is a success story:“From eco- to organic, fair trade to locally sourced, sweatshop safe to dolphin friendly, sales pitches that 10 years ago would have reeked of patchouli oil and set the red baiters on full alert are now thoroughly mainstream. Companies like Whole Foods (and its quarterly “5 Percent Day,” when each location donates 5 percent of its net sales to a nonprofit) or the Vermont-based Seventh Generation (a natural soap and detergent company devoted to all forms of sustainability, whose co-founder and executive chairman is known as the “inspired protagonist” of the firm) are massively successful operations.”This is only a bad thing if you think that the point of dissent is not to change the system for the better, but to bring it down entirely.
That last line feels key to me, and is something that, until someone comes up with a better response than authoritarian socialism, needs to be repeated.
BUT – and it’s a big one – if Potter is arguing that capitalism’s capacity to absorb critique can make the world a better place (which I agree with) it is also that same capacity that simultaneously makes the world worse.
After all, if contemporary capitalism works by beckoning us to enjoy and feel good – whether that pleasure comes from fast food, a sex toy or ethical satisfaction at having bought fair trade – it means that capitalism’s capacity to ameliorate the world only works when those improvements have market value.
But the difficulty with capitalism is that issues or problems that cannot be incorporated into markets and have no to little cultural currency – say, the drudgery of factory work, health concerns of workers, the massive disparity between the ‘first world’ and the Global South, or the use of that disparity to fuel a manufacturing economy – then capitalism’s capacity to absorb critiques becomes a massive elision, this gaping hole into which the world’s misery is poured. To wit, the same capitalist process of enjoyment that allows for the useful incorporation of fair trade or local farming is the same process that allows for massive southern poverty, Western control of the IMF, or environmental abuses in places we’ve never heard of. The problem with relying on the market’s capacity to respond is that there is no necessary concordance between those ideas and issues with market value and those with ethical, environmental or cultural value.
So sure, celebrate when the markets react to make the world a better place. But also keep in mind that it’s the very same process that enables capitalism’s most egregious and aggressive moments of terror, suffering and deprivation.
Note: The animated Zizek video is so so so good.
Writing on Film
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Rambles on August 6, 2010
This may be nothing at all, but I feel like I’m noticing a trend: Film is suddenly being infiltrated by text.
I saw this first in Zombieland, in which rules were written on the screen as the film proceeded. This you can see above.
Second, I saw this in the new BBC series Sherlock. In one of the opening scenes, when a group of people all receive the same text message, we see that text appear above each person’s phone.
And third, as half of Toronto knows, overlayed text forms part of the film itself in Scott Pilgrim, a movie that obviously draws from its ‘video game-inspired comic’ roots.
So, is the obvious conclusion too obvious? That screens, now the cultural home of both moving pictures and text, cannot help but show both at the same time?
Some Lazy (But Hopefully Interesting) Links
So, clearly I’m having a bit of trouble keeping this blog updated regularly. It’s not that I can’t think of anything to write – I just can’t seem to find the time or focus to put ideas together coherently (as my last post was obvious testament to). So in the meantime, I’ll be a little lazy and link you to writing I’ve done elsewhere:
- At Techi, I tried my best to do a mainstream version of a quasi-Marxist critique of the Facebook privacy backtrack. It’s only a fraction of what I wanted to say, but attention span etc. The thing I’m actually much more interested in – but just wouldn’t fly on a blog with a general readership – is to think about the links between the Death of Privacy and the Death of the Author. We’re edgy about this privacy business because of the way the signs and texts of identity disseminate multiply and are then repurposed against our original intention. So there’s an obvious, if not particularly literal, connection between Barthes and Zuckerberg, and it seems it would be interesting to think about how we are being asked to reconceptualise the self in relation to its online functioning – it scatters, it spreads, yet, like the author function that Foucault articulated, we still need a discourse of the bodily or physical self in order to still talk about selves in general.
- Also at Techi, I tried to round up some ‘trends’ (yeah yeah, shut up) in interface technology. Not the usual abstract rambling about how I think interfaces are to tech what language is to reality, but it might interest those of you who share my fascination with UI’s.
- Finally, a little while ago I spent a couple of days at Mesh – Canada’s Web Conference – and wrote things up for Torontoist. I’ll be doing the same for the first NXNEi when it shows up later this month. Oh, I never wrote about it, but I was, erm, on a panel for some ‘social media for PR people’ thingy at the Royal York with Sarah Evans and the awesomeness that is Rea. The main thing of note – other than the shocking feeling that I almost knew what I was talking about – was that ‘PR professionals’ are almost exclusively women, who are young, well-dressed and stereotypically attractive. It was weird.
Bombs Over District 9
For more reasons than I can count, I’m tired of hating things. I’m tired of saying to myself “you shouldn’t enjoy this film – it’s racist”. I can feel myself becoming an anachronism – out of time, in more ways than one.
As I sat there, reading about “Bombs over Baghdad”, something tweaked inside my brain.
I had seen District 9 a couple of nights before, and the film had stymied me. I could see how interesting the premise was, how well it was done. But I was troubled. The representation of both the black and alien characters as savages irked me, as if the film were setting up stereotypes only to not knock them down. It reminded me of the Star Trek model of tolerance: when we find that rare alien who expresses the same liberal values, then we finally see our common ground. Maybe there’s hope for them yet. If I were feeling even more cynical than usual, Christopher would be Barack Obama.
The cop-out, liberal-humanist ending – look, deep down, those who are different are actually just like us – was played out; it’s been repeated thousands of times in seemingly every film ever made and the fact that this film also went there didn’t just bore me – it made me angry.
These were the things that went through my mind.
It was art that made me who I am. When art expresses beliefs that aren’t mine, become potential fodder for ideologies I oppose, I cringe. I switch the screen off. I move away. I decry, I spit and foam at the mouth. “These things are not me!”, I exclaim. These things are not me.
The overwhelmingly positive web-geek reaction left me puzzled, as if suddenly I were the only one in a room full of sophisticates chewing with his mouth open.
There was one fascinating line in District 9. It was when Wikus says something about ‘the prawns having no sense of property or ownership’. That was difference. That was the insurmountable barrier. That was interesting.
Having spent years steeped in contemporary cultural theory, this was the moment I was expecting big things. Something new. Not the same old story.
But was it?
“OutKast’s B.O.B. is the best because it says YES to everything we are and compresses it to pure energy.” -Tim
“B.O.B” works because it just fucking goes. It’s like someone put a brick on the accelerator at the beginning of the song, and you just can’t help but be carried along with it, in its energy, in its relentless, restless drive. Like the decade it heralded, the song is insatiable in its push to move on to the next moment.
Dance. Drink. Fuck. Lick. Smoke. Abandon yourself. Enjoy.
It was impossible not to be inundated with a thousand opinions of District 9 that were the opposite of mine. They weren’t just babble. They were smart, well-argued perspectives, ones that I could see myself agreeing with someday. Something was different here. Something about art had changed.
Art is not diminished. But it is now something else.
The threat and the danger of art was always its capacity to create subjects in its image. Sexist art begat sexist people. Racist art encouraged racism. This is why we had to force criticism into a box. We had to make it fit to make the world a better a place.
Art made people who they were. This is now a lie.
I’m trying to express something I don’t have words for. This reassures me. I’m trying to express something that exists in the future. Let’s create a picture.
You stand at the edge of the ocean. The tide washes over you. It never goes in. It just comes against you, over and over and over again. It is endless.
You used to get breaks. Breathers. Where you could collect yourself and thoughts and sink your feet a little into the sand. “There,” you thought. Some respite. Ah. This is who I am.
No longer.
The rushing torrent never ends.
“B.O.B” says yes to everything because it can.
Because the tide is always coming in and you are a rock, stable and worn, fixed and malleable.
“District 9 is a racist film!” you say. But it doesn’t matter. Because minds have been made up before. They are also rocks in the tide. And the stream rushes past them too.
Art is not diminished. But it is something else.
The virtual is the canvas for your soul. While your insides were always outside, now the metaphor means something else.
The screen is blank and you are the projector.
And art is not diminished. But it is something else.
The End of Indie
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Pop Culture, Rambles, Theorizing the Web on August 11, 2009
Via the always great The Rumpus, Richard Nash writes on the ‘End of Indie’ – which I keep typing as the end of India. Anyway, I suppose this is a re-figuring of the death of the niche idea, but it’s more interesting in that, rather than only talking about the effects of ‘the death of indie’, he discusses the structures involved in producing culture:
All is changed, changed utterly. Indie doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s dead. Which is OK, because it won. Open source, Twitter. Indie won. Etsy. The irresistible decline of major labels and network TV and corporate publishing. Indie won. We won, but at the cost to many folks personally of suddenly becoming unnecessary. This was most visible in the last few years in the magazines like Punk Planet, Kitchen Sink, Clamor. But it’ll come for us all. You see, to the extent that indie meant anything, it was as its root word, independent. It was about seizing the means of production.
That last point is, I think, up for debate. Because you’ve seized the means of production, it doesn’t mean you’ve seized the networks of distribution or the means necessary to entice people to your work. That still (often) requires centralised pots of money or cultural capital. It’s hyperbolic to say the age of indie is over when we all know who Katy Perry is. But it ends on a more interesting note:
All things we tried to do with the means of production we seized in the 90’s, we have to continue do with the means of production that technology has handed to us in the 21st century. Moore’s Law is value-neutral, apolitical, amoral, just like Gutenberg’s press. Its how we use it.
So now the phase of indie is over, now that the monopoly on the production and distribution of knowledge, culture and opinion has been broken, what next, a new phase, a drive to, perhaps, create, maintain, defend a New Authenticity arises?—Ah, am I opening myself up for derision with that…? Never mind, I toss it up there, a wounded duck. Power will try to hide behind the people, let’s use a new authenticity to stop them.
It’s an odd, ambiguous ending, right? It seems to simultaneously suggest two monopolies: a centralised one of culture and opinion that has been broken; but another one called ‘power’ that lurks behind people, one that must be stopped with that (naive) rallying cry of indie, Authenticity. Fascinating. It exhibits that same push and pull between mainstream and indie even as it says that such binaries no longer hold.
To me, this means that the rumours of indie’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Not indie as ‘a movement’ or ‘an aesthetic’, mind you, but simply as a mindset that exists as a product of there being a mainstream. The question isn’t whether or not indie is dead; rather, it’s to ask what the balance will be between aesthetic culture produced by large corporations and individuals and small groups. And, just as interestingly to me, how will we speak about these things without simply replicating a discourse of centre and margin?
Song Lyrics That Describe the Blogosphere
Posted by Nav in Music, Pop Culture, Rambles on August 11, 2009
I’ve had this idea kicking around for some time now. After all, trying to actually describe various aspects of web culture I come across in dry academic language is, besides being difficult, not really all that much fun. In song lyrics though? Much easier. I’m also just interested in how we are going to create stories and art about this time in history without, ya’ know, starting short stories with lines like “It was dark out. He was on Twitter again.”
So, given that the term ‘blogosphere’ doesn’t describe much of anything these days, what I propose we do is collect song lyrics that describe various aspects of our online culture (so, very roughly, the North American, English-speaking web). Why? Because it’s fun and commentary at the same time. We could even have a hashtag if you like. Say… #bloglyrics or something (maybe you can think of a better one). We could put them on twitter.
I’ll get started with some simple, rather obvious ones I’ve thought of so far:
- “Everyone’s right and no-one is sorry / That’s the start and the end of the story”. -Nada Surf, “See These Bones“
- “A sense of purpose and a sense of skill, a sense of function but a disregard
We will not be the first, we won’t
You said you were going to conquer new frontiers,
Go stick your bloody head in the jaws of the beast,
We promised the world, we’d tame it, what were we hoping for??” -Bloc Party, “Pioneers“ - “I’m too busy acting like I’m not naive / I’ve seen it all / I was here first” – Nirvana, “Very Ape“.
That’s all I’ve got. To be honest, though, I’m more interested in what others come up with.
So… have at it.
From the Comments:
Tim: “I’ve got style / for miles and miles / so much style that it’s wasted.” -Pavement “Frontwards”.
xtian: “the cruelty’s so predictable /makes you sad on the stage/ though our love project has so much potential” -Of Montreal, “The Past is a Grotesque Animal:
“these walls are paper thin and everyone hears every little sound/
everyone’s a voyeur as they’re watching me watch them watch me right now/…
laugh hard, it’s a long way to the bank/
i can’t be blamed for nothing anymore” -Modest Mouse, “Paper Thin Walls”.
So, erm, I started a food blog…
I apologise to those of you who follow on me on Twitter for the repetition, but I wanted to let as many people as possible know that I’ve started a Toronto-centric food blog (sorry, Yank/Montreal/miscellaneous pals). Yes, yes, I know – go on, get your eye rolling over with. Another blog? Original! Well, I like food. A little too much, in fact. And as my little profile description over there says, I had to put my obsession with food somewhere. So I’m gonna’ write about it, because, for better or worse, that’s what I do.
It’s not just that though. I’m also increasingly concerned with the idea of ‘producing a vision of the local’ or whatever. I like my hometown and I like the stuff in it, so this new food blog is all part of that. It’s time for me to accept that this place is my home and not some transitionary phase on an incredibly prolonged, 20-year trip from London to New York.
The blog is called “What’s Next for Snacks?“. It’ll focus on reviews of restaurants, takeout joints, bars, etc., and will also include links to other Toronto sites’/blogs’ stories on the same topics. Essentially, if you’re in Toronto and you like food/beer/wine, I’ll be doing my best to cater to you, both with my own content and others’. If you’re looking for an explanation of the name, you’ll find that in the obligatory ‘welcome post‘.
So, perhaps even more so than with this site, I’m gonna’ lay down the typical “read it! subscribe! tell your friends!” shtick. It”ll be far more accessible and relevant than the clusterfuck that is Scrawled in Wax and, though the thought is actually a little depressing, I think it will end up with a larger readership than this 2 or 3 year old site.
Also, blogger, techie people – we need to talk about Posterous. It makes Tumblr look complicated and highbrow. Seriously, it’s almost ridiculous how foolproof they made the thing.
Anyway… enjoy!
Feminism shows up in the funniest places
Posted by Nav in Pop Culture, Rambles on July 31, 2009
Here, from Blogulator, an animated pitch for a sitcom called “A Fat Wife” that features a plump woman with a ‘surprisingly’ hot, successful husband. Get it? It’s like, the inverse. Clever, witty stuff.
A Temporary Diversion into Bloggy Onanism
I know, I know – you’re thinking “Nav, your entire blog is just self-indulgent, masturbatory nonsense”. But, dear reader, I’ll tell you why you’re wrong… because fuck you, that’s why! Ahem. Excuse me.
So, like everyone who does anything, lately I’ve been thinking about that thing I do: blogging, writing, twittering etc. I’ve recently found myself in the odd position of, on the one hand, really enjoying blogging for the first time in a while and, on the other, sorta’ frustrated that after 2 or 3 years of this I can’t seem to develop a larger audience.
So I just thought this post by Mark Evans, popular Canadian tech blogger (and co-founder of the Mesh Conference) was interesting and far less annoying than it’s title – “11 Reasons Why Blogs Still Matter” – would suggest. It’s neat and worth a quick skim for anyone who, like me, has occasionally found themselves wondering why the hell they keep doing this.
(P.S. No, don’t worry. You’re not about to be hit with a bunch of links on ‘the future of blogging’. I said I was feeling reflective – not stupid.)
