internet

My essay "the Rise and Fall of New Media" can be found in the twentieth anniversary issue of Frieze and online their site here. It's paired with an essay by Lauren Cornell of Rhizome and the New Museum. Together, both deal with the issue that far from being a niche interest, as Cornell writes, "every kind of artistic practice has been touched by the Internet as both a tool and as something that affects us in a broader sense…" 

Posting has been light this summer as I've moved into a new house (modernism, even!) but things have been moving behind the scenes. With the new semester coming up, expect more on the way.

I'm immersed in construction these days. It's a twist for me. Since the early 1990s, I've been interested in the theoretical aspects of architecture: the role of networks in cities, the impact of changes in capital on the profession, and other topics that my readers will find familiar. It's been fascinating, but also stressful (the stakes are high since the financial implications are real!) to get my hands dirty like this. As I do so, I can't escape how new media and networked mobile devices are omnipresent throughout the process: contractors text me and send me photos of the work they have done via e-mail from their smart phones, plumbing supply representatives tell me to look on the net for products, I watch instructions on how to power wash a deck on youtube, my wife (an environmental engineer) looks up the toxicity of products, and so on. 

As I was running back and forth to the lumber yard today, I was driving my twenty year old Saab 900 and since the radio is broken, for distraction, I plugged my iphone into the a cable hooked to the auxiliary jack and turned on the Sirius radio app to listen to MSNBC. The stories they described may not stand the test of time—a congressman who flashed his public on Twitter, a mother on trial for murdering her daughter who was caught partying afterwards in photographs on social media sites, a couple photographed kissing during a riot and later identified via the Web, the arrest of a nineteen year old in a massive passwork hack, the death of a minor celebrity in a car wreck after he had tweeted an image of himself drinking—but each one involved "new media."

Or rather each one didn't. For their was nothing new about networked mobile devices and the Web. To continue thinking of them as new media has itself become an anachronism. Rather, they are simply the media of our own modernity, network culture. Just as the first modernity destroyed the traces of the world that existed before industrialization, network culture destroys the old (postmodern) unconnected world. But we've gone past a point of no return: new media are the media of our time, with all of their goods and all of their bads. It's still an ongoing process, but new media have nevertheless long since stopped occuping a discrete niche or a ghetto. They form our world. It's on those terms we need to investigate them.   

Until last night, I was eagerly awaiting Adam Curtis's All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. 

The first episode is already available on YouTube. See below or go to the site.

I'm sad to say that I was disappointed by this first episode and am not sure I will want to spend the time to watch any further. 

In "The Century of the Self," Curtis perfected a style consisting of appropriated music and film clips—as another filmmaker told me yesterday, this is made possible by blanket licensing rights possessed by the BBC—over which the unseen Curtis narrates in an ominous voice, simultaneously calm and urgent, sounding the alarm with regard to vast conspiracies of right wing forces attacking to exploit us for their own intersets. 

In the Century of the Self, the enemy was Freud and Freudianism and with it, the strange dialectic of pleasure and control so endemic to twentieth century life. I was riveted by Century of the Self and watched a number of Curtis's other documentaries. Generally speaking I didn't find these as compelling and I must admit that the style began to wear on me after a while.

But I had high hopes for this series. It had been some time since he had made a new one and I thought that by now he would have reworked his style and produced something of striking originality. I had hoped for a fresh take on network culture. After all, I will be the first with my hand in the air to accuse network culture of promoting elitism and individualism. Its influence on our society, particularly on the academy and the creative fields, has been pervasive and pernicious.

All Watched Over, alas, almost descends into self-parody. The first episode seems to loosely take Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron's fifteen year old Californian Ideology article as a reference point (although he fails to mention that they coined the term in a critical essay and misses the point about the critical influence of the counterculture in forging Silicon Valley's libertarian mindset) but he veers off into a protracted discussion of Ayn Rand.

Granted, Rand's work is commonly read in Silicon Valley (and of course among architects), but methodologically this is where the show goes awry. The gist of the first episode is that this rather misguided and insane woman's ideology of pure individualism and selfishness led us down the road to ruin. Curtis drags out Alan Greenspan as one of her followers. Fair enough, I suppose, although a more critical approach would be to look at the Chicago School, but I suppose that has already been done to death and Curtis wanted something more original. Still, by this point I was wondering just where Curtis was going. Although he would eventually reintroduce computers as these HAL-like entities controlling Wall Street, this wasn't terribly convincing (I think the real masters of the universe on Wall Street know very well what they are doing and rarely place blind faith in machines to save us all).

Worst of all, Curtis veered off into left field with a misinformed section on President Bill Clinton. Curtis weaves a tale of a president who had come to change society for the better but wound up so convinced by Greenspan's success with the economy and, by implication, so taken with the ideology of individualism, that he wound up leaving behind his ideas of making the country better and indulging in the earthly pleasures of Monica Lewinsky. After footage of Hilary giving a tour of the White House and even of Socks the cat, I was ready to call it a day. Somehow I made it through to the end, but I doubt I will want to cringe my way through another episode.

The changes in network culture are not the product of a conspiracy theory (if you like conspiracy theories then please spend your time on Geoff Waite's Nietzsche's Corps(e) for a much more self-reflective and compelling work). For a time better spent, try out David Harvey's A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism, Fred Turner's From Counter-Culture to Cyberculture, Barbrook and Cameron's Californian Ideology essay and compliment these with a good analysis of economic history like Robert Brenner's The Economics of Global Turbulence. 

I hate giving bad reviews. My mother taught me that if you don't have anything good to say, don't say it. Moreover, it pains me that I have found Curtis's work so compelling in the past and, as I stated at the outset, my whole network culture project is a sustained critique of the field. But in episode one of this series, Curtis reduces history to a caricature. 

If only Ayn Rand hadn't been so mentally unfit, if only her darting eyes hadn't been so convincing, then perhaps all these bad things wouldn't have happened and the man who had come to change society for the better would have done so. 

History isn't so simple. 

I don't see how can I avoid sounding like an ogre or troll in this post but there's no sense in writing for print anymore. 

I'm faced with a huge amount of work on my plate and something has to what give. Since I'm already spending too little time on the blog and my book, I have to find something to cut. The victim is the print-only journal. I wish it well.

Network culture begins with a condition of information overload. Having grown up in a house with a massive library, I can appreciate the desire to have books and journals at hand and I sought to emulate my father in collecting for a while, but gave it up almost a decade ago. Objects consume scarce resources and space. Books and journals are still the worst offenders in my house. Even as cull them without mercy, they pile up around me, largely unread, passed by in a day when there's too much to do. 

Let's face it, a personal library is the academic's version of an SUV. It's handy for when you need it, but it's big and unwieldy, a poor choice when it comes to ecology and not a defensible option in a world of limits except for those who really, truly need them.  

The journals that I read regularly—the New Left Review, Mute Magazine, Eurozine, and Domus (to name a select few)—are already on the Net. There are few print-only publications and I read none of them regularly. Fetish objects like the New City Reader, Junk Jet, Volume, or Loud Paper generally wind up on the Internet in reduced or pirated form. You have to pay—or otherwise seek out—the original format if that's what you want, but the content is there for the taking.

Google books makes it possible to search through new and old books alike while pirate book sites mean that it's easy to carry thousands of books in a laptop. Pirating may be illegal now, but it's thriving—take the book scanning movement, for example—and is just the faintest ripple in the surface of the ocean before the tides pull back and then the tsumani hits.

If not in this decade, then surely within two decades virtually all publishers—book, journal, and newspaper will provide universities with everything they publish in digital form. Within that time, as I pointed out at the CCA on Thursday, most archives will also be online.  

A book or journal that in print form only is inadequate for our age. It cannot be properly searched. Hand-made indices have some degree of utility, but no matter how intelligent the maker of the index was, remain reductive, the product of one mind that can't adequately foresee everything the text will be used for. Full-text search is revolutionary for scholarship.  

Then there's portability. Like so many of my colleagues, I travel frequently, both overseas and across the Hudson to Columbia. I clung to slides until 2006 when travelling to Ireland to teach made that impossible. Books are the same. It's entirely different to have my library at my fingertips as I type.

But is this historian's desire so new? While teaching in Brazil, Braudel would visit Europe periodically and employ microfilm to record material in archives for later references. I'm confident that if Benjamin were alive today, he'd be surfing book pirate Web sites instead of frequenting old bookstores, collecting PDFs in his laptop, just in case the sites wind up shut down.

Moreover, there's another ethical question, beyond the viability of publishers which I suspect will survive in this new world (printing presses, may be another matter). A friend once told me that while she was teaching in South America, she translated my texts for her students. At the time, she explained, my work was just about the only informed commentary on contemporary architecture available online and her university lacked the funds to acquire books and journals or pay for access to material behind paywalls. Her message hit home: print publications and paywalls maintain a global imbalance of intellectual resources.     

There's nothing more tiresome than the aged (or young) scholar lamenting the lack of intellectual rigor online. Surely such learned individuals have heard of the Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim who published his De laude scriptorum manualium, defending the tradition of script against the printing press in 1492? Our fields were hardly more rigorous in the postmodern 1980s or the post-structuralist 1990s let alone the heroic era of the 1920s. Plenty of material not worth the ink and paper it cost to print was published back then. 

Instead of lamenting print, let's work together to break down paywalls, physical or electronic. Those of us in the academy are not in the business of knowledge, we're in a community of knowledge, a community that transcends old limits. Let's embrace that.  

I am delighted to announce that I will be succeeding Beatriz Colomina as the review editor of the media section of the Journal of Society of Architectural Historians.

It will be my charge to edit articles on Web sites, films, software, digital books, databases, and other media at a moment in which my field is undergoing a revolutionary transition. I am in debt to Beatriz for paving the way by creating a stellar review section, to David Brownlee, JSAH editor for inviting me to take part in his journal, and to Dean Wigley for his support in this new endeavor. 

If you are a historian of architecture and you read my blog, please do contact me using the form on the left. This is a most exciting appointment. 

Iceland's Eyjafjallajoekull volcano hasn't given up disrupting north Atlantic air travel this summer, but what if it's the harbinger of something bigger?

The global city is predicated on face to face communication being essential to major business deals. But the global city model, originally outlined by my colleague Saskia Sassen, is almost twenty years old. Trying booting up your Powerbook 100 to read this blog post. In this post I'd like to speculate on the impact of the volcano, technology, and global warming on the global city.  

First, let's talk global warming and green hype. During the last decade, friendly but misguided green advocates have advocated pedestrian-oriented cities as environmentally-sound alternatives to the suburbs. But looking at America (and many countries in Europe aren't all that different from this), most cities have seen sustained and uninterrupted declines in the last half century. The starring exceptions are the global city of various scales: New York, Chicago, Boston, LA, San Francisco and so on. For the most part, these cities have seen a remarkable renaissance as centers of business and creative activity. The urbanites who live here live in the global city, thinking nothing of jetting from London to Shanghai and alighting in San Francisco. Often, these individuals literally inhabit the global city and owning pied-à-tierres on multiple continents is increasingly as common among the super-wealthy as owning an estate is. At home, the "creative class" practices localism religiously, probably out enjoying home-smoked bacon cupcakes and carbon-neutral triple-pulled ristrettos right now.  

But the idea that this kind of life—which is as predicated on consumption as existence in deepest suburbia—is environmentally sound is laughable. Apart from the manic rate of conspicuous consumption in the global city, flying one mile on an airplane produces almost  as much CO2 as driving that same mile by oneself in an automobile (other side effects, including polluting in the very thin atmosphere high-up may be much worse). Moreover, if an average driver in the United States drives some 12,000 miles a year, that's half of what you need to get into a frequent flyer club.

I think by now you get the picture: the high-flyer of the global city is much worse for the environment than the suburbanite. So much for sustainable living. 

Now back to the volcano. The impact it's had on transatlantic travel has been massive as planes continue to be grounded in one European country or another multiple times a week. Pollution-wise, the amount of CO2 it released is significantly less than the amount of CO2 that would have been produced by the Airbuses and Boeings that happened not to fly on those days (obviously, the volcano also released other pollutants, many of which are quite toxic to life). Business travel had already dropped as a result of the recession. The volcano is a wake-up call. If my business relied on frequent international travel for face-to-face meetings, I'd begin asking myself how sustainable this is from an economic standpoint and how vulnerable my business was to such disruptions.   

There's more to the story. As I stated earlier, we're far from the day of the Powerbook 100, which couldn't even browse the Web. 70% of stock market trades now take place between computers at millisecond-level speeds. I have a hunch that the face-to-face financial deals that used to drive the global financial markets are becoming less important economically. 

Let's put this all together then. A perfect storm is emerging. Far from the idea that the suburbs will collapse in Richard Florida's great reset, it is likely the global city that collapses, replaced by ubiquitous high-speed telecommunications and undone by changing climatological conditions, not to mention peak oil.

Make no mistake, I'm not offering up a new utopia of any sort here. What I'm predicting is an end to network culture as we know it and it won't be pretty. The coming collapse of the global city will be slow and brutal, accompanied by the stationary state that Gopal Balakrishnan described last year.

I don't see many easy solutions out there. Ironically, the best bet is probably the very scare-word the American right loves to deploy: socialism. Now it's unlikely to take hold in the US, at least not for a generation or two but some countries will probably get the drift and head in that direction. What gets us out of this morass and what form of global spatial organization replaces the global city is unclear. Still, the late, great global city was far from equitable or sustainable. We can hardly lament its passing.  

Nothing irks me more than the idiots* who say that nobody saw the crash coming. I blogged about it years before it happened. It was plain as day. The real estate market was a bubble. Nothing fundamental had changed.

So for the record, the bump in the stock market today suggests just how fragile the markets are. I've brought this up many times in the networked publics panels, but it's worth mentioning again: high velocity trading is a major threat to the markets and the markets are far from stable.

In literally the blink of an eye the NYSE had dropped over 995 points. It bounced back, but was still down over 350 at the end of the day. 

This isn't the kind of glitch we should ignore. It's a warning underscoring how unsound our financial markets are. Anyone interested in the survival of the current economy system should hope that the Obama administration doesn't ignore it.  

*Of course some of the people saying that nobody saw the crash coming aren't idiots; they're liars.

I spent half of my childhood in the thick of things in Chicago and the other half in rural-exurban Western Massachusetts. It always surprises me when someone says "I can't imagine you in the countryside" (I often fantasize publicly about living in Vermont or somewhere similarly rural). What, Points of Interest in the Owens River Valley wasn't enough for you? 

Since my exurban life came during my all-important teenage years, I found it  crucial to visit the city where I'd scour the record stores or to tune into WRPI, a great industrially-oriented radio station, something I could only do whenever the horrific local Christian station was off the air. When I went to college at Cornell in Ithaca, New York, I was even further from civilization and without even a decent radio station (the college radio station was obsessed with Phish, infinitely worse fate than even classic rock) and so-so record stores. I invested in a short wave radio to listen to the John Peel show (and, when I could get it, the brilliant, ill-fated Radio Sierra Leone) and took painfully long road trips to the city to the same record stores to collect more music.

All this is gone now. I haven't been to a record store in years. I'm a bit of an audiophile so I still keep the best music in CDs but no record store is as efficient as the Net so I even that fix takes place online. In any event the record stores have closed down, the staff off to do God knows what. The scene is gone.

Why do I blog this? Simply enough: the old role of cities as places that you go to in order to experience hard-to-find culture is over. The Nick Hornby novel/film High Fidelity is completely foreign to network culture. Ours is the world of the Long Tail. Everything is available. The city is dead.