[image by glueckauf from Flickr]

Are there other versions of Quartzsite? Although I am frequently asked about it, the planned nature of Burning Man doesn't interest me. What does interest me is the 7km market in Odessa. 

In 1989 the Odessa city government expelled an impromptu flea market to a site some 7km outside of town. Since then the market has grown tremendously to over 170 acres in 2006 and does an estimated $20 million of business a day. 

See the New York Times for more. 

Design cycles faster and faster these days. See the New York Times for Flash in the Can: Designs Soon Forgotten. If you have a wall for of antlers or resin deer heads, trade it in quick, or be as hip as a proud owner of a Michael Graves teapot in the supermodern era.

Which begs the question, how can architecture continue to avoid fashion? To be sure, there are mini-fashions, but the blob remains with us a decade after its rightful death. And what is parametric design, after all, then the newest version of Bucky-Fuller-speak? Has architecture even caught up with what I wrote about fashion back in 2001? Maybe instead of less fashion, we need more fashion? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this…

Amazon released its oddly-named (Farenheit 451?) Kindle book reader today. On initial view, the device is ungainly when compared to the iPhone or the Sony PRS-505. But with some 90,000 books on offer for the relatively low price of $9.99, the Kindle is a shot across the bow for book publishers. I confess to a certain hatred of books (my publishers wouldn't want to hear this, I'm sure). About 30% of the books that I bring home are elegant objects that I am glad to own. But some 70% are pointless to own in physical form. Why do I need a work of fiction as a book if an e-reading device can serve me as well? Why do I need to own a copy of a textbook when I could get it on an e-reader? This idea attracts me greatly.

Alas, web browsing seems rudimentary while magazines, newspapers, and even blogs demand a subscription fee. This is a big step back from the world of free content that my iPhone offers.

My prediction is that although Kindle will have some degree of success, it will take someone like Apple licensing the content (why does Amazon need to produce hardware anyway? seems like a questionable move) before this technology will really take off.

But see Newsweek for more.

Via Architecture for Humanity's Cameron Sinclair at Archinect and Boing Boing ... comes this piece from Spiegel online on objectophilia and the love one woman feels for the Beriln Wall and another feels for the Twin Towers. More on the woman who married the Berlin Wall in Blue Monday ...

In thinking about expanding the work on network culture, one topic for expansion is that technologies have advanced to the point in which failure is a constant presence in everyday life.

As readers of this blog know, I had a series of server transitions which did not go smoothly by any means this year. Nor am I the only one. Problems in migration between versions of MYSQL are endemic on the web. From this site to Archinect to Natalie Jeremijenko's fabulous How Stuff is Made, the web is littered with junk like "’" instead of apostrophes these days.

Idiotic design decisions make ours an age of "enraging technology" (thanks to Adam for that link). As technologies begin to talk to each other, the connections between them mean that when one system fails, another fails. Little by little you find yourself doing nothing but debugging a cascade of problems. Why can't I post images on audc.org when I can on varnelis.net? They run off the very same code. I have no idea. Why do my printers sometimes fail to respond? Who knows? Why has my car been back to the mechanic four times to debug a check engine light (I checked, it's still there). My mechanic doesn't know. My espresso machine is in a similar cascade, with a heating element failing then a switch failing, then the AC cord. Or was it the AC cord to begin with? As I was mailing copies of Blue Monday to friends in Canada, I noted with frustration that the Postal Service's click and ship labeling program generates blank addresses fields for the city and country if you fill in a company name. There is simply no way to add a company name for Canada. Who tested this garbage?

When I first moved to Los Angeles in 1996, I insisted that we have an apartment with a dishwasher. We were grown-ups, with two real jobs for the first time, and neither of our families had owned dishwashers. Why? Well maybe because they didn't want more technology in their lives, but I'm too busy to deal with dishes, moreover I find nothing therapeutic about it.

So it was with great delight that I turned on the dishwasher and, it failed immediately.The repairman kept coming in while I was at work to replace a part but when I started the unit that evening, it would break again. I was very annoyed. After all, this was a main reason for renting that apartment! Finally I decided to stay home to watch him do the repair.

"Ah, he said," in his heavy Russian accent, while holding part of the machine in his hand.

"You see, first motor burn out control unit. Then control unit burn out new motor. It burn out second new motor too. Now I replace motor and control unit. Same problem here as at last job, ten years ago. Too much automation!"

"What was your last job?", I asked.

"Service engineer, Soviet nuclear power plant, Ukraine"

He actually didn't work at Chernobyl, but at another similar plant. The day the explosion happened, he took for for Israel and, eventually, for L. A.

What all this suggests is that our emerging relationship with objects—which will only get more intense in the world of ubicom that is rapidly on its way—needs a theory of everyday failure. The concept of the everyday that Lefebvre formulated in 1944 needs to be rethought for the age of semi-intelligent (and sometimes even malicious) objects. Alienation isn't the right term since we generally don't think of the object as being designed, but rather we think of objects in terms of the agency they themselves possess.

I have to go help my wife get a desk for her office since the keyboard drawer she needs to use won't fit on it and to bring in the car for repairs or I'd post more, but this seems like a necessary, if miserable, part of network culture to address.

Please comment. That is, if you can get the comment system to work (it usually does, really).

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The previous post on Clocky brought us to the topic of our relationship to things, something that Robert Sumrell and I have spent a good deal of time thinking about in our new book Blue Monday. This week, I have been going over the edits one very last time before we sent it to the printer and, in so doing, realized that I should point varnelis.net readers toward three short stories in Blue Monday that we have, thus far, kept largely under wraps.

The first is the story of Wall W. Berliner-Mauer , a Swedish woman who fell in love with the great modernist icon, the Berlin Wall and married it in 1979. As you might imagine, Berliner-Mauer's story is quite tragic as her husband was demolished a decade later. Berliner-Mauer has extensively theorized her relationship with the wall on her web site. The second is the story of Clarence, an obsessive record collector who has given up his life to the objects of his attention. In this story we explore our devotion and even slavery to objects. The third is the story of Mike, a chicken who survived decapitation to form a bond with the man who chopped off his head. Mike's life allowed us insight into just how perilous relationships of people and things can be.

Together, these three stories explore the fraught relationships we have with objects and our desire not only to make them submit to us, but to submit ourselves to them. We hope you'll enjoy them, and enjoy them even more when they become available in far more readable form in the book.

PBS's Frontline carried another fantastic episode today, "the Persuaders," on advertising today.

In 1957, Vance Packard wrote "The Hidden Persuaders" on how corporations employed subliminal techniques. Do the Persuaders really need to be hidden anymore? Frontline finds out. As usual, the show has an impressive web site with discussions between key analysts, supplemental material, opportunities to speak out, and the entire show online (just in cased you missed it).

Afrigadget is dedicated to "solving everyday problems with African ingenuity." Mortar shells that fell on Ethiopia become coffee makers,wood flash drive case mods, Kenyan carved lion iPod stands, hippo rollers and other products of everyday life in Africa are featured on this blog that reminds us that Network Culture is by no means confined to the first world.

On the topic of convergences between cybernetics and design, there's also the rather wild Chilean Cybersyn project. In 1970, Dr. Salvador Allende was elected President of Chile. Against the wishes of the United States, Allende and his Popular Unity government hoped to create "the Chilean Way to Socialism," La v??a chilena al socialismo. Allende and Fernando Flores, his 29-year-old minister of finance (now philosopher and management consultant) were faced with the challenge of managing newly nationalized industry but hoped to avoid the top-down methods of the Soviet model. As a doctor, Allende was attracted to scientific methods and when Flores proposed a technocratic means of controlling the industry, he agreed, hiring on his recommendation British management guru/scientist/visionary Stafford Beer to create Project Cybersyn, a system with which to monitor the output of factories, the flow of materials, rates of absenteeism, and other indicators on a daily basis. Through Project Cybersyn, Beer hoped to implant an electronic "nervous system" into Chilean society. The country would be linked together via a vast communications network to create what the Guardian calls a "socialist Internet." Finding about 500 abandoned TELEX machines in a factory, Beer networked these together to a provide input for software written by Chilean engineers in consultation with British engineers from Arthur Anderson called Cyberstrider that used Bayesian statistics to create a self-learning control system. All this was fed into the Cybersyn Opsroom, designed by Grupo de Dise?±o Industrial, a government Industrial Design Group led by former Ulm School Professor Gui Bonsiepe. Although the room was never operational, it was understood at the time as "the symbolic heart of the project," to quote Eden Medina, a scholar who wrote her dissertation at MIT on the topic and presented the material at Bruno Latour's Making Things Public exhibit as well as in the catalog for the show. In a setting influenced by the design of 2001, seven swivel chairs with buttons in the armrests""?themselves influenced by Saarinen's Silla Tulip Chairs""?were clustered in a circle as advisors processed data from large projection screens. The armrests of each chair were outfitted with ash trays and spaces for drinks. Although there was no space for writing, which was prohibited, buttons allowed occupants to control the material on the screens and provide feedback. Since the advisors were used to secretaries doing the typing, there was no keyboard interface. Instead, large buttons, fit for pounding on, if necessary, allowed officials to make their decisions. But computer graphics was not yet ready for the job. The displays were not CRTs with computer generated data. Instead, industrial designers would painstakingly produce the diagrams by hand. These would be photographed and projected as slides onto the display screens. As Robert Sumrell mentioned to me, this proves that they had more faith in the computer than if they had actually had machines produce the renderings. Even as it consumed massive amounts of the Chilean economy, Cybersyn initially appeared to be successful when, during October 1972, conservative small businessmen went on strike. Some 50,000 truck drivers blocked the streets of Santiago, but through Cybersyn the government was able to identify 200 trucks that remained loyal and coordinate food deliveries to the areas of the city that needed it most. A year later, however, on September 11, 1973, Allende's government was overthrown in a military coup with support from the United States government and, allegedly, telecommunications conglomerate ITT, which specialized in owning telecommunications monopolies outside the United States and owned 70% of the Chilean Telephone Company. Cybersyn's simplifications proved unable to comprehend what was to come and the Pinochet regime destroyed the Cybersyn project and the Opsroom. Technorati Tags: 1970s, computers, cybernetics, history of new media, object culture, ulm