culture
Cupcakes and froyo
A squeezable nugget of comfort
I was waiting for the perfect image to start blogging the idea, and last week supplied one: the Celestial Buddies plush toy that rode on the Crew Dragon test flight. The symbolism is perfect: an oddly satisfying little squeezable nugget of comfort within the disorienting, weird domesticity of a spaceship.
Domestic cozy is in an attitude, emerging socioeconomic posture, and aesthetic, that is in many ways the antithesis of premium mediocrity. Unsurprisingly, it takes its cues from the marginal shadow behaviors of premium mediocrity.
The Big Lie
“We only give them what they want.”
This is The Big Lie of mass culture and of debased art, and also it is the weak excuse for the cultural default of many designers.
Millennials and Gen. Z
I made a prediction on Twitter on February 6th: If Millennials (b. 1980 – 2000) were the premium mediocre generation, Gen Z (b. 2000 – 2020) is going to be the domestic cozy generation.
Cultural relevance
More than ever, people are choosing how to spend their time based on the amount of attention they can garner—and you and I are no exception. Everyone is susceptible to this logic. But what I want to argue in this piece is that tech startup founders are particularly susceptible to this tendency.
Working at and around startups for several years, I’ve noticed many founders prioritizing culture, visibility, and perception over product, customer development, and strategy. Maybe this is to be expected in a time where culture moves faster and is perceived as more important than ever. But I find it unusual that the tech industry seems unaware of a whole class of typical mistakes founders make in pursuit of cultural relevance.
Avant-Garde and Kitsch
An Essay by Clement GreenbergCapitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it is still capable of producing becomes almost invariably a threat to its own existence.
The Third Way
An Article by Kevin KellyBut all the civilized cities of the world were also filled with third places that people loved. Not quite private, not quite public, these third places were intimate but open to anyone. Like settling down at a table at a cafe. It felt like your space, but you were not the landlord. They were public, open spaces that you could “own” for a while.
…We need a new third category of work — something between “employee” and “not an employee”—that encompasses digital gig laborers. AirBnB is neither a hotel, nor a private resident. It is a third thing, and we need to create a new category to deal with it…This is the era of the third way.
You Don't Need To Do The Farmhouse Home Aesthetic When You Decorate
An Article by Kate WagnerIt took two decades for HGTV and its ilk to streamline the process of creating design hegemony — to perfect the concept of having multiple shows congeal around the same aesthetic rather than let them exist at the whims of their individual hosts, as was more the case in the 2000s. While previous eras of design (think midcentury modernism) were spearheaded by architects, interior designers, and other tastemakers, in the late ’90s, capital-A Architecture lost interest in the home — deconstructivist ideas and new, high-tech forms were better suited to museums and universities — and a coalition of real estate developers, home improvement and furniture stores, and TV decorators stepped in to take their place. The worlds of high culture and popular consumption in residential design have never been more separate, and, in this critic’s opinion, both suffer as a result.
Class 1 / Class 2 Problems
An Article by Kevin KellyThere are two classes of problems caused by new technology. Class 1 problems are due to it not working perfectly. Class 2 problems are due to it working perfectly.
...Class 1 problems arise early and they are easy to imagine. Usually market forces will solve them. You could say, most Class 1 problems are solved along the way as they rush to become Class 2 problems. Class 2 problems are much harder to solve because they require more than just the invisible hand of the market to overcome them.
...Class 1 problems are caused by technology that is not perfect, and are solved by the marketplace. Class 2 problems are caused by technology that is perfect, and must be solved by extra-market forces such as cultural norms, regulation, and social imagination.
Monoskop
A WebsiteMonoskop is a wiki for the arts, media and humanities.
Scenius
Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.
Premium Mediocre
An Article from Ribbonfarm by Venkatesh Rao
The Real World of Technology
Technology is a system
Technology is not the sum of the artifacts, of the wheels and gears, of the rails and electronic transmitters. Technology is a system. It entails far more than its individual material components. Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset.
Fish and water
How does one speak about something that is both fish and water, means as well as end?
Defining activities
One has to keep in mind how much the technology of doing something defines the activity itself.
Holistic and prescriptive technologies
Holistic technologies are normally associated with the notion of craft. Artisans, be they potters, weavers, metal-smiths, or cooks, control the process of their own work from beginning to finish. Using holistic technologies does not mean that people do not work together, but the way in which they work together leaves the individual worker in control of a particular process of creating or doing something.
The opposite is specialization by process; this I call prescriptive technology. Here, the making or doing of something is broken down into clearly identifiable steps. Each step is carried out by a separate worker, or group or workers, who need to be familiar only with the skills of performing that one step. This is what is normally meant by "division of labor".
That which requires caring
Today's real world of technology is characterized by the dominance of prescriptive technologies.
The temptation to design more or less everything according to prescriptive and broken-up technologies is so strong that it is even applied to those tasks that should be conducted in a holistic way. Any tasks that require caring, whether for people or nature, any tasks that require immediate feedback and adjustment, are best done holistically. Such tasks cannot be planed, coordinated, and controlled the way prescriptive tasks must be.
Prescriptive technologies eliminate the occasions for decision-making and judgment in general and especially for the making of principled decisions. Any goal of the technology is incorporated a priori in the design and is not negotiable.
One-machine policy
Today population forecasts are based on extensive and reliable data. However, no such demographic base exists for the world's growing population of machines and devices. Now may be the time to take machine demography seriously and enter into real discussions about machine population control.
The downgrading of experience
Today scientific constructs have become the model of describing reality rather than one of the ways of describing life around us. As a consequence there has been a very marked decrease in the reliance of people on their own experience and their own senses.
The downgrading of experience and the glorification of expertise is a very significant feature of the real world of technology.
Reciprocity
Whenever human activities incorporate machines or rigidly prescribed procedures, the modes of human interaction change. In general, technical arrangements reduce or eliminate reciprocity. Reciprocity is some manner of interactive give and take, a genuine communication among interacting parties.
Instruments of cooperation
When work isn't shared, the instruments of cooperation – listening, taking note, adjusting – atrophy like muscles that are no longer in use.
When all you have is a hammer
The success and spread of a particular tool – and this tool can be organizational or administrative as well as mechanical – has another consequence. Any task tends to be structured by the available tools. It can appear that the available tools represent the best or even the only way to deal with a situation.
Thus is may be wise, when communities are faced with new technological solutions to existing problems, to ask what these techniques may prevent and not only to check what the techniques promise to do.
Consumption
The proponents of technology in the 1840s were very enthusiastic about replacing workers with machines. But somehow I find no indication that they realized that while production could be carried out with few workers and still run to high outputs, buyers would be needed for those outputs. The realization that though the need for workers decreased, the need for purchasers could increase, did not seem to be part of the discourse on the machinery question. Since then, however, technology and its promoters have had to create a social institution – the consumer – in order to deal with the increasingly tricky problem that machines can produce but it is usually people who consume.
Bridges as walls
The biographer of Robert Moses, Robert A. Caro, refers to the bridges and underpasses of the famed New York State parkways. These bridges and underpasses are quite low, intentionally specified by Moses to allow only private cars to pass. All those who traveled by bus because they were poor or black or both were barred from the use and enjoyment of the parkland and its "public amenities" by the technical design of the bridges. Even at the time of Robert Moses, a political statement of the form "We don't want them blacks in our parks" would have been unacceptable in New York State. But a technological expression of the same prejudice appeared to be all right. Of course, to the public the intent of the design became evident only after it was executed, and then the bridges were there.
Designed to be ruins
I don't want to talk here about the grand designs of the past – the sort of thing one finds in majestic cities, in palaces and temples; the sorts of layouts that brought a friend of mine to sum up his first impression of Washington D.C. by saying, "The place seems to be designed to be ruins."
Little sense of season
The real world of technology denies the existence and the reality of nature. For instance, there is little sense of season as one walks through a North American or western European supermarket.
Just as there is a little sense of season, there is little sense of climate. Everything possible is done to equalize the ambiance – to construct and environment that is warm in the winter, cool in the summer.
Humility
Maybe what the real world of technology needs more than anything else are citizens with a sense of humility – the humility of Kepler or Newton, who studied the universe but knew they were not asked to run it.
Technological middle age
In the automobile's technological middle age, it is hard, if not impossible, to tune or repair one's own vehicle. Technical standardization of cars has occurred, and with it the elimination of the user's access to the machine itself. At the same time, the infrastructures that once served those who did not use automobiles atrophied and vanished. Some may say they were deliberately starved out. Railways gave way to more and more roadways. And thus a technology that had been perceived to liberate its users began to enslave them.
All things change
The authors of this prognostication evidently assumed that the introduction of the sewing machine would result in more sewing – and easier sewing – by those who had always sewn. They would do the work they had always done in an unchanged setting. Reality turned out to be quite different.
It should be evident by now that there is no such thing as "just introducing" a new gadget to do one particular task. It is foolish to assume that everything else in such a situation will remain the same; all things change when one thing changes.
Exploiting emotion
There are no shortcuts to the investment of time and care in friendship and human bonding, and it is fraudulent to pretend otherwise. When human loneliness becomes a source of income for others through devices, we'd better stop and think a bit about the place of human needs in the real world of technology.
The receiving end
At times it helps to rephrase an observation in line with a perspective from the receiving end of technology. When my colleagues in the field of cold-water engineering speak of "ice-infested waters", I am tempted to think of "rig-infested oceans". Language is a fine barometer of values and priorities. As such it deserves careful attention.
Speaking people
Surely those who oversee and guide municipal transportation systems ought to use public transit during their work days. Why not put a clause to that effect in their job description or contract?
Requiring those whose work has a major impact on people's lives to experience some of the impact is really not too much ask. It means that they speak "people" rather than French, Cree, or Spanish.
Ping-pong patterns
The role of asynchronicity in unraveling social and political patterns without apparent replacement with other patterns cannot be overestimated. The ping-pong pattern of verbal communication is no longer tied to space or time.
Mechanisms and organisms
"Kant described a mechanism as a functional unity, in which the parts exist for one another in the performance of a particular function.
An organism, on the other hand, is a functional and structural unity in which the parts exist for and by means of one another in the expression of a particular nature.
This means that the parts of an organism – leaves, roots, flowers, limbs, eyes, heart, brain – are not made independently and then assembled, as in a machine, but arise as a result of interactions within the developing organism."
— Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed His Spots