2007 – Page 5 – Jonathan Rowe

Space Waste: As Below, So Above

We humans tend to think that things would be better if only we could be some place else. The alcoholic would stop drinking if only he could move to California, the laggard would be more productive if only he could be in another job. Perhaps the ultimate projection screen for this particular tendency is what is called “outer space.” If only we could be out there, things would be different – ethereal, romantic. Even war would be dramatic and archetypal, not the hell that it is down here.

But usually we find that we take ourselves with us, wherever we go. The desk in the new office becomes as messy as the desk in the old one. Some of the same issues arise in the second marriage as in the first (though perhaps we deal with them a little better.) Once up there, we find to our surprise that we are the same people we were down here. Thus the headline in our local paper this week, “Space Junk May Spell Doom For Pricey Satellites.” We are turning the heavens into a dump just as we did the earth. Who would have thought?

Steve Jobs, Encloser

There are numerous ways to enclose a commons. You can expropriate it, such as by selling off the national parks. You can despoil it, such as by dumping crap into the sky. Or, in the case of a social commons, you can suck the life out of it by seducing or compelling people to attend to something else. Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple Inc, has gotten two out of three.

Jobs generally is seen as the mercurial product genius, in contrast to Bill Gates the impresario of patent monopoly and closed code. There is a bit of truth to that portrayal; but Jobs and Gates actually are brothers under the corporate skin. They share the fatuous technophile belief that any new gizmo they offer for sale is a great step for human kind. They share as well an apparent deficit in low self-esteem; and neither seems to think deeply about the impacts of their technologies upon the people who use them or on society at large.

It’s Official: Life is now a Stage Set for Ads

You may have read about the marketing campaign in Boston that turned into a city-wide fiasco. An ad agency with the apt name of Interference Inc. deployed small electronic light screens with batteries and wires around the city to advertise a Turner Broadcasting cartoon show. Employees affixed the devices to bridge supports, the sides of buildings, even outside Fenway Park. A transit worker saw one on a freeway off ramp, and thought it might be a bomb. (The cartoon images on the screens were not clearly visible in daylight.)

Bomb experts were summoned. Traffic was held up for hours. Reports came of other such devices elsewhere around town. Before the day was over the city had spent over half a million dollars, officials say. Now Boston Mayor Tom Menino is demanding compensation. Turner Broadcasting has apologized. The media meanwhile is playing the story as a clueless officialdom that is out of touch with the hip new ways of “viral marketing”, which takes ads out of their traditional media contexts and seeks to imbed them the normal processes of daily life.

The Language of Strangers

How a hotshot editor with big ideas failed to comprehend the soul of community journalism

The Second Death of Great American Cities (and How the Commons Can Help Bring Them Back)

America’s cities are dying, but not the way they were a generation or two ago. Some still contend with poverty and decay. But many now have the opposite problem — an excess of money, rather than a lack of it. Too much can be almost as bad as too little. It can suffocate a city even as, by conventional (ie money-based) measures the place is doing well.

The pathology starts with real estate prices and rents. A city needs low-rent precincts, much the way nature needs wetlands and breeding grounds. These are where creativity flourishes and the future is born. Poetry slams took root on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, not on Park Avenue; Apple Computer was born in a garage. It was a suburban garage, yes; but that’s a different version of the same thing. Countless enterprises were born in the lofts of Tribeca and Soho when the rents there still were low.

Rural Post Offices and the Hidden Productivity of Common Space

One of the great allies of the canny dictator is the human tendency to forget. Bring about a new normal with sufficient skill, and people gradually forget that things ever were any different. The corporate economy makes use of this fact of human nature as well. When it seizes upon a life process and turns it into a commodity – that is, when it sucks out the the natural or social content and leaves the dead husk of stuff — we soon lose track of that as well.

Tomatoes used to taste better? People hung out with neighbors on side porches and front stoops? You could take the kids to a ball game without being barraged by electronic ads? When was that? We are left with vague yearnings, hungers that do not have names, and so are easily re-channeled back into the commodity culture, which depends on chronic appetite for its “growth”. There must be something we can buy to make us feel better. Our kids have not a clue that anything else ever existed.

Bust the Grid: Back Alleys Become Commons

The built environment gets inside us with the force of habit. Once things are constructed it soon seems that they have been that way forever. Even people who thought the World Trade Center was a monstrosity (myself for one) were unsettled by the hole in the sky after 9/11, and not just because of the barbarity of the attack. It wasn’t just the towers that were gone but normality itself.

As with structures, so with the underlying template. It is hard for an American to envision development on any pattern other than the standard grid. Rectangular lots, lined up like ledger entries; yours there and mine here. The grid emerged for the purpose of turning land into a fungible commodity. It is obtuse to the landscape and to the social needs of the people who inhabit it. Yet the grid determines the shape of our settlements and therefore, in large degree, the pathways of our daily lives. Few things so illustrate the tragedy of commodity thinking.

Commercial Television Tries Community

Is there anything commercial television has touched that is the better for it? Sports? Politics? Drama? Anything? The practice of community has been blessedly exempt, except to the extent television has depleted the ranks of those available to do the work. Community doesn’t have much sizzle; and how do you sell products in the context of a show about people who think there’s something more important than buying products?

It looks like that is changing though. On New Year’s Eve I found myself at a family gathering, watching a show that has taken the popular themes of personal makeover and home improvement and given them a new twist. It appears the show solicits the names of people who have made significant contributions to their communities. Then, via the show, people in the community help to build the family a new or remodeled home in return.