The Convivial Society, No. 20
"In a society caught up in the race for the better, limits on change are experienced as a threat. The commitments to the better at any cost makes the good impossible at all costs. Failure to renew the bill of goods frustrates the expectation of what is possible, while renewal of the bill of goods intensifies the expectations of unattainable progress. What people have and what they are about to get are equally exasperating to them. Accelerating change has become both addictive and intolerable. At this point the balance among stability, change and tradition has been upset; society has lost both its roots in shared memories and its bearings for innovation. Judgement on precedents has lost its value." — Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
[The Convivial Society, I'm happy to report, is back. My apologies for the unannounced hiatus. Over the last month or so, I've been in the thick of some major life transitions, all good transitions for which I am grateful. I thought I might be able to get at least one installment published, but that proved to be foolishly optimistic. In any case, let's get on with it.]
Years ago, in 2001 or maybe 2002, I wrote something about Fear Factor, the reality show that was then quite popular. Some of you may recall that contestants were pitted against one another in situations that induced either fear or revulsion. It wasn't a great piece of writing, but, looking back at it now, I see certain concerns already taking shape that have remained important to me. It's also a curious piece because it had no audience. I had no online venue on which to post it, and I had no intention of sending it in anywhere. I shared it with two or three people at the time, but mostly I wrote it to write it. Now, that seems almost quaint, but admirably so.
I mention that piece here because it came to mind when I heard about a new reality show called Love Island, a British import which debuted on American television earlier this month.
I'll let Sarah Jeong supply the executive summary:
"'Love Island' is a reality show that can be roughly described as a cross between 'The Bachelor' and the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Now in its fifth season in Britain, it is one of the highest-rated prime-time television programs in the country. Millions of viewers tune in six days a week for an unrelenting barrage of relationship drama recorded from every possible angle, using as many as 73 cameras and countless hidden microphones to capture it all ....
"Here’s the premise: Women and men are paired off and corralled inside a luxury villa on a beautiful island (the British version takes place in Mallorca, the American version in Fiji). As the days pass, they are eliminated in a variety of ways — sometimes by audience vote, sometimes by introducing a gender imbalance that forces the contestants into a game of musical chairs, but for heterosexuality."
Jeong's story about Love Island highlights how the show relates to our emerging surveillance society. "'Love Island' is a product of the zeitgeist for many reasons—" Jeong writes, "the show peddles its own makeup line and populates itself with minor Instagram influencers — but it is the absolute surveillance that makes it a cultural touchstone."
One key takeaway for Jeong is that "ubiquity breeds familiarity, and eventually even reality show contestants, who have signed a stack of legal consent forms just to participate, forget the price of constant surveillance." As the article's subtitle puts it, no one remembers the cameras are there. And there is, indeed, an important lesson in this.
We tend to acclimate, especially to structures and protocols that become so common they gradually drop from conscious awareness. And, as Jeong goes on to note, "we should be more afraid of how impossible it will be to tell that we’ve changed." The reality show participants will eventually step away from the contrived reality of the show's "inside" back to a normal "outside." We don't get the benefit of such a bright line. We know only the inside of our ordinary experience, and within that experience it will be very difficult to tell how we have changed, adapted, acclimated, etc.
Point taken. Here are a few more thoughts, briefly.
As with Fear Factor nearly two decades ago, it's worth asking what exactly what is being watched and why? It seemed to me then, and still does, that we are watching human beings whose emotions are extracted and commodified for our entertainment. I would still argue, as I did then, that this is dehumanizing, both for the participant and for the viewer (the consent of either notwithstanding). I'd extend this point not only to reality television, but to each of the myriad ways we are now enabled to watch one another, with or without the consent of the watched. In my view, this calls for the renewal of a new sort of chastened vision, one which would turn away from spectacle of intimate life extracted and commodified.
Relatedly, this is a case in point of what I'd call the surveillance-exhibitionism nexus. It seems that these topics are often treated separately, but I don't think we can talk about one without the other, although I think we'd like to. I've put down some underdeveloped thoughts on this in a couple of posts about what I inelegantly termed the society of the disciplinary spectacle. The central idea is that we should synthesize Foucault and Debord, chiefly because the apparatus of the spectacle and the apparatus of disciplinary surveillance have, to a significant degree, blended. Ellul anticipated as much. (You can read more here and here.)
Final word to Phillip Rieff, who, in 1966, offered the most eloquent anticipation of reality television that I am aware of: "I expect that modern society will mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted miracle plays, with patient-analysts acting out their inner lives, after which they could extemporize the final act as interpretation. We shall even institutionalize in the hospital-theater the Verfremdungseffekt, with the therapeutic triumphantly enacting his own discovered will."
News and Resources
Matthew Stewart on "The Deceptive Platform Utopianism of Google’s Sidewalk Labs": "Through this process of market making, Pasquale explains that platforms aim to take over more governmental responsibilities over time, moving from territorial to functional sovereignty, where urban citizens will be increasingly 'subject to corporate rather than democratic, control,' affecting the means of social reproduction, from renting apartments to transport."
Review of Holland Michel's Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All: "[Will Smith's Enemy of the State (1998)] was, however, much more than just prescient: it was also an inspiration, even a blueprint, for one of the most powerful surveillance technologies ever created."
Alexis Madrigal on the computers on board Apollo 11: "Of course, any contemporary device has vastly more raw computational ability than the early machine, but the Apollo computer was remarkably capable, reliable, and up to the task it was given. You could not actually guide a spaceship to the moon with a smart doorbell." And, just for kicks, here is a simulator of the Apollo Guidance Computer.
Adam Roberts reviews three works on faith and the American space program. Interesting throughout. I'll take the opportunity to remind you of David Noble's The Religion of Technology, which included a chapter on the space program. In that chapter, you learn, among other things, that if you were to visit the landing site of Apollo 15, you would find an open Bible sitting on the control panel of the first lunar rover. It was left there by Commander David Scott, the first person to drive a rover on the moon.
Cal Newport on the utility fallacy: "The point too often missed in a cooly instrumentalist understanding of technology is that we don’t use these tools in a vacuum; we instead participate in complicated social systems that can careen in unforeseen directions when powerful new technological forces are introduced."
A review of three recent books exploring the nature of our experience of time, especially in relation to two technologies that structure this experience: the mechanical clock, of course, and the book.
Shannon Mattern's talk "Time's Interfaces," which includes this apt formulation: "Our phones seem to be contrived for circadian contradiction." Do read her elaboration of this claim.
Heather Altfeld and Rebecca Diggs write about the significance of metaphors. The essay argues that in our "image-saturated world" we are losing the power to create and find meaning through metaphor. I'm not sure what to make of the claim, it seems too expansive to meaningfully substantiate, but some interesting bits within. Quoting Sven Birkerts: "‘Metaphor requires a perceptual power and ability, a re-seeing, a re-analogising’ that is not inborn, but instead fostered through a ‘depth of attention’ that, in turn, breeds imagination." I will add that I've been curious about the changing nature of our metaphors. For example, it seems that fewer of our metaphors, not surprisingly, arise out of a direct experience of rural life. I think there's something significant about this, but my thoughts remain relatively unformed.
From a site devoted to "narrow gauge railroading in western North America and the Pacific Rim," a look at mid- to late-19th century railroad design and what it owed to classical architecture.
A lovely 5-minute animated film titled Negative Space.
Re-framings
I've been increasingly interested in practices that foster deep attention, rather than what Linda Stone called continuous partial attention or what Katherine Hayles has called hyper attention. I've been especially interested in practices of this sort that also deepen our sense of place. I was glad, then, to come across a page created in 2008 by William Cronon's graduate seminar on learning to research environmental history. This page provides extensive but not exhaustive tips for those interested in learning to "read a landscape."
"One way to think of a landscape is to see it the way that medieval exegetes saw sacred scriptural texts. For the medieval scholar of the Bible, there were four basic layers of meaning operating in the scriptures: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological (moral), and the anagogical. Reading identical texts in productively different ways requires two things: facility with different lenses, since you will find different things in the landscape depending on what you’re searching for, and belief that the text can teach several radically different lessons depending on the questions being asked. These textual approaches may also be applied to landscapes, with some modification. While you probably won’t try to read your landscape anagogically, the idea of a single text possessing features that can be understood according to several disparate senses is an idea that can be applied equally well to places and landscapes. Don’t forget that no single reading, no matter how original or insightful, is ever exclusive or comprehensive."
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From the late Paul Virilio's 2005 work, The Original Accident.
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From a 1968 RAND report on the social consequences of computing titled, "On The Future Computer Era: Modification Of The American Character And The Role Of The Engineer, Or, A Little Caution On The Haste To Number."
Recently Published
On the blog, some reflections on using Twitter: Devil's Bargain. Also, thoughts on time, self, and remembering online. Finally, some comments on technology occasioned by some articles about baseball.
My latest piece in Real Life explored the role convenience plays in structuring our use of technology: The Easy Way Out.
In the intervening weeks since the last newsletter, The Convivial Society registered its 1,000th subscriber. This is by most measures an exceedingly modest number, but, to me, it's pleasantly surprising. Glad to have you all here. We should be returning to our usual schedule: a new installment every two weeks or so.
Trust you are all well.
Cheers,
Michael