More than a quarter of a million people have marched through central London to deliver a powerful message about the government’s cuts in public spending. The generally good-natured mood was soured by violent and destructive attacks on symbols of wealth including the Ritz, banks and a luxury car dealer; and an occupation of the upmarket food store Fortnum and Mason.
[...]
Last night police appealed to people not involved in the disorder to leave Trafalgar Square as they came under increased bombardment from a group of protesters who said they planned to stay there all night. The protesters were throwing items such as coins and water bottles. Scotland Yard said that light bulbs filled with ammonia had also been thrown at officers earlier. But Commander Bob Broadhurst, the Scotland Yard officer in charge of policing the protests, said the TUC had done an excellent job in ensuring that the march was “very professional, very well prepared”. But he said a hardcore element had been intent on making trouble.
“Unfortunately we’ve had in the region of 500-plus criminals – people hiding under the pretence of the TUC march who have caused considerable damage, attacked police officers, attacked police vehicles and scared the general public. Unfortunately, because of their mobility and the fact they are aware of some of our tactics, we have been unable to contain them and so we have had these groups wandering around the central London area.”
The story, of course, is that 250K folks would have been peaceably disputing the actions of their government, which the police is all to happy to grant them, but for the criminals who came and ruined the party. A seemingly logical story of course, because it sounds like those 500 did do some damage, for a purpose and effect that seems specious at best.
That is, until we realize how illogical the story itself is. These 250K are going for a good-natured stroll. That is a powerful message?
Another story about a powerful message, that took place no more that two months ago almost to the day, is the story of Egypt, and Tahrir Square. Egypt was not afforded the right to go for a good-natured stroll, and so they were forced to fight for the right to do so. Eventually the police relented, when they were supplanted by the army. Now the people were allowed to have their stroll. Everybody happy, yes?
No. The Egyptian people had had enough. They were not content at sending a “powerful message”. They wanted their government to actually change, and so they said they would not stop their good-natured stroll until that happened. They set up camp, and decided to stay.
And we know what happened next. There was violence, and strolling, and violence, and solidarity. They held together, and they got their change.
The 250K who are only interested in sending a “power message” are not in it for the change. They are in it for their conscience. The 500-plus who refused to leave when the police informed them their stroll was over? They were in it for the change. For the long haul. For the sit down, and stay until you are listened to, and not just tolerated. And they were branded criminals, not only by the police, but by the 250K strollers who condemned those unfortunate, misguided kids.
Perhaps they were criminals. Perhaps they only show up for the breaking glass, for the paint. Perhaps they like being beaten by cops… who knows. But they were the only ones willing to stay.
When they are all arrested, and the good-natured stroll is over, the government will continue to have its way. The cuts will take place, because even though there were many people willing to send a message, no one was willing to stay.
Videos of 3D weaving machines, which Lexus uses to build car components, among other things. Added strength, less material, and so forth. Via BLDGBLOG.
While once, extruded technologies (plastics) were all the rage of the future, the anality of the mechanisms of cutting-edge capitalistic production is now even more high-strung. Replace the urge to expel with a general increase in tension. The problems of infrastructural distribution that guided flows of solid material and waste, are swapped out for algorithmic Gordian knots. From muscular compression, and old-world-modernist strength, the present-day technologies have progresses towards stretching: no longer thinking bigger and better, pulling every last bit of surplus value out, pulling the thread as taught as it can get.
Tim questions exactly what is so important about being absolutely up-to-date about “World Event X”, when the information that is available might only be immediately relevant to a few people, and for those few people, all they really need is an update every 15 minutes or so. And then he speculates, might we even make better decisions if we haven’t been following events so closely? What if the person who was most knowledgeable and was tasked with making the actual decisions was kept in the dark, and then briefed with all known info all at once? This might avoid misinformation that could occur in the meantime. No perception bias would be allowed to form. There would be no old, bad data–only current information.
It is an interesting proposition, and could work well for a turn-based strategy game. Or any game theory application, in which the previous games played could affect the player’s perception of the current game. It takes the meat out of gambling, completely. If one viewed each spin of the roulette wheel as the only game that would ever be played, the odds are much clearer. Unlike, say, after a night of gambling, when one feels that one’s “luck has to change”.
The problem is, that in life there are no turns. There are no preset intervals like turns, or spins of the wheel, or games, at which all preconceived strategies can be cleared from the head, and the “rules of the game” can be conceived as unique and unconstrained by the rest of time.
Time is a continuum of what Henri Bergson called “duration”. If you think of the last fifteen minutes, you do not think of each minute interval separately, stretching backward until you count up to fifteen. You think of a solid duration, formed of the memories that linger from that period, cutting off the duration at some point which you guess to be roughly the same as the elapsing of fifteen minutes on a clock. That period of time is crushed flat in the memory as a chunk, not arrayed on a segmented timeline of numerical values.
In fact, even the order of events in the mind are only ordered in time, in that we construct smaller partial pieces of duration for events, which we then layer as “before” and “after” in the larger durational span. I climbed a ladder; and I fell off a ladder. Because I parcel these as two separate actions, each with their own separate duration, I can understand that I must have completed the former action before the latter, but only because they are related in my mind as an activity with a before and after. Whereas, I might only remember answering the phone before I opened a book, because I also remember walking from the phone over to the book shelf, and so that links a continuum of events that imbued causality.
In the last fifteen minutes, I have climbed a ladder/fallen off a ladder. Now, in the present, my butt is sore. I know why it is sore: because in the duration period preceding “now”, there was a fall from a ladder. But do I still remember that I had to climb the ladder first? Obviously I must have, if I think about it. I understand each of these separate events as tied to way that time unfolds in a “forward” direction. But what is the point of recalling those durations separately? It is easier to compress them together. I might climb the ladder again in the future, and perhaps I will take greater care to avoid a future falling event, because I remember those previous durations, climbing/falling/pain. As those moments of duration replay in my memory, they will link together, and the meaning will be established. But which happened first? It no longer matters precisely, as long as the meaning of what I had learned before still rings clear. Do I remember that I climbed a ladder, fell off a ladder, hurt myself, and resolved to be careful? Or do I simply remember that climbing a ladder can result in pain if one isn’t careful? What is the difference between what actually happened, and the conclusion one draws from it? There is no difference. Unless, of course, we decide to separate everything that has ever happened to us out into these little parcels of cause and effect, of minute succeeding minute, of one turn after the next.
Via Wikimedia
Why don’t we think of each spin of the roulette wheel as a separate probability game? Why? What are we doing on the casino floor to begin with? Why are we even attempting to think of roulette logically, now, if we didn’t think of it logically the last hundred times we have bet this evening? If we don’t think logically about gambling, then why would we be suddenly do so? The duration of each bet is overlapped into a larger duration that refuses to be split: the process of gambling. The game theory player thinks rationally, judging the rules according to durations of probability and risk within a single spin. The gambler, on the other hand, lives in the continuum of playing multiple games, a time-space filled with durations of winning and losing, highs and lows. The game theorist is rational, of course. But what is more reasonable: that humans are all, in essence, Game Theorists, or that casinos will remain open and a profitable business? The data shows that we tend towards irrationalism… towards a subjective, durational model of time and action. Which reality is broken? The one that is real, or the one that is theorized as a perfectly non-existent alternative?
Cable news provides another example. Viewed in its abstract, the programming is asinine. Perhaps fifteen minutes of news is stretched into hours, view repetition, commentary, highlight re-caps, and news tickers. If a person sat there and watched it all, they would be wasting their time, and learning nothing. It is irrational.
However, the day’s news is not released at midnight every day. News, which we might define as information that is “current”, is released at an unpredictable rate around the clock. Because the technology exists to transmit that information around the clock, it broadcasts new information immediately, and must wait for the next piece of news in the meantime, if it wishes to approximate the most current awareness available. In this way, cable news is like the human memory. It records events in duration: in sound bites, in video clips, in produced segments, and edited interviews. It recalls these elements constantly, repeating them as memory, to fill the gaps until there is something new to be perceived and recorded. The news is “current”, like consciousness. It’s nowness is the extent to which it has relevant memories through which to orient its new perceptions. The media that cycles through a cable news channel might be meaningless, or contradictory, or inflammatory. What is relevant to “news”, that informational consciousness, continues to circulate, and rise to the top. So-called “latest pictures” don’t represent any particular logical component of information. Not facts, not measurements, not logical rules. They are perception, flattened to a particular segment of duration, and recalled to consciousness, until they are no longer needed. A history book can recall events in a timeline, process activities according to quantitative turns of the earth, or choices made by individuals at particular intervals. But the news can only direct the eye and the ear. And for some reason, we prefer to watch the news than read history books.
Even when we do read history books, these only join the vast news tickers of the 24-hour cable news channel that is our consciousness. The problem for the nuclear scientists, engineers, and technicians at Fukushima, is that they cannot directly consult the historical timeline of events at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, and immediately know the logical action they ought to make in the present. Of course they can consult those timelines, and I have no doubt that someone was doing so fervently. But the present is always different than the past, separated by the duration between that time and space and this one, as well as all the other durational memories lingering as the substance of our reality. The present requires its own decisions to be made, and past success or failure cannot guarantee the same conditions in the present. The present is always evolving rapidly, and those who need to make the decisions cannot simply collect all the necessary information, and present it as the present. The minute it is all collected, it becomes the past as the present continues to evolve away, out from underneath us. There is no basic state from which we can make our decisions, and trust them to be rational. We can only hope to construct the most intricate understanding of past durations that we can, a network of associations of observations of past events, as complex as it can be while still being useful.
And then we have to pick up the dice…. forced to gamble.
From many sources frequented by discerning viewers:
Many things to notice here, in addition to the straight awesomeness of what is embedded. Something about the cinematographic separation of white and black. Put next to this:
There is something in paint, and what we expect it to do, and why we use it, and what we think about what it might mean. Something about white suits, about dark skin. About black skull-art work, and about white bone. I don’t know what it is, or if I would get any closer to it by thinking about it in words.
Maybe what I should do is make a music video that is visually not-altogether-not-alike to another video by what might at one time been a diametric opposite artist, but do so by covering a song that might as well have been another diametric opposite in another dimension but is now an inspiration, and do so in a way that completely represents an entirely different culture and place, in symbols that are apparent to nearly anyone anywhere in the world with the technology to view the video in the way the video is presented. I would have to make a video, because just listing these characteristics and proposing the idea is not nearly the same as doing it, especially when someone has already done it. But I couldn’t do it, and not just because someone has already done it.
Something about opposites, in the way they are like echoes.
Streaming Netflix to the Wii, thanks to a generous gift from my parents of a subscription. I’m behind the times on this, because most people who are interested in streaming Netflix are already doing so.
The interesting thing about it for me, is how this new burst of functionality actually creates a feeling of frustration for me. I’m frustrated for all the ways the Wii is not like Chrome.
Netflix is probably the first useful thing I’ve used on the Wii’s network connection. The browser is near pointless, the weather and news apps are useless in comparison to my cell phone, I don’t play multiplayer games online. I have downloaded a couple of games from the Wii Store (Secret of Mana and Zelda: Link to the Past, suckas!) but other than that, it just sits. But now that Netflix is pulling gigs of hot entertainment off of the cloud, I realize just how useless that pretty white box is.
Where is my Pandora app? A usable YouTube app? Free, pointless web games? Audiovox? Al Jazeera, or other news networks? I don’t know very much about the Wii programming front, but as wonderful and easy as navigating the Netflix native app with the Wiimote, I can’t believe I can’t stream music, news, or do any of the other easy web app tasks I do on all of my computers.
This isn’t the only inherent limitation in the setup. I can’t play DVDs in the Wii, so I’m constantly switching the RCA cables back and forth to my crappy single input TV. I can’t access network shares of any format. I’m expected to use a SD card to transfer pictures, for goodness sakes. And when I point my Wiimote at the toaster or the toilet, nothing happens!
Well, I might need some additional black market… hardware modifications… to make my waste elimination controllable via bluetooth. And I know that my Wii is several years old, so I shouldn’t expect cutting edge technology to be on it. But this is a common gadget problem, gadget problems being the localized “serious first world issues” that they are.
Everything electronic device I have seems to be limited by something. And not by being a few years old, or by having no interface to my spinal cord. I have devices running iOS, Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and whatever it is that is going on inside the Wii. Certain things will work with others and the larger network, via TCI/IP, CIFS, USB cable, or native app programming. But they don’t all work. Certain functionalities occur on certain devices, but not on others. I feel like I have a tool box filled with magnetized tools. The hammer is perfectly useful on its own, but bring it near my cold chisel, and the chisel flies across the room.
I know it is too much to hope that there ever be one OS to unite them all. But then, my good systems make me wish for what could be. There’s Roku, there’s Boxee, there’s XBMC. I could buy one of the pre-made systems, or I could hack together my own using free software and a small PC. These all get a little closer, but it still isn’t perfect. It will never be perfect.
What is perfect? Shouldn’t we at least have something to shoot for? What are people shooting for? I have some guesses as to what Apple and Nintendo are shooting for. It rhymes with “shmonetization”. Open-source developers like those working on XBMC might be shooting for perfect, one step at a time. But they are constrained by the pay services, and their own goals. Netflix won’t work on XBMC running on a Linux box, for example, because of the Silverlight DRM. Of course, Netflix is constrained in turn by their content providers, and I have no problem with this really. Their service is totally worth the money they charge. It provides real value, if you are into entertainment value. But it could provide more value, and yet is not. There are always limitations.
Limitations are a part of life. They only become frustrating when they seem arbitrary, and what is desired is just out of reach. I can listen to Pandora and Last.fm on Chrome OS, but I can’t watch Netflix. I can watch Netflix on the Wii, but can’t listen to Pandora. I feel like if I want it hard enough, I should be able to figure out a way past this impasse, but alas, technology is much more complex than wishing.
I could put this aside as just a silly little entertainment issue, and go back to doing something important. But, this desire to sync is not just a TV problem. It’s an information problem. We, the consumers, think of our technology in terms of features, not in terms of company motivation, operating system, or app availability. We want to DO functions, not understand the complex paths of compatibility. This problem engages all technology from car cabin controls, to social networking, to kitchen appliances.
Some of us (like myself, or so I like to think) can see past our desires and understand the reasons why things don’t work, and wait patiently hoping that some day they will work. But why is there a disconnect? Can’t we meet somewhere in the middle, with more easily component technological connections that more closely adhere to our schemas of functional understanding?
via Flickr user Mac User's Guide
Take RCA cables, for instance. In some scenarios, I’m the “tech geek”, simply because I understand the difference between red, white, and yellow, and between input and output. I don’t know anything about how a DVD player functions, but I can understand making a simple component connection between media source and display. I can figure out how best to organize the stereo receiver, the DVD player, the game system, and any other inputs and outputs to cobble together a home theater system from whatever is lying around. Just with some colorful little cables.
Everyone tries for this sort of component ease. Debian packages. iOS apps. Chrome apps. Web stores. Plug and play. But this component ease is always designed within a particular system, either an operating system, a gadget industry, or a particular company’s product offerings. Why isn’t the system the “consumer’s logical understanding environment”? Probably because consumer user experience only goes so far as to increase that consumer’s surface area as a customer. Why would anyone spend time and money working on R&D for improving UI purposefully outside of the scope of a product? Why would anyone want to potentially improve someone else’s product, outside of doing so as a way of improving their own product? Everyone is trying to use everyone else, be it the OS using its third-party developers, the developers using the interface, the interface using the customers. Except for the customers, who aren’t using anyone, and only getting used. It’s consumer capitalism, and this isn’t any revelation.
What would happen, if cell phone manufacturers actually wanted you to have better health care? Or if app developers really wanted a more directly representative democracy? If the world was made to help enable the synchronized functions we desire, rather than the functions that will earn someone money? First of all, we’d be living in a utopia. We’d be living in a world in which the human species was not self-interested and individualistic, and in which the consolidation of power in the form of money and resources didn’t beget the accumulation of more power and resources. All of which is not the case. No need to get weepy about it; we are whom we are.
But we could get much closer than we are now. I’d wait on my Wii apps, if it would help.
John Murray Spear, a middle-aged Universalist pastor in [mid 1800s] Massachusetts, claimed to be receiving messages from dead men. Sure, it was somewhat strange that instead of talking to a deceased relative for comfort, he claimed that a “Band of Electricizers” made up of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and others, had chosen him to bring a messiah into the world. But, in a twist fitting a new era, this savior was a machine, one that would, Spear relayed, “revolutionize the world and raise mankind to an exalted level of spiritual development.”
With “spirit guidance,” Spear constructed a contraption of zinc batteries, metal balls, and thousands of copper wires, encased in a wooden frame. He named it the New Motor. The purpose of this machine was as vague as the man himself, but he claimed that it not only harnessed spiritual electricity, but also housed an as-yet unborn soul.
Spear was hardly the first to build an odd contraption with spiritual properties, and he will not be the last. The article above mentions a number of other future-leaning types, abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, and others who dabbled in Spiritualism during that period. You can think of your own similar examples from other points in history.
I love this sort of thing, and of course I do, because I have some half-built machine/art project in my living room running off of the eccentric motors pulled out of half a dozen malfunctioning atomic-synced radio clocks. Art is my excuse of course. My excuse to play with technology that I only half understand, building nothing of consequence from pieces of things I have broken. I’d like to pretend I’m tinkering in the great tradition of gentlemen scientists who actually made most of the scientific discoveries in the world, prior to Spear’s time period, not unlike those whom Spear believed appeared to him in a dream to tell him how to build his own machine.
But I’m not. I don’t have the patience or the interest to learn how something works outside of a mental understanding. I don’t seek to create, or invent, or discover. I just like to tinker. I like to read. My field of real creation lies elsewhere. And so I understand when I draw a bit of those looks, those “woo woo” looks, the sort that one gives to a man who will just as easily discuss Game Theory as Orgone Theory. To an extent, I deserve them.
I don’t think that Orgone Theory is a real thing (not any more than I believe in Game Theory :) but I like learning about it anyway, just because it isn’t. There is something wonderfully tragic about such a theory that could so consume a smart man like its theorist, Wilhelm Reich. And while I’m not sure I agree with the author of the above piece, who suggests that maybe those whom are progressive and forward thinking are always a bit crazy, I think there is something about wild, unproven technologies, and the desire to build machines without knowing if they work, or in the full knowledge that they don’t. The pathos of dreaming, perhaps. Or the skill, and yes I call it a skill, to make one’s delusions real in the world.
It’s a capacity of performance art, and I think it lives in everything that we do. Whether or not your technology empirically “works”, there is a bit of performance art to it, that constitutes the will to make it exist, if not to make it functional. There is a sense of pleasure in this sort of creative work, whether or not anything ever comes from the science, or whether or not there is any science within half a mile of the project. It’s dreaming in real life. It’s the ability to creatively fetishize technology–to believe you are fulfilled, even though perhaps you are sitting inside an empty wooden box.
Take, for example, 3D films. It is a technology that “works”, empirically. And yet, what is the real use? Entertainment is important, sure. But I couldn’t care less. I’m entertained anyway. And while the inventors of 3D film technology might have had delusions of grandeur about the importance of their device, or simply been convinced that it would make them rich, they didn’t know this for sure. They had to build something, with an idea, and not much else. Most people see film, and they are satisfied. But these folks wanted it to be something more.
Maybe if I had an idea of where my clock machine was going to take us technologically, I would actually get somewhere. Spear’s machine was smashed by an angry crowd, and the new spirit he was theorizing never came into existence. But he DID end up working on the Underground Railroad, with several communes and other socialist projects. In the large, never-ending piece of performance art called life, his technology–if you want to call it that–did end amounting to something.
The world of ideas and mechanics are related. Video games, once a diversion, are now supposed to improve the cognitive facilities. Real, world-changing technologies are born and die on the backs of envelopes and napkins. I’m no scientist (really, not a scientist) but I wouldn’t be surprised if building a failed perpetual motion machine wasn’t in some way, good for the mind. At the very least, it is all an interesting piece of art. Perhaps the technology really does exist in the mind, rather than this world.
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!”
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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.
Henry Moore’s “Tube Shelter Perspective”, via Tate Collection
The B.s, who only came up to London a few weeks ago and have seen nothing of the blitz, say that they find Londoners very much changed, everyone very hysterical, talking in much louder tones, etc., etc. If this is so, it is something that happens gradually and that one does not notice while in the middle of it, as with the growth of a child. The only change I have definitely noticed since the air-raids began is that people are much more ready to speak to strangers in the street. . . . The Tube stations don’t now stink to any extent, the new metal bunks are quite good, and the people one sees there are reasonably well found as to bedding and seem contented and normal in all ways – but this just what disquiets me. What is one to think of people who go on living this subhuman life night after night for months, including periods of a week or more when no aeroplane has come near London? . . . It is appalling to see children still in all the Tube stations, taking it all for granted and having great fun riding round and round the Inner Circle. A little while back D. J. was coming to London from Cheltenham, and in the train was a young woman with her two children who had been evacuated to somewhere in the West Country and whom she was now bringing back. As the train neared London an air-raid began and the woman spent the rest of the journey in tears. What had decided her to come back was the fact that at that time there had been no raid on London for a week or more, and so she had concluded that “it was all right now”. What is one to think of the mentality of such people?
When one suggests that SF involving people living underground in tubes because they fear an unspecified danger above ground is unrealistic, I suppose that we should remember that of all the horrible things we could possibly think of to do to other people, someone has already thought of, and most likely, done so.
