RYNSA: WORDS

This so-called ‘economic meltdown’ in my own beloved United States is, in my opinion, nothing more than a carefully-crafted misnomer designed to camouflage the much more comprehensive villainy of American capitalism. You can’t ‘meltdown’ a global system that has been gradually tearing away at economic sustainability for years! Everything that we’re experiencing now is the entirely predictable outcome of numerous erosive, bipartisan, neoliberal policy decisions dating back to the 1980s; policy decisions that privileged unregulated money markets and corporate interests over the needs of the state and its people.

Honestly, this was inevitable. We could see it coming from a long way off. Sunset, if you will, has finally fallen on Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’.

For details on we how got here I refer you to the writing of journalist David Sirota, author of The Uprising, who has recently provided us with a summary bibliography of key texts, and in only one sentence. From the Huffington Post, he says:

“As I note, this week we will see Thomas Frank’s wrecking crew using Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine to justify a bigger free lunch than David Cay Johnston ever imagined.”

For the life of me, I simply cannot understand how anyone could continue to espouse, or even attempt to justify, the philosophies of ‘free-market’ neoliberalism. The great, green capitalist machine has not righted itself, and now we’re expected to burn 700 billion US dollars (OMFG!!!) to cushion the fall of those who passionately claimed the market would save us. Ultimately, this massive and unprecedented bailout of the financial sector amounts to a soft landing for the least deserving and most hypocritical among us.

Politically, both the republicans and the democrats have apparently converged to reform the fascist party, an orgy of wealth, exclusivity, and corruption. With rare exception (thank you Mr. Kucinich), there is no dissent, no opposition in Washington. There’s the money, and then there’s us. The US is officially a capitalist wasteland where gains are privatized and losses socialized, and the working poor always, always foot the bill.

If ever the phrase ‘the emperor has no clothes’ was relevant to our national discourse, it would be now. And like many of my countrymen and women, I’m just sick of it. Disgust prods me awake at night, like a wiry, old finger jabbing me in the ribcage. I can’t get that ethereal Dorthea Lange photograph out of my head: a furrowed brow and three kids, the world in black-n-white, to have and to have not.

In all probability it won’t be as bad as my night frights suggest. And I hate that fear can grip me so. But then again, what do I know? I’m not a money-man… I’m just one of the millions who have to pay for it when the money-men fuck up!

Argh!!!

It looks as though the world’s multinational corporations have graduated from Maoist ‘reeducation’ camp just in time for the Summer games. According to this article in BusinessWeek, global companies, some from the United States, have recently taken a decidedly nationalistic approach to advertising in Chinese media, and all with the goal of wooing new customers to their brand. 

This is really not much of a surprise. Foreign companies wrapping themselves in the flag–in this case a bright, red one–is nothing new, and it was bound to happen sooner or later in China. There’s certainly a lot of money to be made from the emergent market that is the Chinese mainland, especially so during the Olympics. Corporate interests know this. They’re not gonna let a golden opportunity pass them by.

However, I do worry that corporations are stoking an already healthy fire. National pride is dangerous regardless of the nation in question. When that particular passion is combined with large numbers of disenfranchised people (China in a nutshell), it could spell future chaos in the form of violence, mob rule, or, in the American context, mass adoption of brutal foreign policies (ie, the asinine Bush Doctrine). 

In any case, it’s important to remember that flattering advertising does not a comrade Lei Feng make. Please believe me. As a well-seasoned serf in the global fraud that is economic neoliberalism, I know of what I speak. These corporations couldn’t give two chopsticks what happens to China.

This morning I found this new video from TED in my iTunes podcast list featuring the design work of Swiss entrepreneur Yves Behar.  He is probably best known for his role in designing both the OLPC XO and the Jawbone.

Initially, I was draw to this video and his presentation because of the title: “Creating Objects that Tell Stories.”  The thinking was that this was some new invention or concept, ala the work at MIT’s Media Lab or the art of Andy Goldsworthy, for example, that would provide new methods for helping people–real world, flesh-and-blood people–to tell their stories.  Perhaps this betrays my community bias, but new technology, no matter how sexy or well conceived, is fundamentally useless as a subject.  Humanity is subject, technology is object.  That is to say that technology is merely a tool, a resource, inanimate and inert, and therefore kind of boring.  Its existence is only significant when meaning is ascribed to it by human beings.  A loptop could be a tool for storytelling, or it could be an expensive paper weight.  The key variable here is the conscious human.

There is a tendency among some in the so-called ‘creative industries’–of which I mean designers, coders, graphic designers, web engineers, musicians, videographers and editors, etc.–to overly anthropomorphize the things they create.  The language they use to describe these artifacts is beyond positive, its downright poetic!  Quite literally the words they use to express the potential of a given thing, a technological product, are words that would otherwise be relegated to the human experience.  There is no differentiation.   

Far be it from me to be the semantic police, but this lack of distinction between thing and human is problematic for me.  The sci-fi coolness of cyborg philosophizing aside–which I actually find very compelling–the expansion of language ultimately distorts, or even hides, very real human circumstances and conditions.  It makes it exceedingly difficult, moreover, for human populations to effect change where and when change is needed.  Put another way, if a television and a mother share the same descriptors, how then should we raise our children?

I believe that there is a distinct financial incentive for blurring the lines between subject and object.  At one point in the TED presentation, for example, Mr. Behar betrays his allegiances by saying, “…We bring intellectual property, you know, we bring a marketing approach, we bring all this stuff.  But I think at the end of the day what we bring is these values, and these values create a soul for the companies we work with.” (00:10:30 – 00:10:40, timecode). 

It’s that word ’soul’ that bothers me.  How can an incorporated, for-profit, private enterprise have a soul?!?  Obviously, it can’t.  But the concept is none the less pervasive in the contemporary cultural imagination.  It is a common myth, the humanity of industry.  It is an insidious trope, disseminated by wealthy companies who seek, through elaborate PR and marketing campaigns, to animate their business practice and their products.  

My criticism, to be clear, is not against Yves Behar as an individual, or his designs, or the use of those creations in the public sphere.  I’m simply uncomfortable with the terminology he and his colleagues use to describe their work.  The convergence of the organic and the inorganic may be inevitable, but the liberalization of language most definitely privileges one over the other, and we should always remember that.  We should try to be more conscientious about how we ascribe meaning to technology.

UPDATE:

For real objects that tell stories, check out the Labcast from MIT’s Media Lab, and the invention of these amazing little things they call Siftables.  Imagine the human storytelling potential of these tools!