If you have to do tedious work If you have to stand somewhere doing tedious work, at least make it interesting. Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture Useless work on useful things beautyworkboredom
The Great Blight of Dullness Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities Why Do All Websites Look the Same?Scenes of thoroughgoing sameness euphonyboredom
Abstruse dullness Consider, from the Service's perspective, the advantages of the dull, the arcane, the mind-numbingly complex. The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities help insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it's interesting. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King boredominterest
Distraction To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King boredommelancholyanxietyattentionpain
What hell is He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers connected to nothing he'd ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind's own devices. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King boredom
Unborable The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King successboredombureaucracy
The Pale King A Novel by David Foster Wallace www.goodreads.com We change them and are changedDisplacementWhat's wrong?Narrative codesAn enormous machine+21 More boredombureaucracy
Why Do All Websites Look the Same? An Article by Boris Müller modus.medium.com On the visual weariness of the web. The Great Blight of DullnessWhat On Earth is a Brutalist Website?All Social Networks Look The Same NowAll websites are just digital movie theaters now wwwboredominterfaces
Don't Write the Tedious Thing An Article by Maud Newton maudnewton.medium.com Ugh, now I have to write this boring part, I would think. I would spend a few days in active rebellion against this directive that I imagined the book was imposing. Then I would realize: this is my book! There are no rules! I can write it however I want! Also, I would think, if I’m bored by something that I believe I need to write, the reader undoubtedly will be too, if not because the subject is inherently boring, then because I myself find it so unbearably tedious to imagine discussing it for five pages. Often as not, I would remember some aspect of the subject that deeply interested me, something a little outside the way it’s usually perceived or written about. Then I would meditate on that, and soon I would be scribbling notes from an increasingly excited place until I found a way forward. A form of beginner’s mind. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind boredomwritinginterest
A Burglar's Guide to the City A Book by Geoff Manaugh burglarsguide.com To commune with the spaceEvery building is infinitePutting the streets to useTopology by other meansBurglary's White Whale+13 More Picking locks with audio technologyThe axis of movementLearning to walk through walls architecturecitiesurbanismcrimetheft
To commune with the space ...having realized long ago that the best way to commune with an architectural space was by breaking into it. crime
Every building is infinite For the burglar, every building is infinite. House of Leaves architecture
Putting the streets to use Tad Friend writes, if you build “nine hundred miles of sinuous highway and twenty-one thousand miles of tangled surface streets” in one city alone, then you’re going to find at least a few people who want to put those streets to use. This suggests that every city blooms with the kinds of crime most appropriate to its form. Burglary's White Whale transportationurbanismcrime
Topology by other means The burglar is a three-dimensional actor amid the two-dimensional surfaces and objects of the city. This means operating with a fundamentally different spatial sense of how architecture should work, and how one room could be connected to another. It means seeing how a building can be stented: engineering short-circuits where mere civilians, altogether less aggressive users of the city, would never expect to find them. Burglary is topology pursued by other means: a new science of the city, proceeding by way of shortcuts, splices, and wormholes. spacetopology
Burglary's White Whale If all cities already contain the crimes that will occur there, then, taken to its logical conclusion, this suggests there might be a kind of Moby-Dick of crime, a White Whale of urban burglary: a town or city so badly designed that the entire place can be robbed in one go. Putting the streets to useInvisible Cities
Tarzan of the concrete jungle Weissmuller was most famous for playing Tarzan, and swinging into his apartment from a ledge outside had a wild irony, like some new Tarzan of the concrete jungle updating the character for an urban age.
The source code for SimCity Local Code was Sorkin’s attempt to design a whole city from scratch—with one big twist. The whole thing had been written as if it were the byzantine, nearly impossible to follow codes and regulations for an entire, hypothetical metropolis. The effect is like stumbling upon the source code for SimCity. Sorkin’s exhaustively made point was that, if you know everything about a given metropolis, from its plumbing standards to its parking requirements, its sewer capacity to the borders of its school districts, then you could more or less accurately imagine the future form of that city from the ground up. Local Code: The Constitution of a City at 42º N Latitude rulesregulations
Architectural dark matter Every building had its rhythms. These service corridors were the internal hinterlands—the architectural dark matter—so beloved by Bill Mason. Sonorisms I euphonyinfrastructure
Vamburglars Burglary was originally only possible in a household or dwelling; the very word contains an etymological variant on the Latin burgus, for “castle” or “fortified home” (from which other words, such as burgher and even borough, also derive). Common law definitions of burglary also originally required the person to break into a house or dwelling at night. Giving historical burglary an oddly vampiric dimension, you could not, legally speaking, be a burglar while the sun was still out. darkness
The close Think of it as an invisible geometric shape perceptible only to lawyers—a conceptual pane of glass that might not have kept the rain out but could, for legal purposes, be used to define the original limits of the car’s interior. This is the close, and defining it is ultimately just a form of connecting the dots: drawing an imaginary line from the corner of an open window to the edge of a nearby wall to the front gate of a home garden, and so on. Breaking the close thus constitutes entry into a “protected interior” or “specified enclosure". law
To deter crime “To deter crime,” Cisneros explains, “spaces should convey to would-be intruders a strong sense that if they enter they are very likely to be observed, to be identified as intruders, and to have difficulty escaping.” Eyes on the street
Architectural sequences Noted designer and architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi would call the predictable repetition of events inside an architectural space a sequence: a linear series of actions and behaviors that are at least partially determined by the design of the space itself. Architectural screenplays architecturebehaviorux
Architectural screenplays Tschumi began to explore this notion through what he called screenplays: each “screenplay” was a black-and-white diagram breaking down a range of events that might occur inside an architectural space. Tschumi drew them in a way that resembled dance notation or the spatial analysis of a film scene. Architectural sequences
The City of Light Streetlights were one of many new patrol tools implemented by Louis XIV’s lieutenant general of police, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie. De la Reynie’s plan ordered that lanterns be hung over the streets every sixty feet—with the unintended side effect that Paris soon gained its popular moniker, the City of Light. The world’s most romantic city takes its nickname from a police operation. urbanism
Spatial expectations Loya, who served seven years in prison for multiple bank heists before becoming a writer, explained to me that it was during the getaway that he often had the best chance of thwarting people’s spatial expectations. In his case, this meant that what he did immediately after leaving the bank was often the most important decision of all. Bandits
The getaway to end all getaways Any attempt to track down the perfect getaway is made all the more complex because almost everything we know about burglary—including how they did (or did not) get away—comes from the burglars we’ve caught. As sociologist R. I. Mawby pithily phrases this dilemma, “Known burglars are unrepresentative of burglars in general.” Great methodological despair is hidden in such a comment. Studying burglary is thus a strangely Heisenbergian undertaking, riddled with uncertainty and distorted by moving data points. The getaway to end all getaways—the one that leaves us all scratching our heads—to no small extent remains impossible to study. failure
Every heist is a counterdesign Heists obsess people because of what they reveal about architecture’s peculiar power: the design of new ways of moving through the world. Every heist is thus just a counterdesign—a response to the original architect. crimearchitecture
All the things we want to do This is precisely where “burglary” becomes a myth, a symbol, a metaphor: it stands in for all the things people really want to do with the built environment, what they really want to do to sidestep the obstacles of their lives. Rage rooms urbanismlife