All posts by Paul Raven

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Josh Harris still on the MIT campaign trail

I never thought I’d ever get to say that I’d scooped the folk at Wired, but it looks like I did (even though they’re billing their piece as an”exclusive”, I’m magnanimous enough not to make a big deal about it – I know my place in the information ecosystem). Their Josh Harris screed is a little longer (and a little more unhinged, especially the sidebar about, um, toothpaste) than the one I ran here last year, but the core idea is very much the same: 1) get MIT Media Lab directorship, 2) build monetizable participatory panopticon, 3)… erm, well, the next step is a bit unclear, but I figure the way forward will become apparent when the earlier stages are in the bag.

I note with interest that the comments thread is much more vehemently opposed to the idea of Harris taking the post than the Futurismic equivalent. One could put that down to Wired‘s larger audience (YA RLY), but I’m gonna assume it’s something to do with Futurismic‘s readership being that little bit more open to craziness. Hell, you all read my jibber-jabber every day, you must get some sort of kick out of it… 🙂

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Landscape urbanism: the sound of the suburbs

As the human species becomes majority-urban, the planning and maintenance of cities becomes an increasingly important matter… and where importance goes, there too goes profound philosophical disagreement on best practice. Meet the Landscape Urbanists, the newest new school of architecture and civic planning [via BigThink]:

The landscape urbanist vision propounded by Waldheim and his allies comes down to two central insights. The first is that American cities in the 21st century are not like American cities from the 19th century, and should not be expected to function the same way. The second is that the best way for urban designers to protect the environment is to prioritize the natural landscape. Design should accommodate the waterways and the wildlife that were there before you arrived; it should preserve the rainfall instead of shunting it into sewers, and perhaps use it to irrigate nearby vegetation.

Taken together, those two positions add up to a vision of city planning that doesn’t put a priority on city life over suburban living; it focuses instead on resource protection, the creative use of natural infrastructure, and so-called systems thinking — that is, exactly what landscape architects are trained to do. There are, as yet, few examples of the ideas put into practice: Supporters tend to point to projects still under construction, like the park being built on top of a landfill in Staten Island, N.Y. But Waldheim has said that his program is “specifically” and “explicitly” meant to dislodge the New Urbanists from their perch in the American planning world.

[…]

Proponents of the New Urbanism have not been taking the accusations of obsolescence sitting down. In a widely circulated November essay on the website of Metropolis magazine, Duany mockingly cast the rise of landscape urbanism at Harvard as a “classic Latin American-style…coup.” His fellow New Urbanists have weighed in with more substantive critiques that have been equally harsh. One planning professor in Arizona attacked the landscape urbanists for caring more about nature than humans; on the planning website Planetizen, the Portland, Ore.-based urban design theorist Michael Mehaffy published an indictment of landscape urbanism called “Sprawl in a Pretty Green Dress?”

The underlying argument between the groups goes beyond the relative merits of density, or the question of whether you should start a planning project with the buildings or with the watershed. It’s an argument about whether human beings should adapt to the conditions in which they find themselves, or try to change them. Is sprawl inevitable, or isn’t it? At what point does it make sense to come to terms with it and try to find pragmatic, incremental solutions that don’t rely on any paradigmatic cultural shift?

This is one of those moments where I find myself entertaining the idea of immersing myself in an entirely new academic discipline; I’m in no way qualified to take a side on that argument at this point, but its importance to the near future is blindingly obvious, and I’m a sucker for big questions waiting on an answer.

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Coppola on the future of filmmaking

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Via kottke, here’s a very interesting interview with Francis Ford Coppola, which has some points worthy of consideration by musicians and writers and other artists worried about the internet killing off their chances of success:

Is it important to veer away from the masters to develop one’s own style?

I once found a little excerpt from Balzac. He speaks about a young writer who stole some of his prose. The thing that almost made me weep,  he said, “I was so happy when this young person took from me.” Because that’s what we want. We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice.

And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you. And Balzac said that in his book: It makes me so happy because it makes me immortal because I know that 200 years from now there will be people doing things that somehow I am part of. So the answer to your question is: Don’t worry about whether it’s appropriate to borrow or to take or do something like someone you admire because that’s only the first step and you have to take the first step.

How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce?

We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.

Of course, Coppola is wide open to the standard Doctorow Rejoinders here: “that’s easy for him to say, he’s got a steady income from doing [x] on the side!”; “he’s already got a market thanks to his own fame in other areas!”; “he had lucky breaks that I’ve never got a chance of getting!”… all of which are elaborate ways of avoiding saying “I don’t want to have to work for years on my art with no guarantee of getting rich from it!” Best stop now then, eh? It’ll save you a lot of anguish, and you’ll open the field up for those who’re willing to fight on regardless.

Maybe musicians, writers and movie-makers will have to accept poverty – or at least a low income and/or a supplementary day-job – as the sacrifice they make for the chance to create their dreams; as Coppola (and many others) have pointed out, that’s actually the historical norm rather than a fall from a god-given state of grace. And maybe that will mean there’s less shallow cookie-cutter crap clogging the art marketplaces. Sounds like a net win to me.

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Insomniac nation: the UK sleep deficit

Apparently insomnia is a “massive public health problem” here in the UK: the demands of our employment, our education, our families and loads of other stuff is all conspiring to wear us down into a state of perpetual exhaustion. (It’s not often I find myself in step with the rest of the country, but this is one of those rare incidences; I can’t remember when I last found it easy to get to sleep at night and get up of a morning, but I suspect it was in my early teens.)

Thankfully, the medical world has determined that (quelle surprise!) hypnotics and other highly addictive sleep-inducing medications aren’t the answer. The less positive news is that cognitive behavioural therapies and new types of drug designed to target the brain’s internal 24-hour clock (which are almost certain to have no addiction schedule or side effects, AMIRITEZ?) are the proposed solutions; as is traditional, we’re trying to cure the symptoms rather than going after the root cause of the problem, namely a ridiculously stressful social structure.

Still, why fix your society when drugs and brainwashing can get everyone back in the saddle with a rictius grin for jobs that may not exist in six months’ time, eh?

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More calls for web citizenship, plus precedents

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In light of the internet’s inescapable role in the Egyptian revolution*, Stowe Boyd is the latest pundit to suggest some sort of post-national citizenship-of-the-intertubes set-up, which is something we’ve discussed here in recent months. Boyd cites the precedent of the Knights of Malta, which is a UN-recognised nation-without-a-nation that issues its own passports and everything; riffing on their remit, his initial conception of the United States of Intarwub is a bit wishy-washy, though it has noble ideals at heart:

Perhaps we should structure an equivalent organization — directed toward saving the planet, perhaps — and centered on a religious military order dedicated to Gaia: the belief that the world is a living whole, that she and all her parts need to be protected from those that would destroy her, and that the place of greatest freedom and promise on Earth today is the web and the culture we are building there.

The Knights Of Gaia is a bit over the top. [ O RLY? – PGR. ] But, taking on the metaphor of the web as the Eighth Continent, I suggest The Eighth Continent Contingent. Perhaps we need to actually hold a continental congress? And truly, collectively, declare our independence, and create a constitution?

Yeah, it’s a little bit crazy… but last time I looked at the firehose of global news, the world was looking pretty damned crazy as well. Desperate times, and all that.

Reading about the Knights of Malta reminded me of another precedent, albeit an agit-prop-art version that never achieved (nor, I suspect, ever sought) official recognition. I’m thinking of Laibach, the controversial Slovenian art collective; best known for their subversive and provocative faux-totalitarian imagery (and a distinctly Teutonic flavour of sludgy industrial music, which was an acknowledged influence on the much better-known Rammstein), the art collective of which they are the musical wing, the NSK, went through a stage of issuing passports to anyone who’d stump up the cash… a service for which they apparently still receive numerous enquiries, especially from African citizens. While NSK’s intent was/is to provoke a questioning of the meaning and legitimacy of the nation-state (especially the hypernationalist nation-states of Eastern Europe in the late 20th Century), from our vantage point here at the beginning of the Twentyteens, they’re looking more than a little prescient.