A piece at the Wall Street Journal about lifelong collectors discovering that nobody wants to be bequeathed their collections - their grandchildren, digital natives, do not have the same feeling for the tactile and the solid-form
"For younger people,
collecting seems to be less of a priority. Online pursuits take up much of the
time once given over to baseball cards or sea shells, and the hunt for that
rare Beanie Baby is less interesting now that it can be found instantly on
eBay, said Dr. Montana Miller, an associate professor of popular culture at
Bowling Green State University." Do wonder what if anything my kids will make of my lifetime's lumber... There may not be anybody left to sell it to even, anyone who cares about a 2 Bad Mice 12 inch or a Prospective 21e Siecle LP.
Nicholas Carr at rough type on how "Progress turns everyone into a nostalgist sooner or later ", riffing on an Atlantic article by David Weinberger titled “The Internet That Was (and Still Could Be)”, in which an old net-utopian refuses to give up the dream that went so wrong:
Carr: "What the Triumphalists mistook for the one true architecture was merely a foundation, it turns out, and that foundation could support many different kinds of media structures with many different “values.” And so the net gave rise to, for instance, private content distribution networks, or CDNs, which, despite the underlying democratic protocols for information exchange, allowed big companies to distribute their informational wares with greater speed and reliability than the rest of us could afford. On the net, as elsewhere in society, some equals turned out to be more equal than others. “The architecture itself has been distorted by the needs of commercial content creators and their enabling pals,” Weinberger laments. “Paradise has been well and truly paved.” So much for inevitability....
"Weinberger, like the other Triumphalists, has invested much intellectual and emotional capital into the net over the years. And now he arrives at his moment of crisis: the dreaded moment when he has to write off all that investment and declare bankruptcy.... At the moment of accounting, Weinberger loses his intellectual nerve. Rather than offer a critique of the net as it is, he gives in to nostalgia for the net as it was and should be. ....As Weinberger makes clear, his work, dating back to The Cluetrain Manifesto, has argued that the “openness” of the net’s protocols would inevitably dissolve traditional sources of economic and political power. Everyone on the net, whether an individual or a corporation, would inevitably act as equals. Rather than pursuing their own interests, they would act as the technology demanded. By suggesting that the net’s democratic future was a fait accompli, a technological necessity, Weinberger abetted the kind of commercialization of the web that he now rues."
A review of Margaret Lazarus Dean’s Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight by Michael Rymer at the Los Angeles Review of Books
The strength of the book, Rymer says, is its focus not on the astronauts but the lower level technicians, people like "orbiter integrity clerks":
"Omar [Izquierdo] and his father Francisco, who joined NASA at the inception of the shuttle program after graduating from engineering school in Puerto Rico, become the emotional fulcrum of Dean’s book. Their years of labor in the service of spaceflight have made them, if anything, more awestruck about the business of sending human beings into space. Dean asks Francisco how many space shuttle launches he has seen; he “pauses modestly for a moment” before answering that he has seen “all of them” — a total of 154 at that point.
It’s through these men that we feel most acutely what it means that, as Dean puts it, “we have been flying American spacecraft in space for fifty years and now have decided to stop.”... Many of these workers have nowhere to go; certainly it seems unlikely that the private sector will absorb them. SpaceX, one of the private companies with which NASA has partnered in the new, post-shuttle era, doesn’t hold much promise for long-time space workers, who, Dean reports, are being overlooked because “the company doesn’t want workers who have been steeped in NASA culture” — a culture perceived as having a retrograde “extreme concern for safety.”....
.... Dean herself is skeptical about the new era of privatized spaceflight. “[G]etting to space as cheaply as possible with an emphasis on catering to paying customers only serves to rob spaceflight of the things I most love about it,” she writes, fretting that “the type of big, grand, daring spaceflight projects I’m interested in are, by definition, not good investments.” With private companies controlling spaceflight, she fears we’ll lose access to “everything — images, films, discoveries, crew chatter” that NASA has always made public. And if space travel becomes a “privilege of the incredibly wealthy,” children may no longer dream of becoming astronauts, losing “motivation to do their algebra homework or serve in the military, knowing that their only hope of earning a seat lies in getting rich.”
Nicholas Carr at Rough Type, riffing on a piece by Kenneth Goldsmith in the Los Angeles Review of Books in which KG discusses how in the digital-era " our role as librarians and archivists has outpaced our role as cultural consumers" such that we enjoy the acquiring and organising cultural-artifacts than more than actually listening/reading/watching them. Carr: "It’s as though we find ourselves, suddenly, in a vast library, an infinite library, a library of Borgesian proportions, and we discover that what’s of most interest to us is not the books on the shelves but the intricacies of the Dewey Decimal System."
"Abundance breeds boredom. When there’s no end of choices, each choice feels disappointing. Listening to or watching one thing means you’re not listening to or watching all the other things you might be listening to or watching.... "Bored by the content, bored by the art, bored by the experience, we become obsessed with the interface. We seek to master the mechanism’s intricate, fascinating functions: downloading and uploading, archiving and cataloging, monitoring readouts, watching time counts, streaming and pausing and skipping, posting and reposting, clicking buttons bearing Heart and Thumbs-Up icons. We become bureaucrats of experience." "Bureaucrats of experience" - love the phrase!
Actually came up with a similar phrase once - "bureaucrats of desire" - as a catty description of poptimists, or rather the generalist-kind you tend to find working as the resident pop critic at a newspaper or major magazine - the ones that go about their work with conscientious fair-mindedness, doling out coverage and respect in equal amounts to every genre Which has nothing, of course, to do with POP!, the true passion of the pop kid who hates as fiercely as she loves, who is fickle (poor Justin Bieber, who means nothing now to my 9 year old Tazzy, displaced first by One Direction, and then by other poppets who have erased 1D from her heart and mini-Ipod) Don't know if beauty is cruelty but pop certainly works like that... The Goldsmith piece It’s a Mistake to Mistake Content for Content is definitely worth reading: "In the digital ecosystem, the apparatuses surrounding the artifact are more engaging than the artifact itself. Management (acquisition, distribution, archiving, filing, redundancy) is the cultural artifact’s new content. Context is the new content. In an unanticipated twist to John Perry Barlow’s 1994 prediction that in the digital age we’d be able to enjoy wine without the bottles, we’ve now come to prefer the bottles to the wine"
Peter Hitchens, Tory Eurosceptic brother of Christopher, with a moving meditation on the Sixties and all its losses and costs (I didn’t realise he’d once been a
student revolutionary) cued by the memoradelic effect of a song he loved for a season as a 17-year-old and then forgot all about for 45 years - "Meet On The Ledge" by Fairport Convention
From the first Mail on Sundayblogpost "I can recall playing it, over and over again, alone in the house, on my parents’ monstrous 1940s radiogram with its heavily-engineered turntable. And then I lost interest, as 17-year-olds do.... Then my brother died, so concentrating my mind on my own childhood in a way that I hadn’t done for years. And then, as I wrote here last year, Linda Grant wrote her novel ‘Upstairs at the Party’(out in paperback any day now), which touches directly on my years as a student revolutionary. At a stroke, Linda turned this period of my life from a series of random memories into the buried past, so long ago that I’m amazed to have lived through it and still be alive. Since then, my memories of these things have become a bit insistent. I’m more curious about who I then was than I used to be...
The idea that the song is about death is what originally hooked and haunted Hitchens. But...
"The rather unsatisfactory
explanation of ‘the ledge’ is that this was Richard Thompson’s childhood name
for a low-hanging tree branch on which he and his friends used to sit.
"Well, if he says so. For me, it conjured up a very clear mental
picture of a ledge high on a chilly and windswept mountainside (the rest of the
words very much point this way) on which were gathered the last survivors of
some perilous quest, who had agreed to meet there when they began, many, happy
and young, and had now reached it, few, sad and old.
"What the quest was I’m not sure now, and wasn’t then. I
suspect it was a kind of longing we all had, adolescence to the power of ten, a
belief that just beyond the horizon a world of colour, pleasure and fulfilled
ambition waited for us all. It didn’t, of course.
"I’d read ‘The Lord of the Rings’ when I was 12 and 13, long before
it was fashionable or even widely-known, and was probably influenced by that,
and also by Alan Garner’s work of genius ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’
.But my mind was also crammed with dozens of other boyish adventure
stories of the sort we still used to read. I used to, anyway, in attics or in a
corner of the staircase, or in a remote part of my boarding school’s
spacious buildings where nobody would find me, on winter afternoons. Quests,
caves, tunnels, escapes, tottering bridges and precipices filled our
imaginations.
"I’ve often thought that this was the children’s literature of a
profoundly safe and civilised country, where a snake was an event and the
largest wild beast in the woods was a fox, and where most horizons ended in
gentle downland (or if you were lucky, moorland) rather than in the jagged
peaks of Tibet or Mordor.
"And we were so safe as the sixties got under way, brought up in
warm homes with plenty to eat, attending orderly schools, venturing out onto
crime-free streets with very little traffic, cocooned in lives of predictable
mild prosperity and full employment. Fools that we were, we sometimes
chafed at all this safety and predictability, and longed for real excitement,
not just the sort you got from a book. I did, for certain. I remember, in 1968,
being unpleasantly thrilled by the chaos in the boulevards of Paris, by the
Warsaw Pact tanks trundling through Prague and in 1969, even more unpleasantly
satisfied to see serious violence on the apparently British streets of Belfast
and Londonderry. What I didn’t know then was that these things were exciting,
as it is exciting to shelter from a storm , precisely because we were so safe.
The word ‘selfishness’ simply isn’t rude enough to describe my state of mind in
those years"...
".... What if we had all not gone on our adventures? Would we have lost
more than we gained? Too late, now, anyway. But I think we’ll all have to be
dead before anyone can write a proper, fair account of my generation. From here
it looks nearly as bad as the Children’s Crusade. I hate to think what it must
have been like for our parents to watch it depart, unable to stop it." There was also a follow up post responding to the many positive and curious responses the original blog recieved:
"I was surprised (and
not altogether pleased) , years later, to find out that it had won a sort of
cult following. But I knew why, just as I know why Richard Thompson’s mother
asked him to sing it at her funeral. It contains an unstated hope that in
the end, after all the car crashes and suicides and divorces and abortions and
young, untimely deaths, *everything will be all right* . We
will meet on the ledge....
"I think there was a growing sense of danger in our minds as the
Sixties went wildly and rather unstoppably on (they ended for me, in a series
of self-inflicted personal melodramas in August 1969, but for everyone else, I
think, in the sudden slamming on of the economic brakes by the Yom Kippur war
in 1973). But in 1967 and 1968, there seemed no limit to it. Everything
we had been told we couldn't or shouldn't do, we were now doing. If you were in
your teens, it was a very insecure time, full of combined longing and
apprehension... Forbidden words were being broadcast on TV.
Forbidden and previously unnamed actions were being openly discussed. And
our parents' marriages were in many cases foundering, as the new Divorce Laws
took rapid effect, one of the most underestimated and under-recorded factors in
the Sixties revolution."
(via - whose else could it be really ? - Robin Carmody - his Facebook rather than the suddenly very active blog - Carmody who I once compared to Fairport Convention, then decided he was more like the Roy Harper of bloggers (bloggers as proggers - Oct 5 2003). I expect he'd rather be the former again, after the seedy revelations of the last few years)
