Editor's Note: Rita blogged earlier some still images of artist Catie Newell's installation at the Imagination Station in Detroit, where Newell used as raw materials the wood burned by arson from building next to the Imagination Station. She used the burned materials to construct an art installation. Detroit cinematographer Stephen McGee has posted a rough cut video tour of the installation. It's pretty amazing. We've added it to the top of the original post.
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The Imagination Station in Corktown, Detroit, is morphing into a digital media literacy center and a world-class public art space. Reclamation by Marianne Burrows was the first work created at the Imagination Station. Catie Newell's mesmerizing installation, Salvaged Landscapes, opened last night. The above picture is what I saw the first time I visited the Imagination Station. The progress since has been spectacular.
In 2000 I was the editor of an online magazine called "OJR, the Online Journalism Review." In Spring of 2000, one of our columnists mentioned an unusual event. The then-new and excruciatingly hip website, McSweeneys.net, by author Dave Eggers, which launched on the web following the wave of Egger's best-seller book, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" had run out of money.
McSweeneys, like BoingBoing, is a dot net, not a dot com. The McSweeneys.com site was filled with pictures from a family in Maine on their camping trips and barbecues. The design lacked the minimalist refinement of Eggers' McSweeneys.net. The background color was bright pink and the font an oppressive 52 point bold face.
When Eggers announced in March 2001 that he had run out of money to support McSweeneys.net and the nice family at McSweeneys.com had offered to host the site for him, journalism outlets like Salon.com and the Boston Globe jumped on the story as an example of grassroots philanthropy in new media.
Highbrow literary readers who were avid followers of Eggers and readers of McSweeneys.net were outraged when, at the end of March 2001, McSweeneys.net went from the refined minimalist design for which they are still recognized today, to a bright pink, gigantic bold font, with pictures and zany aesthetics.
Two respectable news outlets decided this story was a naive gaffe and not an intentional goof.
But that wasn't the case. In fact, Dave Eggers had purchased McSweeneys.com the same year he purchased McSweeneys.net. A cursory search on Network Solutions revealed this, but had not been fact-checked by either Salon or The Boston Globe. His philanthropic receipt, followed by eye-gouging naive design was an April Fool's joke. Or was it?
What happened next was Dave Eggers experienced another huge bump in notoriety. McSweeneys.net became a major news story, for a bit. And, unlike similar journals of its kind launched in that era, it's still around.
GAP: Too Big to Fail?
Fast forward to today as analysts are considering the true meaning behind the GAP Logo debacle, in which GAP changed its logo online, was met with outrage from the Internet community, and then switched it back to the original design. The New York Times posits in Rob Walker's Consumed column in The New York Times Magazine, Walker's larger exploration of negative publicity takes the GAP Logo change as an honest, if seemingly innocent mistake.
Was it?
What if what they did was nothing more than a media strategy?
I asked Rita J. King, my collaborator, who is also a writer, artist, and investigative journalist, what she thought. I'll leave you with her observations:
From a design perspective, the old logo fits in a square and is posted above every GAP door I've ever noticed. The expense of retrofitting every physical world GAP and new labels mixing with old from an inventory perspective would also be not worth it for a new logo unless there was a compelling reason to go that far. Further, the new logo was so bad that it's surprising that a designer really would have put it forward as a viable contender even during early iterations. I've read articles in which the logo is referred to as having been "launched" for a week. Was the logo ever launched anywhere other than in social media? Did a single "real-world" logo ever change? And what would be the advantage of doing so eventually?
Also See:
October 12, 2010: [The New York Times Magazine: Consumed -- "Good News, Bad News"]
Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's because the Internet grants easier and more palpable access to global public opinion. No matter what the motivation or combination therein, the results are this: The Peace Corps has seen the largest number of new enrollees in forty years.
What does this mean for economic and cultural development? Culturally, the more people we have in the field with no motivation other than work and cultural relations, the better. There are plenty of Americans on the US payroll with other messages.
Jan Van Looy at the University of Ghent has just released a new poverty awareness roleplaying game in collaboration with a team in Rotterdam and an array of European foundations and NGOs.
PING, Poverty Is Not a Game runs on the Unity 3D platform, which can be played in your browser or as a downloadable stand-alone client.
The game is available in multiple languages. It is intended as a teaching tool for secondary school students and comes complete with a manual for teachers. Though it's funded by European agencies, and has a European flavor to it, I think it could be instructive for teachers in the United States as well.
The gameplay is quite good. The narrative begins comic book style with the protagonist (I played the boy option) who, after a dispute with his parents leaves home. The game takes you through the challenges of finding a housing using both public and private options and the real hardship and reality of needing money to do so. It is sobering and serious, but also compelling as a game with an interesting world to explore and good narrative interaction with the non-player characters.
Though games like this are often referred to as "Serious Games" because they can address serious subjects (or are trying to change human approaches to issues). This game is also well made and interesting, which makes it fun as well, even if the subject is challenging to tackle.
It's an important game and I'm pleased to see it was funded.
This might look a Halloween-centric piece of art, but I see it as a year-round Zombie Safeguard. I haven't bought into the whole Zombie Meme (I'm more one for the Whole World is a Hologram, if you want to know).
Etsy crafter AnUnclesMonkey maker of the sold-out Zombie Peashooter Seedling, offers up the above insurance policy for the Zombie-pocalypse. Portable, kinda. Awesome looking.
When you live in the US, save for The Daily Show, the media narrative around US politics doesn't get terribly critical in calling the news about politics for what it is. In addition, again with the exception of The Daily Show (in this case I'm referring to John Oliver's character) it almost never includes a perspective from outside the US.
When I travel overseas I always feel like I've entered back into the Planet Earth where the media bubble is not specifically focused on the US by the US. To be sure, the global media narrative includes the US media, what with CNN somehow playing in every airport terminal on the planet. But inside the US you almost never get a non-US perspective on how the world sees the US.
But for those inside the US, the rest of the world watches the US, monitors its oddities and eccentricities and reports on them. (If we could only get US media to pay the same attention to news outside the US as the non-US media does to the United States!)
The above article from Monday's Irish Times is a great example of an outside-the-US perspective on the US political circus. It should be required reading by everyone. As the article states, "Winston Churchill famously remarked that democracy was the worst possible system, with the exception of all others. Maybe it’s time we heard about the others."
After September 11 and the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the US began to ask the question "Why do they hate us?"
This article doesn't answer that question, but it's a reminder that the world is still watching the United States. Perhaps seeing the United States system reflected through the eyes of an outside observer will inform people of the US how they are really seen.
This video of philosopher Terence McKenna is old, but it remains relevant and it's worth (re-) watching as the US moves into yet another divisive election season highlighting how disparate and internecine the cultures within one country can be.
But it offers a ray of hope: The path toward overcoming these divisions is "by creating Art." Words of advice that could be well-served in both the cultural relations fields and beyond.
The Guardian Newspaper's "Media Monkey" column blogged this hilarious clip of Paul O'Grady who has commentary that is as funny and biting toward the British Government as Jon Stewart is on The Daily Show.
One could argue that the Brits invented the genre of political satire and lambasting of politicians in the media. But it's fun to get a window into how comedians in the UK are dealing with the political sturm-und-drang presently ongoing in the UK.
Quotable from Media Monkey:
"I'd sooner have Ozzy Osbourne as chancellor. At least with Ozzy the only cuts would be the f-ing and blinding from his speech. Do you know what got my back up? Those Tories hooping and hollering when they heard about the cuts. Gonna scrap the pensions – yeah! – no more wheelchairs – yeah! Bastards. I do apologise for the language, that just fell out. I bet when they were children they laughed in Bambi when his mother got shot." Warming to his theme, O'Grady slipped into an old music hall song – "It's the same the whole world over, it's the poor what gets the blame" – and suggested viewers take to the streets "in our fight against oppression".
Rita J. King is interviewed in the latest issue of "The Innovation Corps of America," a consortium of fomer IBM employees. From the Interview:
Technology is a prism which you hold up to the bright light of imagination. There is a race between the possibility of evolution and the dangers that are presented to us, both externally and those we create. I remember a few years ago when I was living in Albuquerque, and Jupiter was hit by meteors, and I realized we were all on this little blue planet. ... We need to amplify the collective ability to make changes and create more effective systems. So, all in all I am optimistic, because that helps drive me to create.
This is why YouTube matters: When else in the history of humanity could a 3-year-old who has genius-level talent conducting Beethoven expose a global audience to his talent?
P.S. Hey, The GAP: Erase global memory of your logo gaffe by giving this kid a contract to do a series of commercials.
Want more: Jonathan, the boy in the above video, who was three when the video was posted, is four now. And there are even more current videos. He's even better than the above video. Watch and enjoy.
Ben Cerveny shares a fascinating anticipatory 2010 census data visualization tool by his company Stamen Design. This Tract is an intriguingly provocative data visualization mapping tool that anticipates the results of the 2010 Census but can also automagically geolocate you based on your ISP location using your web browser and offer predictions of your location. Or, if you don't want to share where you are you can enter an address, like I did above.
From the site:
This Tract is a view into U.S. 2000 Census data for every tract, built in anticipation of the forthcoming 2010 Census data release. It uses your web browser’s built-in geolocation feature to give you a view of the demographics of your local area, or you can search by address or location.
These guys should collaborate with the mapping project over at MakeLoveland.com.
Since 2009, Matt Stillman has gone to Union Square in New York City with nothing but two chairs, one table and a sign that reads "Creative Approaches to What You Have Been Thinking About" and a smaller one that reads "Pay What You Like or Take What You Need".
He sits with no computer or cell phone, waiting to talk with strangers about any subject at all and trying to offer a creative approach to it. No subject is off limits. His blog, "Stillman Says" is the story of this experiment.
His latest entry tells the story of a woman "perhaps in her early 60s" who sits at his table. The story is wry, funny and sexy. And you should read it.
You should read it not because it's funny, sexy or wry, but because it's an example of the Imagination Age. In a period of global economic upheaval when governments are slashing their investment in arts and culture, creative people are rising to fill the gap that government might play by creating nexus points of creative connectivity.
(Note to the reader: In an odd coincidence, our own Rita J. King does similar projects. I suppose it's no coincidence, since the two of them were drama students together.)
This great Kickstarter project for art supplies for kids in Detroit is fantastic. I know the kids who got the last round of art supplies, and they did some amazing work. Check out the video above and consider kicking in, please!
60 Minutes added its broadcast power to a lame trend this week by sharing a story we all know too well, one guaranteed to cause rage and frustration without addressing the cause of the problem or the solution: the documentation of joblessness.
When Unemployment Benefits Run Out barely contains surprise that jobs haven't started cropping up by now without any entrepreneurial effort at all.
You won't see "innovative" "entrepreneurial" or "LLC" in this CBS / 60 Minutes piece.
So are these media outfits simply imitating each other, or do they really not realize that American joblessness, for those who keep hoping that a job will create itself, is here to stay until the jobs that get created shift toward relevance?
"Congress did something that it has never done before - it extended unemployment benefits to 99 weeks. That cost more than $100 billion, a huge expense for a government in debt," the 60 Minutes piece explains.
But now, for many Americans 99 weeks have passed and there's still no job in sight. Some have taken to calling themselves the "99ers."
"60 Minutes" and correspondent Scott Pelley went to several communities in search of the 99ers, but we didn't expect to find such a crisis in Silicon Valley, the high tech capital that many people hoped would be creating jobs.
Really? Did they think that everyone in Silicon Valley is floating in a cloud of code? Imagine if they said the same about New York, as if hedge fund managers were never inconvenienced by panhandlers and homeless sleeping on the streets. Imagine how stunned they might be in Detroit to find squatters living in homes gutted by arson! Or the look of surprise they might have to learn that not everybody in Hollywood is in the film business?
The 99ers will eventually become the 199ers, then the 299ers. It's time to take a serious look at what "job creation" means when the more important task is creating a future. While the short term situation is dire, the long term prospects are even more bleak if relevance isn't rated above expectation in the job market. Many of the kinds of jobs Americans are losing won't exist in the future, and unless we are to embrace a fate as a welfare state full of victims, which only fans the flames of the misplaced rage that has come to pass for political ambition, we need to face reality: the world has changed and the kind of jobs it offers have changed with it.
I would love to see a series on unlikely entrepreneurs doing unusual work--people who didn't know they had it in them and then thrived against the odds. There are plenty of people like that out there. It's true that many people don't even know where to begin, which is why it would be a great public service to help people who don't consider themselves in "that demographic" understand how to start their own venture. In the short term, this will be the only solution--and if more people start thinking this way, then at least there will be a few less 99ers out there.
A while back I blogged about a spectacular Russian Fallout Cosplay or LARP (Live Action Roleplayers) group who were dressing up and adventuring in Russia dressed as characters from the post-apocalyptic video game, Fallout.
Apparently a group of people in the US have been doing, what should be a sister campaign, gathering in the desert to dress-up as apocalyptic refugees. Their particular emphasis is the Mad Max movie world. But, it's not so far down the lane from Steampunk and Fallout fans.
This beautiful video by photographer Mike Matas of his two week, 4,000 photograph trip from Morocco to Barcelona with his girlfriend is both a loveletter to the countries and cultures they visited as it is to his girlfriend. Plus, it's damn fine art. It's the kind of art that looks effortless, but is incredibly difficult and time-consuming to create.
Screenshot of the Webzine 99 website. Image credit: Ryan Junell.
Farhad Manjoo has a good essay up on Slate titled, "This Is Not a Blog Post," which explores the tensions in journalism between "blog posts" and "articles" and highlights how some blogs like Gawker will soon be morphing themselves into "Web Magazines." I think Gawker's move is an important one in the evolution of web publishing. My hope is that it will move us toward a more nuanced approach to what web publishing really means.
In 1998 I co-founded and edited a small web magazine called "OJR - The Online Journalism Review," which I ran until 2003. Our goal was to be the first site to both chronicle the evolution of journalism on the web and to serve as a watchdog to Big Journalism and new media journalism as this field grew.
Back then, there were no "blogs," because there was no Blogger. Blogger essentially did to web publishing what Kleenex did to tissue. It became such a dominant brand, concept, and ultimately euphemism, that anything published on the web became a "blog."
But before there was Blogger, there was a much more diverse array of definitions to describe online publishing. There were, among many descriptors, "Home Pagers," "Journalers," "Journals," "Storytellers," and, my favorite, "Webzines," also called "Zinesters."
I was particularly delighted by Zinesters -- a DIY group of writers, poets, artists, experimenters and journalists. When I discovered that they were having a conference for anyone who considered themselves in the broader family of being a "webzine" I immediately applied to speak and volunteer at it. At the venue in San Francisco, I was thrilled to find myself at a table alongside the likes of some of the popular zines at the time "GirlWonder," "Squirrelbait," "PigDog," "TexasMonkey" and our emcee, one of the first web celebrities, Justin Hall of Links.net, who at that time was classified as a "Home Pager" and would later be featured in one of the first documentaries about that era, called, appropriately, "Home Page".
Like the indie paper zines before the web, these people were on the frontlines of shaping what web content could mean. And almost all of them built their websites themselves. Some had teams of people editing and writing. Others were one person machines. But, all of us understood the fluid and evolving nature of what we were doing. And I think that we all knew we were present at a unique moment in history. (Ryan Junell has an good archive of the Webzine movement on TexasMonkey.com called "15 Megs of Fame".)
But "Webzines" and some of other more nuanced terms terms were not long for the world. In 1999, the team at Pyra Labs launched a service called Blogger, which made it easy for anyone to publish on the web, for free, with little or no knowledge of how to build a website. And the rest, I guess, is Kleenex.
Soon newspapers were battling over whether to blog or not, a charge that was lead by Dan Gillmor during his tenure as one of the first "journalist bloggers" while he was still at the San Jose Mercury News. But eventually, everyone, in some way or another, became a blogger. I was sad to see the nuance go, because I felt that pre-Blogger terms were more accurate descriptors of web publishing and, frankly, more fun.
So I'm really pleased to see Farhad Manjoo's article. I think it bodes well for the return of a more nuanced approach to describing web publishing. It feels like web publishing is maturing in a way, coming back to its roots.
The Guardian has done something amazing with data visualization. They have taken the recent wikileaks documents about the Iraq war and used them to create a data-visualization mapping every death in Iraq. This is also a great example of how newspapers are embracing new media tools. Read the US Defense Department's response to the documents release.
A few weeks ago, I blogged about the amazing Etsy Blue Beanie with Crocheted Beard, which was geared toward warming the face of men, ostensibly, with a knitted beard cap. ... The item quickly sold out.
Today I discover that Etsy crafter who goes by the handle, IMadeYouABeard is crafting beards for people who don't have them -- in multiple colors and with lots in stock!
I was born without the ability to grow a beard, and now I make beards to help people like me blend in with their bearded compatriots.
This crafter loves beards. One thing I love is when crafters and artists take the calling of their respective muses seriously and go all out in embracing that calling.
TIME Magazine has just posted a pleasant, if slightly condescending article, by writer Daniel Fastenberg musing "Why Is Twitter So Popular in Brazil?" The article, while intending to be optimistic and championing Twitter, comes across with empirical undertones that undervalue the true creativity of Brazilian society and brings no expert insight to the appeal and value of Twitter to Brazilians.
The TIME article asks Brown University professor James N. Green, the author of a recent and very important book, "We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States" why Twitter is so popular in Brazil. [For the record: I lived in BrasÃlia the capital of Brazil from 1983-1984 during the throes of Diretas Já, the civil uprising to restore democratic voting (and again in the 1990s). I witnessed riots in the streets by people desperate for the right to have a voice in their government and strong suspicions about the United States role in supporting Brazil's military rule. The importance of Professor Green's book is visceral to me.]
But, Professor Green's expertise doesn't seem to have much to do with why Brazilian's love Twitter. Why they quoted Green, who does not appear to have any expertise in social or digital media, is unclear. Despite my best search efforts, I can find no Twitter account for James N. Green, professor at Brown University. A cursory Google, however, does turn up dozens of experts inside Brazil who could have contributed to this article in a meaningful way and made it much better and informative.
Translated through Green's expertise and filter, not surprisingly, Twitter's popularity is, "tied intimately to the history of the country's rise from the shadow of authoritarianism to its newfound status as a budding global power."
Green is only partially right.
It's not surprising that Professor Green would see Brazil's interest in Twitter through the filter of Brazil's transition from a military government to a democracy. What he's missing is the fact that Brazilians have always been a culture of intense innovation, passion, creativity, art and, yes, communication.
Technological and artistic innovation and creativity in Brazil did not begin after or even in reaction to the military rule. It has a long history predating and extending throughout the military rule. It was during military rule that Brazil took the radical step of investing in the innovative development of and wide-scale use of sugar cane-based ethanol as an alternative automotive fuel to Petroleum, which no other country has replicated.
I have been tracking for the past decades and chronicling for the past three years on this blog Brazil's amazing appetite and capacity for digital culture and digital media from Brazil's rise into Orkut, the virtual world of Second Life, to Metaplace, to Twitter and on.
Brazil's interest in digital media is much more than an appetite for change: It's in the DNA of their culture. It's truly a culture that embodies the Imagination Age.
Elizabeth King interviewed me this week about my creative process for an artists' series she's been working on. The result is a mammoth profile that covers almost every era of my life. I'm happy to see my mother's quote, "Only boring people get bored," get the attention it deserves. :)
This came over the transom and is worth a note. Described as the "brainchild of marketing executive Angelo Tartaro" Scholargamers.com is a casual games website with loads of Flash-based games, which invites kids to play their games toward an ultimate reward of a trip to a Disney resort where they will compete in a final competition to win a $10,000 college scholarship.
In principal this seems like a good idea. And while some of the games are decidedly mindless, like "Smiley Showdown: A fun chain reaction game where you get to blow up thousands of smileys!!" Some are actually really good, such as a Geography Game (pictured below) in which players have to identify countries on a map from Central America to Africa -- an important and likely challenging but incredibly useful skill in an increasingly globalized planet.
What would be great is if they had a worldwide competition in which kids from around the world could compete for scholarships and play games that challenged them intellectually, kind of like a global college bowl. Then you create a gateway for cultural relations and education. Tomorrow's students not only face a financial deficit, but an interconnected planet the likes of which no generation has seen before.
Choosing J R for the 2011 TED Prize was an amazing stroke of ingenuity. While TED's website says that JR is a "seemingly unconventional recipient," I disagree. This is exactly the spirit of imagination that TED should be promoting. There's no reason why beauty shouldn't permeate every inch of the planet, and JR's work is a magnificent example of the transformative power of creativity.
From TED, about JR:
His art inspires people to view the world differently –- and want to change it for the better.
JR creates what might be called pervasive art. Working with a team of volunteers in various urban environments, he mounts enormous black-and-white photo canvases that spread on the buildings of the slums around Paris, on the walls in the Middle East, on broken bridges in Africa, and across the favelas of Brazil. These images become part of the local landscape and capture people’s attention and imagination around the world.
In Rio, he turned hillsides into dramatic visual landscape by applying images to the facades of favela homes. In Kenya, for his project “Women Are Heroes,” he turned Kibera into a stunning gallery of local faces. (See the trailer for “Women Are Heroes” above.) And in Israel and Palestine, he mounted photos of a rabbi, imam and priest on walls across the region –- including the wall separating Israel from the West Bank.
JR remains anonymous -– never showing his full face, revealing his name, or explaining his huge portraits –- to allow for an encounter between the subject and passers-by.
“JR’s mind-blowing creations have inspired people to see art where they wouldn’t expect it and create it when they didn’t know they could,” said TED Prize Director Amy Novogratz.
Over the course of the next months, JR will be working with the TED Prize team to develop an auducious wish that will involve the world in a brand new piece of art. The wish will be announced at TED2011 in Long Beach, California, at the end of February. Watch TEDPrize.org for news.
Check out Rodrigo Nogueira, who has also been working to transform the favelas in Brazil.
I love this retro-future, DIY view of technology built with elaborately handmade cardboard and plastic effects by Dutch ICT firm OGD.
Called "Bits in Pieces," (the double entendre unfolds in the story) is described on their about website this way:
The employees of OGD ict services made an internet video together, using only old-fashioned techniques. No computer effects, no blue screen, no digital animation. Instead they used nylon wires, cardboard, and crêpe paper. Everything you see was created on the film set, not in a computer. An analog film for the digital world.
Also check-out the "making of" video they produced.
Rita J. King's digital memorial yesterday, remembering the life of Mac Tonnies reminded me that Futurist Mac Tonnies, were he blogging and writing today would have loved the above item.
Common Scams From the World of Warcraft, by SiteJabber.
With tens of millions (if not a billion, by some estimates) of people worldwide playing, living and working in virtual worlds and Massively Multiplayer Games (MMOs), it's not just that these systems contain myriad different cultures interacting with each other, each virtual world has an economy and a culture unto itself.
Yesterday Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life updated an announcement that First Quarter of 2010 had set an all-time record for the in-world economy (that is, people spending real world currency on virtual world goods). T Linden announced the following eye-popping statistics, which were especially interesting given the massive US economic collapse:
User-to-User Transactions totaled US$160 million, a 30% increase year-to-year and an all-time high
Total Sales on Xstreet (Second Life's virtual goods market) reached US$2.3 million, an 82% increase year-to-year and a 24% increase over the previous quarter
Total L$ exchanged on the LindeX totaled US$31 million, a 9% increase year-to-year
Residents active in the Economy reached 517,349 in March, a 2010 high
Monthly Unique Users with Repeat Logins peaked in March at 826,214, a 13% increase year-to-year and an all-time high
As with the physical world, there exist people who want to scam you out of your money. Only, in a virtual world or an MMO how do you know how to watch out for them?
Enter SiteJabber, a web site dedicated to raising consumer awareness about fraudulent web sites.
SiteJabber founder Jeremy Gin has just released an infographic on how to avoid scams in the World of Warcraft, arguably the largest, if not the most popular, MMO produced inside the United States with nearly 12 million paying users.
I found the graphic incredibly useful. Especially because new players enter into the MMO and virtual world space every day. Gin says that SiteJabber has no immediate plans to produce similar infographics for other popular virtual worlds and MMOs like Second Life (over 16 million registered users) or "smaller" MMOs like Warhammer Online or Star Trek Online which have around a million paying but, more importantly, a very dedicated user base.
There's a real opportunity for SiteJabber or another consumer watchdog to expand out beyond World of Warcraft. I hope to see more of this.
My friend Jenny posted this video on Twitter and although I was in the middle of writing a chapter I stopped and watched the entire thing with rapt attention. It's one of the greatest songs that I always forget until I hear it again. The performance is absolutely spectacular.
The first time I ever heard this song was during an episode of Family Ties, which Billy Vera mentions in the interview above. As soon as I hear the opening lines of At This Moment I immediately think of the scene in Family Ties in which Alex P. Keaton and his girlfriend, played by Michael J. Fox and his now wife Tracy Pollan, dance. (I knew Jenny back then, too!) I'm sure I'm not the only one whose little world was rocked by that scene. So I Googled it, and wow, did I find a train wreck.
Somebody took the time to create the a "tribute" video but instead of keeping the original song that gave the scene its oomph they chose a saccharine replacement. Unless you love Celine Dion, turn down the volume on the video below and fast forward to :35 where the dance scene starts. It ends at 1:07.
The comments section reveals that I am not the only person outraged by this switcheroo.
I love the fact that my first glimpse of adolescent romance (I refuse to count Porky's Revenge) came from Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan, who are still married today.
I asked Jenny via direct message on Twitter why she'd posted the song to begin with and she told me that she's still brokenhearted because a friend of hers, Billy Harkins, was hit by a car and killed 19 years ago to the day. I told her that I'm grieving too, coincidentally, for a friend who died exactly one year ago tonight.
Oh, why not? Let's count Porky's Revenge. With all the talk of love and death, sometimes it saves the sanity to spend a little time with a character named "Meat."
Mac Tonnies was a true technology visionary, a believer in the mystery of infinite possibility, a compelling skeptic and most of all, an exquisite machine.
A year ago tonight, my friend Mac Tonnies sent me a message on Twitter, went to sleep and died unexpectedly. In every decade of my life, I've lost a close friend, near my age, and these deaths have gutted me and served as an alarm bell that highlights the fragility, pain and beauty of being alive.
In the wake of Mac's death, an intriguing group of mutual friends began to connect via Twitter. Last night, a handful of us had a video chat via Skype, and it blew my mind.
This was the first time I'd ever met Kate Sherrod face to face, though in the past year she has written three sonnets for me. She writes a sonnet every single day before dinnertime. She wrote one for my birthday, another for Loveland, and one last night after our digital memorial service. Kate met Mac via Twitter, via discussions about the author William Gibson.
Last night was also the first time I met Chris Butler, who met Mac in 2007 via discussions of the Noosphere, constituted by the interaction of human minds.
"Mac was a true technologist and futurist," said Chris. "There was never a shortage of things to discuss. Mac was an ambassador for people learning about something new, making it palatable, getting people to engage. He taught me how to be a lot more diplomatic. He made high weirdness perfectly reasonable, and yet he was a great skeptic. He was a techno-Buddhist."
Mac, he said, had a great way of understanding that you don't have to have all the answers or believe everything you're taught.
Public perception that people connect digitally only via Facebook and Twitter (as evidenced by many recent writings, not least of which this piece by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker) was undermined by this conversation, which demonstrates that creative, curious people find each other in inventive ways and that the Internet serves as a labyrinth of doors, much like the Chapel Perilous. In fact, the Chapel Perilous is how Mark Plattner found the intriguing Mac Tonnies.
Mark was learning about the writer Robert Anton Wilson and a Google search on the Chapel Perilous led him to a blog post Mac had written. They connected. Plattner explained the Chapel Perilous and related concepts.
"You can change your personality," said Plattner. "Radical undoing is hard and it's shocking when you do it."
The Chapel Perilous, he explained, is the place that you go to start the radical undoing.
"You can get tricked by the labyrinth. Sometimes you think you've gone out the door but you're just in another room. You have to leave everything you know behind."
It was around this time that Mac started his blog, Posthuman Blues.
Although I had been friends with Mac for years, after we were introduced by Cliff Pickover and Patrick Huyghe, I had never met him in person. He lived in Kansas City and shortly before his death, during our last conversation, I persuaded him to come and visit the city, and me, for the first time. He was afraid that I would no longer view him with the interplanetary man of mystery persona he had created, but I assured him that I would, since I well understand the necessity to act as a secret agent in the modern world. Mark, however, had met Mac in the physical world.
"He was dating a choreographer and she was doing a show in St. Louis so he came to town to watch," he said. "We had dinner at a Thai restaurant."
Mac's death is a terrible blow for many reasons. He was an exquisite curator of the beautiful and strange and a true transhumanist.
"During any talk about the future of technology and how technology will change us," Chris said, "he always had the coolest perspective."
They didn't get permission from the MoMA to install their art. Mark Skwarek, one of the organizers of the show, says he wasn't sure how the museum would react. "Actually MoMA tweeted about our exhibition, they basically welcomed us, so it was very positive," says Skwarek. "I think the Museum was receptive."
Swarek says that in the future there will be no separation of the virtual and the real. "This is real. We're on the edge of this field," he says.
Unfortunately Layar doesn't run on iPod touch (why is that?)
Fort Worth Councilman Joel Burns will save lives with this candid story about having been bullied, and maybe worse, as a young teen. He has since lived to create beautiful memories and hold the hand of his post-op Texas cowboy father who has learned to love him for who he is, not who he thought he was supposed to be. This kind of courage to speak out in public about such a sensitive subject and earn a standing ovation from his colleagues is moving and rare. I hope the right young person who is being bullied sees it and it saves his or her life.
The Ceramic Peppynootz is so much more well behaved than the dog he was created to symbolize.
I inherited one thing from my grandmother, and it was delivered to me today by my father. She didn’t have to leave it to me in her will, because it was the one thing that nobody else would possibly want. Everybody knew that I wanted this one thing, ever since I was a child, and everybody has always laughed at me for wanting it: The Ceramic Peppynootz. The one work of art my grandmother produced in her lifetime.
Peppynootz was my great-grandparents' gray poodle. When he heard us coming up the stairs of their Brooklyn brownstone, he would start scuttling across the linoleum with his curly nails (polished blue or pink) so he could leap at our faces when the door opened. He was a biter, a nasty dog who terrorized us like a character from a slasher film, out for blood. Peppynootz was a star in their eyes, however, and when he died my great-grandparents grieved hard.
My grandmother did something completely unusual in response to their grief. She went to a plaster craft shop, chose a poodle mold that looked just like him, waited while they baked him in the kiln and then painted him with gray glaze. Somebody at the shop must have helped her with the details because he is perfect--symbolic of an entire life preserved like a dinosaur skeleton in a museum.
After my great-grandparents died, I went to visit my grandmother. When I woke up, the first thing I saw was a picture of my great-grandparents from their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary hanging on the wall above the Ceramic Peppynootz, in front of the lacquered mantle. The party had been fun. Somebody gave my great-grandparents racy lingerie and after they stared at the delicate silken garments for a few moments in complete bewilderment they started laughing until they cried. Then we all laughed until we cried.
Walking with my grandmother in a magical place my father once lived on the estate of the cellist Rostropovich, she pointed something out to me and I didn't understand then, but now I do. Later we would find out that her husband died that day while she was visiting us, but we didn't know it when this picture was taken.
At the time I still used the I Ching regularly and I had just done a reading for her, focused on Hexagram 55: Zenith. There's a lesson in zenith about the sense of sadness that occurs when natural changes bring decline. The only remedy for this universal problem is to be happy in the moment, now.
As the mayor of this magnificent project I couldn't be more proud of the way the rest of the team is depicted in this xconomy article. I've been inundated with bureaucracy for days to ensure that the deposit has been approved for the upcoming land auction in Detroit, so expect our Disney-sized imaginations to grow by at least a few parcels in the not-so-distant future.
In July I blogged about an unfortunate media trend: woe-is-me articles about twenty-somethings who can't find jobs that never once mention entrepreneurial inventiveness as a viable alternative to the frustration, boredom and fear of not being immediately employed after college.
The recession has had a crippling effect on the job market, but it has also led to a rise in entrepreneurial ventures which have far more power to transform the lives of young workers and the world at large. This never gets mentioned even glancingly in articles that follow this trend. My comments are in bold following the original text excerpts:
"Since January, for 35 hours a week, at a rate of $10 an hour, Luke Stacks has been working for a home-electronics chain. He answers the phone and attempts to coax callers into buying more stuff. This is not how he imagined he would be spending his late 20s."
"Like a lot of us," Fairbanks writes, "Stacks was given a fairly straightforward version of how his life would unfold: He would go to college and study something he found interesting, graduate, and get a decent job. For a while, things went pretty much according to plan. Stacks, who now is 27, went to the University of Virginia, not far from where he grew up, majoring in American Studies. He later enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the University of Iowa, with the eventual goal of becoming a professor."
The fact that Stacks' life is not unfolding according to the cookie-cutter vision planted in his head is a personal problem. And apparently the author can relate, therefore granting her permission to extrapolate that this impression was created for "a lot of us." We are therefore entitled, she infers, to achieve what we have been given the impression that we deserve.
Stacks, as an educated individual, should be learning to look around and realize that this vision does not correspond with reality rather than hoping that reality will conform to his vision. It won't. The transformation of the global economy has a crippling impact on prospects. The solution is not to wait for that to change, but to try and be the change you want to see. This can best be accomplished through entrepreneurialism and creative collaboration, both of which are never mentioned as viable solutions. In fact, no solutions are ever mentioned at all.
"Flash forward to the fall of 2008, when the stock market crashed. There were never enough jobs for newly minted Ph.D.s to begin with, and now the likelihood of landing a tenure-track teaching position in the humanities was slim. Academia stopped looking like such a sure bet and Stacks grew disenchanted with his program. Even if he were to finish his doctorate, he reasoned, a job was in no way guaranteed to follow. He wondered, “How bad could it really be out there?” Turns out, it’s pretty bad."
This is why my brother, who will earn his PhD in December, recently told me that he plans to become a licensed electrician so he can feed his family in case his academic plans end up failing to correspond with reality. I admire this attitude and I will respect him more for being an electrician with a PhD than an unemployed, bitter academic with an unshakeable sense of entitlement. The world has changed past the point of whether this is "fair" or not. We are in the collective process of creating entirely new systems, and those who lose hope because their visions don't match what the world might offer won't succeed, period. I don't think my brother will ever have to use any such certificate unless he chooses to, however, because he is already employed as a professor. I think his work ethic is the reason why. He didn't expect academia to roll out the red carpet. He has maximized every opportunity that has come his way, amplifying the extrinsic effects of situations that aren't necessarily intrinsically glamorous but can open doors to expand his experience.
"So, in May of 2009, equipped with a master’s degree and a decent amount of courage, Stacks changed course. Shortly after graduation, he moved back in with his mother, who lives in Chantilly, Virginia. And from a desk in his bedroom, still littered with childhood toys and posters, Stacks started over.
"What confronted him was not exactly pleasant. What once thrilled him—curating museum exhibits, making comic books, being a curious person—now seemed to make little financial sense. “I’m not confident that schooling has a direct connection with employment anymore,” he says. “But if I hadn’t received the kind of education I did, I would be less of an active citizen and less engaged in the world in ways I would not have discovered on my own.” And while passion and intellectual curiosity can’t be measured in dollars and cents, he expected they might at least secure a paycheck."
What does Stacks do that engages him in the world from his mother's basement? Maybe he's highly engaged, but the article paints him out as a victim barely past boyhood, still sitting among his childhood toys, and never mentions exactly what form this engagement takes from his mother's basement.
As time passed, Stacks’s confidence flagged. “It’s the hardest thing in the world to write another cover letter about your great accomplishments if you question every day the greatness of your accomplishments,” he says.
Again, the article fails to address whether any of Stacks' accomplishments are truly great. There's a certain amount of hubris required to perceive oneself as great, even if one truly is great, which can be off-putting to potential employers.
"Still, for Stacks and many others of his generation, the old “go to school, get a job” mantra sounds hollow."
It is hollow. But what are they going to do about it?
"Fifty years ago, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had attained traditional markers of maturity by their thirtieth birthday: They had left home, finished school, gotten a job, married, and started a family. By 2005, those numbers had almost halved. Now, a new crop of 20-somethings is experiencing what it’s like to be young and ambitious and unable to find work, or work that in any way aligns with what they’re passionate about. As a recent New York Times Magazine story made clear, early adulthood has become one long pause, affecting not only short-term, conventional milestones of coming of age, but longer-term stuff, too—things like the hopes and dreams and basic constitution of a person."
It was already evident that the recent NYT article influenced the tone of this one, but they're both off for the same reasons. Entitlement and ambition are not the same thing, and this problem is not a new one for passionate people. Sure, a tiny sliver of the population is fortunate enough to find work that matches exactly with their passions, and what a wonderful blessing that is for them. But most people settle for work they can't stand because it pays the bills, and it is this category of work that has been most severely impacted by the economic transformation.
The remedy in many cases to create a company (or align with an existing effort by adding value) that serves a need you perceive that aligns with your passions. If there's no need for what you're offering, it likely won't work. Even a job that seems like it will be perfect can often end up getting mired in glacial bureaucracy and what my mother sagely calls "insect authority." Young people can't understand this because they have no work experience. Maturity, further, cannot simply be measured by the blind adherence to expectation in the form of milestones, especially if we're talking about a person who is waiting amidst his childhood toys for the offer of his dreams.
"Few people right out of college expect that their first job will be the ideal one. Neither did Stacks. But he also didn’t expect that he would be the only person in his entire company to crack open a book during their 30-minute lunch break."
This last sentence reveals a first-world, elitist bias that is more subtly woven throughout the article elsewhere. Are Stacks' co-workers required to prove themselves during thirty minute lunch breaks in order to demonstrate that he's in good company?
"For Stacks in particular, the most severe toll hasn’t been a loss of income, but feelings of estrangement and isolation. It’s fair to say that Stacks doesn’t exactly have a lot in common with his coworkers. Many are still in high school. Most of the older ones haven’t gone to college. In general, Stacks veers away from conversations about his education or the number of degrees he has acquired, worried that they’ll think less of him because of it—or worse, think that he thinks he’s better than they are."
Many recent grads have felt isolated since the concept of college was invented, mainly because their social bubbles get pricked by a new reality as they enter a world that isn't conveniently set up for them to learn in controlled environments and socialize with same-age peers. I understand the feeling he describes, but the remedy for it is to embrace the fullness of the human condition and allow it to erode the illusions that have created the sense of entitlement to begin with.
So if college doesn’t guarantee a path toward upward mobility, is it even necessary?
Increasingly, it seems that the answer is no. Education is necessary, but more people are realizing more ways they can achieve this. I've tried an experiment since becoming an entrepreneur. I don't discuss my education, how many degrees I do or don't have. One of my parents has an Ivy League education with advanced degrees and the other never took a college class. I've watched with interest as these decisions affect--or don't--the paths of their respective lives. Very often, it's not about what you learned but rather the feeling the listener is supposed to get, the impressions of you as a person with a certain future, because of where you studied, even if not much studying took place. On the other hand, education is critical, for those who undertake it earnestly.
Beyond that, some people are so smart that it doesn't matter how they learned what they learned. Take William Kamkwamba, for example. My level of education is not a badge that entitles me to a career. Experience builds on itself. I consider this a great adventure and the reason why I'm taking the time to respond to this article point by point is to illustrate why this lame trend in covering the work and education crisis must stop. Not a single client in four years--including Fortune 100 companies, think tanks, and top universities--has ever asked about my education.
Some recent graduates aren’t yet ready to settle for a version of life that is less than what they had imagined. When looking for work, the line that Kristen Vockel draws is this: Could she have done it before graduating from college, like the jobs she worked during summers while she was in school—at a call center, a movie theater, a dollar store?
“It was nice to have a break at first, but at this point I’m bored,” says Vockel, who goes to bed late and wakes up even later. “The glamour of being able to do whatever you want wears off pretty quickly.”
Again I will call on my mother's wisdom for this one: "Only boring people get bored." If Vockel is bored in such an amazing and dynamic world, why should anyone hire her? If she can't even keep herself occupied, why is it an employer's obligation to keep her busy? It's a very competitive climate into which young people are graduating, and anyone who admits boredom isn't employable. This is a major problem.
"If it weren’t for the 15 hours a week of work she currently has, "she imagines she would resort to making jewelry and selling it on Etsy."
Why not make jewelry and sell it on Etsy? She might meet someone interesting who can point her in the direction of more satisfying, lucrative, long term employment. This article, and the others that came before it that influenced it, seem to believe in a direct cause and effect relationship between college and career, as if individuals play no role in creating the lives they imagine through taking chances and choosing unexpected routes to the eventual goal of sustainable employment. This is partly because young people feel that their parents have expectations, but letting go of how others perceive you is a necessity if the world in which you exist is completely different in so many ways from the one once inhabited by parents before they hit their "maturity markers" in a timely fashion.
"Most days, Stacks leaves work and comes home to the upper-class neighborhood where he lives, feeling beaten down. While not all parts of his underemployment have been bad—Stacks has had time to read contemporary novels again, wade his way through the entire Criterion Collection of films, and has grown closer to his mother since moving back home—it isn’t easy for him to shake the sense that life as he’s living it won’t last forever. With his personal life on hold, not wanting to start a new relationship while living in his mother’s house, he tweaks his resume, writes cover letters with astonishing speed, and waits."
Stacks is still living in an upper class neighborhood and reading novels. I understand that frustration is relative and not just reserved for people who can't feed their families because their entire city has collapsed and they literally have no hope for the future. Stacks has what he needs to get himself back on track. Billions of people don't.
It is the end of the article, however, that makes it read like a piece from the Onion and proves why this trend toward bandwagon reporting isn't helping to undermine the root cause of the problem at all.
Despite all of the stories that Stacks reads that say he is hardly alone in his battle for meaningful employment, nearly all of his friends have jobs. Some are really successful. “It makes talking about it and hanging out with them, marveling at the size of their televisions and spacious kitchens, really difficult,” he says.
Last fall, a friend invited Stacks to a Halloween party where there would be a lot of people he didn’t know. After wavering on what sort of costume he should wear, he ended up not going. “I honestly had no idea to how to explain to people who I was and what I did,” says Stacks. “And maybe I still don’t.”
If his costume had been clever enough, maybe no one would have asked.
The Imagination Station in Corktown, Detroit, is morphing into a digital media literacy center and a world-class public art space. Reclamation by Marianne Burrows was the first work created at the Imagination Station. Catie Newell's mesmerizing installation, Salvaged Landscapes, opened last night. The above picture is what I saw the first time I visited the Imagination Station. The progress since has been spectacular.
