It’s the early 90s. In the form of an Australian teenager finishing high school, with a head full of Heinlein, I tried to join the Army. That future never eventuated—in this timeline, anyway. I entered university still full of techno-optimism, studying computer science & software engineering. Top of my class in AI, I was offered a summer research position, the first step to a career in the lab, building better machine minds. That future exists only in a parallel universe.

Instead, a year later I was in the middle of an inter-corporate war on the other side of the planet. I was sat in a trailer, trying to help usher in the home internet age for a very minimum wage. This is the story of that reality: my journey through the corporate R&D wormhole and out the other side into the blogosphere; my first-hand witness of how the future is—and mostly isn’t—created; how I became an anarchist futurist, a Doktor of Mystery and, above all else, a grinder.

Once upon a time, broadband internet was just a dream. Specifically, ADSL was. The idea that you could compress a high-bandwidth internet connection across the existing PSTN network of twisted copper pairs (ie the stuff which people make landline phone calls with) was technically possible, but practically unachievable for every engineer working furiously in research labs across the planet. This was how I came to claim a ~$1000 prototype ADSL modem from its fate in a landfill, to use in a scifi short I never made. Because a network effect-dependant device without a network is useless. Or Chindōgu.

It’s the mid-90s, now. Much easier to instead piggy-back on that other existing network, cable television, and dream up high-bandwidth infrastructure projects involving laying fibre optic cable. But should it be to the home, or to the curb? Oh, the decisions the megacorps put to the governments of the first-world, whilst deploying their lowliest employees to build on their existing assets.

So there I am, sat in a trailer, making machines go ping, churning out code, whilst my managers fight other managers from competing divisions within the same megacorp for the right to justify their existence. Because the truth was, my division of this Dutch megacorp only existed in Australia as a tax break to offset the sale of consumer white goods in that country, whilst the American competitor was a formerly local brand still resisting the idea that they’d been scooped up by a ton of eurotrash dollars. This is how the future is built: begrudgingly, staring down the authoritative, figurative barrel of a former Texas Ranger.

It’s the late 90s now, and the techno-utopians of WIRED have declared the Long Boom. Great progress has been made. ADSL has been actualised; the Australian Commonwealth-owned telco monopoly Telstra is being privatised, and has set about creating a duplicate network with its new competitor Optus. Because the privatisation zealots want the fattest cow possible to sell, and the idea of cleaving the monolithic telecom company into two parts—infrastructure and services—is anathema to that. This is how politicos leave a nice, stinking legacy for the future. Especially when they see everything with free market eyes.

Now, being a good employee of this Dutch megacorp, you’d think they’d be future-friendly by now. That when the prophets of the Long Boom came to Melbourne to speak, the whole staff would be encouraged, nay mandated to go drink at this fount of futurism. The reality is that software development is incredibly short-term focused. Get that compile working, get those bugs fixed, get that next version out. To the degree that my friend and I had to beg for a day off—with no pay—to go to such an event. This is how the future is ignored, sometimes for the best.

On the cusp of the millennium I graduate and, believing in the hype and trusting the Global Business Network front that WIRED is, take off to travel the world with my girlfriend of the time, working in pubs in London, feeling secure in the knowledge that this promised future will still be there, waiting for me when I returned.

The reality? There is no Long Boom. There is parasitic capitalism instead. Rushed IPOs, cash-outs; for a snapshot, go watch Startup.com. And on came the DotCom Bust, or… a Short Crash. Caused by pretty much the same players that got bailed out ten years later in the global financial crisis. Just sayin’.

What also happens is that the Dutch sell off that whole division to a French military/telecommunications megacorp, and the software with 100K human hours on it becomes cannibalised to run the cameras for the Sydney Olympics, then abandoned. Because nearly every software project fails.

What crushing existential fatigue?!

I return just in time to catch it, mid-2000. Joining the swelling ranks of a start-up that is in freefall and doesn’t know it. Being bribed with future shares that would never vest. Sitting through round upon round of redundancies, and being wracked with survivor’s guilt, until the whole façade falls down a year, and in swoops the investment company that will really profit from the whole collapse.

This is what makes a veteran. This is how eyes are forced open. This is how I become a mercenary software dev: pragmatic, scheming, taking the maximum money for the expected effort, and no longer fueled by the passion of programming. Joining another R&D division of a different geopolitically based megacorp, that is part tax write-off, part rich from the one-time sale of broadband to an entire country (Turkey) leaping into the futurepresent. It’s a great trick, as they say, that can only be done once.

There is a legend at this place of a room full of developers who’d been left with nothing to do for several months, as “resources” for a project always just about to start, so they wrote their own First Person Shooter game mod, sold it and quit. This is how the future succeeds, in spite of obstacles… for those guys anyway.

By this stage I am thoroughly back into reading comics for the first time since my military scifi-driven youth with its dreams of becoming Shatterstar, and being recruited by Cable to fight for the future of the mutants. Having now cottoned onto the fact that comics are the most efficient, cost-effective place to absorb prototyped futures; stories and scenarios that will be watered down into big budget spectaculars. Future visions that would inspire the techno-cultural actions needed to deploy millions of dollars in research.

Yes, like many others, I have progressed from haunting forums dedicated to dissecting The Matrix, to reading The Invisibles (which said film “borrowed” heavily from) and the other works of Grant Morrison, and his fellow travellers, including one Warren Ellis …

Images via Why I Love Comics, Entre Comics, mania, Comic Book Daily

Disruption? Yes, let’s talk about disruption.

The word summons up demons. Cracks open in the ground, as the crust of the earth swells from an upwelling of energy at the throbbing outskirts of the planet’s core. Out of the jagged rift climb beasts, made entirely of muscled, grasping arms, with twisting hands and pinching nails, looking to pickpocket the life out of creatures within range of their ravaging, caterpillaring ambulations. They hide in the shadows of rocks, between the reeds in streams, and in the branches of trees, disguising themselves by miming the sway of the limbs in the breeze before reaching down to seize and throttle passersby.

These mythic abominations of fantasized nature are not connoted by the word “disruption”, not directly. They are, instead, my reaction to it. From within my brain comes these images, these plagued imaginations of violent intervention. They are the things that contemporary capitalist-induced fever dreams are made from. The swirling asterisks of arms that come out of ground, carry forward the darkness held in chunks of asphalt, hurled at the windows of stainless steel architecture, collected into piles and mortared together with saliva and blood to build the monuments of eternal de-civilization.

The word “disruption” is the glorious bit-coin of the monied technologist, of the capitalists who call themselves innovators. In its troika of syllables hides their subtle poison. It is the banner of the rising feudal prince, opposing to the king. It is a concept that reeks of the scent of the word “progress”, an insidious micro-fascism. It is born from the magical phrase “the only constant is change”, bankrupting both parties in the verbal exchange, and cashing out in the process. It propagates the philosophy that understands evolution as a gigantic chicken sitting atop nature’s very lucrative egg. It is putrefaction as a service, sold by worms. It is the ethic of incubation that seizes the unimpeded nature of spoiling meat being slowly warmed by the sun, converting botulinum’s handicrafts into a beauty product. It is the glorification of the festering wounds caused by the spear of “advancement”, from which will one day burst one thousand golden maggots.

Google Ngram for “disruption”, “innovation”, “invention”.

It isn’t the drive to profit that is appalling. The urge to profit is historical, whereas disruption is a recent change in discourse. Attempting to profit off the thriving systems of nature and society is a behavior that has been around since the beginning of human-defined time, and it is hardly worth railing against it now. As long as there are exchanges, there will be scams. As long as there are objects, there will the ones that are polished to hide the rot within. But what pulls the stomach acid into the throat and what turns the black thoughts into words is the talk of “change”. Profiting by disruption is the status quo. This is the doublespeak. Nothing is disrupted. History is simply continuing. And this logical reversal is the slicing moment of the disgusted mind.

There is nothing that can be technologically disrupted that was not intended for disrupted. This “disruption” is the perfect pace of the continuation of flow. Technology–the act of art–is about taking what exists and changing it into something else. The development of anything is premised by the existence of what came before it. The causality of invention depends upon a previous, different state. Simply because you put the pieces together in the right order at the right time in a way that could be replicated and sold does not mean that you have disrupted anything. In fact, it means the opposite. You have only continued, maintained, bridged, and extended. You have not changed anything. You have preserved the banner of profitability. You have fallen to your knees, and demonstrated the most significant act of filial piety.

The drive to create is no different, no less human than that the urge to profit. But only recently it has taken on this sickly pallor–the desire to present itself as different… as difference. It has become a drama, a narrative of success or failure. It is something to achieve, a mountain-top to climb and conquer, though the mountain’s existence does not change a bit because of the track of a pair of human feet crossing its spine. The success or failure of a business to make money from innovation is never a disruption. It is an Oedipal story, and nothing more.

The Boss is the father, the Product is the mother, and the creative worker is the rebellious child. Everyone wants to become the boss, impregnate the product with creativity and hard work, to raise little workers of their own. Will it happen the way the child wants it to? Will he or she succeed in slaying Laius at the crossroads, and disrupting the reign of the Sphinx over Thebes? Or will it be punishment for these crimes, castration of the lovely creative object, and eternal childhood? Who cares. It is all a story. The disruption of the murder-or-castration doesn’t exist. The plague was the Sphinx’s disruption. Thebes was the disruption. Your family is no more important than any other. This trinity is no more holy than any other. Except that by seeking your specific disruptions, you believe in them above all others.

The product–the commodity–is worshiped as the fertile game-changer, the engine of history. Technology that is in the form of a product is more important than any other technology or system. But the product is not the change. This particular liturgy of history wraps the constants of progress into a sealed and labeled package. But it isn’t these fantastical eggs that create time. These are only the data points, the nodes in the network. Disruption is fetishized, made into a thing that is birthed from these eggs (properly inseminated with creativity, of course). And that is why we pay so much money for them. We pay for the disruption itself, as if any particular amount of money paid or earned for any particular project could actually be the change itself. The fantastical narrative is packaged into its actors. And its actors are put on the altar.

But without any particular product, history will continue to occur. Without you giving birth, the human race will continue to live. Without whatever drama of success and failure you may feel yourself creating around you, history’s arcs will continue to rise and fall. Phase reversals, oscillations, jagged edges, fractals, drop-offs, vacuums, cliffs, critical failures and exothermic explosions–these disruptions are natural, and will occur whether they are thought of as such, or not. But heroes, fathers, fate, ownership, and inheritance, only occur as long as there is someone who believes in them.

And so, I release my counter beliefs. My monsters emerge from the earth, bearing the old weapons of historical constancy. To every new corporate castle, they bring rot and erosion. To the quiet poisoning of the peasantry by the feudal lords, the sudden end of strangulation. To liturgical beliefs, the ecstasy of chemical hallucination. To thousand-year kingdoms, winter’s calm, slow glaciation. To the regulated trade of desires, freely given perversions.

But the best part of these beasts, is that they don’t need belief in order to exist. That which remains after you stop believing in it, is the real disruption.

Lorde’s poetry as poetry and not as purely a feminist rubric, however, has been written about far less. In Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, writer and scholar Alexis De Veaux describes the genesis of the poem “Sahara,” published in Lorde’s 1978 book of poems, The Black Unicorn, in a moment while Lorde was on a plane in 1977 that passed over the Sahara desert after making a stop in Madrid to refuel. The poet, flying from New York City, was on her way to Lagos, Nigeria for FESTAC, the Second World African Festival of Arts and Culture. Lorde’s trip to Nigeria is meaningful not simply because the plane ride—the birds-eye view of the vastness of the Sahara—inspired the homonymous poem. By 1977, Nigeria had emerged as what De Veaux calls the “richest black-ruled nation” in Africa because of oil wealth. Bringing together Black activists, academics, writers, artists and spectators, FESTAC acted as a transnational spectacle establishing new political, literary and racial grounds.

What’s most significant here is that despite the literal and symbolic coming together of a black diasporic vision in the name of arts and culture, Lorde stayed on the fringes and felt separate from some sense of a monolithic group identity, an identity based seemingly solely on race—and not gender or sexuality. Lorde’s participation and view on FESTAC is mostly shrouded in mystery but what we do have is the poem “Sahara.” I read “Sahara” through Lorde’s trip to FESTAC and thus, envision landscapes of diaspora as heterogeneous and transformative. Her hesitation toward FESTAC parallels the poem’s fluctuating hesitation toward the Sahara desert. I say hesitation rather than outright fear despite the all-encompassing terror that can be gleaned from Lorde’s approach to the masculine desert: “grief of sand… male sand / terrifying sand.” The hesitation emerges from the heterogeneous incarnations sand is allowed to take. Rocks, what sand is made of, take millions and millions of years to become sand, meaning the image of a desert can’t be separated from its process, from its formation through finely divided particles, a prolonged breaking down.

While the repetition of the word “sand” in the poem is obvious, the build-up changes shape and tone with each instance. For instance, in the second stanza, we’re presented with what could perhaps be understood as merely description of the environment: “Plateaus of sand / dendrites of sand / continents and islands and waddys / of sand.” The sand, however, transforms to “Will I ever get out of here sand,” “I am tired of no sand” and “Hey you come here and she came sand,” which begin to stand out among the lines that are shorter and more constrained with pedantic geological vocabulary. Changing the grounds, the dimensions of sand are altered—they are longer in terms of the length of the descriptors i.e. more words on the line but also they become profound moments of address and enactments of survival in the midst of what Lorde calls a “jungle of sand.”

The first stanza of “Sahara” lacks the accreted momentum of the rest of the poem, the accumulated sand-on-top-of-sand feeling, not simply because the word “sand” is not used but it also but exemplifies Lorde’s use of short poetic lines, consisting of a few words:

High
above this desert
I am
becoming
absorbed.

Set against the zoomed-in perspective of “pimples and pustules and macula of sand,” Lorde’s birds-eye view from the plane, brings about questions of positionality. Is she suspended? Godly? Manipulating the dichotomy between universalisity and particularity, Lorde posits the first-person position to be stretched out and embodying a tension between an expansive, sweeping vantage point and an attention to detail on the ground. On the one hand, the far-reaching perspective a plane offers lets you assess the broad brush of the landscape. On the other hand, to consider individual particles of sand is to see up-close images in “Sahara” are that both ornamental, for instance, the malachite crystal but also banal and undesirable, like “pimples.” This dichotomy parallels the lack of punctuation in The Black Unicorn more generally and calls attention to the creative possibility in an in-between space.

Lorde’s sense of belonging is not rooted in the land but rather, gestures toward the irregularity of landscape as a preeminent mode of being in the world. Lorde’s tentativeness stems from the instability of her position and in the case of “Sahara,” the slippery texture of what she walks on, what’s beneath her and the very constitution of the landscape: sand.

Around the same time I was reading The Black Unicorn, I came across Systaime’s “Datamosh Glitch Cover” of Rihanna’s already magnetic “Stay” video (and then also his “Datamosh Glitch 8 Bit cover”). Systaime, a French video artist born Michaël Borras in the early 1970s, has a steady following: he showed at the 2011 Venice Biennale, worked with Bianca Jagger, etc., and people talk about him while simultaneously referring to things like “the YouTube era” and “Facebook art,” etc. But his datamosh of Rihanna gave me shivers. And not just because of Rihanna (the Queen of Net Art Controversy!). It was inflected with affect, of the kind that floated me back to my best friend’s basement, where we would share time on her dad’s computer: an hour each on MSN Messenger before we passed out in her room where fabric fell from the ceiling.

Systaime’s glitch is the intentional production or exaggeration of errors or bugs. The make-up is made more visible. Glitch, too, can have more overtly political implications. Like Lorde’s use of geology in The Black Unicorn, we’re visually drawn to processes of decomposition, sedimentation, erosion, layering and formation. It’s these processes that magnify affective temporalities and, I think, memory. But is the outcome beautification and romanticization or perhaps a more mournful aestheticization on where we’re at and what missteps it took to get here?

In BOMB’s 2009 literary supplement, contemporary poet Laura Mullen’s breathtaking poem “Glitch” reads in part:

Then there’s almost no story in the frame held onto too long, as the protagonist, turning to speak, turns into some suggestions or cartoon shards of human features tossed in the mad workings of the excited medium itself, a stew, all process. As if we could watch the distance of ceasing to care, or forgetting: see what it looks like. “You’re…” he says, and then, mammmurghovzwughurghlf. What it does to us. Repeated cleanings and re-loadings leading to the same breakdown in roughly the same place, and now in the smoothest movie the memory always there of those disparate bits of information forced into a flow. Memory of memory itself: liable to quit at any instant at the site of some invisible scar, aware of the work of desire. But—paused there—so the fear of breaking up might be gradually replaced by something like an understanding of our brokenness: a sort of undulant surface tension tugged at by both the will to present some success and an increasing desire to inhabit and explore the spaces opened by a failure not quite not quite not quite complete.

My interlude here into glitch is most enthralling because it asks: What becomes lost or undiscernible? If to distort or aestheticize error is to distort a memory, how do we see our pasts? That is to say, what does it mean to start from a precarious position? One that’s breaking, broken or broke? To raise distortions up, perhaps, or to bring the fallacy of the original down?

Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall writes in his 1999 article “Cultural Identity and Diaspora:

Practices of representation always implicate the positions from which we speak or write – the positions of enunciation. What recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we speak, so to say ‘in our own name’, of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place. Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production’, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.

It can tempting to steep in a tenuous position—one easily fallen through whether it’s sand or a glitch—and to romanticize it, and make it a position of possibility. A glitch, after all, refers to something short-lived, something with an end or at least an end to its error. To embody a glitch, then, suggests a suddenness to an inconsistent life. Starting from a position of a glitch, a mistake, means attempting to question and represent the self. But Lorde’s hesitation toward FESTAC and toward the unreliable sandy ground she walks on is the very position from which she stands, lives and breaths: her precarity is her flesh. In an interview with poet Adrienne Rich on her poem “Power,” Lorde said: “And that sense of writing at the edge, out of urgency, not because you choose it but because you have to, that sense of survival—that’s what the poem is out of.”

Images via heavy mettle, for harriet, 1chain, questionsomething, secretagentrookie ]]> http://www.thestate.ae/slippery-positions/feed/ 0 http://www.thestate.ae/comfort-vlog-the-lizzie-bennett-diaries-and-the-taming-of-digital-media/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=comfort-vlog-the-lizzie-bennett-diaries-and-the-taming-of-digital-media http://www.thestate.ae/comfort-vlog-the-lizzie-bennett-diaries-and-the-taming-of-digital-media/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 06:29:55 +0000 Olivia Rosane http://www.thestate.ae/?p=10930 Spoiler alert: the following article discusses plot points from both Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and the Lizzie Bennett Diaries by Hank Green and Bernie Su.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an emerging medium in possession of a large audience must be in want of a Pride and Prejudice adaptation.

Enter The Lizzie Bennett Diaries, a retelling of Jane Austen’s most famous novel as a modern-day Lizzie’s serialized video blog, In this version, Lizzie is “a 24-year-old grad student with a mountain of student loans, living at home and preparing for a career,” but despite her unglamorous circumstances, she still bewitched plenty of viewers. The series posted its last episode this March and went on to complete a Kickstarter campaign for a DVD that raised 800% of its initial goal and made it the site’s fourth-most funded video/ film project. Lizzie and Darcy are, apparently, just as compelling on YouTube as they are on page and screen.

Jane Austen’s internet success isn’t so surprising. She is, after all, one of those few authors who live on as both a pop-cultural phenomenon and a dissertation topic. In fact, given her talent for snarky dialogue, Austen and the internet seem like a perfect match. For what do we use social media, after all, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?

The series is well-acted and adapted with skill and sensitivity, but what turned it in my mind from a quality procrastination device to an object of critical attention was an analysis of Austen’s popularity I read while researching my obsession: the similarity between the 1790s panic over proliferating print-culture and our own internet anxieties.

In The Work of Writing, Clifford Siskin argues that the reason Austen enjoyed lasting success while many of her female contemporaries were forgotten was because she and her novels helped to make the technology of writing feel comfortable and safe. Contemporary reviews of Emma praised it as “inoffensive” and “a harmless amusement.” Siskin ties the safety of Austen’s novels to the way her stylistic and publication choices assuaged turn-of-the-19^th century concerns about the power of writing. Her ironic treatment of sentimental situations contrasted favorably with “sentimental novels” that critics feared would unduly influence the feelings and actions of their readers. Her decision to publish her novels as stand-alone volumes rather than serially in periodicals played into the creation of a hierarchy of publication modes (books over magazines) that helped to conquer writing by dividing it.

Siskin focuses his analysis on Northanger Abbey, the Austen novel that takes the novel itself as one of its themes. The novel’s heroine is rather fixated on gothic romances, and occasionally interprets real life through the prism of her reading material, to embarrassing and comedic effect, but without disastrous consequences. Siskin writes of Northanger:

The discomforting question is whether we become what we read. Austen’s answer—an answer that I would argue signals a change in the status of writing from a worrisome new technology to a more trusted tool—is “Yes and no, but don’t worry.”

Procrastinating to The Lizzie Bennett Diaries while researching Romantic-era print culture, I realized that what Austen did for the novel, LBD creators Hank Green and Bernie Su do for the vlog, and digital media generally. They take a story telling medium that is new and strange and potentially threatening, and they make it comfortable.

The comfort of the Lizzie Bennett Diaries in part stems from the fact that it is adapted from such a well-known story.  According to his bio on the project’s website, Co-creator Bernie Su’s “goal is to tell a timeless story in an immersive and innovative way across multiple platforms and formats.” Timeless is the key word here. Watching a story that has survived two centuries play out over new media is an assurance that something of our humanity remains constant between the world of quills and parchment and the world of styluses and screens. We will still judge each other based on first impressions. We will still have embarrassing families. A combination of money and reserve will make you seem like a huge jerk to everyone who doesn’t know you well. But more than that, watching a serialized adaptation of a story we all know takes the edge off our suspense. No matter how disturbing some developments may be, (Spoiler alert: in this version, in stead of running off with Lydia under the false pretense of an elopement, Wickham plans to publish a sex tape of Lydia online without her consent) we know the end is happy. We keep watching not to know what will happen, but how it will. As Janet Potter wrote for the Awl, “It’s great fun to know what points of the story are coming up, and waiting to see how they’re updated.”

Adding to the comfort is the fact that the “how” conforms to contemporary (coastal, liberal) sensibilities. The series’ creators were smart to realize that the demographics of today’s California are different than those of Regency England, so Mr. Bingley becomes Bing Lee, Charlotte Lucas becomes Charlotte Lu, and Darcy’s friend Fitz is black and gay.  Darcy and Elizabeth remain white, however.  The diversity of the supporting cast helps the story slide comfortably into the dominate culture of our time without directly challenging the audience’s perception of the original or its assumptions about who gets to star in drawing-room romances.

The revisionism is more effective, but no less comforting, on the sexual politics front. In the original novel, Mrs. Bennett’s desire to marry off her daughters comes from a place of legitimate concern, even if she expresses it in inappropriate ways. The Bennett estate will pass to a male cousin, and the daughters need to marry in order to attain financial security. In the vlog, Mrs. Bennett’s fixation on marriage is played for laughs as an annoying anachronism. The sisters themselves know that their futures depend more on job applications than marriage proposals, and the series turns the story from a straight romance into a Bildungsroman. By the end, Lizzie and Jane don’t just find love; they find their professional place in the world.

The best reimagining involves the series’ treatment of Lydia Bennett, the youngest Bennett sister who, in the novel, nearly ruins her own and her sisters’ futures when she runs off with the rakish George Wickham, who has to be bribed into marrying her and thereby averting scandal. In the novel, Lydia is presented as a silly, flirtatious girl who never develops enough as a character to realize what sort of punishment her marriage will be.  I would argue that in the book, Lydia is judged less for her flirtatiousness than for her selfishness and thoughtlessness. She barely considers or understands the effects her elopement will have on her family or on herself. Still, she runs off with Wickham believing he intended to marry her when he did not, and the best solution her friends and family can come up is to have her marry the man who took advantage of her naiveté. Today, that “solution” would be rather uncomfortable to watch. Add to that the fact that one girl’s indiscretions are unlikely to destroy her sisters’ future prospects, and the question becomes how to update Lydia Bennett without slut-shaming? This was the concern raised by Think Progress’ Alyssa Rosenberg towards the series’ beginning:

The one thing that strikes me as a little off, though, is the way modern Lizzie ribs Lydia about being a slut. Lydia’s character is unpleasant, but the relish the novel takes in packing her off to a miserable marriage is pretty nasty, and a reminder that, no matter how enduring Lizzie Bennett is, Jane Austen was a woman of her time.

What the series makes clear as it develops is that when Lizzie calls Lydia a “stupid whorey slut,” in the second video, she is misjudging her in the same way she misjudges Darcy’s reserve for contempt and Wickham’s sociability for kindness. Lydia, for her part, makes fun of Lizzie for being a “nerd” and compiles a list of reasons why “Lizzie Bennett is perpetually single.” Watching the two sisters get to really know the person behind the persona they’ve grown up with is one of the greatest, most surprising pleasures of the series, and is facilitated by Ashley Clements’ assured and nuanced performance as Lizzie and especially Mary Kate Wiles’ charismatic and vulnerable Lydia.

Austen’s feminism is debatable: her heroines are strong and well-developed, but they succeed within rather than challenge a decidedly sexist society. The Lizzie Bennett Diaries, on the other hand, makes its feminism apparent by the end, taking a clear stand against slut-shaming and rape culture. In the aftermath of the Wickham sex-tape incident, Lizzie finds her flippant words coming back to haunt her when a distraught Lydia asks,” None of this would have happened if I hadn’t been acting like a stupid, whorey slut again, right?” “I let him film us having sex, Lizzie!” she continues, “I let him do that.”

“That doesn’t make it OK for him to take advantage of you.” Lizzie insists.  While in the book, Lydia and Wickham are equally judged for running off together, the series makes clear where the blame lies. “This is on him,” Lizzie declares.

Beyond smoothing away the wrinkles of the past, The Lizzie Bennett Diaries goes out of its way to make us comfortable with the technologies of the future. The fact that Lizzie is recording her videos live becomes an integral part of the story. Since Lizzie is pursuing a graduate degree in mass communications, the videos aren’t merely a hobby; they are a way for her to practice the skills she is learning. The series makes the world of vlogging comfortable to its viewers not merely by hooking us on some very entertaining vlogs, but by using plot points to familiarize us with web video culture. Mr. Collins, the pedantic minister who proposes to Lizzie in the book, now produces instructional videos at Collins and Collins. (Instead of marriage; he offers her a job. Lizzie, dead-set against “selling out,” refuses.) Pemberley, Mr. Darcy’s large and beautiful estate, is replaced by Pemberley Digital, a San Francisco media company that has “done some amazing things with the topiary around the rooftop pool.” At one point, Lizzie Bennett even attends VidCon!

In many ways, this Pride and Prejudice is as much about the dangers and blessings of engaging with online media as it is about two soul mates learning to overcome bad first impressions. The series does not shy away from raising ethical questions about the new form. Episode 29 foregrounds this issue with its title, “The Ethics of Seeing Bing,” and features Lizzie deliberating over whether she has crossed a line in posting footage of Jane interacting with Bing Lee, who her viewers have not yet seen, as they record a private video letter to Charlotte. Wickham’s betrayal of Lydia centers on his decision to post online (and for profit) what was meant to be private. Internet technology, and web video specifically, enables Lizzie and Wickham’s unethical choices.

And yet, over the course of the series, the videos are ultimately a redemptive force. Watching the videos helps Darcy to understand the family he once disdained and urges Bing to come and visit Jane after their breakup, leading to their ultimate reconciliation. It is watching Lydia’s spin-off videos that forces a tearful Lizzie to admit, humbled, “I don’t know that girl.” And while digital technologies may facilitate Wickham’s betrayal of trust, they also put a stop to it. Darcy’s sister Georgiana, getting a chance in this version to actively face her own past with Wickham, calls him using the Pemberley-developed Domino app. By accepting the call, he accepts the app’s terms and conditions, allowing Darcy to access his information, track him down, and ultimately buy out the company planning to launch the video. In this series, there isn’t a problem the internet causes that it can’t also resolve. Which makes it seem less like a disruption than another, newer but increasingly familiar, part of life.

To bring this theme home, the series doesn’t end with Lizzie and Darcy’s climactic kiss. Instead, it ends two episodes later with a reflective conversation between Lizzie and Charlotte (who, in this version, helps edit Lizzie’s videos.)

“Are you glad we did this?” Charlotte asks.

“Absolutely,” Lizzie responds. “I mean, there are some things I wish I had done differently, but life isn’t about do-overs and I think we’ll all be stronger for it. I’m glad we did it.”

The message of series mirrors the message Siskin attributes to Austen’s novels. If the “discomforting question” is whether we become what we post, The Lizzie Bennett Diaries answer, “Yes and no, but don’t worry.”

Images via tubefilter, Flavorwire (by Danny Nolan), the Fremd High School English Ning, tumblr ]]> http://www.thestate.ae/comfort-vlog-the-lizzie-bennett-diaries-and-the-taming-of-digital-media/feed/ 2 http://www.thestate.ae/southsouth-cities/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=southsouth-cities http://www.thestate.ae/southsouth-cities/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 06:00:18 +0000 Asher Kohn http://www.thestate.ae/?p=10925

I currently live in the Netherlands, but I took the overnight bus to Paris recently to reconnect with a cousin who was traveling there on business. I do not speak French beyond a Je m’appelle level, but the cousin and the Paris were enough of a combined reason to brave a night half-asleep sitting up. He got in soon after me, and similarly starving, we jumped at the first fast food place we could find. However, as bleary as we were, we could not understand the adduccion we were given. Fumbling through our collective Euro, I realized we ordered, among other things, un doner, une pizza à la Turque. I looked up and asked for the bill in Turkish. Seventeen Euro lighter, we were on our way.

I probably should not have been so surprised. The phone I used to call my cousin on the way in, I bought from the Turkish phone shop across the street from me. The first student meeting I attended, I brought cig kofte from the Usta a bit farther down. I remember at that meeting cracking a joke at the expense of someone who appreciated me for bringing ‘ethnic food’ to the meeting. We were from all over the world (well, at least the northern hemisphere) and not one of us brought along any Dutch fare. Gouda cheese would have been truly appropriate ethnic food, not the spicy little thumbs of lentil and walnut.

These encounters, and countless others, make me recall a recently-finished book by China Mieville, The City & The City. (This Geoff Manaugh interview with the author is essential.) That book is narrated by a hard-boiled detective in a city split in two, investigating a murder on both sides of the city. The two cities of the title are kept cloven by a murky force called Breach; the only force that may cross between the cities is the one keeping everybody else on their side of the line. I am just on a student visa and am hardly clothed in great power. What I’ve noticed, though, is that my clothing and the length of my beard has done more to determine where I fit in Dutch society than my legal standing does. Standing as I do in Breach; the law student cursing in support of Galatasaray, the dark man with a nose like half of Sugarloaf Mountain drinking beer by the half-liter, I have been able to see how Europe treats its immigrants and how its immigrants treat Europe. It’s actually pretty simple. They treat it like home.

Once one’s eyes are attuned to the mirror Europe, one finds that cities read differently. Pakistanis in Berlin ask if I’ve visited Lord’s Cricket Grounds in London. The Surinamese sandwich stand in Utrecht promises me that the rijstaffel at this place in The Hague is her equal (she’s wrong, but that may be more due to modesty than treachery). The minefield of cheap kebab throughout Europe is negotiated by asking the nice men who work at phone shops. Istanbul Eats, now Culinary Backstreets, was probably my first indoctrination into discovering how to read a city as a palimpsest, separating tourist sites from the good food from the pleasant walks. This cartographic code-switching is emphasized in the city one lives in. The trickiest part is to remember to act one way to drink tea and another to drink coffee. There are few glances more withering an old man looking up from his dominoes when you ask if his joint has wi-fi.

There is great fun to be had in this sliding through social space in a city. One can readily see that for all the chest-beating pride of the global North, the adherent of Geert Wilders’ “Party for Freedom” eats kerrie and doner and wears the red/white strips of PSV Eindhoven with Jeremain Lens’ name and number on the back. The South/South alliance may be priming the minds of Northerners, but they have not yet been able to make a similar mark on the cities. In my own town, the rail line cuts the city in half, bifurcating the lovely canals of the old city from the (admittedly garish) mosque construction and the 1980s concrete blocks that look like someone’s B- project in Bauhaus Architecture course. The continental model of compromise assumes equal bargaining power, which would require tremendous amounts of solidarity in the banlieus and the blocks. Which is one of the many reasons why parts of Europe are losing their enthusiasm for solidarity as they gain an enthusiasm for lahmacun.

Mieville made clear by the end of The City & The City, being clever in both cities is no way to make oneself welcome in either. And Breach, as populated as it is with its weird collection physiognometric and sociological shapeshifters, is a lonely place. Both Manan Ahmed Asif and Ben Lerner have noted the alienation, both self-inflicted and antagonistic, that marks the privileged homeless. One cannot navigate on maps alone.

But maps are nice. The city expands, bloats, shrinks, and transforms as much based on social connections as on urban renewal projects. The South/South City can be found as north as Dublin and Copenhagen and I’m sure much further. It comes up through the cracks that Rick Steves and Lonely Planet elide, poking up wherever things need to be fixed, and appetites must be sated. The South/South city is all around us in the North, creating the social foundation that the aforementioned glossy travel brochures rest upon. It’s roots run deep and broad, and are as thick and varied as the city itself.

Images via cjwho at Tumblr ]]> http://www.thestate.ae/southsouth-cities/feed/ 0 http://www.thestate.ae/weaponized-information-distributed/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=weaponized-information-distributed http://www.thestate.ae/weaponized-information-distributed/#comments Sun, 12 May 2013 06:00:56 +0000 Adam Rothstein http://www.thestate.ae/?p=10907 For anyone following the saga of Defense Distributed and their mission to create a 3D printable gun, that the US government has stepped in and demanded that the designs be taken offline is not a huge surprise. The Liberator, as this fully-printable weapon is called, is not designed to be a precision firearm, but instead, a confrontation. It was designed to test the waters and provoke a response about gun control. With current additive-manufacturing technology, a 3D printable gun  is not so much a well-made weapon as a mental exercise. The Liberator does not suggest a hail of bullets, but the possibility of a world in which the manufacturing of weapons is so distributed as to be nearly impossible to regulate. What would the US government, at all levels increasingly preoccupied with gun control, do in the face of this fully-armed, home-fabbable future? Attempting to crack down on Defense Distributed certainly seems like a potentiality.

But the weapon wasn’t declared illegal (at least, so far). Whether or not the Liberator itself is legal is still a subject of discussion.

Gun laws in the United States are very complicated. In addition to getting a license to manufacture firearms or particular parts of firearms (that is, those not for personal use), there are a host of complicated categories through which guns must pass in order to determine whether they are legal or not. The Gun Control Act (called Title I) is one large hand of federal law regarding firearms, and the National Firearms Act (Title II) is the second. Of all guns in the United States, certain guns are legally ownable, and regulated by Title I. Certain guns, like muzzle-loading antique pieces and curios are excepted from both Title I and II. And then, there are certain classes of guns called “Title II Weapons” that are illegal except in the control of manufacturers, the military, and certain police forces. The details of what guns are and aren’t considered Title II is complicated and always under bureaucratic and court review. But for sake of brevity, machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, automatic shotguns, grenades, missiles, and other big war-like weapons and concealable, “gangster weapons” are not allowed. Aside from questions about potential sales of the Liberator (after being produced, it could not be sold by anyone unless it bears a unique manufacturer serial number, which assumedly 3D printed designed would not include) there was questions as to whether it would fit into the “Any Other Weapon” category of Title II classification, which deems certain smooth-bore pistols as illegal. Additionally, there were other features of its construction that places it in legal grey areas (it is illegal to make a weapon designed to bypass metal detectors–and while the Liberator contained metal parts for the sole purpose of showing up on metal detectors despite its nearly-all-plastic 3D printed construction, it is conceivable that the authorities could exploit this to declare the weapon illegal).

However, it was not the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) that stepped in against the Liberator (both the GCA and the NFA are upheld by the authority of the ATF). It was the State Department. The Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance of the State Department asked that the designs for the Liberator be taken down while they are reviewed for their potential of being controlled by the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). The NFA dates back to 1934 and the repeal of prohibition (which had prompted a major crime wave across the country). The GCA dates from 1968, and was passed in the wake of several high profile assassinations (Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy). The ATF as well tracks its creation as a separate bureau from these points in history. When we talk about “gun control”, we are largely talking about this history. But ITAR dates to 1976, during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

While exporting weapons and weapons information to the Soviet Union would be more easily and directly defined as espionage and treason, in the ’70s the US government wanted to control the ability of US citizens to sell such things to third-party nations, where proxy wars and other conflicts relevant to the Cold War might be taking place. ITAR controls the export of items on the United States Munitions List (USML), which, while containing obvious munitions like guns, bombs, tanks, and other military hardware, also includes other categories of electronics with military applications, spacecraft and other pertaining technologies, and all manner of scientific and technical data considered classified. On the USML, data can be considered a munition.

And this is the reason the State Department is reviewing the Liberator–not to see whether or not the weapon is illegal, or whether the weapon itself might be exported. They are in the process of judging whether or not the online publication of its design constitutes the illegal sharing of weaponized intellectual property.

This is not the first time that the sharing of information was considered to be the exportation of munitions. Famously, Phil Zimmerman, the creator of the encryption software Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) was investigated in the early ’90s after his software got out of the country–as computer encryption was at that time considered to be a munition. He bypassed this regulation by publishing the source code of the software as a printed, hardbound book, because while the distribution of the program itself could be regulated by ITAR, the exportation of books is a Constitutionally protected act.

Whether or not Defense Distributed will attempt to pull the same trick with the Liberator remains to be seen. But meanwhile, this case is an interesting example of the United States government considering particular forms of information to be weapons.

Scientific breakthroughs, of course, have been considered to have strategic military value for some time. Back in the era of World War Two, the Norden bombsight was considered too sensitive to be shared with British allies. The Rosenbergs were executed for epsionage and treason after allegedly giving information on the atmoic bomb to the Soviet Union. And Operation Paperclip worked in opposition to President Truman’s own orders to make sure that Nazi scientists were recruited by the United States, rather than going to the other allies or to the Soviet Union.

But the Liberator is not a strategic secret. It is quite possible that the US government simply decided that ITAR would be a much more efficient and easy method of taking the Liberator and other Defense Distributed files offline than trying to prove a violation through Title II. Title I and II, after all, were the laws that Defense Distributed had directly attempted to engineer their way around.

Inevitably, the State Department did not actually succeed in taking the Liberator offline. After 100,000 downloads, the 3D printing source file is still coursing through the torrent networks, but it is Defense Distributed’s own website that has been “disarmed”, and perhaps that was the real goal. Arguably, being tied up in litigation over ITAR could be a much more serious and costly consequence than challenging gun control laws.

The fate of Defense Distributed aside, this case falls into an ongoing pattern of the US government attempting to control and police information networks. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), another branch of the federal government under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has the odd combined purview of not only deporting immigration law violators, but also investigating cases of technological proliferation pursuant to ITAR, and also theft of intellectual property by its Cyber Crimes Section. Recent “cyber security” initiatives have been upping the federal government’s involvement in counter-espionage through electronic means, and defending both public and private information security through expansion of ICE’s investigations, and through other federal government departments and initiatives. Janet Napolitano, Secretary of DHS, recently said:

…the United States is the nation of innovation. And we have the best innovators, really, in the world. Our intellectual property is one of our huge national economic assets.

The federal government clearly feels that they have the right to define and protect intellectual property. And accordingly, to investigate and prosecute illegal uses of intellectual property, whether that illegal use is a simple violation of copyright or a violation of ITAR.

Ownership, propagation, export, control–these are Twentieth century nation-state questions put to Twenty-first century information systems. But the nation-state that is the United States government still has powerful answers to the timeless questions, in that they own more than enough guns, police, and prisons. And so, they will continue to ask whatever sorts of questions they want. Intellectual property is simply too valuable to the United States as a “national economic asset”, whether militarized or proprietary, to allow the networks to develop according to their own, anarchistic patterns. Whether that anarchistic pattern is missile technology getting to North Korea, poorly made hand-gun designs shared through the internet, or having one’s means of creative production subverted by the evolution of technological and industrial capacity, there is simply too much money and power at stake for the US government to lay down and let the internet walk over it.

The bureaucratic hoops of firearm manufacture are one sort of governmental challenge to one sort of political control. But the ongoing process of turning the distribution of information into control of “national asset” level infrastructure poses all sorts of problems, both past and potential.

It was the same rights of the First Amendment that protected Phil Zimmerman’s publication of PGP’s source code as a book that protected the New York Times when it published the classified information of the Pentagon Papers, allowing the American public to know some of the truth about the Vietnam War and other US military incursions in Southeast Asia. No doubt, the favorable free-speech ruling of New York Times Co. v. United States now protects the same publication and others in that have published classified information from various Wikileaks information releases. But the same cannot be said for the alleged sources of that information. Indeed, the current presidential administration has targeted more whistle-blowers for prosecution than any other administration in history. Once the information lands on the printed page, it has some freedom and protection. But until then, the federal government is doing its best to contain and constrain what information can reach that frontier, and go after those who might be leading information in that direction.

So what is information? Is it a national asset, or is the property of the people? Is it something as free as the air, or is something only as free as fresh water, managed by public and private interests for “the common good”? Is information a weapon, or is it only the material from which a weapon can be constructed in the right hand and with the right equipment? Are there different classes of information–that that is free and public, and that which is dangerous, classified as either munition or “Any Other Weapon”, and subject to bans and embargoes? Between all the bureaucratic acronyms, the file extensions, the dangerous possibilities and the extents of speculative imagination, lie these questions. They affect how we’ll think in the future, and what we’ll be able to think about. Saying that “information should be free” doesn’t quite cut it anymore, because we’re beyond the stage of ethical imperative. Information is already imprisoned. Information is already owned, already taxed, already regulated, already reserved. So now what? What will the next steps be, for designers, for governments, for publications, and for the people?

Images via all k-pop, Seeking bff

Baila music is a classical folk art that originated in Sri Lanka. The genre is mainly popular with Sri Lankan Kaffirs or Afro-Sinhalese, an ethnic group that is a mix of Portuguese, south African, and south Indian communities. Kaffirs are mainly found in the northwestern part of the Sri Lankan island, which was also the area where the Portuguese colonists had settled. The term baila is an adapted version of the Portuguese verb “bailar” meaning “dancing” or “to dance.” The instruments and rhythms of Baila are heavily influenced by those found in Portugal.

Sri Lankan Kaffirs are descendants of Portuguese traders and African slaves, who were brought to fight for the Sri Lankan kings in the 16^th century against the Portuguese, and also formed the major labour force in the cinnamon plantations of the island’s southern coast. Kaffirs are known to be very similar to the Afro populations found in Iraq and Kuwait.

The word Kaffir is interesting as it derives from the Arabic word ‘Kafer’ which translates to ‘non-believer’ or atheist. It is understood that the origins of the word comes from when Arab traders met non-Muslim people in southeast Africa. The term ‘Cafrinhas’ continued to be used by the Portuguese when they started to buy slaves from Arab traders. Portuguese explorers kept using the term when they encountered different tribes in southern Africa, and the term persisted when the English and Dutch colonists arrived to southern Africa.

In South Africa, the term ‘Kafir’ or ‘Cafre’ was used to refer to a Black person. Today, it is highly regarded as a racially offensive term, and it was especially prevalent during the apartheid era. Similarly in Muslim nations the term is used derogatorily. However, Kaffirs in Sri Lanka take great pride in the term and it does not have any negative connotations. Moatuwa, a suburb of Colombo, is recognized as the home of Baila musicians and singers as many of the famous baila popstars come from there.

Baila became mainstream in Sri Lanka after Wally Bastian (the most respected baila singer, also dubbed as the father of baila) introduced Sinhalese lyrics into the genre. M.S. Fernando is another key figure of baila as he adapted the songs to accommodate Tamilian lyrics. The Tamil Baila genre was especially popularized in 1967 by Nithi Kanagartnam’s song “Chinna Mamiye” (or “Sinna Mamiye”). This genre is also popular in the Indian province Tamil Nadu.

Today, Baila or the Kaffarinha music style has been adapted from violin, bongo drums, mandolin, box guitar and honky tonk piano to accommodate modern instruments such as the electric guitar and synthesiser/workstation keyboards, octapad, and drum kit.

Waada Baila, a sub-genre of baila, is an impromptu contest between several baila singers. Judges usually assign a topic and several baila singers will perform. Later, scores are given based on rhythm, wittiness, and vocabulary. Baila stylistically is also very similar to Konkani songs, which are mainly famous in the Indian island of Goa, and also similar to the music of Afro minorities in the south of Iraq and Kuwait.

Irene Josephine – Wally Bastian

Afro-Kuwaiti song

The Salton Sea in Southern California is the story of an ongoing, gigantic, human-created accident. The Sea is the largest lake in California, residing in a endorheic basin (a basin lower than sea level, without any natural outlet) right above the San Andreas fault. Its creation is linked to the long history of geoengineering in the region, as the burgeoning cities and agriculture struggle to meet their water needs. Wikipedia writes the narrative of the Salton Sea’s origins in such a compelling way, I’ll simply quote it directly:

In 1900, the California Development Company began construction of irrigation canals to divert water from the Colorado River into the Salton Sink, a dry lake bed. After construction of these irrigation canals, the Salton Sink became fertile for a time, allowing farmers to plant crops.

Within two years, the Imperial Canal became filled with silt from the Colorado River. Engineers tried to alleviate the blockages to no avail. In 1905, heavy rainfall and snowmelt caused the Colorado River to swell, overrunning a set of headgates for the Alamo Canal. The resulting flood poured down the canal and breached an Imperial Valley dike, eroding two watercourses, the New River in the west, and the Alamo River in the east, each about 60 miles (97 km) long. Over a period of approximately two years these two newly created rivers sporadically carried the entire volume of the Colorado River into the Salton Sink.

The Southern Pacific Railroad attempted to stop the flooding by dumping earth into the canal’s headgates area, but the effort was not fast enough, and as the river eroded deeper and deeper into the dry desert sand of the Imperial Valley, a massive waterfall was created that started to cut rapidly upstream along the path of the Alamo Canal that now was occupied by the Colorado. This waterfall was initially 15 feet (4.6 m) high but grew to a height of 80 feet (24 m) before the flow through the breach was finally stopped. It was originally feared that the waterfall would recede upstream to the true main path of the Colorado, attaining a height of up to 100 to 300 feet (30 to 91 m), from where it would be practically impossible to fix the problem. As the basin filled, the town of Salton, a Southern Pacific Railroad siding, and Torres-Martinez Native American land were submerged. The sudden influx of water and the lack of any drainage from the basin resulted in the formation of the Salton Sea.

That described image of a 80-foot waterfall cutting back towards the Colorado River like a ravenous, eroding beast will haunt my impression of every agricultural canal I ever see. But today, the Sea is less a catastrophe than an ongoing series of problems. For a time the desert coast line of the Sea was promoted as “the California Riviera”. But first the towns were beset by flooding, and then a receding coastline. Now ongoing problems from agricultural runoff and an increasing salinity (currently saltier than the Pacific Ocean but less than the Great Salt Lake) killed off all the fish stocked in the Sea except for tilapia, and cause occasional epidemics of avian botulism and other diseases among the diverse migratory bird populations. Farms in the area are generally successful while the communities around the Sea languish, becoming postcards of ruin-porn as rusting trailers and dry marina docks slowly fade into the arid desert.

But is “ruin-porn” the extent of how we respond to such artifacts of geography and geology? A photograph is perhaps easily and quickly consumed, only the minimum of thought engaged in processing the image as we simply recognize and accept the content for what it is: ruin. We classify and categorize, and move on. But if this is the case, then why ruin? Why do photos of rusted metal and sun-bleached wood speak more loudly to us than images of the Sea itself, a geoengineering ruin on a massive scale that cannot be cleaned up any more than it can be re-appropriated? Humans flock to the shores of this ruin, attempting to live their own lives on its catastrophic existence, building the structures that inevitably rot and sink into the alluvium. It is this narrative that we connect with–the smaller narratives of human existence amid greater catastrophe. We symbolize and appreciate the larger systemic failures via these smaller human crises. We are drawn towards the signs of human life and death for what they mean to us about the greater systems we interact with, whether our interaction is one of triumph or of pathos.

And it isn’t all ruin, either. The ruin that is so easily symbolized is always held in contrast to the continued life around it. For every dried out pool, there is a still-occupied trailer. Like small flowers in the cracks of a sidewalk, this “pre-ruin”–or non-ruin in and amongst the overwhleming tendency towards ruin–tells its own story of thriving and surviving in the niches, the narrative of rare desert plants that are actually towering blooms of evolutionary fitness, the sudden juxtaposition of presence and diversity to scarcity and sparseness that make the blankness of the desert all the more apparent by its interruption by teeming life. The die-offs of birds and fish are only possible because those animals are resolutely present despite the obstacles, attempting to exploit what few resources and stable plateaus of water and food exist amid the ruin. The post-apocalyptic narrative is one of continued life, amid and despite perpetual crisis.