All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace Episode 1

 

Until last night, I was eagerly awaiting Adam Curtis's All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

The first episode is already available on YouTube. See below or go to the site.

I'm sad to say that I was disappointed by this first episode and am not sure I will want to spend the time to watch any further. 

In "The Century of the Self," Curtis perfected a style consisting of appropriated music and film clips—as another filmmaker told me yesterday, this is made possible by blanket licensing rights possessed by the BBC—over which the unseen Curtis narrates in an ominous voice, simultaneously calm and urgent, sounding the alarm with regard to vast conspiracies of right wing forces attacking to exploit us for their own intersets. 

In the Century of the Self, the enemy was Freud and Freudianism and with it, the strange dialectic of pleasure and control so endemic to twentieth century life. I was riveted by Century of the Self and watched a number of Curtis's other documentaries. Generally speaking I didn't find these as compelling and I must admit that the style began to wear on me after a while.

But I had high hopes for this series. It had been some time since he had made a new one and I thought that by now he would have reworked his style and produced something of striking originality. I had hoped for a fresh take on network culture. After all, I will be the first with my hand in the air to accuse network culture of promoting elitism and individualism. Its influence on our society, particularly on the academy and the creative fields, has been pervasive and pernicious.

 

All Watched Over, alas, almost descends into self-parody. The first episode seems to loosely take Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron's fifteen year old Californian Ideology article as a reference point (although he fails to mention that they coined the term in a critical essay and misses the point about the critical influence of the counterculture in forging Silicon Valley's libertarian mindset) but he veers off into a protracted discussion of Ayn Rand.

Granted, Rand's work is commonly read in Silicon Valley (and of course among architects), but methodologically this is where the show goes awry. The gist of the first episode is that this rather misguided and insane woman's ideology of pure individualism and selfishness led us down the road to ruin. Curtis drags out Alan Greenspan as one of her followers. Fair enough, I suppose, although a more critical approach would be to look at the Chicago School, but I suppose that has already been done to death and Curtis wanted something more original. Still, by this point I was wondering just where Curtis was going. Although he would eventually reintroduce computers as these HAL-like entities controlling Wall Street, this wasn't terribly convincing (I think the real masters of the universe on Wall Street know very well what they are doing and rarely place blind faith in machines to save us all).

Worst of all, Curtis veered off into left field with a misinformed section on President Bill Clinton. Curtis weaves a tale of a president who had come to change society for the better but wound up so convinced by Greenspan's success with the economy and, by implication, so taken with the ideology of individualism, that he wound up leaving behind his ideas of making the country better and indulging in the earthly pleasures of Monica Lewinsky. After footage of Hilary giving a tour of the White House and even of Socks the cat, I was ready to call it a day. Somehow I made it through to the end, but I doubt I will want to cringe my way through another episode.

The changes in network culture are not the product of a conspiracy theory (if you like conspiracy theories then please spend your time on Geoff Waite's Nietzsche's Corps(e) for a much more self-reflective and compelling work). For a time better spent, try out David Harvey's A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism, Fred Turner's From Counter-Culture to Cyberculture, Barbrook and Cameron's Californian Ideology essay and compliment these with a good analysis of economic history like Robert Brenner's The Economics of Global Turbulence

I hate giving bad reviews. My mother taught me that if you don't have anything good to say, don't say it. Moreover, it pains me that I have found Curtis's work so compelling in the past and, as I stated at the outset, my whole network culture project is a sustained critique of the field. But in episode one of this series, Curtis reduces history to a caricature. 

If only Ayn Rand hadn't been so mentally unfit, if only her darting eyes hadn't been so convincing, then perhaps all these bad things wouldn't have happened and the man who had come to change society for the better would have done so. 

History isn't so simple. 

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Against Print

I don't see how can I avoid sounding like an ogre or troll in this post but there's no sense in writing for print anymore. 

I'm faced with a huge amount of work on my plate and something has to what give. Since I'm already spending too little time on the blog and my book, I have to find something to cut. The victim is the print-only journal. I wish it well.

Network culture begins with a condition of information overload. Having grown up in a house with a massive library, I can appreciate the desire to have books and journals at hand and I sought to emulate my father in collecting for a while, but gave it up almost a decade ago. Objects consume scarce resources and space. Books and journals are still the worst offenders in my house. Even as cull them without mercy, they pile up around me, largely unread, passed by in a day when there's too much to do. 

Let's face it, a personal library is the academic's version of an SUV. It's handy for when you need it, but it's big and unwieldy, a poor choice when it comes to ecology and not a defensible option in a world of limits except for those who really, truly need them.  

The journals that I read regularly—the New Left Review, Mute Magazine, Eurozine, and Domus (to name a select few)—are already on the Net. There are few print-only publications and I read none of them regularly. Fetish objects like the New City Reader, Junk Jet, Volume, or Loud Paper generally wind up on the Internet in reduced or pirated form. You have to pay—or otherwise seek out—the original format if that's what you want, but the content is there for the taking.

Google books makes it possible to search through new and old books alike while pirate book sites mean that it's easy to carry thousands of books in a laptop. Pirating may be illegal now, but it's thriving—take the book scanning movement, for example—and is just the faintest ripple in the surface of the ocean before the tides pull back and then the tsumani hits.

If not in this decade, then surely within two decades virtually all publishers—book, journal, and newspaper will provide universities with everything they publish in digital form. Within that time, as I pointed out at the CCA on Thursday, most archives will also be online.  

A book or journal that in print form only is inadequate for our age. It cannot be properly searched. Hand-made indices have some degree of utility, but no matter how intelligent the maker of the index was, remain reductive, the product of one mind that can't adequately foresee everything the text will be used for. Full-text search is revolutionary for scholarship.  

Then there's portability. Like so many of my colleagues, I travel frequently, both overseas and across the Hudson to Columbia. I clung to slides until 2006 when travelling to Ireland to teach made that impossible. Books are the same. It's entirely different to have my library at my fingertips as I type.

But is this historian's desire so new? While teaching in Brazil, Braudel would visit Europe periodically and employ microfilm to record material in archives for later references. I'm confident that if Benjamin were alive today, he'd be surfing book pirate Web sites instead of frequenting old bookstores, collecting PDFs in his laptop, just in case the sites wind up shut down.

Moreover, there's another ethical question, beyond the viability of publishers which I suspect will survive in this new world (printing presses, may be another matter). A friend once told me that while she was teaching in South America, she translated my texts for her students. At the time, she explained, my work was just about the only informed commentary on contemporary architecture available online and her university lacked the funds to acquire books and journals or pay for access to material behind paywalls. Her message hit home: print publications and paywalls maintain a global imbalance of intellectual resources.     

There's nothing more tiresome than the aged (or young) scholar lamenting the lack of intellectual rigor online. Surely such learned individuals have heard of the Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim who published his De laude scriptorum manualium, defending the tradition of script against the printing press in 1492? Our fields were hardly more rigorous in the postmodern 1980s or the post-structuralist 1990s let alone the heroic era of the 1920s. Plenty of material not worth the ink and paper it cost to print was published back then. 

Instead of lamenting print, let's work together to break down paywalls, physical or electronic. Those of us in the academy are not in the business of knowledge, we're in a community of knowledge, a community that transcends old limits. Let's embrace that.  

 

 

 

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Announcing the New City Reader

I am delighted to announce the New City Reader, a newspaper on architecture, public space and the city, published as part of the Last Newspaper, an exhibit running at the New Museum from 6 October 2010‒9 January 2011. Editorial work for the New City Reader will take place in the Museum gallery, starting at 11 tomorrow, October 5.

at linco

Produced as a collaboration between myself/the Netlab and Joseph Grima, the New City Reader will consist of one edition, published over the course of the project with a new section produced weekly by alternating guest editorial teams within the museum’s gallery space. These sections will be available free at the New Museum and—in emulation of a practice common in the nineteenth-century American city and still popular in parts of the world today—will be posted in public throughout the city for collective reading.

The New City Reader kicks off today with the City section, a massively detailed graphic produced by the Netlab recounting the 1977 New York City blackout and its effects on the failing city to reveal the interdependence of infrastructure, information, and social stability. If the challenges of that era map to the difficulties facing both the country and the city today, the New City Reader will inquire into these parallels.

Each issue of the New City Reader will be guest edited by a contributing network of architects, theorists, and research groups who will bring their particular expertise to bear on the sections.

You can also follow our tumbelog at newcityreader.tumblr.com

Staff: 

EXECUTIVE EDITORS

– Joseph Grima

– Kazys Varnelis

MANAGING EDITOR

Alan Rapp

ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR

– John Cantwell

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

– Brigette Borders

– Daniel Payne

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

– Pantea Tehrani

ART DIRECTOR

Neil Donnelly

DESIGNER

Chris Rypkema

EDITORIAL CARTOONIST

Klaus

BLACKOUT! CARTOONISTS

– Momo Araki

– Alexis Burson

– Leigha Dennis

– Kyle Hovenkotter

WEB DEVELOPER

Jochen Hartmann

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

David Benjamin & Livia Corona

C-Lab/Jeffrey Inaba

Program for Media & Modernity

common room

DJ N-RON & DJ/rupture

– Jeannie Kim & Hunter Tura

Leagues and Legions

– Michael Meredith, MOS

Network Architecture Lab

Frank Pasquale & Kevin Slavin

School of Visual Arts D-Crit

Robert Sumrell & Andrea Ching

Geminidas & Nomeda Urbonas, Nugu with Saskia Sassen

– Eyal Weizman, Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London

 

 

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Media for Historians of Architecture

I am delighted to announce that I will be succeeding Beatriz Colomina as the review editor of the media section of the Journal of Society of Architectural Historians.

It will be my charge to edit articles on Web sites, films, software, digital books, databases, and other media at a moment in which my field is undergoing a revolutionary transition. I am in debt to Beatriz for paving the way by creating a stellar review section, to David Brownlee, JSAH editor for inviting me to take part in his journal, and to Dean Wigley for his support in this new endeavor. 

If you are a historian of architecture and you read my blog, please do contact me using the form on the left. This is a most exciting appointment. 

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Fear of Flying

Iceland’s Eyjafjallajoekull volcano hasn’t given up disrupting north Atlantic air travel this summer, but what if it’s the harbinger of something bigger?

The global city is predicated on face to face communication being essential to major business deals. But the global city model, originally outlined by my colleague Saskia Sassen, is almost twenty years old. Trying booting up your Powerbook 100 to read this blog post. In this post I’d like to speculate on the impact of the volcano, technology, and global warming on the global city.  

First, let’s talk global warming and green hype. During the last decade, friendly but misguided green advocates have advocated pedestrian-oriented cities as environmentally-sound alternatives to the suburbs. But looking at America (and many countries in Europe aren’t all that different from this), most cities have seen sustained and uninterrupted declines in the last half century. The starring exceptions are the global city of various scales: New York, Chicago, Boston, LA, San Francisco and so on. For the most part, these cities have seen a remarkable renaissance as centers of business and creative activity. The urbanites who live here live in the global city, thinking nothing of jetting from London to Shanghai and alighting in San Francisco. Often, these individuals literally inhabit the global city and owning pied-à-tierres on multiple continents is increasingly as common among the super-wealthy as owning an estate is. At home, the "creative class" practices localism religiously, probably out enjoying home-smoked bacon cupcakes and carbon-neutral triple-pulled ristrettos right now.  

But the idea that this kind of life—which is as predicated on consumption as existence in deepest suburbia—is environmentally sound is laughable. Apart from the manic rate of conspicuous consumption in the global city, flying one mile on an airplane produces almost  as much CO2 as driving that same mile by oneself in an automobile (other side effects, including polluting in the very thin atmosphere high-up may be much worse). Moreover, if an average driver in the United States drives some 12,000 miles a year, that’s half of what you need to get into a frequent flyer club.

I think by now you get the picture: the high-flyer of the global city is much worse for the environment than the suburbanite. So much for sustainable living. 

Now back to the volcano. The impact it’s had on transatlantic travel has been massive as planes continue to be grounded in one European country or another multiple times a week. Pollution-wise, the amount of CO2 it released is significantly less than the amount of CO2 that would have been produced by the Airbuses and Boeings that happened not to fly on those days (obviously, the volcano also released other pollutants, many of which are quite toxic to life). Business travel had already dropped as a result of the recession. The volcano is a wake-up call. If my business relied on frequent international travel for face-to-face meetings, I’d begin asking myself how sustainable this is from an economic standpoint and how vulnerable my business was to such disruptions.   

There’s more to the story. As I stated earlier, we’re far from the day of the Powerbook 100, which couldn’t even browse the Web. 70% of stock market trades now take place between computers at millisecond-level speeds. I have a hunch that the face-to-face financial deals that used to drive the global financial markets are becoming less important economically. 

Let’s put this all together then. A perfect storm is emerging. Far from the idea that the suburbs will collapse in Richard Florida’s great reset, it is likely the global city that collapses, replaced by ubiquitous high-speed telecommunications and undone by changing climatological conditions, not to mention peak oil.

Make no mistake, I’m not offering up a new utopia of any sort here. What I’m predicting is an end to network culture as we know it and it won’t be pretty. The coming collapse of the global city will be slow and brutal, accompanied by the stationary state that Gopal Balakrishnan described last year.

I don’t see many easy solutions out there. Ironically, the best bet is probably the very scare-word the American right loves to deploy: socialism. Now it’s unlikely to take hold in the US, at least not for a generation or two but some countries will probably get the drift and head in that direction. What gets us out of this morass and what form of global spatial organization replaces the global city is unclear. Still, the late, great global city was far from equitable or sustainable. We can hardly lament its passing.  

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For the Record

Nothing irks me more than the idiots* who say that nobody saw the crash coming. I blogged about it years before it happened. It was plain as day. The real estate market was a bubble. Nothing fundamental had changed.

So for the record, the bump in the stock market today suggests just how fragile the markets are. I’ve brought this up many times in the networked publics panels, but it’s worth mentioning again: high velocity trading is a major threat to the markets and the markets are far from stable.

In literally the blink of an eye the NYSE had dropped over 995 points. It bounced back, but was still down over 350 at the end of the day. 

This isn’t the kind of glitch we should ignore. It’s a warning underscoring how unsound our financial markets are. Anyone interested in the survival of the current economy system should hope that the Obama administration doesn’t ignore it.  

*Of course some of the people saying that nobody saw the crash coming aren’t idiots; they’re liars.

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Goodbye to the Record Store

I spent half of my childhood in the thick of things in Chicago and the other half in rural-exurban Western Massachusetts. It always surprises me when someone says "I can’t imagine you in the countryside" (I often fantasize publicly about living in Vermont or somewhere similarly rural). What, Points of Interest in the Owens River Valley wasn’t enough for you? 

Since my exurban life came during my all-important teenage years, I found it  crucial to visit the city where I’d scour the record stores or to tune into WRPI, a great industrially-oriented radio station, something I could only do whenever the horrific local Christian station was off the air. When I went to college at Cornell in Ithaca, New York, I was even further from civilization and without even a decent radio station (the college radio station was obsessed with Phish, infinitely worse fate than even classic rock) and so-so record stores. I invested in a short wave radio to listen to the John Peel show (and, when I could get it, the brilliant, ill-fated Radio Sierra Leone) and took painfully long road trips to the city to the same record stores to collect more music.

All this is gone now. I haven’t been to a record store in years. I’m a bit of an audiophile so I still keep the best music in CDs but no record store is as efficient as the Net so I even that fix takes place online. In any event the record stores have closed down, the staff off to do God knows what. The scene is gone.

Why do I blog this? Simply enough: the old role of cities as places that you go to in order to experience hard-to-find culture is over. The Nick Hornby novel/film High Fidelity is completely foreign to network culture. Ours is the world of the Long Tail. Everything is available. The city is dead.  

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A Chapter on Atemporality

I’ve put a revised version of the introduction to my book on network culture together with the first chapter—on atemporality—on my site. I hope you’ll be as excited to read this material as I am to post it.

I know that I owe my most readers a few words of explanation about why it took over a year to post a chapter that I had initially thought I’d have up within a couple of months.

First, I had the honor of writing a chapter in Networked: A (Networked) Book on (Networked) Art. As part of this project, I agreed that I wouldn’t take the material for the chapter and immediately publish it on my own site. That material, like a lot of the research I  did last year requires substantial reworking to fit the book (little of it is in the first chapter…you’ll see it later, in the chapter on poetics).

Second, I’ve thoroughly rethought the book during the intervening year not once but repeatedly. This is hardly a crisis, but rather the way that I—and many historians—write. Revise again and again as you nibble at unformed parts until everything comes together.

Some of you have asked how the revision process works, so I’ve left the record on the site, just go to the revisions tab for any section and compare the current version with earlier ones. Of all the revisions, the most significant is a new model of historical succession that I find simply works for network culture. Whereas last year I had some uncertainty about just how this book would be a history, the first chapter—which of course is on history—now makes my strategy of relying on Michel Foucault and Jeffrey Nealon’s model of intensification emphatically clear.

Speaking of revisions, make no mistake, there are plenty of rough patches in these chapters. This is, after all, a draft. Don’t  read it if you want a finished product. But also don’t think you should hold back on your commentary. Whether at Networked or at the other ventures including this one, networked books have largely failed at generating comments. Don’t let that stop you. If you see a problem in the text call me out on it wherever you feel appropriate. The more that I can draw on the massive collective intelligence of my readership, the better this project wil be.   

While I’m on the topic of collective intelligence… This first chapter owes much to a dialogue that Bruce Sterling and I have maintained between our blogs (take, for example, Bruce’s discussion of atemporality in his keynote address at Transmediale this year) and on Twitter with many of you. All of the kind attention that this dialogue brought during the first few months of the year makes me think that my attempt to write a history of atemporality is both timely and untimely (in Nietzsche’s sense).

Finally, a word about the book title. It’s very much in flux now, but I’m thinking it might be "Life After Networks: A Critical History of Network Culture."   

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On the iPad’s Fatal Flaw

I’ve had my iPad for a short while and am enjoying it immensely. Anecdotally speaking, I’ve noticed that people who don’t immediately understand how they would want one wind up taking them back to the store or, if they didn’t purchase one, sometimes even get hostile (sometimes, even when they should know better because, say, they teaching in the digital media field). 

There’s no question anymore that this is a successful implementation of a computing typology that is fundamentally different from either a laptop or a desktop. A tablet computer that is ready to go at a moment notice is great for looking up recipes in the kitchen, for reading a newspaper or a book in the subway, and perfect for taking notes in lectures. It’s much less intrusive than a laptop, which can’t be held in one hand when standing and creates a barrier between the individual and others in a seminar or classroom. The multitouch interface works much better on the iPad than it does on the iPhone. Of the two, the latter seems like the unit I can more easily live without. 

I take immense pleasure in being able to haul around hundreds of books in a device that weighs less than a copy of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism book and occupies less space. Highlighting isn’t available yet, but it will be soon and with it, full-text search. At that point, the transformation of academic books into immaterial objects will be just a matter of time. I used to care a great deal accumulating a library at home, but if I can have one with me in my bag, then which is more useful? 

Still, don’t get me wrong. If a comparable product emerges from another vendor, I will defect immediately. I’m no great fan of the walled garden of applications that Apple has created, nor am I a fan of their "Father Knows Best" attitude toward the user. But everything so far is still vaporware or much less capable, so I’m stuck with the iPad for now.

As promised in the title of this piece, there IS a fatal flaw to the iPad, only it’s fatal not to Apple but to the media. There has been a lot of noise about how the iPad would give the media one more chance to survive. I was dubious that the iPad would play Jesus to the media to begin with, but now that Apple has banned applications developed by Adobe’s Flash Packager for iPhone, it’s game over. 

Where a periodical previously would have been able to develop an issue in Indesign, distribute it in print and over the net, convert it to Flash for non-Apple devices and use Flash Package for Apple devices, now the latter are inaccessible unless the media developer hand codes the application. This is much, much harder. At the Netlab, for example, we would have loved to produce periodicals, pamphlets, and books to read on the iPad  using a workflow consisting of Indesign, Flash, and the media packager, but now this is impossible. I’m not lamenting this too much. It’s disappointing, but our material will appear on the Web and as PDFs.

I see no great reason to complain. The Netlab doesn’t make money off its publications. But what about commercial periodicals? They’ll have to struggle to monetize content on the iPad and that difficulty—precisely at a time when they’re struggling just to stay afloat—will prove fatal for many. The rapid pace of creative destruction moves on. 

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Read the Infrastructural City

I’m delighted to announce that the good people at m.ammoth.us have organized an online reading group to read the Infrastructural City. Find out more at their site

Like Networked Publics, the Infrastructural City has become a long-term project that goes beyond the bounds of Los Angeles. I’m currently immersed in the Network Culture book, but I have some plans for a follow-up article to my introduction in Infrastructural City later this year and maybe even a book some time later. 

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