May 31, 2008 at 10:21 am · Filed under Uncategorized
As I mentioned recently, many in “my culture”—including myself; the scare quotes are there simply to remind me that I want no single culture, that I seek no consistent views, that I need to question every damned thing I assume—value things highest that exist on a “human scale”.
Right-sized meetings, hand-made crafts, simple graceful little software projects, locally-grown food, first-hand personal experiences in our worklives and abroad. Don’t like politics, TV, mass production, don’t like best-sellers, or shrink-wrapped meat, have no truck with big-city black-suited consultants or politicians or men in gray flannel suits. We don’t revile these; we pity them and the benighted folks who ignorantly choose to deal on that level.
Want to help.
See, things are out of whack. We’re off track. A correction is in order. There’s been some kind of global cultural inefficiency, because the world’s gone too fast, too far, away from where it would have been otherwise. Too busy, too mechanized, too commercial. Soon “our” social efforts, and those magical sustainable electronic inventions some blessed insightful souls [among "us"] have brought to light recently, those forces will permeate this shadowed world and guide us all back onto the lost track.
[Where by "track" one doesn't mean to imply railroad tracks, of course; we mean sylvan wooded grassy path. Without any ticks or anything on it. But not too crowded, either.]
Back to a simpler day, in other words. The way things should have been. Before reviled patriarchal Corporate American workaday polluted greedy culture pervaded our lives, turned us (well, no, not “us” literally—mostly other people one doesn’t often encounter in our immediate circle) into little more than political stooges, and obligate poverty-ridden consumerist zombies.
“We” are some rude amalgam (no doubt the phrase “distinctly American” will crop up soon in this passage; whoops, there it goes) of Transcendentalist, Craftsman/Socialist and Decadent, boosted high by privilege, and living in a para-academic cosmopolitan world of seven-layered education and a jointly held small-world of empowerment.
Christ—I sound like David Brooks, of all things. This is all just some crappy list of straw men. Kill me now. [See? Amusing recursion! Geeky and meta.]
Anyway, to date what we do most actually has been sitting and typing on blogs and in literary magazines, among ourselves: pining for the romance, the democratizing “level playing field”, the human scale of some lovely lost golden “past”.
You might be able to tell, that sets my hackles to rising, that kind of talk.
It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them….
Twain makes the argument that Scott and his backward-looking romanticism reinforced the leanings of the people of the South before the Civil War. That he provided pre-written propaganda, accidentally reinforced the tropes and tendencies that set the South apart from the rest of the country.
And then they went to war. We did—”we” without the quotes, so far. So recently and thoroughly that if you’re from the United States you are probably no more than four steps away from knowing somebody personally who survived the Civil War.
Watch not the skies: watch the books. Watch the literate folks’ reading lists, not your opponents’. Look carefully at the blogrolls not of your political “enemies”, but your own. Watch the sharp boundaries of networking groups, the sharp divisions between what people wear or own, and who they spend their time with.
Count the number of friends who “can’t stand” other people you know. Keep track: You want that number high, not low.
Watch for “revolutions”, and “uprisings”. Watch for any over-simplification that decries a mindless, soulless local enemy, that threat to “our” lifestyle who lives next door. Watch carefullest of all for the words “we” use to blame the bad, misguided people who led us astray from the track.
Because Twain was right. He almost always was.
“We” are heading down a path that strives to build “our own” culture, a separate parallel lifestyle that preserves what “we” think is right. We don’t need the other folks; we have our own stores, books, blogosphere, our own meeting-spaces, churches. Our own candidates, our own better lifestyles.
See, maybe “we” can split off “our” culture from the ugly scar that is the rest of the misdirected world. Bring back some sensible, human-scale order locally, and will our human-scaled communities into the shapes we believe they should have had, all along.
For it is “our” communities that are, by definition, human-scaled. The rest must surely be something else to be so patently different.
Hmmm. Now what word could we use to describe them?
Watch yourself. Watch how you think of your neighbor, your boss, your political representative: the ones you didn’t like very much to begin with.
Crucial points of our agreement: “…I maintain that small world ethics will trump big world ethics everytime.” And also: “…the nature of social scale means that the value is tied to smallness, while the publisher mindset wants bigness. As we move to the edge, everything gets small, and those holding to the center want to keep things big.”
I left a comment there, but more seems worth writing down.
First, an interesting observation, which I’m sure is 100% original with me: Groups and communities tend to form and grow dynamically and then shed participants (participants, not followers or watchers or subscribers) at a very particular scale. Might depend on the medium and the frequency of meeting and the importance of the stuff the group attends to, but in general all groups have a Goldilocks size.
That’s no doubt a novel revelation, yes? I so smart. Oh, wait, it does sound a bit like something I heard once in an introductory anthropology course, or maybe it was sociology or public policy, or maybe it’s… oh yeah. Fucking common sense.
Well, still. I don’t hear it trotted out very often in my circles. Novel is as novel does.
As Stowe points out, the cultural assumptions and mistakes (here “Big World vs. Small World”) seem to come down to that word I highlighted accidentally up there: “participants”.
Sitting on your ass surfing? Relatively simple. Innocuous activity. We all—all of us—tend to devalue it, denigrate it, consider it a passive low-impact low-benefit time-waster. It’s consumption. It’s consumerism. Guilty pleasure. It’s TV-watching, sitting and nodding in an audience, clicking the clicker. Church. Nurenburg. Stadium concerts. Commercial radio. Bestsellers. Introductory university classes. Mass media pabulum.
Whoops, I wasted the whole day doing mindless _____! Tee hee. Silly me; I’ll do better tomorrow. My Next Work is almost complete; if only I could avoid switching on the _____!
Heed not the fact that we all do it. We all viscerally tend towards liking it, but socially we (the “we” reading and writing here, I bet) don’t really value it very highly. Loads of people like it and think nothing of it, but “we”, well we know better.
Most of “us” don’t own TVs or don’t have cars or don’t belong to a church or only buy local or don’t eat burgers or we walk to work or we eschew “marketroids and suits” like the plague or we’re missionaries or we have organic farms or we seek a Different Path or we write blogs and books or we have Macs (or Linux!) or we’re Not Employees or we live in quirky expensive “smarter” neighborhoods or we play at (of all things) community activism.
Pshaw. We don’t attend meetings, we run them. Collaborative meetings, where everybody “gets to” talk. Meetings where people are expected to get up and contribute something, dammit.
We don’t write articles, we run magazines. We don’t go to lectures, we give them at conferences. We don’t buy CDs, we have studios in our basement. We have easels, and sound mixing boards; we do digital letterpress, and use local ingredients to cook food from cuisines as far away as possible; we design our own houses, in which own servers are running software we wrote ourselves.
All that other stuff? Bah. That’s just sitting around and typing. Listening to the Muzak of the world. Surfing. Being a political sheep, a dupe, a stooge, the easily manipulated raw material of commerce and the octopoid Conservative political machine. What have you done recently? What have you personally written recently? What have you made?
How many useful comments have you left on people’s blogs, how many links to their good stuff?
How have you participated, in other words? Because consuming isn’t participating. It’s not creating if you don’t modify it and pass it along, in kind, enhanced somehow.
That stuff in your head, those unvoiced ideas and vague appreciations, those conversations you have face to face, those enjoyable moments of appreciation? Nothing; worthless. Where have you added beauty to the world? Show us the beauty, dammit. Your nodding smile isn’t good in this town, ya fuckin’ tourist.
Those other people we dismiss? They’re about monetization and mind control. We hate that; it’s greed pure and simple. Old World stuff. Filthy lucre taints the purity of our essence. We don’t do khaki, we don’t do desk jobs, we don’t do commercials. Monetization is crass.
No, we’re all about the utilization. Every click a helpful reference; every link a nugget of affecting amusement, or irony, or distilled advice. You’re not supposed to just stare at it. It’s something you’re supposed to see because it will make you make something wonderful.
U HAZ A KEY. I MADE IT FOR U: This crap I’m typing in my blog, it’s your key to freedom, intelligence, political awareness, action. A better… well, something or other.
You haven’t utilized my work enough if you haven’t jumped in and participated and created something of your own in response. What are you? Have you no Craft, Man? Where’s your authenticity?
So here’s my premise, hyperbole aside: What Stowe calls “big world”, which is a widely-accepted socioeconomic structure that most folks would identify easily as “normal stuff”, is about consumption. The implicit economic agreement is: you consume it, you should reward the producer with some combo of (a) buying something from a subscription or an an ad, (b) further and continued attention in future, (c) did we mention money? Well, maybe you just thank them now and then.
What Stowe calls “small world” — which is “new” in some sense (novel is as novel does) but is in fact what a number of pretentious but influential people in the 19th century (that godawful wordy Ruskin ass, filigreed tubby William Morris, Henry D. Thoreau, some other stupid poets I can’t keep straight [insert hyperlinks!!1!]) invented, that’s about craft. Factories were bad, see; they changed stuff. All those people who used to be just peasants and tradesmen, they became endangered by the Moloch of commerce, the ceaseless mindless inattentive drollery of… well you get it. All that green stuff we used to have, the cow manure, the muddy roads, the thundermugs, overnight replaced by stinking automobiles rolling on pavement, and soul-sucking labor-saving devices.
How horrible it was, to have lost all that local folkloric quaint charming culture in the wash of globalized industrial convenience. Before that, everybody had to do it the hard way, just like in Hobbiton, bless their button noses and fuzzy little feet.
So in response these poets and stuff did what any one of “us” would have done, given their technical limitations: They started small presses, held salons, painted outrageously transgressive works of art involving Catholicism and fairies, and wrote challenging short novels printed in heavy typefaces with a heavy impression on heavy deckled paper. Symbolism is something you’re supposed to use, see.
Note well: they didn’t broadcast, didn’t write essays and letters in magazines (except their own). For chrissakes they didn’t hold public meetings, where just anybody could come along and meander ignorantly on about their personal concerns. No: they chatted amongst themselves. Because of course every valued conversation, every consecutive creative act, that was the empowering seed of the next step towards a proper democratic thoughtful self-governed transcendent panarchic utopia. A practical, efficient economy of fungible creation, each act usefully supporting and reinforcing another’s sensibilities.
Everything important is either creation or criticism. Often both! Folks “pay” for stuff by giving you back stuff in return, as efficiently as possible. You accept (crassly, “consume”) novel beauty, but then if you’re one of “us” you are then expected to create something of beauty in return. If nothing else, by pointing out how cunning and creative we are. You may post a short accolade in the accompanying form.
In practice “in return” means merely giving credit to the source. The original author should be part of the conversation, should be standing right there next to you on the ground, not towering above. Things, designs, they must above all else to be kept on a “human scale”. We hate unsympathetic corporate sprawling international towering monsters where you’re just left unable to respond in kind, an awe-struck consumer. I mean, how is that fair? Don’ have no truck wi’ wizards in thayse parts.
Because if you like something, you’re supposed to reward the creator. Directly, if possible, and in kind.
That’s the implicit social rule, right there: Freedom comes only at the price of authentic participation. And by extension: inauthenticity dilutes freedom. Marketing, advertising, globalization: they are the enemies of freedom because they undermine the crucial human trade in authentic beauty.
So think about Twitter: Is it noise, or fun? Do you post a lot, or do you find it annoyingly “dilute”? What about email? Do you try to diligently reply to every email you get (that’s worthwhile), or do you slack off and just read it, and get around to replying when you have a chance? Facebook? Do you like looking and surfing your network’s gang-sign-throwing photos at Facebook, or do you try to empower communities by setting up groups of like-minded individuals? Do you have a blog of your own, and does anybody care if you are tardy posting useful stuff?
Now, having asked those questions: what makes you think I care?
And, finally. Do I really need to explain the role of “r/K selection” in this context? I mean, it seems kindof lazy for me not to, having promised early on. Or, wait, am I ironically breaking my social contract as an “author” by not following through on promise of my title, and trying to make a point on how you’re empowered, see, to look it up and figure out the neat puzzle all by yourself?
No, really, I’m not sure. That’s not meta-meta. Just meta.
In general, is it an act of laziness if I leave something unexplained and confusing on the Internet? Or am I being “symbolic” and soliciting participatory cunning help from my insider-laden small social world? The people that matter, they get it surely.
Is my del.icio.us feed a boring, mass-consumption piece of crap that means I’m lazy and can’t be bothered to write real useful stuff? Or am I harking back consciously to the day when a “blog” was little more than what you might call a “log of websites”, a kind of personal diary of what I find useful and interesting and think you might as well? Am I being more useful and productive by posting comments and essays in response the ones other people write, or am I being even more meta-creative by posting oblique links without any connecting explanatory mesh? Or do I need to use Arial Black for that and call it a Tumblog?
Hang on, dammit. Am I agreeing with Stowe Boyd, who says that small worlds like “ours” will trump big world designs targeting “the masses” through broadcast and consumption? Or am I questioning his (and my own) assumptions about individuation, about membership in discrete demographics or consistency of behavior, and the fundamental dynamics of social (and business) strategies?
Heavens. Disambiguation needed.
Hell. Don’t ask me. I personally don’t know which side of any of these dichotomies is the right answer. Don’t even know which dichotomy is most important.
By invoking an abstruse metaphor from mathematical ecology in a discussion of social dynamics and business models in the New Ecominny, am I implying something pretentiously ingenious? Or maybe it’s… oh yeah. Fucking common sense.
Or maybe it’s just about history and perspective. Again. Maybe all I ever say is: What makes you think you’re so special?
Comments welcomed!
And remember: Every time you leave something confusing on the Internet, an angel eats a kitten.
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