1. The clear, obvious reason that the company that did this does not have the best intentions is in the name. “Homeless”. What does that even mean in this context? Did they check to make sure the people they gave hotspots to don’t have a place to sleep at night? Or did they have to be people who are not only houseless, but hang around downtown, too (as if there are no homeless people in the suburbs)? What was the criteria? How does “homeless” factor in at all to the required task at hand? If this was just a job, or just charity, they could have taken out a Craiglist Ad. “Wanted: people without anything to do, to earn tips for providing Wifi to conference goers.” Just like a hundred other low-paid, sub-work gigs that are advertised and taken by people who need cash, every day of the year, in every city on earth. Not a mention of “homelessness” in that ad. And yet, we have the name: “Homeless Hotspots”. Their choice of an alliterative title for this start-up is the calling card of insensitivity and mockery. They might as well have called it “Bum Spots”, or something just as painfully derogatory.

2. All of which is to say, this is endemic of a huge perception problem regarding houselessness. One of the reasons that I use the corrected term “houseless” is that it points back to the actual problem. It hasn’t been converted into a class of untouchable people, “the homeless”. In American culture, “homeless” is something that you can “look like”. Something that you can “talk like”. It neglects to be aware of the facts of the issue of houselessness, which is that all kinds of people are without a place to take shelter at night. People with jobs, people without jobs, families, children, the elderly, students, and yes, people with mental health and substance abuse problems. All of these people are houseless; they are united by their lack of shelter, not, that they need to pick up some cash tips or find something to do with their lives. Of course, when we say “homeless”, we think of that class, of that particularly unwanted set of transients that cause problems in front of the the grocery store, block the sidewalk in the shopping district, or that we have to come uncomfortably close to on public transit. This lame hotspot idea does everything to reinforce that perception of an untouchable class, and nothing to alleviate the problem of a lack of affordable housing.

3. Houseless people don’t need cash. They need shelter. Of course, we all need cash, and those who are houseless often have a number of precarities. But the term defines the need, and it defines the specific problem. Houseless people do not need jobs, per se. They need a place to sleep at night, so they can be well rested in the morning to go to a job, or look for one. Houselessness does not define a state of “needing something to do”, it defines needing a place to go when one is doing what one does during the day.

3B. You know what people who are hard up really need? Transportation. Even when there are services available, they are often spread out across the city. And if you are houseless and forced to carry all your possessions with you all day long, that makes life pretty difficult. How do you get to the doctor? To a job interview? To a court date? Someone should point a start-up towards that problem. Oh yeah–not real profitable, probably.

4. There are start-ups to help the houseless. Here’s one in Portland: Right to Dream 2. Of course, it’s not trying to make money, it’s trying to overturn laws that make it illegal for people to sleep outside in the city. Their catchy slogan? “Sleep is a human right.” If you are concerned about houselessness, you should call your city government and ask them to make sure that tent cities are given permits.

5. I already complained on Twitter that a big stupid aspect of the Homeless Hotspots is that it gives a lot of bleeding hearts the right to sound self-righteous about houselessness, because now they can talk about houselessness in the same sentence as SXSW and 4G internet. I won’t really repeat that, because it doesn’t make me feel any better to complain about it, and just kind of annoyed. But, I do wish that the internet didn’t have to use annoying knee-jerk reactions to viral social media stories as the opportunity to actually educate people about social justice issues (cf. Uganda) but here we are. I guess no opportunity is a bad opportunity. So, just one more time: estimates guess that 3.5 million people experience homelessness in a given year in the United States. That is over 1% of the population. Almost none of them have Wifi hotspots.

6. So let’s say that this was just a program that paid people (any people willing to do so) to carry a Wifi hotspot. Okay, kind of interesting. Now, let’s say that the company trying this service created a pilot program to help people who are often on the streets (who may indeed by houseless) to get the first place in line for these programs. Okay, that’s more interesting. Then, let’s pretend that the company also started a bunch of on-the-street tech solutions, like quick cell phone charging, SIM card re-ups, Google Search Service, or single-use phone calls and phone cards, all provided by these foot-traffic retailers. Give them a Symbol device, and I bet you can have them trained in an hour. Now we’re talking. That is potentially a sustainable business model that would not only provide real jobs and provide a service. As the saying goes, the street finds a use for things, at that would be letting the street sell its own tech. Every single one of those services I just mentioned are not useful, but they are things that people on the street actively need, and are currently ripped off for by larger businesses, for whom it is not profitable to maintain a pay phone, or a public computer, etc. But this so-called start up is not letting the street find its own uses for things, it’s forcing the street to adopt to the needs of a tech conference.

Smashwords is trying to fight Paypal on the censorship issue. Good for them! What follows is clipped without internal edits from an email from Smashwords (I’m a Smashwords author, though none of my books are threatened by Paypal’s attempt at censorship.)

PAYPAL CENSORSHIP UPDATE
________________________________________

In case you haven’t heard, about two weeks ago, PayPal contacted Smashwords and
gave us a surprise ultimatum: Remove all titles containing bestiality, rape
or incest, otherwise they threatened to deactivate our PayPal account. We engaged
them in discussions and on Monday they gave us a temporary reprieve as we continue
to work in good faith to find a suitable solution.

PayPal tells us that their crackdown is necessary so that they can remain in
compliance with the requirements of the banks and credit card associations (likely
Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, though they didn’t mention them
by name).

Last Friday, I sent the following email to our erotica authors and publishers:
https://www.smashwords.com/press/release/27 Then on Monday, I issued an update,
and announced we would delay enforcement of PayPal’s guidelines so we and PayPal
could continue our discussions: https://www.smashwords.com/press/release/28

THE PROBLEM:

PayPal is asking us to censor legal fiction. Regardless of how one views topics
of rape, bestiality and incest, these topics are pervasive in mainstream fiction.
We believe this crackdown is really targeting erotica writers. This is unfair,
and it marks a slippery slope. We don’t want credit card companies or financial
institutions telling our authors what they can write and what readers can read.
Fiction is fantasy. It’s not real. It’s legal.

THE SOLUTION:

There’s no easy solution. Legally, PayPal and the credit card companies probably
have the right to decide how their services are used. Unfortunately, since they’re
the moneyrunners, they control the oxygen that feeds digital commerce.

Many Smashwords authors have suggested we find a different payment processor.
That’s not a good long term solution, because if credit card companies are behind
this, they’ll eventually force crackdowns elsewhere. PayPal works well for us.
In addition to running all credit card processing at the Smashwords.com store,
PayPal is how we pay all our authors outside the U.S. My conversations with
PayPal are ongoing and have been productive, yet I have no illusion that the
road ahead will be simple, or that the outcome will be favorable.

BUILDING A COALITION OF SUPPORT:

Independent advocacy groups are considering taking on the PayPal censorship case.
I’m supporting the development of this loose-knit coalition of like-minded groups
who believe that censorship of legal fiction should not be allowed. We will grow
the coalition. Each group will have its own voice and tactics I’m working with
them because we share a common cause to protect books from censorship. Earlier
today I had conversations with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), The
American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) and the National
Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC). I briefed them on the Smashwords/PayPal
situation, explained the adverse affect this crackdown will have on some of our
authors and customers, and shared my intention to continue working with PayPal
in a positive manner to move the discussion forward.

The EFF blogged about the issue a few days ago: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/legal-censorship-paypal-makes-habit-deciding-what-users-can-read
Today, ABFFE and NCAC issued a press release: http://www.scribd.com/doc/83549049/NCAC-ABFFE-Letter-To-PayPal-eBay-re-Ebook-Refusal-2012

I will not be on the streets with torch in hand calling for PayPal’s head, but
I will encourage interested parties to get involved and speak their piece. This
is where you come in…

HOW YOU CAN HELP:

Although erotica authors are being targeted, this is an issue that should concern
all indie authors. It affects indies disproportionately because indies are the
ones pushing the boundaries of fiction. Indies are the ones out there publishing
without the (fading) protective patina of a “traditional publisher” to lend them
legitimacy. We indies only have each other.

Several Smashwords authors have contacted me to stress that this censorship affects
women disproportionately. Women write a lot of the erotica, and they’re also
the primary consumers of erotica. They’re also the primary consumers of mainstream
romance, which could also come under threat if PayPal and the credit card companies
were to overly enforce their too-broad and too-nebulous obsenity clauses (I think
this is unlikely, but at the same time, why would dubious consent be okay in
mainstream romance but not okay in erotica? If your write paranormal, can your
were-creatures not get it on with one another, or is that bestiality? The insanity
needs to stop here. These are not questions an author, publisher or distributor
of legal fiction should have to answer.).

All writers and their readers should stand up and voice their opposition to financial
services companies censoring books. Authors should have the freedom to publish
legal fiction, and readers should have the freedom to read what they want.

These corporations need to hear from you. Pick up the phone and call them.
Email them. Start petitions. Sign petitions. Blog your opposition to censorship.
Encourage your readers to do the same. Pass the word among your social networks.
Contact your favorite bloggers and encourage them to follow this story. Contact
your local newspaper and offer to let them interview you so they can hear a local
author’s perspective on this story of international significance. If you have
connections to mainstream media, encourage them to pick up on the story. Encourage
them to call the credit card companies and pose this simple question, “PayPal
says they’re trying to enforce the policies of credit card companies. Why are
you censoring legal fiction?”

Below are links to the companies waiting to hear from you. Click the link and
you’ll find their phone numbers, executive names and postal mailing addresses.
Be polite, respectful and professional, and encourage your friends and followers
to do the same. Let them know you want them out of the business of censoring
legal fiction.

Tell the credit card companies you want them to give PayPal permission to sell
your ebooks without censorship or discrimination. Let them know that PayPal’s
policies are out of step with the major online ebook retailers who already accept
your books as they are. Address your calls, emails (if you can find the email)
and paper letters (yes paper!) to the executives. Post open letters to them
on your blog, then tweet and Facebook hyperlinks to your letters. Force the
credit card companies to join the discussion about censorship. And yes, express
your feelings and opinions to PayPal as well. Don’t scream at them. Ask them
to work on your behalf to protect you and your readers from censorship. Tell
them how their proposed censorship will harm you and your fellow writers.

Visa:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=V+Profile

American Express:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=AXP+Profile

MasterCard:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=MA+Profile

Discover:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=DFS+Profile

Ebay (owns PayPal):

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=ebay+Profile

_________

Starting Sunday, if our email systems can handle it, we will send out an email
to several hundred thousand registered Smashwords members who are opted in to
receive occasional Smashwords service updates. The email will combine Read an
Ebook Week with the censorship call to action. Let’s start a little fire, shall
we?

Thank you for your continuing support of Smashwords. With your help, we can
move mountains.

Best wishes,

Mark

As part of my Burning Man reflections, I did a bit of thinking about what “art is”. Or, perhaps said better, is how it might work.

I actually did not realize the significance of a couple of sentences that I had written on that subject, until they were quoted back to me (thanks, Matthews Battles!). Here they are:

The purpose of Burning Man is to entertain. The art is low on poignant meaning, high on effort converted into wow-factor. But through that expression of entertainment is channeled an incredible amount of material, human resource, and hard work.

With these words still in my head last week, I went to see some of the events and installations of the Time Based Arts festival (TBA) here in Portland. Now, I always talk a lot of shit about TBA. Mostly because it provides me, as an artist, with that every so delicious opportunity to complain about his/her own art scene. And additionally, as the artists receive compensation for their work at TBA, it gives this non-paid artist another vector for being bitter, along a more materialist critique.

But with playa dust still coming out of my hair, TBA seemed even more asinine this year than ever before. It is not about the scope of the artwork. That there were no forty-foot tall burning structures or flame-belching vehicles meant that the work at TBA is of course going to be judged according to a different venue. But it was the attention of the artists to their art, or the lack thereof, that really stood out to me.

This is something that as an artist, or a person who builds or makes anything, can immediately see. It is as inimical to the work as the material out of which it is made. Once upon a time, we might have called it “workmanship”. Today it might be abbreviated as “good design”. I might describe it as the part of the worker that is abstracted into the work; and even this is a bit too materialist-philosophically esoteric to use as a description.

Instead, I would merely call it “quality”. Quality is something that can immediately be apprehended in viewing an object. It is something difficult to fake. In talking about this on Twitter Ella Dymaxion, playing the devil’s advocate, suggested that quality might just be a measure of privilege, “quantified by the amount of time one has had to devote to past art.” I think this gets at the point of quality, but specifically differentiating it from “skill”. We might have seemingly innate skills, or skills learned through excellent training, either acquired by luck, by privilege, or by hard work. “Quality” is limited to the particular work in question, and is only used as a stand-in for “skill” when the word is used to refer to something more general, such as the oeuvre of an artist, or an entire venue or thematic category of work.

There may be a threshold of skill that makes quality much easier to achieve. Or, some of the privilege representative in skill might constrain the sorts of mediums in which quality might reasonably be achieved by a particular person. However, the true factor in quality is effort. Whether it is a small drawing that took a few minutes, or a life long work, was the effort put into that thing, in creating it, sufficient to make quality apparent? Subjectivity will determine the response, but each subject should be able to easily make this determination.

My point in arguing this out is not to establish a new aesthetic criteria. I believe notice of quality already exists in our apprehension of artwork, mostly in terms of the negative. It isn’t so much that we stand in front of artwork and say to ourselves, “yes, this has quality, and I notice by this-and-this-and-these features.” It is that we stand in front of it, and say, “boy, but was that a waste of materials and everyone’s time.” Work lacking in quality is missing something. We’re looking for something expressed to us that means this is why we have all taken the time.

The work at TBA is largely of the sort that seeks, either explicitly (by the artist’s statement) or implicitly (by “taking part” in a genre or medium, as it were), to transmit meaning. The artists’ statements are designed to imply that the art itself is a statement. The work at Burning Man is the sort that does not imply a meaning, or if so, with a very light touch. The focus, overall, is on the apprehension, and hence, there is more of an opportunity for quality to come through in the immediate viewing of the work, rather than having to read a statement in order to “get it”.

But in addition to this difference lending Burning Man art to have its quality more easily observed than the work at TBA, I think this framework provides a better venue for aligning the artists towards finding quality in their work. I had an endemic sense at TBA that the work itself was “written off”, so to speak, in favor of the artist statement. As if it didn’t matter what sort of shit was slapped together, if it could be justified as quality in the statement.

I’ve heard the statement before that “art doesn’t justify bad craft”: meaning that you cannot use art to justify mistakes you made. You know there are mistakes. The viewer knows. There are always mistakes in work. But saying “those mistakes are supposed to be there” insults not only our intelligence as people who make things, as well as demeaning our notions of quality that art is supposed to invoke. We know better. We know when materials have been wasted, and when something could have been done better. A lack of quality, quite simply, cannot be justified as artistic. And that is the difference between quality and a lack of it.

I think that statement extends to saying that “meaning identified as artistic doesn’t justify bad craft”. I often complain about “gimmicky” artwork, seeking a popular appeal by easy, spine-jerking vectors. But at least a gimmick, well-executed, doesn’t leave the viewer with a sense of being cheated somehow. It doesn’t leave a taste in the mouth of ruined materials. It doesn’t give one an overwhelming urge to go recycle something. It may be cheap, but at least it does what it says on the box. There are quality gimmicks, and then there are voids of quality. At TBA, I noticed the latter, in hordes.

I told myself on starting to write this little essay, that I wouldn’t target any particular works I thought were lacking quality. But there was one so egregious, one so paramount of what I’m trying to convey, that I can’t help myself. Let me just say this: if you do a piece of work that, through repetition, attempts to represent a particular amount of “otherwise uncounted numbers of war dead”, and then put your work on display WITHOUT FINISHING THE TOTAL NUMBER OF THE REPRESENTATION, you are telling me that either those hundreds of thousands of dead that you did not finish representing are meaningless, or that your entire concept is. This example was particularly awful, because through its poor quality it negated a purportedly ethical meaning. But the general point is illustrated: just because you say the work means something, you cannot expect that it will. And quality is the brick from which you are going to build anything, meaningful or otherwise. You can say a wall will keep out the mongol hordes. But unless that wall is built from brick, it’s not going to do shit. And once you have a built a wall so high and so long, you don’t need to say anything. Because a real wall will be a wall without anyone having to say a thing.

What is the point of all this?

The point is that it is incredibly easy to develop stand-ins for the worth we all implicitly know and respect in work of any kind. It is easy to excuse a lack of quality for sake of art, entertainment, political meaning, wow-factor, or money. There aren’t many absolute rationales for anything in the world anymore. Even quality, despite all my talk of its almost sui generis qualities (and no it’s not, but it might sound like it is) is nothing like an absolute force in the world. And so, why not make a little money? Why not take a political cheap shot, or go after a gimmick rather than put in the time?

Yeah, that’s a good question. But I think the thing about quality is, we already know the answer to that. We just need to remember to speak up and say so, rather than take the easier way out.

Some thoughts on the ongoing London riots, in no particular order. They kind of descend from open question, to class-war-screed, back to open question, but I think I’ll leave it just with the lack of form that it has. These sorts of thoughts shouldn’t be set in stone, because no one is really an expert on this. We’re all just trying to deal.

I’m following the Guardian’s live blogs, which are as usual, pleasantly diverse in their coverage. (Here’s the current one–they retire the url and start anew every 12 hours or so.) Also Twitter, of course.

- Geography – An on-going question of mine. I’m unfamiliar with London geography, and I wonder what relation the riot areas have with each other. I read an article recently (offline, sorry no link) about how public transit can dramatically decrease crime and increase civic-togetherness in quantifiable ways by connecting slum neighborhoods to the rest of the city. It seems these London neighborhoods are not slums or favelas by any means. I wonder how that thesis relates to this situation. Reading about the areas, it seems there is a large amount of gang activity based around post codes, or “ends” (Americanized as ‘hoods, perhaps), which is standard for places where people are unable to connect to the rest of the city. I wonder about the particulars of why these areas might have been cut off from the rest of London. One sense of London I have, though based on almost nothing, is that it is perfectly easy to be “lost” in the sprawl. When I lived in Harlem a couple of years ago, I noticed that one reason it was a perfectly excellent place to live was that it was very much ‘synced’ with the rest of Manhattan, and did not seem cut off by the park, as perhaps it had been at one time. Unlike the South Bronx, which although was only a few blocks and a subway stop from where I lived in Harlem, seemed miles away due to the river, and the overpass highway systems on the north side of the river. A similar thing is evident in South Central LA, where the highway loops and concentrates poorer neighborhoods, and the only public transit linking it to the rest of the city is a long, slow bus ride. And yet, perhaps because London doesn’t have the history of red-lining the way the US does, the riot areas are spread out, and all over. Maybe it has something to do with low-income areas that are near shopping areas? i.e. Potential rioters, with access to riot targets, but not much else? All speculation, because I don’t know.

- Riot vs. Protest – I hope, perhaps with a bit of guilty schadenfreude, that this puts the difference between riot and protest in perspective, and next time there are protests at least in the UK, the language used to describe the black bloc is different. The black bloc may to some degree made from “kids who just want to break stuff”, and yet they do not steal merchandise, burn down buildings, smash smaller businesses, or destroy private vehicles. On the other hand, we may see a new form of provacateuring on the part of the police, or, potential looters may try and join the bloc, now that they have a taste for how easy it can be.

- Anarchism – Relatedly, hoping for a language shift surrounding “anarchy”. But more than that, I’ve been waiting and hoping for an anarchist response to these riots. Solfed, a North London Anarchist Organization, released a statement, but I’m (still) hoping for more. Since this is the Internet, and posting utopian reality-design-fiction from half a world away is completely acceptable, let me draw you a pen-portrait of the anarchist response I’d like to see:

First and foremost, black shirts on the streets. Properly marked as anarchists, perhaps with circle-A insignia, if not something else. This is to make it apparent that any person with a mask and a hood is not necessarily an Anarchist, and to mark the difference. Now, the activity would depend on the numbers and the resources available. Taking as a pattern Common Ground rebuilding efforts, Black Cross street medics, organizing consensus groups of people in the community to defend their block or communicate anger towards the government, or simply Food Not Bombs if nothing else, an effort to build solidarity and community between people in the street, and an effort to break the categories of “Rioter”, “Police”, and “Vigilante”. The bloc pushes protests towards radical anger, but the riots are an opportunity for the other side of anarchism, organization, community, and building (which we all know and love) to show its face. Take that bravery in the streets that faces down cop riots, and show how it can help people. Show how a gang doesn’t just point aggression outwards, but works together for mutual benefit.

Anyway, or so I wish. I try to think how I would do this in my own city, were this to happen here. I have some ideas, but I don’t know if they would work or not until I try it. I have the feeling though, that we must begin to try things like this, because these won’t be the last riots, and things we not return to the status quo where anarchists just mobilize for protests and society runs on in an uneasy truce “as normal”. It’s time for those who believe in a self-determining society to step up. Easy for me to say, but I’m going to keep saying it.

- Racism/Bigotry – Race is certainly a factor here, from the original shooting to the often repeated anger about the police’s right to stop and search in the UK. And, we’re seeing it become a HUGE deal in the backlash to these riots. Race riots normally start as racial anger (justified or not), and then a backlash. It doesn’t matter who starts it, but what happens is people are getting killed in the streets because of their race. The reaction to these riots seems to be heavily pushing things in this direction. There’s news of nationalist groups getting together, drunken vigilantism, and many, many characterizations of who is rioting that are based on race. Furthermore, calling the rioters “thugs”, “yobs”, “criminals” or other things like this is in fact a bigoted statement. They may be committing crimes, but from the people put in court so far, I’ve seen school teachers, counselors, and children. You would not call these people criminals if you met them on the street. To assume to use such a term to refer to a large group of people is a categorical judgment, and worse, a sentence of social death. It is not in terms of innocence/guilt that they are called thugs, but in terms of being reduced to a stereotype that always leads back to race. This is much like the phrase “crackhead”, at least here in the United States. Calling someone a “crackhead” because they look weird or act oddly may in fact be an accurate statement. That person might smoke crack, or some other drug. However, one does not actually know this, and is using the epithet based on a characterization of how a person looks, and is a stand in for “n—–.” It doesn’t matter the person’s color: what is implied is that the speaker has judged this person on the basis of categorical appearance and decided they are a worthless undesirable. I saw a twitter comment (sorry no source, it got lost in the flood) saying, “you KNOW what people wearing masks on the streets are up to”. Actually, NO. Most definitively, you DO NOT KNOW what they are up to. You are judging them, based on what you assume they are up to; and what you assume is that from the way they look and the way that they are dressed (mask or not) that they are a worthless undesirable. Leaders at the highest levels, to the media, to the people on the street are reifying this categorical depiction of “thugs”, which is at heart the expression of a skin-deep, racial judgment. Listen to 911 calls here in the States: “he looked like a thug”, “they were a couple of gangsters”. It is clear what this means (and sometimes they use the actual word, because this is America). You better believe that when the vigilante groups form, they are going to go after people they KNOW are thugs. And you know whom those people are. This linguistic racism MUST BE STOPPED, and now. Not only is it wrong, it’s going to get innocent people killed.

- Class War & Fascism – Seguing from the above, we can see that under stress, the lower segments of Western society oscillate between two opposing urges. The first, to riot in anger, to take things, to burn and smash. The second, to hurt people, to shoot people, to put boots on faces in order to support a paradigm of “order”. And of course, these are not far apart at all, leading “violence” to be the category we use to describe them inclusively. But they are not the same thing. It is one thing to act destructively towards physical objects, an entirely different thing to act that way towards people. Between these two, we see what Class War actually looks like, and it isn’t pretty.

There are other forces at play here besides what we might point out as solely “class” issues. Race, police, geography, etc. But if we look at those in this rioting society, we see the uninsured, the un-secure, the unemployed, and the undersupported. They are the ones with the most to gain by rioting, and the most to lose in the fires and at the hands of the police who are supposed to be “protecting” society. For the first time in at least a couple decades, we are seeing what a major “first-world” city looks like without the supposed continual protection of the police. In other words, what many of the lower classes see every day. What is “violent”, “anarchy”, and “thuggish” is a lower class world, and now it is on the television and the Internet. The way people react in this situation is according to two models: they hit the streets in gangs to take what they want, or they hit the streets in mobs to blame whom they want. This is the purest, uncontrolled, undisciplined form of class war. When the authority that held the class in its position (“under control”, or “peaceful” is what it is typically called, even though it is normally nothing like “peace”) is released, the class agonism boils over in these directions. We might call it “uncontrolled” class war, but we certainly shouldn’t call it unexpected. Again, this will not be the last riot in the history of the world.

As one who has on occasion acted as a proponent for “class war” in a rhetorical sense, I think it’s my responsibility to identify this as what it is, and to try and identify strategies to prepare for this literal, street class war, that is far more brutal and horrifying than any proletarian uprising as proposed in words. To try and simply clean this up, and go back to “normal” is a fallacy. To “regain control” is only to bottle up this urge again, until the next time it boils over. The class controls that keep areas impoverished, and susceptible to the urge to destroy, to blame, and to mob and kill are always insufficient; and in fact, they are the cause of the build up of agonism. This sort of agonistic tension needs to be released, and not simply by sports matches, video games, and bar brawls. Rather than placating the lower classes, they need to be elevated. The infrastructure that needs to be set up must be akin to hydroelectric power. The floods of intensity can be harnessed to build, rather than destroy. But the upper classes have no interest in this, as if very clearly goes against their interest. It is in the interest of the upper classes that riots occur, so that stronger police forces can be built, so that racial tension explode, and so that the lower classes rise up and fight each other, and burn down their own neighborhoods. Look for new police budgets, new racial organizations, new gentrification after these riots.

Lastly, when I say “they” to refer to the lower classes, be aware this is an attempt at objectivity. Because, it is really “We”. If you are not one of the upper classes, you are in the lower classes. There is no bourgeois anymore: the shopkeepers and employees who will clean up this mess are from the same neighborhoods where the destruction originated. Rents will still be collected. The sneakers and TVs that were stolen are teardrops in an ocean of consumerism. Profits have never been higher, and you and I are not seeing any of it.

- The Future – To try and turn away from the preachy-anarchist angle, let’s look to the future. The future is undoubtedly uncertain. No one could have predicted this, and no one will predict the next one. However, what we can say is that there will be a next one. There is something incredibly zeitgeisty about these riots. It sends a shutter down the back, and makes one’s eye look to the bookshelf, to the SF paperbacks that have described similar things at “some time in the near future”. That near future is now, even if we don’t know why.

The key of it is, that there was indeed a time when our culture as a whole stopped worrying about “this”. There was a moment of comfort, sometime in the 80s and 90s. Not to say that there weren’t riots and conflicts and crashes and wars, but they were such that a perspective was enabled. It became possible to “look the other way”, whatever direction that was. Now things are back in view, which is probably for the best. It’s hard to say whether we’ll be able to make these things better by preparing for them, but we can’t say they’d get better if we ignored them.

But, I think it’s our duty to try. Besides “radical politics” things we can do, (see anarchist reality-design-fiction above) and standard liberal politics things (reinstate and build support structures), it behooves us to think like futurists about this. If we are feeling a pull towards science fiction, maybe we should consult science fiction. And not just by planning for utopia/dystopia, but by doing the grunt work of SF: look at the aspects of one particular technological element, and then imagine how things would be different if one-little-thing were different. Examples? Hmm, let’s see: well, what if rather than using Blackberry Messenger to coordinate riots, what if the youth used it for X? I don’t know for what. But what sort of payoff would there have to be to make people freely organize for X, rather than riot? What is the payoff of rioting, and how could that be supplanted by something positive? SMS and QR codes are used to advertise and sell products, and with arguable results. What is between a riot and a sales pitch? A flash mob? A meme? I don’t know, but these are questions we should be asking, because these are things we’ll likely be dealing with in the future. Think of Graffiti-Markup-Language. Graffiti used to be purely a nuisance, and a sign of urban blight. Now it is merged with programming language to make an art form. Who could have predicted that? Maybe no one. But somebody made it.

I think we all should probably be thinking about making things, as hard as we can. That might be the purest advice for dealing with destruction that I can think of.

Bruce Sterling commented on this diagram on his blog:

via Layar

*These icons represent user interactions associated with Layar augmented “Points of Interest,” or “floaties.” It’s a pretty good graphic-design job and I have no problem with that, but check out how many of these icons are archaic “skeuomorphs,” or references to archaic, no-longer-functional forms of analog media.

“Hey!” I said. I have many of these so-called skeuomorphs sitting in my living room. They would be littering my desk, if I had one. I use these things often, and not just for kitsch value, but for their intended and designed use, of all things.

I have a certain dislike of the term skeuomorph. It is a meaningful term, of course, defined like so on the helpful Tumblr-style site, Skeuomorphs.com:

Wikipedia defines a skeuomorph as “a derivative object which retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.”

Skeuomorphs.com uses the following tests to determine if an object is a skeuomorph:

- the function of the design cue must be lost, otherwise it is an example of path dependence

- the design cue must be inherited from a predecessor, not copied from a similar object

- the object must be derivative. Functional objects do not become skeuomorphs when they are repurposed as decorations

Fair enough. You can see plenty of good examples on their site. But, I often see this term used (skeuomorphically repurposed?) to denote things called “obsolete”, or otherwise less fashionable than objects that perform a similar task more quickly/cheaper/alternatively/on the internet.

The point of the definition above is a sort of “empty design echo”. A form or aesthetic of a functional object is deliberately maintained, inherited from a completely different object that does not require that form or aesthetic to function. This is not the same as being a vinyl LP afficionado; this would be like making a tone arm to come down over top of an open CD player, the arm being non-functional because the sound data is read from the bottom. Why would you do that? Good question.

On the other hand, to actually listen to vinyl records has a distinct function. And it is not just to be “retro”. Vinyl has a distinctive sound. There are vast numbers of vinyl records and equipment for playing them out there and available, many of them inexpensive. Some people still have vinyl they bought when it was new, and would rather continue to listen to them just as before, rather than “upgrading” for the joy of being “current”. To call something obsolete just because it is “behind the times” is to almost make a reverse-skeuomorph: to select an object for a design that attempt to evoke modernity, futurity and State-of-the-Art-edness, thereby ignoring the function for the sake of the curve. Are stainless steel appliances and fixtures really better than those made from plastic? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t ask Kohler or Whirlpool for their reverse-skeuomorph marketing schtick.

Anyway: I decided to play a fun game. I went down the list of icons above to see which ones I could produce the symbolized object, not just its functional equivalent. I did this because I am unpacking from a move, and so for at least a week I know where everything is. The point isn’t to prove anything, just to see to what extent these symbolic skeuomorphs are or are not part of my everyday life.

Skeuomorphic Symbol Scavenger Hunt

Here are the rules:

I get one point if have the actual object.

I get half a point if have a very similar object, that actually has the same symbolized function without being a skeuomorph. Or in the case of those that are more of verbs than nouns, I have something pretty close.

I don’t get any points if I “recently had one”, or “I’ve got one in storage”, or if “I know where I can get one”. The implication from the full-point status is that I not only have this object as if I collected it, but I use it regularly as it was designed to be used, not just getting it out on weekends for fun, like my pinstriped sport suit I wear when I ride my penny-farthing down the promenade (I don’t actually do this).

So without further ado or theory, my results.

Info – One Point

You’re probably pretty skeptical that I’m giving myself a full point for this first one, but I consider this correct. The “i” stands for info, or alternately, a person, as in the “You Are Here” symbol on the map located at an information kiosk of some sort, because if you are looking at the map, you are at the kiosk. And, I have a travel map, of the kind that is the sort of info that is handed out at travel kiosks.

Audio – One Point

Say hello to my Grado Labs SR-60s! Some of the best headphones you can get in the price range. And would you look at that functionalist earphone profile? The icon is almost a silhouette of it.

Video – Half Point

Arguably, the icon is of a projector, not of a camera, because even film cameras utilize cartridges. I had a 8mm projector up until last week, and have a 8mm camera in storage, but neither of these count. However, I do have a video camera that uses tapes. Digital magnetic tapes, but they have the functional reels that make up the primary feature of the icon. “Rewind” is not a metaphor.

Phone – Zero Points

I got nothing. I had a plug-in handset up until I moved a week ago, but I hadn’t plugged it in in five years. And despite the urging of the Qwest salesperson who signed me up for Internet, I was not about to start. My phone looks like a pack of playing cards, and I can shout at whatever side I want.

Email – One Point

I send mail in envelopes all the time. I even have stamps too, though we used the last one this morning. Why do I send “snail mail”? I’ll tell you why. Because, if nothing else, the electricity company charges a surcharge for electronic payment!

Position – One Point

Because there ain’t no cellular network in the woods, fella. In fact, at the speed the network works sometimes, I’d take a quadrangle and compass over a crashing app. Interestingly enough, my cell phone uses this symbol for its location feature, even though it only has GPS and no compass.

Add/Remove – Half Point

These are verbs, so that’s a bit difficult to produce. But, I do have this awesome TI-2550. Check out the red display! It uses 4 AA batteries, and claims operating time of 6 hours on this charge. But, it’s sturdy as shit and doesn’t break the way that crappy credit card solar calculator did when I put it my bag. Plus, as a co-worker once remarked, “it works in the dark!” I give myself a half point for both of these combined.

Edit – One Point

Accept no substitutes.

Collect – One Point

Handmade by some hippie in the third-world ghettos of Portland, Oregon. Cost like $10, and holds more groceries than any other reusable bag we have. Also makes a bitchin’ picnic basket.

Play – Half Point

This is a verb, but the symbol shows up in black and silver on my tape recorder, though you can’t see it in the picture. And this is a functional usage, because it differentiates between tape direction, and the relative speed of rewind and fast-forward.

Play – One Point

You can’t hear it, but I’m singing the theme to Link right now. Dum, dum, da dadadadada! Dum dada, dum da dada! Probably best this way.

Share – Zero Points

Bruces is right, this is an interesting symbol. I thought for a long time about what retro-sharing might look like, but couldn’t come up with anything. Maybe hands exchanging something? I don’t know. I do have this cool folding ruler, but it’s not earning me any points.

Pin – One Point

This kills me, because just yesterday I was holding a box of honest-to-goodness map pins in my hand, that were used to pin locations on a paper map. I dug through a bunch of half-unpacked boxes, but couldn’t find them. Instead, I guiltily present these thumb tacks, and take my full point anyway.

Check In/Out – Zero Points

I don’t know about this one. I have some hotel room cards, of the swipe-in/out variety, but I don’t think that counts. It’s hard to tell exactly what that symbolizes, and it doesn’t make me think of checking in to anything. Not sure what would–a revolving door, maybe? Anyway, instead please see my awesome flight calculator, which CAN ALSO BE USED AS A SLIDE RULE, and will totally be helpful to me when the apocalypse hits and I’m stuck on a boat or a plane?

Log In/Out – One Point

I think the name of this one is the actual skeuomorph. Yeah, your sign-ins to a service may be logged, but so is just about everything. You are really unlocking a service, when something requires a “log-in”. And without the proper key, you do not have access. The log is just a record of that. I wonder, tangentially, when “log on” became uniformly “log in”?

Lock/Unlock – One Point

Keeping gym lockers secure. This one looks pretty flimsy, but I’d trust it more than certain web sites that don’t even run SSL.

List – One Point

How I GTD. I’ve never liked any GTD app as much as paper, and this floppy little book cost less than a buck and fits in my pocket. The list is part of the contents of my storage unit.

Money – One Point

Virtual currency, of the seemingly “real” variety. Interestingly, the “$” symbol does not appear anywhere on the bill.

Open/Close – Zero Points

Nothing for these verbs. And again, the nomenclature is the skeuomorph. “Open” and “close” are what the “windows” are animated to do. If anything, you are running and halting a program or process, conjuring or dispelling a dimension of the GUI.

Search – One Point

The best for last. I suppose I have never really “searched” for anything with my magnifying glass, but I have found things with it. Talk about your semantic search–with this search tool, context isn’t everything, it’s the only thing!

FINAL SCORE: Out of 22 items, 14.5 points.

Think you can do better, or would like to dispute my scoring? Take it to the comments, suckas.

Hearing the commotion from the hall, the designer puts down his scalpel. A security officer comes in the swinging, double doors of the lab, out of breath, as the designer stands. “No problem here, zir. One of them writers broke out of containment. It took the full charge on two tasers, but we got it wrangled now. We’re taking it back to the tank, and then we’ll be back to clean up the mess on the floor. Wish they didn’t always void their bowels like that….” The officer was gone.

The designer sits back down on his minimalist steel stool, and picks up the blade. It might be part of the realities of doing design-fiction, but an interruption is an interruption. Increasing the magnification on the goggles, the designer brings the scalpel low over the text for another slice. The page shrinks back instinctively, as the sharp edge parts its fibers…

I couldn’t consider myself much of a young writer knowledgeable about the technological zeitgeist if I couldn’t preach to a particular choir about the particular concept developed in the last five years known as “design-fiction”. Like anything else these days, the truth no doubt resists easy categorization, being multi-faceted, and having different characteristics and attributes at different times and in different settings, depending who is measuring, and from where they are looking. Luckily, abstraction is my chosen art form, and building characters that are easily readable is a skill fundamentally component to my nature, almost as much as design-sense comes naturally to those who can afford Adobe Creative Suite. Without too much beating about the bush, I’m going to weave a little narrative about design-fiction; just a couple of multi-touch gestures on our collective interface here.

via Flickr user lifeontheedge

Let me begin by unilaterally defining design-fiction as the theory and practice behind conflating design, “building things that exist”, with fiction, “making up shit that doesn’t exist”. Design-fiction–either through its own limited fictional proposition or on the back of pre-existing works of fiction–links a fictional narrative regarding a proposed object, with some image, shadow, ghost, dream, or otherwise hologrammically-real design of that object. It could be a mock up of a car from Blade Runner, it could be a functioning hologram like in Star Wars. It could be the proposed features of a cell phone that could exist, if only the technology was available as specified. Or it could be the working prototype of something entirely useful, if certain fictional conditions were true. Most generally, design-fiction take “the future” as the generic narrative for its activity, and uses only enough fictional glue as is necessary to prop the designed object up upon that plane. No doubt, the makers of design-fiction experience a bit of perceived freedom in this activity. With this tool, they can give context to design ideas that wouldn’t otherwise be taken seriously. Fiction was something that reality merchants used to avoid, but now it is a new territory, just waiting to be settled. The designers and engineers, after decades (or centuries, depending who is doing the counting) of attempting to maintain their privileged control over the domain of reality, have suddenly noticed that there is an entire new world available in the realm of unreal, and are building new colonies as we speak to tap these fictional deposits.

The resource of fiction has proven invaluable to the design community. It is a fertile land for farming new ideas. It is a forest of raw timber, just waiting to be processed into something profitable. It is a mineral resource: a treasure trove of value just underneath the soil, which the natives refuse to profit by, at least until they are put to work mining and smelting it to store and back the value of the new economy of this land, in which fiction creators are now lucky enough to participate.

We, the fiction makers, used to do simple arts and crafts. Little stories, films, and comic books. Did you know that when we used to be able to freely hunt the elk of imagination, we’d use every part of the animal? We’d use the hide for plot, the bone for characters, and the antlers would be our lifestyle. (We’d even eat the genitals, for the sexual content which we believed it imbued our fiction.) We had a true respect for the environment of fiction, when we lived in harmony with its spirits. But that time has past, and we’ve been woken up to the new economy. Now we sell to the tourists along the highway, and if we’re lucky, get a job in design-fiction’s factory lines, hopefully with enough time to still practice the fictive arts around the fire, at home in the evening. We show off the goods that we have as the designers come around on buying tours. A positive nod from a designer, a mention in a bibliography or a name-drop in a project… well, that could make a career for one of us. Our fiction could be discovered, and we could be whisked off to the lab, to have our fiction milked for years-worth of homogenized product-fantasies, and our genetic material cloned into sterile keynote after keynote. If we are good and docile, we might even find a privileged pet position as “Director of Visionary Hype” at some publicly-traded corporation. We could be the monkey that gets to go home with the scientist.

Today, the magic no longer exists in our fiction, but in what they can do with our fiction. By the manifest destiny of design, the wonders of the future have been created in real life, with the subjugation of fiction to the anvil of reality. All classes have indeed benefited from this abundance. What wonders we have, on the bleeding edge of this economic extraction! We have “cyberspace”. We have virtual reality. Augmented reality. We have billions of phones that would be no more than simple radios if not touched by the magic hand of design, transmuting them into “cyborg” appendages, and we celebrate them for the virility they imbue within us. The value of everyday things like touch-screen interfaces, environmental sensors, and vehicular transportation increases exponentially when inseminated with “design-fiction”. It is the ultimate gamification, the hand of design-fiction, turning what would be ordinary stuff into exploding, plinging, gold coins, making all of technology and fiction seamlessly function For The Win. What once was merely the artistic present, is now the valuable future.

Cue the Disney-produced GM animation. Or rather, cue the Vimeo cut. Or even better, just play the entirety of Minority Report. Or, let us crowd-source a film version of Neuromancer, so we can slip once more into a sweet visual fantasy dimension, of endless flowing tides of VC and Kickstarter love and dollars.

I stretch the truth a bit, of course. Because I am a writer, and this is what I do. I make stuff up, at least to a certain degree. I invent worlds that don’t exist, for other people’s amusement. I simplify and I abstract to make a point, and to write something hopefully concrete and understandable. I draw the lines that no one else is willing to draw, and then give it away free: my own little bit of folk art. To get these bothersome ideas out of my head, and onto the web. Just doing my part, as a serf of fiction. Carrying my little crowd-sourced bag of fictional dirt up the wall of the pit mine that is the internet.

But I must answer for my quota of cotton; I need to bring you something for re-sale, and not just my little straw men. I can’t just spin fiction off into the wind, and so it must mean something. So I must ask, seriously: when it comes to the reality of design-fiction: what is it that we are doing here? How is it–and why is it–that fiction is actually being taken “seriously” when it is conflated with cool little technological gadgets, with visionary architecture, with high-profile names in the design world? Why is it only now that “fiction” is allowed to become almost “real” when printed on a design pamphlet or wired to an Arduino board, minted into the coinage of design-fiction? Should we who create fiction accept this colonization? What was fiction before design-fiction? Is design-fiction merely the modern extension and the next prototype of fiction: the future of fiction?

It seems that many people thought books and literature were only ever entertaining side-pursuits in our cultural history; that literature only came close to science in the form of library science. But fiction has always been a part of historical reality, long before design-fiction so kindly discovered the power of future-affirmation to it. Fiction has a very human purpose: it is the singularly important task of assembling, what I would call, a “mechanism of desires”. Fiction expresses the raw, chaotic power of human life through its material components. Through its own technology of imagery, thematic archetype, language, and other media forms, fiction expresses the depths of our species’ life in the continuum of past, present and future, and indeed, it is the only way we ever have. We talk about ourselves via the form of literature, or fictive writing, and also in music, film, art, and any other expression in which we might be able to conceive or perceive a narrative. Sure, often it is, strictly, “made up”. But this is the creative element–in order to better express those dark human desires underlying our societies, to project the hard-to-define emotions that pulse within our living existence, we must not be constrained to the plane of reality that those in the physical sciences hold themselves within. And in this way, fiction is entirely real–as real as emotion and thought, as real as our egos, as real as the mutable species-entity known as “humanity” that unites all of us with a similar genotype. It utilizes as its energy the chaotic reality of human life, and constructs a branching, cultural pipeline for this energy to flow within. And all this time, you thought you were just reading words!

Apart from this deep, underlying function, fiction is also useful for a great many other things as part of its expressive nature. We’re aware of the general humanistic good of consuming fine literature, of the entertaining feature of films, of the social aspect of music. Fiction can motivate and inspire humans to “real-life” activity in a variety of arenas, and physical design and technological invention is surely one of these. But over and above inspiration, design-fiction’s functionality has what could be considered to be a more insidious mechanism.

What is the purpose of attempting to design a cyberspace deck? What do we gain from building a Minority Report display interface? Why work on a product that only will ever exist within a story, pre-existing as separate narrative, or written specifically for that gadget? When we assume the design-fiction mantle of Future-Vision, what is the motivation? It is four-fold: 1) We believe these devices would be cool or otherwise meaningful in real life. 2) We believe they would perhaps be successfully marketable products, if they could be created. 3) We want to see if it can be done. 4) We buy into the fictional fantasy world of generic future-tense, and we commit to design-fiction as a way to express our mental investment and solidarity with that forward-leaning worldview. These reasons all have a common thread: once a technological gadget can be identified in a fictional way, a part of us wants to port this fiction to reality.

These are the reasons behind the majority of design-fiction, and as such, design-fiction is no more than steampunk. I don’t intend to drag steampunk through the mud by association, either; steampunk is a fine hobby. There is no reason not to port fiction to reality, as a prop. Play-acting is a form of fiction consumption, and always has been. A prop, just its progenitor the classical theater mask, is simultaneously real and not real. But design-fiction is kidding itself if it believes it can simply make the fictional real, to make it less than a prop. And that to do so is any more than gluing gears to vests for sale on Etsy, to sell shit by calling it Shinola.

via Dvice.com

Play acting is all well and good, but when the props are treated as real, there is a psychotic sort of commodification underway. The psychosis is a disavowal–a forced rejection of the entire fictional mechanism except for that one value point, “to make the future real”. It is a cauterizing excision of a segment of the fiction, cut out and fused into an independent object with only one quantifiable dimension. Ripped out of its context, the purpose of fiction as a whole is conveniently forgotten, and the gadget object is reduced to a commodity, existing only in terms of its market value. The expressive component of play-acting is dead. Design-fiction is a fetish pushed to the point of absolute objectification; it is no longer a node of pleasure, only a dried and homogenized portion of the original fiction, ready to be sold in consumer-ready packages. The future is no longer a vanishing point of progress in a real-unreal network of invention and art, but a quantified MSRP. It is to reduce all speculation to the assumption that what could exist must exist, and would, in existence, be valuable. It is to make this supposed value the end-all of all creativity. You can hook a disembodied dog head up to a blood pump, and watch it try to live. But why would you do that? Design-fiction has such questions to answer.

We don’t celebrate Neuromancer because it contains the idea of cyberspace; we celebrate the idea of cyberspace because it is part of Neuromancer. Neuromancer is less about the actual proposition of a virtual realm called cyberspace accessible through communication technology, and more about the feeling of micro-gravity. It is about the human wish to fly. Cyberspace gets the press, because it is an easily identifiable term, and not a more ethereal thematic concept. The coined phrase is its own commodity value. We recall that the end of the book take place in earth-orbit, as the cowboy of the virtual space is forced by physical circumstances to take his metaphorical combat into the world. The book is about dimensions that are unreal, and no less real. It is about manufactured space in general, and the new physics that we must learn to live within. It is about the new thermodynamics of information, and such immutable laws that would birth the sublime triple point of black ice. It is about the life that develops in unreal physical environments, life that is both human, and non-human. In the time since the book was written, the Internet has come to life. Cyberspace is now an actual thing, different than the cyberspace in the book. But the human desire, and ultimately, the need to fly through our invented territorial realms is still real, both in reality and the original fiction.

via saranblog.wordpress.com

Design-fiction reduces the mechanism of fiction to one more corporate R&D department, convinced that it’s products are something more than just products. The fictional, thinner-than-thin, design-fiction smart phone is a product of dimensional flattening, reducing the real environment of information technology and communications to point at which it is just another virtual icon, that we flick across the surface of our real phones despondently: the killer app of the week. Such so-called “fiction” downsizes the network assemblage of human creativity and desire-engineering, replacing it with the boring repetition of the start-up model. How it works and what it does is less important than how quickly it can be pushed to market, or more likely, to the blog. It minimizes the desire that drove creativity to express itself through dynamic fiction into no more than a meter of quantitative investment and click-through interest, that can be channelled as is liked for best returns. So you’ve stimulated the nerve endings with desire for a phone that will never be sold. It’s creative output is made-you-look. The fiction might as well have never existed, and all that was manufactured was the lie. It’s thinking you don’t have to feed your dog as long as you keep ringing the Pavlovian bell. It’s inventing the Happy Meal toy before the shooting the film. At best, it’s bad fiction. At worst, the most you are affecting your audience with is lead poisoning.

Design-fiction would have you avoid the vast mechanism of real fiction, and invest in what is made up as a secondary commodification. It would have you forget about the book, and concentrate on the deck. It would sell you an Ono-Sendai T-shirt, not to bring the book to life, but in order to brand you into the fan club. The book is alive already, and its position as a classic work of fiction is the proof. If there was a cyberspace deck, it would be a piece of memorabilia to put under glass on a shelf. Something to sell online, if you were lucky enough to have an actual box to ship. What would be the purpose of a cyberspace deck today? We already have the interfaces that best conflate our needs to connect to our networks with the technology we have available. Design, without the fiction, is already delivering on the dream. It may be an interesting exercise to consider why we have smart phones rather than cyberspace decks–but this is a theoretical exploration between the work of fiction and reality, and something for writers to bother themselves with, rather than designers.

And then on to the next one. Remake each book into a film, and each film into a phone. What can you quantify the rights to, and convert into a design-fiction option? How about Minority Report? The Minority-Report-Interface (MRI) is now a completely isolated, flat piece of fiction separate from the fiction from which it is derived. Amputated from the work of fiction, in which it is an important image of the thematic import of the work–a larger theme of truth, evidence, and the foreseeable future–the device itself is now only a milestone about technological progress. When will we have the MRI? When, when, when? And how much will it cost? The future will only be here when we can gesture in space and construct a narrative of the future at our whim. But this forgets the point of Minority Report as a work of fiction: the idea of the work is that the future cannot be predicted, and cannot be constructed at our whim. In our manic gesturing towards the gadget-of-the-future, we’ve missed the whole point. The reality of fiction has been replaced by an urge towards false, isolated commodity.

Are objects pulled into the “real” world and isolated from the assemblage which invented them, even to be considered real? These simulacra of fiction seem to double down on the fakery. In fact, the entire woven mechanism of fictional meaning from which these objects grew before they were harvested like clones, the question of the worth of technology as an element of human existence from which have the fruitful discipline known as Science-Fiction seems more real. In open speculation and the intricate programming of fiction, I see more reality than in the commodification of potential-product. What is more real: the cyborg in the horror film, or the hardwired, uncanny horror that causes us to invent cyborgs in fiction, to keep us looking even though we wish we could turn away? What is more alarming–uncanny human subjects, on the border point between humanity and object, or uncanny objects, on the border point between creativity and capitalistic exploitation?

But let me call curtain. Enough with my own play-acting here, and philosophical slight-of-hand. Let me end this fictive fantasy I’m spinning, and return to reality. These post-colonial memories–they aren’t yours. This was a nightmare, from which we all can easily wake up. Fiction and object design are both equally real. They are all real, but only together, united as they always were.

I’ve been giving design-fiction an especially hard time, trying to seed its practitioners with a horrible dream, in which they are the enemies of the future, rather than its saviors and heralds. As the brainwashing super-villian in this narrative, I speak for an a-vocal, imagined constituency against a trumped up enemy. Us designers of fiction (not designers of design-fiction) are, in general, so pleased to finally be taken seriously that we almost forget to take our newly discovered importance as an insult. And so, I’ve lobbed the perceived insult playfully back towards my characterization of the design-fictioners, if only to have them finally look up into the sky for what might one day actually condense in reality with enough weight to hit them in the face.

Behind this little bit of territorial posturing, the relationship between the real and the fictional is the same terrain that we’ve always traversed. Our ideas, both of fiction and of physical invention, grow as nodes in the network–starting independently, connecting, separating, and eventually fading in importance. The lasting effect of anything, technological or artistic, is its ability to network with everything else in a connecting, transmitting relationship, rather than as a cancerous, pooling sink of resources. Both fiction and reality are simultaneous. Isolation and consolidation of nodes will occur, and there is nothing wrong with picking particular pieces of fruit as they grow. But reality only occurs simultaneously amid real-world praxis and the extensive networks of the creative production of fantasy. Keep your hammer in one hand, and your dreams in the other.

And in the end, recognition of this truth is my fantasy of the future. We who create fiction don’t have to view the design world as an expropriating, gentrifying force. We can work as a team with the designers. The designers are no doubt just as interested in our characters and the overall fictive headspace as they are in our marketable gadgets. And the world of engineering can be the same fertile ground for creativity, as fiction can be for design. They can let us into their studios and laboratories just as we let them into our heads. This was the origin of Science-Fiction, of course; and it is the continuing legacy of speculative fiction of all categories. Writers, artists, and creators of all media continue to be informed by the world around them just as we inform it with our work, and in this society of continual connecting networks, we ought to turn up the bandwidth, and upload as much data to the commons as we realistically can.

via Vintagraph.com

But in that effort, design-fiction: I urge you to remember who constitutes reality in this relationship. I may write on a computer, and access the cloud through the prouduct of your brilliant, visionary interface. But your imagination, your creativity, your humanity–you read these inscriptions off of the broad back of fiction. This world and its aspirations were built by fiction, and fiction keeps it. Remember, design-fiction, that when you dream, you are in our hands. We are you, while you sleep.

The zine I proposed to make, is made.

The title is “Apopheniac Communiques”. Along with seven fantastic contributors, I’ve put together 28 pages of art, poems, short stories, and commentary. It’s full of low-fi awesomeness, pasted together by hand in the “traditional” zine style. Is there a pattern? Is there a theme? That will be for the reader to decide, but suffice it to say, we’ve already put a call in to the proper authorities who deal with such miracles.

In keeping with the classic tradition, I’ll be offering copies in the “mail-art” format: for $2 in either fungible currency or un-cancelled postage, I’ll mail you your very own printed copy, on cream-colored paper, in beautiful 4.25″ x 7″ format.

Mail those monies here:

POSZU
4835 SE Sherman St.
Portland, OR 97215

AND… because it’s totally crazy, I’ll accept Bitcoins as payment. In fact, I’ll let you name your price if you choose to pay in BTC. Email me to get my public key and to give me your address.

The zine is licensed under Creative Commons (Attrib-Comm-Sharealike). And hey, if you just want to see what it looks like, even though it would never, ever compare to having a real life zine in your hands, here is a link to the full PDF.

Image credit: Flickr user damiosantana

And like a shot, the Aufhebung Klaxon goes off, the Marx signal is shining in the sky (it is the full of the Theses of Feuerbach, blurrily illuminated on a cloud), and I’m off and running to the Use-Value Mobile (okay, it’s my website)… all because someone needs some learning about the true worth of labor.

Okay, so I don’t know how much this guy actually knows about Marx or not. According to his bio he’s studied economics, so I would hope that means he at least he thinks he gets it. At any rate, all of that was just my intro to my rebuttal of this stupid piece, which is the real point, and doesn’t involve Marx at all. Except where it does.

Look–I don’t mean to be a jerk. I just am. But even so, I don’t like utterly condemning the thoughts of someone I’ve never met. That person could be a pretty good person, all things considered. And yet sometimes, the nature of the argument requires it. If we’re going to make and strong definitions, sooner or later, they are going to have to be definitions in opposition to something. And considering that this guy pretty much just shit all over everything that I and many of my acquaintances do, I’m not going to pull any punches on this trash essay in my effort to show just how wrong this conception really is. Be forewarned.

Fella’s point is this:

Why won’t hipsterism ever go away? Consider that technology (facilitated by capitalism’s emphasis on efficiency; i.e., consider the assembly line a technology as well as the internet) is stripping people of what has been traditionally defined as “useful” or “legitimate” or “meaningful” work, and thus stripping meaning from their lives. “Nothing productive left to do since the robots came; better make my consumption more flamboyant and self-announcing!”

[...]

Hence the field of consumption becomes the field of distinction and social recognition as well, and consuming becomes a sort of semiotic labor that absorbs more and more of our natural inclination to do something regarded as socially useful. (And Shop Class as Soulcraft-style retro crafts like carpentry and gardening and Etsy-ism start to register as consumerist hobbies, not “real” production.) Social media supplies the factory and distribution center for this sort of work, as well as the scoreboard in the form of data about just how many people are paying attention to you. We produce content and links to try to “connect” to others, that is, have them regard us as socially necessary the way, say, in the 19th century the village blacksmith was vitally necessary when the horse you were traveling on pulled up lame. (Okay, that was a somewhat far-flung, Downton Abbey-inspired example.) The point is we want to feel useful, and there are fewer opportunities for that in the sphere of production. So consumption becomes production, and the main way that happens is to make what we consume more salient and more socially significant, to have it inflect an ever-shifting language of status signifiers.

Considering that the guy leaves out most of the connections between his data points, let me try and reconstruct his argument a little bit more direction.

1) Technology is more efficient; thus there is less “meaningful” work to do.

2) Consumption takes the place of meaningful work, in our understanding of what “meaningful” is.

3) “Meaningfulness” is related to social recognition, and so consumption becomes a social activity, furthered in social arena.

4) The things that we make, if they are at all social, are akin to consumption, because we only think they are meaningful, in our attempts to replace actually “meaningful” production.

Interesting, but completely, utterly wrong. There are a couple of syllogisms here I think, but I’m going to focus on the biggest, overwhelming lacuna.

Exactly what in the hell does he mean by “meaningful”? It seems to be key to the argument, because the lack of meaning is what causes production to be replaced by consumption, as a way of countering this lack of meaning. But if we don’t know what we are supposed to be replacing, how can we tell if we are indeed attempting to replace it?

He never actually says what this “meaningfulness” is. I’m not going to even attempt to try and flesh out what he thinks “meaningfulness” is, because if I did, I would be grasping at such thin connections in the attempt to half-create a distinguishable sense of his concept, that I wouldn’t even have a straw man, so much as a scattered bit of hay with a carrot nose sitting on top.

But along with “meaning”, our guy here places “useful” and “legitimate” at the head of the table. “Useful” is a pretty good one, because many people have attempted to theorize what “usefulness” is. “Legitimate” is much more problematic, so I’m going to set it aside for now, and then we’ll come back to it.

So starting from here, let me tell you what I think meaningfulness is. In a sense, it is hard for me to do so, because I’m an artist/anarchist not really willing to make general statements about what things mean, let alone what they mean to other people. But, in the effort to work this out, let’s table aesthetic value as a different category than this “meaningfulness” he is trying to get at. Aesthetics are neither here nor there, I suppose: eye of the beholder, and all that. So let’s continue to suggest that beyond the relativism of aesthetics, there are actions in the world that do indeed have meaning.

Usefulness… usefulness… let’s see what I have in my philosophy bag here… oh look, Marx! Without digging too deep in Marx, let’s simply remember use-value: the use an object or labor has for a person, based upon its use. i.e. The satisfaction of a want.

Use-value goes hand in hand with exchange-value, which is itself based upon the equivalence of two different use-values via a fair and equitable exchange of these objects/labors. 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, as the old example reads. Linen has a certain use-value, a coat another, but in these proportions their use-value is equivalent. The exchange is typically phrased in the form of currency. X number of $ is equivalent to both use values, and so the exchange takes place. This is like the Newtonian physics of markets. Many other complicated things happen from here on out, but this is the basics of where it all begins.

But, the author of the aforementioned article specifically states, “meaningfulness” does not occur just because someone will pay money for labor. So he says. It might be exchanged, but does it doesn’t necessarily have a use. This is the “meaningless” labor that so-called hipsters do–moving social signifiers around, trying to up their follower counts, even occasionally building things just to get on BoingBoing, Reddit, etc, the bourses of hype-exchanging. To him, all of this labor is “meaningless”. Through these social exchanges, this is all no more than continuous consumption of whuffie: some sort of hipster bullshit.

But what about use-value? How can there just be none, simply because there might be other systems of social exchange-value applied over top? As I said, I’m totally going to bracket the aesthetic value of Steampunk cell phones, just because that is not even necessary to discuss. Guess what: even if you only make a single call on your Steampunk cell phone, it has use-value. If you do not buy another phone, because you are totally happy with your retro-cycled Nokia with gears glued to the outside, it has use-value. If you do not exchange anything, money or otherwise, for another phone because you have a Steampunk cell phone, then its use-value is greater than anything else that could be exchanged for it.

See, the question is not about efficiency–which, if I had my guess, would be what this irritating author meant to say instead of “meaningfulness”. The power of use-value is not about efficiency. It is true that the vast field of technology and exchanges supporting the development and distribution of technology have trended towards efficiency. Certainly, a Capitalist will look towards efficiency as a quantitative means for increasing surplus value via technology. But efficiency does not define use-value.

What this idiot so dismissively refers to as “hobbies”, and not “real production” is less-than-totally efficient production. It isn’t nostalgia that causes me to pick up my grandfather’s screwdriver to fix my 35MM camera. It is pure use-value. It would be more efficient if I used an electric screwdriver, outsourced the repair to a professional, or junked the whole thing and picked up a new digital camera as small as my thumbnail with a zillion megapixels. That would be most efficient. But the reason I “hobby” around, is because it just works. I don’t need that other shit. This screwdriver works fine, just as it has for the last sixty years. Maybe I would get more use-value out of a digital camera. In fact, I own several digital cameras, which means that I totally understand the use-value they provide. But I also understand the use-value of film cameras, and that is why I use them. Are we expected to believe that the instant I put down the digital camera and pick up the film camera, suddenly what I produce with that camera is meaningless? All of a sudden, my production switches to consumption? Is that the definition of “meaning” that we are really supposed to be using?

You know what carpentry and gardening does? It keeps me out of the mall and the supermarket. My partner knits–not just because it is quaint and because the textile life is so hip–but because we get high quality, repairable, custom-made clothing out of it that keeps us warm in the winter so we don’t have to turn up the heat. I run my own websites, rather than outsourcing it to pros, because it is cheaper, and it is fun. We cook too, even though Domino’s is like, totally more efficient. All of these things have real use-value, and that is why we do them. Maybe our personal household economy isn’t exactly the wonderful world of Monsanto and Dow Chemical… but you know what? I am totally okay with that.

This comes back to the issue of “legitimate”, which this guy equated with his notion of “meaningfulness”. Legitimacy, otherwise known as authenticity, is one of the big battles of the human race. It is the motive force for a thousand actions, for horrible crimes, and for great triumphs. It is the reason to try, and the reason we deem things failures. Largely, authenticity is completely relative. But the way that we do orient our own sense of direction in this crazy, relative world, is by looking to the people around us. We ask our social scene, which we largely compose from folks whom we believe share and supplement our values and views. Is what I’m doing worthwhile? Should I keep trying on this, or should I give up and try something else? From the responses to these questions, we form an understanding of what it is we are doing in the world.

And yes, we sometimes get too wrapped up in it. Our little egos get inflated, and we care too much about what a large number of people think, than what the really important people think. What others think, rather than what we, ourselves think. This happens. But we typically come back to earth. We use our social scene to discover the true meaning of life–the great arbitrator of exchange-values for all of the disparate human actions we call existence.

Whether or not we are heading in the right direction is impossible to say for sure. We can only do our best. At one time, and still for many people, “best” seeking efficiency, profit, and power to go with all that use-value, to supplement it, and even to establish these things as their own tools for achieving useful action. Lately, doing our best has meant, for a large number of different people, that we are ignoring or even becoming disgusted with that way of thinking. Instead, we are doing are carpentry at home, sewing rather than shopping, making crappy amateur art and music rather than buying whatever is on TV. I can tell you this: I am reasonably sure that this is a better course for human life than working in a Lowell mill, or a Chicago slaughterhouse. It is better than achieving someone else’s notion of “success” working for a health insurance company. I don’t know if what I’m doing is “meaningful”, but it sure as hell has more meaning than the common Capitalist lifestyle, and I can say that definitively, without even checking my Twitter feed’s opinion. And know what else? I’m still alive. My current use-value wins out, until the day I die.

So is my life fraught with consumption? Of course. But I’m also consuming less things than I have at any other time in my life. If that is “meaningful”, or even if it isn’t. Judging my level of production is a much more delicate procedure, and I’m sure there are those that could say I could be producing much more. But if production means slamming other people’s life-systems because they refuse to participate in mine, then whatever sort of “meaning” that is, I don’t want any part in it. And I’m not the only one.

So cry about it. Play the real estate market. Write an essay about it, if that justifies your existence. (Works for me.) But I have better things to do than satisfy someone else’s notion of Capitalist legitimacy. And people who agree with me are not just theorizing this world. We’re out there, living it, not buying into that legitimacy. That’s our personal brand. Rather than worrying about it, I suggest that that idiot develop his own a little bit more. ‘Cause as is, it kinda looks like crap.

And here is where we put our money in our mouths. In exchange of course. The market-substitution metaphor takes the money from your possession and substitutes physical food. You paid for the food, you are not literally eating the money. Let’s not play verbal games here. Except, that you are indeed putting your money in your mouth. You are taking it out of your wallet, so that you might satisfy the eternal hunger, and then putting sustenance directly in your mouth. If you were shopping for your weekly groceries, or perhaps, investing in corn oil and pork belly futures on the Chicago Exchange, you might be doing something so complicated as buying food. But to satisfy the hunger, we are just going to stop and grab something quick, we are going to swipe our debit cards without even getting out of the car, take the bag, put at least a little bit in our mouths before we step on the gas, maybe take a little sip of water and corn syrup, the hydrocarbon of humanity, and then zip off to rejoin the rest of the species on the freeway, moving in the same direction, encased inside similar assemblages of metal and plastic, each of us slowly but surely getting hungry again at the same rate.

A grocery store, or a farmer’s market, or a stocked pantry shelf, or even the freshly slaughtered carcass of an animal, those strips of flesh only recently converted by symbolic knife stroke into cuts of meat: these are places where we go to find food. These are the components of nutrition. The brick and mortar of the proverbial food pyramid. These are the ingredients we combine with alchemical precision, with the mystic-mechanical sculpting of thermodynamic processes, acid-base reactions, and even the harnessed life-cycle of animate life-forms that are equally the radical form of our life and an element in its continued sustenance and evolution. This is not to refute the restaurant process—the social experience of dining aside, there are plenty of restaurants who catalyze the elements of food as well or better than any of us could, and the item descriptions on menus alone may be educational pamphlets to those of us whom, for whatever reason, never learned the magical art of cookery ourselves.

But there are other places where sustenance can be had, and yet the mechanics are quite different. Here food is only symbolized, in Technicolor images of synthetic food stand-ins, meant to semiotically stimulate your desire-for-appetite more than to advertise any actual product for sale. The process revolves around the orderly exchange of money for a reduction in appetite, and maybe if you are lucky, a saturation of the gustatory organs at the same time. Colloquially, we call this “fast food”, and yet the process is not so much about reducing time as about removing a stage in the process. The preparation, the cookery, the reaction, the production: all of it is removed. In other words, excising everything that makes a food really a food. The exchange is expedited, so the connection between the food-labor and the product is alienated. The money is paid, the hunger is satiated. Did you eat? Does it matter, as long as the void that stimulated the desire to eat is removed? Hunger is the negative, food is the positive. If you remove the negative, who is to say that the positive was ever needed at all? Unable to provide Jetson-esque “cube meals”, technology, instead, replaces whole foods with a most apt and fluid metaphor. This is the “feeding tube”. A feeding tube sustains life; but it does not provide food. The act of feeding it provides is to remove the need to actually eat. The term “fast food” finds its metaphorical connection to technology through routed speed. From the manipulation of actual objects, to a mere regulation of a tube’s flow. A shortening of the production, a reduction of desire. Minimization, and therefore, maximalization.

This is all very interesting. As you move across the country, you begin to see entire districts set up for this sort of procedure. It’s as if there are giant, stationary herds of people sucking on the fast food feeding tube, and you are merely migrating through them. They call it the commercial district, or the strip mall strip, or the Business Route x (the x replaced by the designation number of whatever lonely freeway the main artery of the tube snakes out from before looping back dutifully to return your automobile to its forelorned interstate road). It’s a rural thing, and yet it isn’t, because they are everywhere. They are themselves an urbanization by proxy, a built up-ness of areas that would not city-ify themselves. It is capitalist irrigation. Without these asphalt conduits, the cash and people flowing out over the parched earth, and the single level buildings on major intersections serving as the ionic pump houses driving the intake of sodium, corn sugar, and saturated fat, why, this would be just another open piece of the country.

The most excellent of all feed tubes is not so much a tube as a giant rectangular prism, reminiscent in their own way of the cuboid meals produced by Rosie the Robot (you burnt the toast, Rosie), but from an alternate and more realistically unpredicted futurism. A future in which the food size inflated rather than concentrated. to such an extent that this American staple gave birth, or at least synthetically incubated, the term “big box store”. This tube among tubes, is Walmart. The logic that would remove the entire production process from nutrition and turn it into a infantile negation of desire finds its home on those hallowed, endless shelves.

Nothing makes sense in a Walmart. Or it does, but it does so on terms of its own devising; it is a Wonderland or an Oz-logic, where both the resident mythos and meta-satire subject is America. Already re-branded countless times in that confusing eternal renewal of Newspeak permanency that a brand image is supposed to provide (we have always been at war with high prices/those bourgeois city folk/terrorism), the current incarnation of our formerly smiley-faced god is now a silent asterisk footnote, a sibylline future-echo of what we will be some other time’s history; the super-novaed remnants of the pre-black hole, what was once the solar light of the American Dream; and the cartoon diagram of an asshole (cf. Breakfast of Champions)–nothing more profane than this orifice, through which we encourage ourselves to forget is the root of all of these illusions, the fundamental concept of the store, the management strategy of its employees, and that pocket-full-of-naughty-holes that is us. The asterisk marks the eclipsing of the Luke Helder emoticon (look him up), and the dawning of a new star not only in the East, but over nearly any city with a population of over ten thousand. In short: Walmart puts the “*” in “What the fu*k”.

All of these explicit invocations you have probably heard in one form or another, or could have readily assemble yourself if you are the sort of person who would be reading this essay. But here is something you might not have known: you can camp in a Walmart parking lot. Did you know this? The folk-beliefs behind this fact vary. One story said that Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, was an avid RVer, and wanted to spread the love. The more materialist explanation is that inviting RVs to their parking lot is a clear attempt to sell more barbecue briquettes, hamburger patties, ice, bottled soda, etc. After sleeping the night away, you can enter the store to stock up. And there are moral explanations as well. These don’t necessarily explain how this fact occurred, but this particular strain of Uncle-Samism gets very worried that there are a growing list of Walmarts that don’t allow camping, and blame this decline on the poor behavior of certain “lot rats” that overstay their welcome, and promote a sort of karmic list of best-practices for “guests” in order to help the gift of free Walmart camping to continue and grow, and in this way justifying its existence. It’s a kind of “freedom isn’t free”, negative theology of corporate alms-giving.

As one who has actually confirmed the belief by camping in a Walmart parking lot, I can tell you a certain number of things. The “allowance” of camping stems directly from the fact that nearly every Walmart is open twenty-four hours a day, and thus, there is no period of the day-night cycle at which it is not permitted to park there. Employees cars are there for about eight hours at a stretch, so if you were there for a similar length of time, no one would even be able to tell the difference. You do see a number of RVs staying over night in Walmart parking lots. As all that is really required for an RV occupant to camp is the ability to stay parked for awhile, and therefore, Walmart camping is easy enough. When I was a guest at Chez Sam Walton, we slept in the back of a station wagon, and thus our camping footprint was a similar four stopped tires. I have no idea of Walmart’s policy or individual locations’ attitudes towards the stringing of clothes lines, the pitching of tents, or say, camp fires. My guest is that this would be pushing the envelope of this un-official camping site pretty far. On one morning, we had a wake up call from a local police officer, who seemed friendly enough as we noticed his obviously watchful presence nearby as he ran the license plates from our car. We proceeded to excuse ourselves at a reasonable pace. In other locations, we had a bit of attention from private security that was patrolling the parking lot, but other than that sort of uncomfortable “hard glance” which I normally get in places that are not coastal cities, we were never specifically rousted. Another common rumor I have heard is that while Walmart does not stop campers, certain towns have passed ordinances against various technical aspects of sleeping in cars or parking in one spot for too long, and earn a certain amount of revenue from transient Walmart campers unwittingly unaware of these local statutes. So, let me say and in doing so excuse myself from any sort of culpability for the potential variances or vagrancy citations of your future camping experience; dear reader: I found sleeping in the parking lot of various Walmart’s across the country to be a doable endeavor, but you should obviously only do whatever your own will and reason prescribes for you.

But let me tell you something else: there is something deeply uncanny, and even more disturbingly oracular about the experience of sleeping in Walmart parking lots than the uncomfortable godly-erotic implications of Walmart’s logo. In addition to the experience of going to sleep in a parking lot and waking up in a parking lot. In excess of what it is like to open your eyes in a succession of departures from sleep, the segmentations separating them being of unknown length, and see the blurry sky beyond the fogged windows gradually lightening and changing in color from the all-night glow of white floodlights to the white-cloudy sunlight of an apocalyptically wintered Great Lakes city sky, like the spectrum steps of a paint chip in the home improvement section. Beyond the sensation of your glass, steel, and plastic bubble enclosing you from a vacuum of continental vastness, each early morning shopper’s car that sizzles past on wet pavement sounding like more and more spaceships stretched out in an endless convoy of interstellar trade, passing by our society’s closest excuse for hyper-sleep, easing the pain of aging during travel. Besides all of this: you are sleeping in a Walmart despite what misgivings you might have about its capitalistic position in society, because it is free. It is the easiest way of reducing that desire for rest and for sleep–not exactly being well-rested, but staving off the need to close the eyes, that heavy weight that is so willing to let your car drift from the lanes of the late interstate night, and end your life in a flipped coffin of metal and flame. Sleeping an a Walmart parking lot is the easiest and quickest. It is the feeding tube of rest, the little death drive of tiredness pushing off and at the same time pulling towards the single, endless, infinite death at the end. You are glad to see Walmart. That mystic asterisk becomes the symbol of your release and relief.

You wake up, and you find your shoes, and you roll out of your vehicle. You pad across the macadam, wrapping your coat against the cold in a way not at all like a bathrobe or piece of sleepware. You enter the Walmart, blink at the light. The greeter says hello, never good morning or good evening. The bathroom is always in the same place. There are only ever hand dryers, and not the paper towels you need to wipe the secreted oils from your face, eyes, and ears. You look like shit in the mirror. So does everyone else. And you start to realize, as you try to remember what state you are in, that this could go on forever. The ruins of America are yours today, and they look like the Walmart in Maumelle, Arkansas. Or the one in Fairfield, California. Or the one in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. I can’t remember which.

Once the feeding tube is inserted, it is hard to pull it away. Our relationship to our desires, both the presence of desires and the temporary resolution thereof, is one a hairsbreadth away from the unhealthy condition of behaviors known as addiction. Feedback loops are of the essence, in today’s world. Every action perpetuates something. The rut becomes everything, a smooth plateau as wide as the parking lot. As all encompassing as the triple-wide big box of the modern, re-branded Supercenter. And as the hunger and tiredness fades once again, you can see a glimpse of our future, spread out in front of us. From no bigger a point than the human act of eating and sleeping, we see a portion of the exhibited evidence of our species on display. I envision a future in which squatters camps surround Supercenters. This gray asphalt area gathers, as all cities do, around the centers of economic activity. Armed greeter guards check your remaining credit limit before you are allowed into the temple proper. Teenagers with hacked RFID credit tokens shoplift organic produce, buying only the cheapest of gift cards (I imagine the amount equally about 50 cents in 2011 dollars) as a cover for their crime. At night the lights shine on, and everyone sleeps, eats if they can. Whatever it was we used to do when we “went shopping” will seem as foreign as “cooking”. And we all get a little older. Why not? It could be our present some day. It’s not less possible than nuclear war. The mushroom cloud has only been re-branded. We’ll have to see. The mechanics of what we will in the future systematically streamline, efficiently reduce, and eventually lose are the mundane tasks of the present. Who is to say in what orifice they will plug the feeding tubes into tomorrow. And where we will line up to receive this treatment.

On Wednesday I will plug the feeding tube into our crotches, and thread it all the way into our genome. Follow my instructions to enter the Museum of Cultural Speciation, and don’t forget to clean your orifice port well before hand.

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If there is an idiot born every minute, every five minutes one of them says, “Let’s go to Cozumel!” And then s/he does. There is something about awful tourist attractions and awful tourists causing them to fly together like rare earth magnets, perhaps even lacerating your fingers if each object is of a great enough mass, and you happen to carelessly put your hand between them. Of course, there must be some place in the world for the itinerant masses to go, when they decide it is indeed time to go somewhere. And hell, who am I to judge? We would all like to go some place warm in the winter (all of us in the Northern hemisphere, anyway). The water in Cozumel is insanely beautiful.

And yet, there reaches a critical mass of massy masses—so many overweight Americans bringing their vacation dollars to a particular place—that either through unwitting clodmanship or through straight-up rudeness they end up pushing other people off the crowded jewelry-salesperson strewn sidewalk directly into raw, Mexican traffic. This is not hyperbole; this actually happened. The fat, sunburnt, sunglassed, cruise ship of a woman who threw an elbow into my father’s chest did not even look back to see who or what she hit. She motored off on her flip-flops, just like any other hit-and-run, BMW-driving, American businessman after he knocks over an unmanned motor scooter in downtown Portland, Oregon (I just seem to witness the nicest people all the time, just in the act of living their lives).

How did we get to this point? Not to the point at which I have a thousand and one sob stories about the callousness of others; but to the point at which vacation destinations, through their own advertising and industry, become so beyond over-capacity with customers that they become less vacation factories than the Stanford Prison Experience™? Do we really not have enough third-world beaches we can harvest for the color of their water and sand? Why do they all seem to go to Cozumel? Do the red, white, and blue flip-flops, swim suits, and sun visors really have some sort of strong-attraction force, magnetically collecting into these conglomerated asteroid super-fields of holiday makers?

I admit that I am biased, being not one for crowds and certainly not one for large groups of fun-seekers. I don’t have to seek fun, and don’t always care for those who do. This is not to say that I am somehow more able to find fun than most people; rather, I have fun doing boring, mundane things. I’m always having fun. Exploring the nether regions of an underpass might as well be taking a hike, for me. Taking a hike, well, that’s a trip to the beach. And a trip to the beach… that’s my own personal roller coaster on the roof of a casino.

But I do like to see new places. And some places that are new to me, unfortunately, are old to the tourist trade. Key West, for example. Beautiful reef waters, within sight of the uninhabited Key West Wildlife Sanctuaries. The beautiful island architecture inspired and housed some famous American artists; best-known, of course, are Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams. You can still visit Hemingway’s house, which is… right between the bar-strewn novelty T-shirt district of Duval Street and the cruise ship pier. I guess you can go if you want. Maybe I will not.

At some point, the aesthetic qualities of a place that attract artistry and travelers like myself—traveling for the sake of traveling rather than the destination—shrink in comparison to the mainstream economic-based motivators that draw the masses. New York is famously going through this problem now, as the artistic climate that has made New York what it is in the art world conspires to raise rents even in an economic downturn, chasing the artists themselves away. Until there are no artists left. It’s all part of the same cycle: attraction, and repulsion. And then what? I believe that gentrification is not a new phenomenon. It has been a problem ever since it because commonplace for people to move within a city. Times change, neighborhoods change, and people on the short end of the real estate stick end up moving to less than desirable places out of necessity. The cycle continues, life begets life, and the hipster chorus hits the high note as the credits roll. But, what perhaps seem un-cyclical is the extent to which these re-culturalizing forces are now becoming mono-cultural forces.

Certain places become miserable, all to their economic gain. While they rake in the dollars, I have a hard time believing that anyone really has a good time. They get drunk, yes. Spend money on stuff they don’t need. They buy antibiotics and painkillers over the counter; all of these are things we normally enjoy. But it is just so concentrated, so canned, and so monetized that it is really no more than a shadow of these fun things, now at twice the price. Will there be a tipping point at which Cozumel is no longer desirable, because it is notorious for being lousy with tourists and the hyenas who thrive upon their steaky wallets? I would have thought we reached that point long ago, but for some reason, people are still showing up. The mono-culture keeps paving, and people keep coming to park.

What is that we are trying to escape through travel, anyway? I mean “we” in the most populist sense—me, and those sorts of tourists and people whom I spend my life trying to avoid. I like to think there is a bit of capital-C Culture going on in where I choose to “tour”. A little bit of my high-falutin’ taste. But I like a dual-culture, if not more multiple than that. I like my small art galleries, but I like bars, too. Aren’t we all just trying to have fun? To see something different. To get drunk and stumble back to hotel. To eat some different food. And maybe take advantage of a beneficial currency exchange. A little warm weather. Maybe a sugar-coated moment of historical significance. Is this balance so much to ask? Is it so hard to find?

Cozumel, in trying to attract tourist dollars by promising just this sort of experience to so many people that it could never deliver on the promise, is really no different than any town in America. The mono-culture of economic expediency would extend itself everywhere, if it could Proof is in the billboards and signs on the sides of the Interstate. Thousands of towns, called out for their uniqueness. Redding. Amarillo. Lawrence. Elk Hart. Drink specials. Kids eat free. Free Wifi. The lowest prices on 1-40. The brithplace of a former Miss America. Memphis might not have the azure waters of Cozumel, but they get the scam. They know the hustle. People are passing by, thousands per day. They are going to spend money somewhere. Why not here? If you put up one sign, you might as well put up twenty. You tell a few tall tales. Then they might start to believe. Give it a couple years, hand out some bumper stickers, and before you know it, you have Wall-Drug—the Cozumel of the middle of nowhere. You get people to believe they’re having fun even though they’re not, and you have just created a tourist economy out of nowhere. And the mono-culture that is the mindless pursuit of capital flows.

The carnival of it all—that is, whatever that unnameable “fun” is that is sold to us for dollars on the penny—is not just in exotic destinations. Although some exotic destinations have some pretty great carnivals. But there are exotic destinations without carnivals, just as there are many carnivals in non-exotic locations. The carnival is everywhere. And so, it becomes that the carnival is only where someone has set up a sign. Wherever anyone sets up the economic tent. Some tents are bigger than others. Doesn’t mean the small ones aren’t tents. And all of a sudden, you aren’t having fun unless there’s a sign, a tent, and someone to take your money.

I wouldn’t suggest stopping at most of these tents any more than I would suggest going to Cozumel. The carnival ugliness is only so interesting in an academic sense, before it is just another freak show. And you have to watch out for those whom you’re gawking at. The anecdote about getting pushed into traffic wasn’t fiction. There are other ways they get at you, too. There’s evil in those crowds, just lingering underneath. A real mob is just below the skin of every good party. The truth about humanity is, that the distance separating a busy street and an orgy of beasts ripping each others’ limbs off and eating them, is about as long as the distance between a noun and a verb. Look into the eyes of a man who has had four daiquiris, and is about to buy jewelry for his wife. That is the seat of evil, my friends. As cold as a frozen drink, and the color of investment grade Tanzanite. Just before I went fully “small town Americana kitsch” on you, I thought I’d leave you with that.

But this is where we are, and this is how I somehow ended up in America, no different than other beasts of my species. More or less. The secret of vacationing, in my opinion, is to read all the billboards, but look for certain ones. You can’t avoid the tents, but you can choose. Don’t go for the biggest, the brightest, or the best deal. The signs you want are smaller, and probably a little broken, because the advertisers don’t have much money. For whatever reason they haven’t grasped the idea that to really make money you have to sell booze. Instead of foot-long daiquiris they’re selling culture, of all foolish commodities. And yet, their doors are still open. They are collecting nickels, but they’re collecting enough of them. That says something. And the something that it says is both what we’re looking for, and the subject of the next museum.

If you’ll follow me and try not to get separated from the group, Wednesday I’ll take you on a tour of the Museum of Small American Museums.

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It only occurred to me afterward how odd a thing it really was to solicit material for a zine online.

In a time when any one person could easily start 5 different blogs using 5 different well-publicized, multi-functional platforms, why would anyone start a zine? Why would anyone want to photocopy some words onto paper, and hand them out, when they could syndicate them immediately to their network of interested people in a format everyone is already prepared to accept? And why would someone, upon deciding that they want to do such an odd thing, turn to the internet for help, whenever on the internet has already rejected the model, replacing it with all of the technology and all of those reasons that a zine seems archaic?

Here is a list of reasons why:

1. A zine can be made for about $15 in photocopies. This is less than the price of nearly any US steady internet connection. It also requires no subscription, no sign-up, no log-in.

2. You are not utilizing some company’s content management system in order to publish your work. It is never handled, stored, or transmitted by anyone other than yourself.

3. A zine is solid. It’s made of paper. It comes in weird shapes. With different materials. Maybe this doesn’t do anything for you. But it does for some people.

4. You could write a zine with a pencil, if you wanted to. A pencil needs no cadmium, no mercury, no fossil fuels. This is kind of interesting. In 50 years it could be really interesting.

5. A zine has no gimmick. It isn’t a themed blog, a link generator, a cleverly-named Tumblr, a pseudonymous tell-all, or a satirical characterization. Of course, it could be like anyone of these things if you wanted it to. But it’s gimmick is that it is a zine. Like what a blog used to be. You can’t say, “I’m starting a blog,” without someone saying, “what kind of blog?” But if you are making a zine, it could be just a zine.

6. There are some challenges, of the old school print variety. Layout. Typeface. Page thickness. Signatures. All of this could be easily handled by the famous, “slap it all together with a fucking stample” method, but it also doesn’t have to be. No WYSIWYG here. No browser rendering issues. It isn’t necessarily easier or harder than HTML. It’s most just different.

7. Everyone who contributes to a zine gets a copy. What do you get if you contribute to a blog? You get a RT? Great. Put that on your coffee table and impress your dinner guests.

8. Getting people to read a zine is hard. You have to force it into their hands, and make them sit still long enough to read it. You can’t just tweet a link and hope for the best. SEO becomes almost as exciting as flirting with someone. I like to hide zines on the shelves of legitimate bookstores. Maybe no one will see it for years. But I can be almost guaranteed that one day, someone will pull it down, say “what the hell is this?” and start flipping through it. That, my friends, is a “hit”.

9. You can trade zines for things. To some fools, they actually have real world value. I’ve traded zines for indie comics before. For stickers. For pizza! For a bus fare. You can’t trade a blog link for shit, except more links.

10. Your mother will think it’s cool that you were published in something made of paper. She’ll still think you’re weird, but she’ll get the zine much more than the blog. Unless she has a blog, and then, well, there’s only 9 reasons to make a zine.

11. But there’s one more. We make zines because we have a disturbingly strong, unstoppable need to publish things. In print, on the Internet, on bathroom walls. Because we can. This reason is best and most.

Don’t just take a typically blog-like “ten/eleven reasons to ____” list! Find out for yourself. I’m making a zine, here is how to help.

I have this problem, where I read something about zines, and I get this urge. Like a deep, unholy desire.

There’s something about publishing a zine. It feeds some deep depraved need that I have in the base of the spinal cord, . Just to make something, and get it out there.

M and I were traveling the country for about a month (we stood in over half the states in the nation over the course of that time) and we abandoned almost all the zines I had left over from other vicious attacks of this pub-lust. So now I’m empty-handed, and rather than cured, I’m ready to start again.

I have loads of time, but I’m also very busy with writing projects both for on and off-web. So I’m going to try an impromptu experiment. There’s really no gimmick to it. It’s just a zine, built from anyone who reads this. I’m going to put out the call, and see what we get back. It will either work, or not.

That’s it, that’s the call. Calling you. It’s a zine, that’s all there is to it. Don’t know what a zine is? Google it. Never read one? Go to a punk record store or indie art store in unnamed-city-near-you, or ask nice and I might send you something.

Define your own level of participation. This is what we need:

Writing. (WRITING! LOTS OF IT!) Any length. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, sass, whatever. Another language? Why the hell not?
Photos that will look good rendered into shitty black and white toner printing.
Art that will look good given same.
Stamps
Other input
Whatever else
A Title

Easy. You can whip any one piece of that out in about half an hour. So you have no reason not to play along. Tell your friends.

Here are the only rules:

#: I’m not going to do it until I can get enough material for a reasonable 20 pages and it will be a maximum of 40 pages long. If for one reason or another either of these two constraints (demands!) aren’t met, we’ll discuss what to do.

&: I also will have a bit of editorial sway (my design sense is much more head-bashingly direct modernism rather than zine-ish Maximum Rock & Roll), though it will be way, way open to coercion by the revolutionary zine committee (i.e. opt-in email list).

@: Oh, and the product will never be seen on the Internet, unless the RZC can convince me why it should (it’s a zine, not a damn Tumblr).

%: And lastly, because there are too many rules already, it will be some sort of Creative Commons, and you’ll own your own shit forever and ever.

If you’re in it, you’ll get hard copies.

The goal is to get this printed in less than a month. If you want to be in it, let me know by a week from now. If you want something else, let me know that too.

This is the only other piece of pertinent info at this time:

adam@poszu.com

Everything goes there. Fire away, suckas. Don’t disappoint.

ps. There will be more of an explanation about my hiatus with my official return from hiatus, which should be here some time next week. This is just a bit of craziness that leaked into my self imposed silence. So, I will say that I’m sorry for posting, rather than being sorry for not posting.

Update:I think my comment below in the thread explaining how the original cartoon was a false syllogism does a much better logical job of making my original argument than the rhetorical strategy I originally implied. Consider my first try “deprecated technology”. :)

This XKCD from yesterday was a bit frustrating for several reasons.

And rather than just say to myself, “well, it’s just a cartoon” and forget it, I made my own chart.

Firstly, it’s not that I think that new age stuff “works”. Or that I think the original table wasn’t meant to be reductive. I think any reasonably intelligent person will agree that there is more than “the economic argument” involved for describing human behavior, even if it is marginalized by calling it “the personal”, or “the spiritual”, or something equivalent.

What bothers me about the XKCD cartoon is the reductive attitude towards “works”. As if anything could really be said to “work” in any comparative sense. For example, if you ask a dowsing expert if homeopathy “works”, they might agree that homeopathy is a crock of shit. Just because they believe in new agey stuff doesn’t mean they think it all “works” equally. Or that it “works” similarly. Drinking certain herbal teas might purportedly cause a general amount of bodily good, and “work” on that basis. But that isn’t to say that anyone can pick up a dowsing rod and find water. It would seem that such a thing would work differently for different people, in that not everyone could make it “work”, and that it might only “work” in certain circumstances. Even if it was a hoax. In other words, sawing a woman in half “works” perfectly well on a magician’s stage, but not so well in the operating room. Not because one is fake and the other is real, but because the qualitative definition of success on the stage is the different than the hospital. On stage, “working” is a convincing illusion. If the audience sees that the woman is not really sawed in half, then the sawing fails, even though the woman is no more or less actually cut in half than she would have been had it worked.

This is to say that “working” is relative; but also, it is not relative. If it were completely relative, it would always be up for interpretation, and mitigation, or excuses. “If only I had tried dowsing where the water table is higher, then it might have worked.” Or, “I didn’t find the water I was looking for, but I found some awesome bedrock!” Those don’t cut it. The positive existence of cause and effect are not up for negotiation. What is negotiable is that the cause and effect might not be what you originally thought. The goal is not to actually saw a woman in half. The “Working” is about praxis–it is about attempting to achieve a specific desired effect, but in a way that is uniquely essentialized to the action’s material being. You know it is a trick, and yet you paid money to see the trick. If you really wanted to see a woman sawed in half, you’d be one sick piece of work. An action’s recognizable existence, as an action, is defined by an expectation of cause and effect that will exist, regardless of success. It is the relationship between cause and effect that is already assumed. If a device doesn’t work the way it is expected, it is broken. If the way the device was expected to work was not expected, then it wouldn’t be a device. Only a thing.

Therefore–a dowsing rod “works” by sometimes not working. If it found water exactly every time, then it would be called “water radar”, or something with an air of certainty. The mystery about whether it will work or not is the dowsing–that’s how it works. You might test a dowsing rod in a series of objective studies, completed to the nth iteration, replicated all around the world with all variables controlled, and find no significant ability to find water using the rod. And yet, it is still a dowsing rod. It is a dowsing rod in that people will use it to try and find water, and not use their shoe, or their toaster, or ground penetrating radar. The dowsing rod “works”. Otherwise it would just be a stick.

Hence, my list. Other things that do not “work” according to a certain qualitative assessment of their intended action, and yet are clearly still things that work. The first two, electric cars and video phones, are easy. They are technology that has been around for a while, function as advertised, and yet are not used for their intended function. Why not? Because the rationality of the market has decided so. Maybe. Or maybe the function too well, doing things that certain interests would prefer they did not do. They function as they are expected to function, and yet we are perfectly happy with their non-functioning. And in this way, they continue to function, as expected.

The next two are similar, but the other direction on the atemporal spectrum. They still function amazingly well, but are now specialty items only for particular tasks, and not used by the general population. The New York Times is still the same paper it always was (more or less) but the task it used to accomplish is now diminished. We could call these things obsolete, and say that other objects work better than these, but that is not true either. Other things work different. The surrounding environment of other working objects channels need in new directions. Reel to reel no longer provides high quality audio recording; it provides a warm crackle to sound, and a feeling of nostalgia, even though it is the exact same device. We don’t need an entertaining media magic show anymore, and so the NYT isn’t worth the paper its printed on. Now we need information surgery, and so we saw the gray lady in half with Google News. Their non-function is a function of other functions.

The next two: world peace and evolution, are a bit different. They are conceptual, and not purely objects in and of themselves. And yet, we know specifically what they are. There is a large portion of the population that defines both of these in the negative–they acknowledge them in that they claim they do not function as advertised. That they are myths. And yet they are no less precise concepts to the warmonger and the creationist, because they still represent the presence of a cause and effect, though the cause may be bleeding heart liberalism and atheism, respectively. And what is our evidence for either of these in the positive, other than that we find specific instances that are consistent with their theories? We find fossils of animals, not fossil copies of The Origin of the Species. Is the theory of evolution a conceptual, taxonomic, dowsing rod? Is there anything wrong with it if it is?

The next two entries are a mix of the physical and the conceptual. There are physical objects that correspond to a conceptual matrix of theoretical function. SETI assumes that electromagnetic radiation might be emitted from other intelligent life forms in the universe, and seeks to look for it. We don’t know that there are other forms of intelligent life, though it is logical to assume so. And we don’t know that they would emit electromagnetic radiation, though that is also a logical assumption. For every quasar and neutron star found, intelligent life is not found. And yet, SETI is still functioning just as advertised, with no results to show for it. Ubuntu does have results. So many successful installs, a long versioning history, many satisfied users. But to what end? To continuously produce these results? Until when? When will Ubuntu successfully “have worked”? At what point could we say that it has stopped “working”, despite any number of people still using it, despite it’s history of successful function? Do we define historical “working” as a certain period of function at or above certain qualifications? How did we know that Linus Torvald wasn’t wasting his time when he first sat down and started writing code? Every thing that is something starts out not looking like anything. And will most likely end up that way, too. What is our functional, “working” theory for measuring diminishing returns on something that has only theoretical, potential, or archival value? And why hasn’t someone explained this all the people still emulating Commodore 64s?

Praxis is a complicated thing. Comics are relatively simple things, and snarky to boot. But that’s why we love XKCD, isn’t it? Not to say that New Age pseudo-science is a complicated thing by comparison. Homeopathy doesn’t exactly treat mainstream medicine with, err… objective scientific respect. But with every legitimate criticism ought to come, at least in my opinion, a multi-axis perspective. For criticism to “work”, not only must you identify failures in reason and observed patterns of cause and effect, but you must understand how the failures themselves “work”. Broken is a function, just not the one you wished for.

CPSC Notice 10/15/2010

Additional Injuries Prompt JAKKS Pacific® to Reannounce Recall of Spa Factory™ Aromatherapy Kits Due to Explosion and Projectile Hazards –

This children’s product was originally recalled in January 2009. Since that time, there have been additional injuries caused by the Spa Factory™ Spa Fantasy Aromatherapy Fountain & Bath Benefits Kits. Pressure from the buildup of carbon dioxide in the jars of Bath Bombs/Balls or Bath Fizzies that come with the kits can cause the unvented lids to blow off, posing explosion and projectile hazards. The flying pieces also can cause property damage. Additionally, the mixture of water with the Bath Bombs/Balls or Bath Fizzies can create citric acid. This acid can get into consumers’ eyes when the jars explode, posing a risk of eye irritation.

As of January 2009, CPSC had received 88 reports of exploding jars, including 13 injuries to children. Since that time, CPSC has received 12 additional reports of exploding unvented jars of JAKKS’ Bath Bombs/Balls or Bath Fizzies, including 13 additional reported injuries. The new injuries include irritated eyes, irritated skin and one eye injury from projectile jar lids.

CPSC Microfiction 10/15/2010

With only a preamble blip of picture, the feed was gone. And we continued to watch. As chairs were pulled from underneath heavily sedated patients, dropping us to the floor in fully subservient embrace of the rule of gravity. Drafted youth organization members of Purely Physical Cause and Effect Party, impassive faces blank as static field of electromagnetic distortion replaced newscast. Eyes automatically releasing anxious iris grip on focus, soft human lenses flexing back slowly, trained ease of first position. Black and white reduced to grey. They say static is residual time-traveling energy noise, in a Theory of Relativity sense anyway, visiting always, from the moment of the beginning until what is whatever is now.

Bath bomb. Took out the whole news room, the engineering room, the server room. The bathroom too, but that wouldn’t have affected the feed. An exothermic reaction in a teacup, or at least in a gift basket set with bath products, imported tea, service set to match, poured in custom carbon porcelain with metal wire reinforcement, jagged little children becoming-shrapnel with dreams of growing up to be grape shot one day. Sent by a dissident start-up, vengeance weapon made of salts and soaps, and something chemically reduced from a skin tightening lotion. A public response to an unfavorable column. Interview over.

We didn’t know that, until another newscast from another channel brought us all up to date. And so we sat, facing the screen. Reconnected with the world. Wondering where the remote was.

For information about this series, please see the introductory post.

CPSC Notices 9/8/10

The Land of Nod Recalls Toy Vegetables Due to Laceration Hazard – The metal wire in the toy asparagus can become exposed, posing a laceration hazard to children. The firm has received a report of an exposed wire in the asparagus. No injuries have been reported.

Microfiction 9/8/10

Haven’t eaten anything since they put wires in my food. Five days ago. Starvation is beginning to affect me. Mentally. Physically, I felt weak and unbalanced by day two. Now my mind is working slower. More animal-like. Needs visualized using only the nerves in my spinal column. Hunger has stopped taking a form of a want, and is an stitch in the torso. Throb in the kidneys. Soreness in the arms, where the muscle is dissolving.

Better than wires in me.

I could inspect the food, go back to the store with wire in hand, making a lot of noise about a free replacement asparagus, double-cheeseburger-hold-the-wire. I know better. They get in eventually. Matter of time. Can try to prevent them, but I’m destined to be wired. It’s the way that it is.

Been thinking, last few hours, maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe you should just let ‘em win, Johnny. If it’s inevitable, why not? Never been a fighter. That’s why they go with wires. Fighters don’t get wired. Get killed outright, dragged to the streets, heads on lamp posts and built into walls. So who am I, other than a future human prawn, dangling on the end of the wire? Why be anything else? Shrink myself into skin, animal madness, cornered in the alley. Is that life? What is it?

They’re in my skin now, oh boy. Can see ‘em snaking in my veins. Never quite made it to animal, I guess. Wired now. No more asparagus for me.

For information about this series, please see the introductory post.

It’s good to know that the more things change, the more red-baiting stays the same. Really–as the mental environment and the logical terrain begins shifting underneath my feet, it makes me happy to know that certain idiots can latch on to the same old rhetorical techniques, the rehashed tired responses, the boring syllogisms. Every time I begin to think that I can’t cope with the world, someone accuses someone else of being, of all things, a “Trotskyite”, and immediately I know that up is up, the world is round, and we’re all better dead than Red. Hearing the soft, familiar shriek of “go back to Cuba!” is like returning to one’s hometown and realizing, yes, the air is sweeter here!

To Cory Doctorow, capitalism is something that other people are conspiring to do to him, and DRM is the weapon they’re doing it with.

His antipathy to kapitalizm is understandable in view of his Trotskyite upbringing, but history has demonstrated that beneath every socialist’s flesh beats the heart of a capitalist.

God, this is good. Let’s count the tropes. 1) Communism is a paranoid fantasy, 2) Communists are all red-diaper babies 3) Communists are actually more capitalist than capitalists 4) communists are socialists (are capitalists are Trotskyites?)

It’s always funny how the worst thing you can call someone in the Communist universe is a Trotskyite. Even Maoists have more street cred than Trotskyites. “Not only are you a Communist, you’re a… Trotskyite!” Ooooh! “Not only are you bad with women, you’re gay!” Does the latter come from the former, or… are we in a middle school locker room? “Wait, are you trying to psychoanalyze me? Psychoanalysts are gay!”

But this article is actually about ebooks (I think), and that’s what I really wanted to get at. Because Cory Doctorow is a liberal, and not a communist in any sense of the term. (At least, not in relation to his well-known stances on DRM, copyright, ebooks, etc. Who KNOWS what sort of books he has stashed away his ENGLISH “flat”! You know what the English are, right? Gay!)

I’ve written about Cory’s stance on DRM before, from a dialectical perspective, actually (not that there’s anything wrong with that). And this would be, in the same sense, a continuation of this dialectic; two sides are eagerly falling into opposing sides of the same argument and verifying that yes, they do disagree, and so the world must be isometrically diametric. Free-market privateers on one side, high-minded Robin Hoods on the other hand. The third side of the coin being me, shaking my head and wondering when I will get a computer/ebook/mp3 player with the functions that I actually want to use (and violently condemning any form of state control. Wait, did I say that out loud?) This particular article is just a little more stark than it usually is. A little more, shall we say, cliche? But as I said, I can appreciate that, because if there wasn’t anyone going around and ruining perfectly good debates with McCarthyism, generations of teenagers wouldn’t read Marx as a form of rebellion.

Within the ebook discourse, the writers of this article are not entirely wrong for making allegations that Doctorow and his ilk are in some ways idealistic, and high-minded, and somewhat willfully ignorant of “the cold logic of market forces”. While Doctorow is successful in self-publishing, it clearly is not a model for everyone. He is an example, and to a certain degree a proof of concept, in that he can give away his ebooks for free and still make money, and can demand with this still-make-money that publishers bend to his will. He is our Paris Commune, which I have cited more times than I care to remember (both Cory and the literal Commune) as an example of intentional communism, err, self-publishing working, until the hegemony of the state (read: trade paperbacks) overcomes the experiment with bloody force. I hope that Cory does not come to the same end as the Commune, and I imagine he will not, because as bloody as this battle is, it’s between people who actually care about the future of reading, which means they have probably never thrown a punch in their lives.

This idealism and the according suspicion of it is not new. As I said, it is familiar of the old dialectic, the scarred hands of the right and the left, and in this way, calming to this old Marxist of twenty-eight years. But what IS new is the whining. What is up with these defenders of the “publishers’ interests?” You are supposed to be the cold-hearted capitalists!

Doctorow writes that he is “more than happy to offer my otherwise free books for sale in any vendor’s store, of course, but only if the vendors agree to carry them on terms I feel I can stand behind as an entrepreneur, as an artist, and as a moral actor.” Well, Mr. Doctorow, publishers have terms too, and if you listen to them long enough you come to understand why they need to impose them.

“Well, Mr. Bomb-throwing anarchist, we oligarchs have our beliefs, and if you would just come to my study, I’ll have my servant pull you up a wooden chair so you don’t stain my embroidered sofa, and I’ll kindly read to you from a selection of Adam Smith, who was a logical fellow, and I think if you try, you’ll see a lot of wisdom in his words to which we can all relate.” What is this shit? Call out the scabs, man! Get the Pinkertons to go burn down Cory’s Nexus One! “This ain’t a union town, Doctorow!” Or at the very least, can we PLEASE have a House Committee on Un-American e-Activities? I thought this was a Trotskyite you were dealing with? A TROTSKYITE! If you’re afraid to fight a Trotskyite, what does that make you?

The reason I know that Doctorow actually does have a bead drawn on the publishers (other than the glaringly obvious fact of THE INTERNET) is because the publishers are running scared. If in the 70s, someone had said to the music industry, “you know it’s kind of bullshit that you make us pay for stuff”, no one would have heard a thing. It would have been silence. More tumbleweeds than a 21st century picket line. But Doctorow IS the Paris Commune. A minor historical example, barely a piece of physical evidence at all in the face of the entire world market, but what he represents is so much of a danger to publishers, that they react this way. He can’t be allowed to get a pass on this, otherwise it will be clear that communism is not a bat shit theory, but an alternative with pros and cons of its own. And yet rather than call out the troops, the publishers are so weak that all they can do is make the market-theory equivalent of slanders to his sexuality.

Another piece I read recently that had a similar tone was this mild rebuke to the Wylie Agency by Michael Bahskar. Although caged in the language of “this is not taking sides”, the article does try to present an alternate logic to the agency-turned-publisher who decided it could form its own ebook economy without the publishers.

The main argument for why royalties [paid by publishers to agents and writers] should be higher in digital seems to be that, given we don’t have a physical book, the costs to the publisher must be so much lower. This is very easy to answer. The per unit cost of printing a book is, in most cases, not where the majority of a publishers’ costs are directed. They are directed at overheads, at editorial and editorial management, at sales, marketing and publicity. Regardless of whether you have a print book or not, these costs are absolutely consistent. So really the only difference we can talk about is the marginal print cost difference, only a fraction of a book’s total cost. [...]

For books to thrive they need good publishers; this is equally true of ebooks, and if publishers are making a loss on digital products then it will increasingly undermine not only their ebook business but ultimately their print books, and beyond that the whole ecosystem of reading and writing.

We could take trade guild rebelling against the nobles as our historical example in this one, to better abut it to our use of Communism previously. In this epoch, new capital rebells against old capital. But really, it is the same thing. Doctorow, as talent-publisher, is no different than the Wylie Agency here. Both are lucky enough to have the talent, and feel they’d be better off on their own terms, so they are going forward without the feet-dragging publishing nobility. Clearly, both Doctorow and Wylie, who have some experience selling books, know what it is that publishers do. And they couldn’t give a shit. All of this supposed work that publishers do is left to Bahskar to explain on a website, to the only people who care. If Doctorow and Wylie NEED publishers so bad, I would imagine they will be finding out that reality shortly when their grand experiments come crashing down. Right? Otherwise, off they go into the glorious communist future.

And so, note: the only thing that publisher are able to do is plead with them.

Please, talent! You NEED us! You are making a historical error! Like communism, you think you can survive without someone from above directing your markets, but you’ll just end up like Russia! You’ll still put people in space, but you’ll have to degrade yourself to space tourism to do it. If you think that is a “successful experiment”, you’re wrong! Plus, Stalin! I mean, come on, Stalin! You don’t want to be that. PLEASE LET US TOUCH YOUR BOOKS!

If these clowns really believed in the free market (secret: no one does) then they would let Doctorow and Wylie try their hand. They’d let them build their own railroad, and then crush them by cornering the market in steel. But the publishers can’t do that, because they don’t have a steel market. If anyone has the steel market, it’s Apple, and Apple is on the side of Henry Ford and the automobile, which… hold on, I think I lost my metaphor.

But the point is, if publishers are having to explain how important they are, then they’re not. Otherwise, we’d all know. Any person who tries to whine to you, liberal or conservative, communist or capitalist, about how you are making a mistake “against history” by opposing them, knows desperately that history is not on their side. History is on the side of complexity, and complexity is a pattern that will stymie any attempt to understand it in dialectical terms. The dialectic will always come around and bite you in the ass, whatever side you’re on. This is why the point is not to have an ideology, or to be “historically and theoretically correct”. The point is the adapt and build, even as everything is falling down. But publishers would rather sit around and whine, sit around and bitch, sit around and call Cory Doctorow a fake communist. I’m sure Cory could give a damn about what they call him, as long as he’s selling books.

And this, children, is the story about how the big baseball jock grew up calling the nerdy kids communist, and then became a wage slave working at the filling station. Luckily, he was straight. But his marriage was not very fulfilling. For the rest of his days, he cursed the dialectic, and always wondered what life would have been like had he actually worked to innovate the publishing industry, rather than defending market entities that were having to lower themselves to ad hominem attacks to replace their lack of economical understanding. His cheap gravestone would read:

“At least I wasn’t a Trotskyite.”

And he’d be right.

But don’t listen to me. Let this guy try and sell you something:

CPSC Notices 8/12/10

Circus World Recalls Wireless Video Baby Monitors Due to Overheating Hazard – Wiring in the baby monitor camera can overheat and emit smoke, posing a burn hazard to consumers. Circus World Displays has received two reports of the camera portion of the monitors overheating and smoking. No injuries have been reported.

Microfiction 8/12/10

Blue light, and he had hated the color. The insides of the trailer shone with it: bright against the water-damaged ceiling tiles, absorbed by the dark metal of the shelves and equipment racks, luminous on the front of his work shirt, dirt and grime illuminated. Blue glared up in front to his face and eyes from his clothing, a squinted halo on a humid day, a mist he couldn’t clear, repeatedly blink involuntarily. And then there was the screen itself.
The people walked by, in groups of universally ugly threes and fours, the occasional child straying across the screen and then running back to whatever person, place or thing might be serving as its caretaker. Occasionally a hot body might stray across the curved luminescence of the monitor, but it was too quick, the video feed refresh rate too staggered-full of white lines and blue ghosts… the mind couldn’t capture the image. The contrast was off, the color an approximation of light and shade only. The long hair was jagged lines, breasts were pixelated pits, exposed skin was bluish-white, bodies turned to drowning corpses in the bottomless cold lake of closed circuit.
A wave of mist and static blew across the screen, and he leaned forward to adjust a knob, blue square filling his picture. Wait–vertical lines, rolling thicknesses of mist, increased foreground brightness. Now he could see the flames. Goddamn it, those fucking kids have set fire to one of the cameras again!

For information about this series, please see the introductory post.

CPSC Notices 8/2/10

Miami Breaker Recalls Counterfeit Square D Circuit Breakers Due to Fire Hazard – The recalled circuit breakers labeled “Square D” or “SQD” have been determined to be counterfeit by Square D and can fail to trip when they are overloaded, posing a fire hazard to consumers. No injuries reported.

Microfiction 8/2/10

You feel it first. Feedback.
Then you think it. Feedback.
Will it work? Feedback.
Is that what I felt? Feedback.
Am I feeling what I’m thinking? Feedback.
Will what I’m thinking and I’m feeling work? Feedback.
Pause for a minute. Something happens here. Not thinking or feeling. Feedback.
Pick up the tool. Feedback.
Stretch your new limb. Feedback.
Think with the tool. Feedback.
Will it work? Feedback.
Is this the right tool? Feedback.
Do I know how to use it? Feedback.
Pause for a minute. Something happens here. Not thinking or feeling. Feedback.
Feel what you made. Feedback.
Think about what you made. Feedback.
Will it work? Feedback.
Is that what I felt? Feedback.
Am I feeling what I’m thinking? Feedback.
Will what I’m thinking and I’m feeling work? Feedback.
Pause for a minute. Nothing happens. Feedback.
Feedback.
Feel: Feedback.
Think: Feedback.
Work: Feedback.
Make: Feedback.
Feedback.
Overload. Feedback.
Overload. Feedback.
Overload. Feedback.
Overload. Feedback.
Overload. Feedback.
Overload. Feedback.
Overload. Feedback.
Overload. Feedback.
Overload. Feedback.
Overload. Feedback.

For information about this series, please see the introductory post.

CPSC Notice 7/8/10

PDi Communications Recalls Televisions Installed in Healthcare Facilities Due to Fire Hazard – A capacitor on the television’s power supply board can fail, posing a fire hazard. PDi Communications has received one report of an incident involving a flame in February 2010. No injuries have been reported.

Micro-fiction 7/8/10

It was a list of ingredients. It faded from vision as the thin text bent and blurred within its printed box. Now it was back. Gelatin. Glycerin. Polyethylene glycol. These were inactive ingredients. Where was…. He turned the small cardboard box over in his hand.
It was the remote control. He turned it over in his hand. There was a way these things were to point if they were have the desired effect. He mashed the buttons. No, that won’t work. One at a time. The noise got louder.
FIND WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR WITH OUR NEW CAREERS KIT YES RIGHT NOW, TELL THEM ENOUGH WITH THE GRIND, THE COMMUTE, THE OFFICE POLITICS, AND BE YOUR OWN BOSS, WORK FROM HOME, MAKE THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS A WEEK….
The cardboard box. There it was, in the other hand. Take two as needed, not to exceed twelve in a twenty-four hour period. If you consume more than three alcoholic drinks per day, consult your physician. The ingredients, the ingredients. Was there acetaminophen in this? Or was it the food coloring allergy? What was that smell? Plastic? Fire? Where was the phone?
The colored lines on the screen grew further apart. Waves, escaping the electromagnetic belts that ought to keep them where they were. They bent out into the room, across the white tile floor. There was foggy mist in the air, no peripheral vision. Or was it… smoke?
The screen burst into flames.

For information about this series, please see the introductory post.

CPSC Notice 6/16/10

Entertainment Centers Recalled by American Signature Due to Fall Hazard – The recalled entertainment centers’ shelves can detach and fall onto consumers when the entertainment centers are moved. American Signature Inc. has received four reports of the shelf above the television collapsing, causing two injuries. Injuries include a child who was struck on her fingers and an adult who required stitches to his mouth. There were also two reports of minor property damage.

Micro-fiction 6/16/10

The light flickered as the channels changed. The men and women moved into one another; their words stuttered and combined into a meaningless language of grunts, moans, and ejaculated syllables; their hairstyles merged and blended in a cloud of color; their bodies met and twisted, finding joint and union in the open, secreting orifices of the moments between shots; the scenes spun around each other, pivoting on access points of revolving light, wall, fashionable furniture, and the littered food items, the stars and planets of colliding galaxies and boiling nebulae; this plot of utterly doomed human astrology spelling out the places and times, war and seduction, fatigue and respite, story and meaninglessness, crashed down like disintegrating airliner across open sea en route to paradise, leaving vast swaths of narrative wreckage floating in slicks of emotional mirth, and we were meant to receive this eucharist as the point, the entertainment value, the take away message, the happy ending, the orgasm before bed; but suddenly the whole thing came detached from the wall, smashing downward and exploding in glass and hot fragments of ceramic, a massive shard of jagged plastic housing flipping outward and catching me on the mouth, ripping open my skin a good two inches upon that edge and sending a flood of hot iron across my tongue and down my throat.

For information about this series, please see the introductory post.