Aidan Fridman and the Filmmaking Club at the University of North Florida sat me down for an interview about writing and teaching and put together this little video. Check it out!
Torn Together
I first experienced Eli Pariser’s fabled filter bubble twenty years ago, before scrolling the fevered feeds of social media had such a hold on us. I didn’t have a television, but my ex-girlfriend had one stored in our garage. I pulled it out specifically to watch the 2004 election coverage on the news. George W. Bush was up for reelection against challenger John Kerry. For the two years leading up to this election, I had been in graduate school in San Diego. So, no, I didn’t know anyone who liked Bush, no one who didn’t make fun of him, not a single person who had nice things to say. To be fair, I didn’t really know anyone who liked Kerry either, but…
I sat there, by myself, in front of that small cathode-ray television tube, wondering what the hell I was seeing. How could this many people be voting for the guy I was sure didn’t have a single fan on the continent?
That’s what it looks like when your bubble bursts, and you’re exposed to the cold light of consensus reality. That’s when you realize you were duped, but by whom?
One of the first non-children books I read was a biography of P. T. Barnum. My middle-school mind was fascinated by his brash persona and his blatant sloganeering. “There’s a sucker born every minute,” he supposedly once said as he curated freak shows and curiosities and co-created the Barnum and Bailey Circus, “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Thankfully as a young impressionable mind, I didn’t internalize his con-man values. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t need side jobs.
But the silver lining isn’t cynicism, nor are koans like that lost on the tricksters and trolls gatekeeping the path. Everybody knows everything yet fails to notice how far they have left to go and how little air they have left to breathe. That’s one of the defining features of a bubble: It’s sealed. Airtight.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
But we don’t need the internet to be blind to the blight around us, stuck not seeing the things about the world we find too disturbing to know, too annoying to think about, or just plain too inconvenient to consider. We do a lot of it on our own. We all wander through the world with blurry lenses, what the literary theorist Kenneth Burke called “terministic screens.” Have you ever learned a new word and then started seeing it everywhere? Burke would say that it was always there, but you were filtering it out, obscuring it with ignorance. Once it became a part of your terministic screen, then you started seeing it.
Outside the circus, Barnum’s resonant ideas rang much louder than simply hawking curiosities for cash. He served two terms as a Republican in the Connecticut legislature, as well as serving as mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Arguing for the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, the abolitionist Barnum said, “A human soul, ‘that God has created and Christ died for,’ is not to be trifled with. It may tenant the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab, or a Hottentot—it is still an immortal spirit.” In spite of his outdated nomenclature, the man most known as a 19th-century huckster had more progressive ideas than many of the current lot.
Now the terministic screens are actual screens, shiny rectangles, radiant with outrage. Now the most lucrative approach to news is anything that foments fear, anger, and resentment: any reaction is great, but rage is preferred and more profitable. Now the bubbles are smaller, stronger, and finding one’s way out is a lot more difficult. Any semblance of distortion your reality may have been teasing you with, easing your mind with a blur on the lens, a national election will quickly clear up for you. Your brain left broken, your shelter shattered.
The Acker Ethic
I’ve been thinking about allusion, quotation, and sampling in the broadest possible terms. It’s led me both deep into the self and what makes up consciousness and way, way outward into what constitutes reality. Some of the concerns are epistemological. That is, how we know what we know. And some are ontological. That is, how we be who we be. I’m zooming in and zooming out to find the limits of the concepts of reference and recycling.
Before we get to Kathy Acker’s writing practices, let’s start with brief survey of other perspectives:
In his book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher, 2006), Daniel Pinchbeck extends Heisenberg’s idea that observation influences the observed into a Hegelian word-view that consciousness constitutes the core of reality, as if the physical world and our perception of it are merely two sides of the same phenomenon. Taken wholesale, it’s not quite solipsism, but it’s close. The act of writing blurs the lines even further.
In his introduction to Cicero’s On the Good Life, Michael Grant writes,
Cicero strongly believed that the universe is governed by a divine plan… When he looked round him at the marvels of the cosmos he could only conclude, adopting the “argument from design,” that they must be of divine origin. He was happy to adopt this form of religion, purified and illuminated by the knowledge of nature, because it justified his confidence in human beings, which was based, as has been seen, on the conviction that the mind or soul of each individual person is a reflection, indeed a part, of the divine mind.
Cicero held a distributed view of religion, each of us representing one aspect of the divine. Evoking both Immanual Kant and Jakob Johann von Uexküll in her book Ecstatic Worlds (MIT Press, 2017), Janine Marchessault writes,
Building upon Kant’s philosophy, Uexküll maintained that the world of every living organism on the earth is different from that of every other organism because of the uniqueness of its sensory organs and its environment; each creature inhabits a unique environment that is uniquely experienced. The world is thus made up of multiple, overlapping environments.
So, on one side, we’re each the eyes of the divine, but if each of us sees ourselves as the center of our own universe, then we all live in universes made up of our own observations and experiences. It’s its own many-worlds theory, even if just by a slight shift in point of view. For the sake of the discussion at hand, let’s adopt the theory—even if only by analogy. When we write, we take on a point of view, make observations, and relay experiences. Now, what if we step outside of ourselves and borrow points of view, observations, and experiences from others?
“I’m not an enclosed or self-sufficient being.” — Colette Peignot,
channeled by Kathy Acker in My Mother: Demonology
Experimental writer and all around badass Kathy Acker would do just that. Her writing practice included variations on William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up method, parody, pastiche, postmodernism, and forms that flirted with plagiarism. During a visit to RE/Search headquarters in 2012, her friend and ex-lover McKenzie Wark told V. Vale, “She would just read a book and re-write it. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she would just read Treasure Island and re-write it. You don’t wait for inspiration, you just get going” (italics in original). Wark met Acker in July of 1995 when she was visiting Sydney, Australia. The next year, Wark visited her in San Francisco. Their brief relationship, which largely existed between those two meetings, is chronicled via their collected emails in I’m Very Into You: Correspondence 1995–1996 (Semiotext(e), 2015).
Like everyone who came in contact with her, Wark was irrevocably inspired. Acker left no stone unthrown, no line uncrossed. Wark continues, “When I met her, she had three books… And she was writing Pussy, King of the Pirates (Grove Press, 1996). It’s one-third Treasure Island and two-thirds something else, and she would just read these three books and, almost at random, re-write them.” Acker explained her methods in a1990 interview with Sylvére Lotringer:
I placed very direct autobiographical, just diary material, right next to fake diary material. I tried to figure out who I wasn’t and I went to texts of murderesses. I just changed them into the first person, really not caring if the writing was good or bad, and put the fake first person text next to the true first person. And then continue to see what would happen. I used pre-Freudian texts because I didn’t want to deal with Freudian jargon. It was a very naive experiment at first. I was experimenting about identity in terms of language.
Like a mash-up artist or hip-hop producer, Acker would sample other texts, recontextualizing them among her own. It wasn’t a shortcut, it was an experiment, an exploration outside herself. Marchessault adds, “The environment described by Uexküll is defined by a multiplicity of overlapping subjective experiences of time.” Acker continues,
What a writer does, in 19th century terms, is that he takes a certain amount of experience and he “represents” that material. What I’m doing is simply taking text to be the same as the world, to be equal to non-text, in fact to be more real than non-text, and start representing text.
Acker was not plagiarizing or imitating but representing another’s text. It’s not mimésis or mimicry in the Aristotelian sense. A symbol on a map represents a particular building or destination, but it isn’t imitating that building or destination. As Acker added, “I didn’t copy it. I didn’t say it was mine.” She was smuggling in other points of view, other observations, other experiences, others. Hers was a proto-punk act of creative destruction.
In her Acker biography, After Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus writes, “But then again, didn’t she do what all writers must do? Create a position from which to write?” Architect of a different vector of bomb, one designed to level the pedestals of the literary canon, Acker could have proclaimed, “Now I am become life, creator of worlds.”
Bibliography:
Kathy Acker, Hannibal Lecter, My Father, New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.
Kathy Acker & McKenzie Wark, I’m Very Into You: Correspondence 1995–1996, New York: Semiotext(e), 2015.
Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology, New York: Grove Press, 1994.
Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates, New York: Grove Press, 1996.
Aristotle, Poetics, New York: Penguin Classics, 1996.
Michael Grant, Introduction, in Cicero, On the Good Life, New York: Penguin Books, 1971, 8.
Chris Kraus, After Kathy Acker: A Biography, New York: Semiotext(e), 2017.
Janine Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.
Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism, San Francisco, CA: Serpent’s Tail, 1996.
V. Vale, A Visit from McKenzie Wark, San Francisco, CA: RE/Search Publications, 2014, 21.
McKenzie Wark, Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.
About Time
The time-travel trope never seems to wear thin. Even a bad time-travel story has its moments. Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962) was the first full-length novel I ever read, and something about it latched onto my sixth-grade imagination and hasn’t let go. Several of my favorite all-time stories involve time travel to some extent.
“Part of the fascination of time travel concerns the stark paradoxes that threaten as soon as travel into the past is considered,” writes the theoretical physicist Paul Davies in his 2001 book How to Build a Time Machine. “Perhaps causal loops can be made self-consistent. Perhaps reality consists of multiple universes.” These thought experiments are rife with unanswered and unanswerable questions, which are the very stuff of great stories.
Though the concept started in religion, it was popularized by H.G. Wells’ 1895 novella, The Time Machine. Mechanical time travel has remained a standard in science fiction ever since. According to James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History (Pantheon, 2016), H.G. Wells wasn’t trying to explain anything. He was just trying to come up with a “plausible-sounding plot device” for a story.
There are the plausible-sounding back-in-time explorations like the Back to the Future franchise (1985-1990), and the time-loop lunacy of Groundhog Day (1993), as well as the outright hysterics of Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) and Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (2015), but they’re not all winners. Project Almanac (2015) illustrates the inherent paradoxes of temporal travel and their intrigue while still being only an okay movie, but it falters in spite of the time travel rather than because of it. 2009’s Triangle also loops time into a muddy and often confusing story. Time travel can be such a cumbersome cognitive load that it’s difficult to get right in a story with much else going on and even harder to make feel real. And then of course there’s Justin Smith Ruiu’s ChronoSwoop app.
With that said, here are twenty-three of my favorite stories that feature time travel in one form or another.
“Time is a game
played beautifully
by children.”
— Heraclitus, Fragment 79
Time Bandits
The story that best captures my childhood fascination with adventure—and directly follows the feeling I got from A Wrinkle in Time—is Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981). Reluctant to go to bed, a young boy (Kevin) is soon whisked away by a band of tiny time-traveling thieves who’ve stolen a map of the universe from the Supreme Being. Through portals marked on the map, they bounce through time, stealing whatever they can along the way. Though young Kevin has been longing for adventure, soon all he wants is to get back home.
Primer
Written, directed, produced, edited, and scored by Shane Carruth, who also costars, Primer (2004) is a D.I.Y. garage sci-fi thriller. It got a lot of attention upon its release in 2004 for its bargain budget, but it’s an achievement at any price. Friends and engineering colleagues Aaron (Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) build a box that turns out to enable them to travel back in time. The fact that they stumble upon this ability and then use it for fairly frivolous means (stock trades) doesn’t dull the chronologically jumbled plot or the inevitable unraveling of their relationship.
Palm Springs
Right when you thought the time-loop concept was past tense, it comes back around again, just as renewed and refreshed as it is recurring. A destination wedding is the setting for the temporal hijinks in Max Barbakow’s Palm Springs (2020). Like the Harlequin in Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” who deliberately knocks a clockwork world out of its scheduled whack, Nyles (Andy Samberg) breaks everyone out of their routines and shows them a different way through the wedding day, over and over again, until Roy (J.K. Simmons) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti), er, shake things up for him.
Timecrimes
Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes; 2007) capitalizes on its causal loops and suspenseful twists rather than wasting them. The film contains exactly four actors, and its action takes place over the course of about an hour and a half. In its handling of causality, Timecrimes is somewhere between Primer and the popular Back to the Future franchise of the 1980s, both of which feature extensive backwards time travel. Like Primer, which uses time travel as the pretext for the study of larger issues, Timecrimes evokes themes of voyeurism and ethics in addition to its time-looping structure and the subsequent questions of causality. [See my full write-up in the Econo Clash Review.]
Safety Not Guaranteed
Inspired by a classified ad that ran in Backwoods Home Magazine in 1997, Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) shows how the possibilities of time travel test our loyalties. All of the film’s characters are faced with decision points that didn’t exist before but that point back to issues they should’ve already processed: one applying for medical school, one tracking down his high-school flame, one seemingly above everything anyway. It’s a surprisingly poignant and effective movie.
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
The narrator in Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Vintage, 2010) is a time-machine mechanic. Charles (the narrator has the same name as the author) travels around in his TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device, alone save his AI supervisor Phil, his onboard computer TAMMY, and his imaginary dog Ed. His mom is stuck in a time-loop, and his dad—inventor of the TM-31—is missing. That premise and those few details unfold into some interesting possibilities and wild predicaments.
Tenet
Before Tenet (2021), the writer and director Christopher Nolan was often criticized for being all head and no heart, but when he ventures too far into love (e.g., Inception and Interstellar), he falters. With Tenet, Nolan seems to stay with his strengths, one of those being the technical intricacies of time travel. Here it’s not so much time travel as we think of it but reversed entropy. So, within this ontology, if one wants to go back in time, one must travel through that piece of time backwards (i.e., you can’t blink back to last Tuesday; you have to go backwards through all the days since then to get there). This yields unique results and finds Nolan at the peak of his powers. Though someone described Tenet as “a puzzle box with nothing inside,” I say it’s well worth the puzzlin’.
The Shining Girls
“The problem with snapshots,” Kirby Mazrachi thinks, “is that they replace actual memories. You lock down the moment and it becomes all there is of it.” Kirby is one of the girls in The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland Books, 2013), a disturbingly beguiling novel that is now an Apple TV series in which Elisabeth Moss plays Kirby. Beukes’ easily digestible prose and gleefully nagging narrative betray a convoluted timeline and staggering depth of research. Drifter Harper Curtis (played in the show by Jamie Bell) quantum leaps from time to time gutting the girls as he goes. The House he squats in his helper, enabling the temporal jaunts. He’s like an inverted Patrick Bateman: no money, all motive. Where Bateman’s stories are told from his point of view in the tones of torture-porn, Harper’s kills are described from the abject horror of the victims. And the victims, who are all strong-willed women with drive and purpose, are only victims at his hand. Otherwise they shine with potential and promise. [Read my full review.]
Happy Death Day and Happy Death Day 2U
Time-loops don’t get any loopier than this. One of the genius turns in the script for Groundhog Day, written by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis, was their use of the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—as an outline for the loops. Christopher Landon’s Happy Death Day (2017) follows Tree (Jessica Rothe) stumbling through a similar cycle. In its sequel, Happy Death Day 2U (2019), a different person is stuck in the next day, and given her repeated previous experience, Tree steps in to help. And a third Happy Death Day is on the way!
12 Monkeys
A core thread of 12 Monkeys is Gaston Bachelard’s Cassandra Complex, in which one is given knowledge of the future, but is unable to convince anyone that the knowledge is true. Inspired by a 1964 French short called La Jetée written and directed by Chris Marker, Terry Gilliam expanded it in 1995 into a feature film starring Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Madeline Stowe, and David Morse. James Cole (Willis) is a prisoner in a decimated 2035, having been ravaged by a virus released in 1996. Cole is sent back to 1995 to try and find the source and stop it, but no one believes his claims of imminent doom.
The Peripheral
After three novels set in the present, The Peripheral (Putnam, 2014) marked William Gibson’s return to the future. The story projects all of the hallmarks of cyberpunk both into the near future and much further afield. In the far future, what passes for a government has figured out how to open new timelines in the past (a.k.a. “stubs”) just prior to an apocalyptic event. As in 12 Monkeys, they’re trying to figure out what happened and somehow benefit from it, exploiting the past for gain in their present. The television adaptation predictably deviates from the novel, but is also pretty great.
The Story of Your Life
Leveraging a very strict interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (i.e., that the language you speak creates and shapes the reality you live in), the lead scientist in Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life,” Dr. Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams in Denis Villenueve’s 2016 adaptation, Arrival), starts to see the world through the language of the alien visitors, the heptapods. Their language, like their perception of time, is nonlinear, so Banks begins to experience her story, and that of her daughter’s short life, according to the alien linguistic sequence.
Source Code
What happens to one reality when we change another quantum reality’s outcome? Source Code, the system for which the movie is named, uses the last eight minutes of brain activity we all experience upon death to allow a person to experience a different timeline in another, compatible person (via quantum entanglement and “parabolic calculus”; As William Gibson put it, “The people who complain about Source Code not getting quantum whatsit right probably thought Moon was about cloning.”). The idea of the system is to be able to find out what happened just before a catastrophic event (in this case a train bombing), in order to prevent further events from happening (e.g., a massive dirty bomb set for downtown Chicago). Somewhere between brain stimulation and computer simulation, Source Code does its work. But Captain Coulter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) goes in for one last shot at getting everything just right (like Aaron’s repeated runs in Primer) and manages to manipulate more than the system is supposed to allow.
Kindred
Octavia Butler’s Kindred (Doubleday, 1979) keeps landing her self-styled protagonist (Dana) in the slavery-era of the American South. Though she meets some of her ancestors, her jaunts are unplanned and unpredictable, making this a harrowing read at best. Among many other things, Butler is one of the few authors to address the physical dangers of time travel, as Dana loses an arm during her first temporal trip.
The Hazards of Time Travel
Can you be nostalgic for the future? In Joyce Carol Oates’ The Hazards of Time Travel (Ecco Press, 2018), the 17-year-old Adriane Strohl is exiled 80 years in her past (1959), finds another expatriate from their present (2039) and thus begins a time-fraught, dystopian love story.
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Audrey Neffenegger’s debut novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife (MacAdam/Cage, 2003), has already been generative enough to yield a movie and a TV series. In another interesting take on temporal logistics, the time-traveler himself, Henry, makes his unexpected jumps due to a genetic disorder.
Donnie Darko
I’ve already written quite a bit about Richard Kelly’s 2001 Halloween myth, Donnie Darko, but it deserves mention for Kelly’s attempt at constructing a comic-book logic of time travel. As somnambulistic as it is, from the very beginning of the movie, something is off, and the traveler is drawn to fix it. He leverages help from unwitting friends, family, and authority figures to correct the anomoly. [Read my full write-up.]
This is How You Lose the Time War
Cowritten by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This is How You Lose the Time War (Saga Press, 2020) chronicles the correspondence between two lovers/enemies in a war over the fate of the universe. This epistolary novel is written from the highest vantage point on time and space I’ve ever seen. Its time travel is only due to its scale. It’s difficult to even describe the scope of it, but thankfully the drama between them is relatable to all.
Before I Fall
Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall (HarperCollins, 2010) puts a YA twist on yet another time-loop story that flows through different stages of purpose and grief. Seventeen-year-old Sam Kingston keeps having to redo February 12, “Cupid’s Day,” and has to keep doing it until she gets it right. Sam approaches the repeated day in ways she wouldn’t normally, surprising her friends and family. Like the novel, the movie—starring Zoey Deutch as Sam—is somehow both dark and uplifting.
Recursion
Blake Crouch has written several compelling stories: Dark Matter (Ballantine, 2017), the Wayward Pines trilogy (the basis for the TV show of the same name), and Upgrade (Ballantine, 2023), among others, but none ignited my mind quite like Recursion (Ballantine, 2020). A billionaire-funded neuroscientist doing memory research on one side, and a detective investigating False Memory Syndrome on the other. When they meet in the middle, well… Things get crazy.
Paper Girls
Brian K. Vaughn and Cliff Chiang’s Paper Girls (Image Comics, 2015-2019) tells the story of four girls on their paper route one morning in the 1980s, who suddenly find themselves in the middle of an intergalactic war being fought across time. There’s an Amazon TV show of this one, too. It’s like Stranger Things but better in every way.
Detention
Joseph Kahn’s 2011 genre-melting thriller Detention is a wild, wild ride. It’s like The Breakfast Club meets The Faculty meets Back to the Future. Through their school mascot, a giant grizzly bear (the time “machine”), secrets about these misfits in detention, the principle who put them there, and their collective past are revealed. Oh, also one of them is a serial killer.
The Future of Another Timeline
Once it’s possible to repair the past, which revision remains? Bouncing between 2022 and 1992, The Future of Another Timeline (Tor, 2020) by Annalee Newitz explores the very notion of what time and history actually mean when you can travel through one to change the other, yet also how everything is connected to everything else.
“Just as the river where I step
is not the same, and is,
so am I as I am not.”
— Heraclitus, Fragment 81
My “Mining Affordances” piece in the Henry Ford Magazine
I wrote a piece about skateboarding for the Summer/Fall 2024 issue of the Henry Ford Magazine. “Mining Affordances” explores the way that riding a skateboard reshapes one’s relationship with the world, the environment, and oneself.
Many thanks to Kristen Gallerneaux for inviting me to do this piece, as well as Jennifer LaForce, Julie Friedman, and all at Octane Design and the Henry Ford Magazine.
You can flip through the magazine or download the .pdf of my essay.
An Invisible Intellectual Speakeasy
Chase Griffin recently did an interview with me for Metapsychosis, a journal of consciousness, literature, and art. Chase is the author of What’s on the Menu? (Long Day Press, 2020), the forthcoming Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace (Corona\Samizdat), as well as co-author (with Christina Quay) of How to Play a Necromancer’s Theremin (Maudlin House, 2023), about the latter of which I wrote,
“How do you like your metaphors mixed? This work of psy-fi docutainment, best ingested by first grinding it into Bookpowder, follows Rocco Atleby’s kudzu plots in the pursuit of fluctuation on the horizon of the Patasphere. Flitting and flirting with spacetimeconsciousness dimensionzzzzz, deep down, heinleined under there somewhere, Chase Griffin and Christina Quay have committed some really serious satire. So pack your pestle and mortar and get ripping!”
Thanks to Chase’s insightful questions, he and I cover quite a lot in this short but wide-ranging discussion.
Chase Griffin: Is there a circuit for you between BMXing/skateboarding and media theory? If so, what’s that sparking thing?
Roy Christopher: Well, in the broadest sense, one of my main research interests is the influence of technology on culture. The study of media—and even that in my mind is quite broad—somewhat narrows the research to where the results of this collision play out. I’m focused on the domains of various youth cultures, so BMX and skateboarding media is where bikes, boards, digital cameras, video cameras, writing, riding, music, and the like converge and capture it all. When you watch a video or see a magazine from a certain era, you’re seeing a snapshot of a culture at that time.
So, yes. I started making zines in the summer of 1986. Ten years later, I started messing around with HTML, and I saw the web as another level in zine-making. Though I was still doing print zines, I learned some basic code, bought some domain names, and starting building websites. The blogs (a term I am still hesitant to own) of the 2000s might’ve been the last era during which I felt like my approach to indie discourse thrived. The social-media silos killed all of that.
CG:Is the feedback loop the only way to go? Is this what makes today’s media such an anxiety inducing place? It feels like it’s not just the geopolitics and climate change? The loops, content aside, can be wholly crippling for many. It feels conspiratorial at times, in a divide and conquer kind of way, to get us all to stop acting in meatspace and live in this anxiety box so that the robber-barons can go on robbing the poor and raping the earth. Is there an alternative to this? Is there a way to create a more positive media?
RC: Last year, I went back to a bar I used to frequent in Chicago, and the same few people were there, sitting in the same places, having the same conversations. That’s what social media looks like after you take a break. It’s always baffling to see the same people posting the same stuff months later.
So, my first inclination is retreat. I’ve left every major social media platform and flirted with a few new ones, but I get fed up and deactivate them every few weeks. It makes for an inconsistent online presence, but I can’t be more consistent with it and still feel human.
Anxiety is lucrative. Once the social media platforms saw the goldmine of outrage, their steering users toward anxiety of one sort or another was inevitable. This has spread to every other kind of media. The goals are not information or entertainment as much as they are to elicit a reaction—any reaction. It’s turned journalists into trolls and the rest of us into dupes. There’s just more money in making people feel shitty than there is in making them feel good.
CG:What is the best way to help others?
RC: Fund their creative pursuits. Every problem I see my artist and writer friends and colleagues having is because there’s no money to do the cool things they want to do. I have the same problems, but I’ve sacrificed things and adjusted my lifestyle to facilitate the creative work I want to do, and subsequently I get to do some of it. The internet democratized and simultaneously demonetized everything.
To put it simply in a slogan: pay for art.
CG:I feel like we should all get together and create a better media. I miss the promise of the user-generated utopia. Do you think coding and computer engineering should be taught in public school widespread and starting at an early age? Do you think that if everyone speaks the new Latin, we can jumpstart society and get along without the new greedy and incompetent priest class?
RC: I can’t help but be cynical about the state of media at this point. The promise of the user-generated world has been fulfilled, but it’s no utopia. Computers, the internet, and ubiquitous cameras and screens have democratized every form of creativity. If one can be a “content creator” simply by aiming a lens, we’re not exactly honoring human creativity. DJ Scratch once said that the reason we respect something as an art is because “it’s hard as fuck to do.” Is the bar getting higher or lower?
A lot of my current students have majors that you would think would help (e.g., computer science, data science, information science, etc.), but the truth is that not everyone should be doing this stuff. The barriers to entry that existed before the internet were not tuned properly, but take a quick look at your feed, and you’ll see that we need some of them.
I think it’s all going to get a lot worse before there’s even a chance of it getting better.
CG:What does your ideal virtual community look like?
RC: A real-life secret salon. An invisible, intellectual speakeasy. I know a lot of smart, creative people. If I had a place to meet all of them on a regular basis and exchange ideas and collaborate on projects, that would be the ideal virtual community. If you went looking, you’d never find us.
Many thanks to Chase Griffin for doing this interview, Metapsychosis for publishing it, and you for reading and sharing it.
The Medium Picture Has a Home
I recently got an email celebrating the 21st anniversary of my long-abandoned LiveJournal account. I looked back at my six entries from 2002 and found the seeds of a book: my earliest research in media theory, a note on Brian Eno’s edge culture, the claustrophobia I felt from working on computer screens.
That was supposed to be my first book. I started outlining it in 2001, worked with an agent on it for a few years, and—after a decade of research and revision—I originally signed a contract for it in 2011. The book then went through several publishing shuffles, during which I went on to finish several other projects. I worked on it off and on in the meantime and am happy to finally have it on the way out of my head and into your hands.
To that end, I am proud to announce that the University of Georgia Press has deigned to publish The Medium Picture. To wit, I was born in Georgia, and I attended UGA briefly during my first attempt at grad school. This project is very close to my heart, and I am stoked to have the UGA Press putting it out.
Here is a brief overview:
The ever-evolving ways that we interact with each other, our world, and our selves through technology is a topic as worn as the devices we clutch and carry everyday. How did we get here? Drawing from the disciplines of media ecology and media archaeology, as well as bringing fresh perspectives from subcultures of music and skateboarding, The Medium Picture illuminates aspects of technological mediation that have been overlooked along the way. With a Foreword by Andrew McLuhan, it shows how immersion in unmoored technologies of connectivity finds us in a world of pure media and redefines who we are, how we are, and what we will be.
The book uses ideas from Marshall McLuhan, Brian Eno, and Mark Fisher, examples from Fugazi, Radiohead, Gang of Four, and Run the Jewels, and artists like Christian Marclay, Richard Long, and Laurie Anderson. It’s post-punk media-theory!
Here’s what some nice people are saying about it:
“Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.” — William Gibson
“Like a skateboarder repurposing the utilitarian textures of the urban terrain for sport, Roy Christopher reclaims the content and technologies of the media environment as a landscape to be navigated and explored. The Medium Picture is both a highly personal yet revelatory chronicle of a decades-long encounter with mediated popular culture.” — Douglas Rushkoff
“A synthesis of theory and thesis, research and personal recollection, The Medium Picture is a work of rangy intelligence and wandering curiosity. Thought-provoking and a pleasure to read.” — Charles Yu
“Immersed in the contemporary digital culture he grew up with as a teenager, Roy Christopher is old enough to recall vinyl, punk, and zines — social media before TikTok and smartphones. The Medium Picture deftly illuminates the connections between post-punk music critique, the increasing virtualization of culture, the history of formal media theory, the liminal zones of analog vs digital, pop vs high culture, capitalism vs anarchy. It’s the kind of book that makes you stop and think and scribble in the margins.” — Howard Rheingold
I have a bunch of things planned for the rollout, but first…
After all of this time and all of the rejections, it feels really good to announce that The Medium Picture will be out next fall from the University of Georgia Press.
Jenny Toomey: Fits and Starts
In November 1993, a few months after I first moved to Seattle, I went to see Washington, DC’s Tsunami at the late, legendary RKCNDY. It was a magical time in a magical place, and I was marveling as the names on record sleeves and magazine pages emerged in the flesh. At the merch table, I met Fontaine Toupes of Versus (who signed my Versus 7” “Seattle ain’t shit!”), my friend and collaborator to this day Tae Won Yu, as well as Kristen Thompson and Jenny Toomey of Tsunami and Simple Machine Records.
Toomey is a towering figure in 1990s punk rock, playing in bands, running a record label, and so much more. She and Kristen Thompson, put out The Introductory Mechanic’s Guide to Putting Out Records, Cassettes, and CDs [.pdf link], which was repeatedly updated with new and better resources over four editions throughout the 1990s. After releasing nearly 80 records, Simple Machines ceased operations in 1998.In the meantime, Toomey has continued quietly trying to figure out how technology can serve music and musicians. She was the founding executive director of the Future of Music Coalition, and she worked in various roles at the Ford Foundation. She’s also working on a book about all of this stuff. In her recent op-ed piece for Fast Company, she recognizes a pattern repeating. Likening generative AI to the file-sharing wave of the early 2000s, she writes,
The potential bait and switch of the tech world today is worryingly reminiscent of the early 2000s. While new technology always promises a flashy quantum leap into utopia, it instead regularly delivers opaque systems that streamline mistakes from the past. Throughout 2023’s frenzied AI debates, my feelings of déjà vu have become undeniable.
After years working behind the scenes, Jenny Toomey is thankfully emerging again.
Roy Christopher: When the impact of the internet started to dismantle the music industry as we knew it, many touted it as a new DIY revolution, returning the means of production to the people. What did you see?
Jenny Toomey: I didn’t see it flatly that way. In the same way that I didn’t feel like punk rock solved the problem of consolidated corporate media. I mean, if you look back at the hippie movements, you can criticize some of the hippies as being sort of just hedonist utopic people in denial about the systems in the world and just rejecting them (drop out), and then you can think of other ones as pragmatic utopian people who say that if we’re going to live a different way, we have to model how to live that different way which is more “drop in” or Whole Earth Catalog or Our Bodies Ourselves or eventually DIY punk.
That’s the element of counter culture and punk that I really liked. Not the flashy nihilism of tearing the old down, but rather the joyful enthusiasm of building the new. Asking that increasingly unasked question, “Why are we consenting to so many things we don’t agree with? And what would it look like if we tried to build different systems to give us more and better choices?” So, putting out your own records is a piece of it. A nice piece… nothing wrong at all with putting out your own records, but it’s not going to solve the problem of highly concentrated corporate media systems in late-stage capitalism. It does offer you a way to not completely condone what you abhor. Simple Machines was very much about that… grasping at, or rebuilding a small patch of agency.
With Future of Music, it was a little bit more trying to bridge those two things, saying we’re actually at an inflection moment where the systems are going to change, and if we could model more open systems, more transparent systems, systems that artists had more say in the design of and more benefit from, then we might get both things. We might get to avoid the systems we hate while actually contributing to building new systems that we could love.
And for me, there was an idealism to it that came out of coming from DC and a kind of can-do quality, that kids that were my age that grew up in DC felt empowered—to DIY, to make your own thing. But we were also practical and pragmatic, because we’d done some of this before. When we put out The Guide to Putting Out Records, and we saw that it took on both of those problems at the same time. First, the guide let novices get on third base and be in charge of their own punk-rock destiny and put out their own records because we spelled out the recipe. But the advice and guidance in the guide wasn’t neutral, it embodied certain values. It looked across the scene and modeled better behavior and therefore it influenced how the scenes functioned. So, if a pressing plant was using bad vinyl, we wouldn’t recommend them, and if a distributor wasn’t paying independent labels, we would take them out of our recommended list of distributors, and if somebody like Barefoot Press was doing great work, we would enthusiastically promote them. It was a way of putting our thumb on the scale to amplify the kinds of behaviors and values and relationships and systems we wanted built.
RC: That was just the beginning though, right?
JT: Yeah, that’s what we were trying to do initially, before we started the Future of Music Coalition. We were just trying to figure out the best path forward for our own catalog. Kristin Thomson from SMR and Tsunami and I started the work as a project we called “The Machine,” which was basically a blog on Insound’s website that allowed us to share whatever we were learning about the music/tech space in real time. We would just sort of reflect on all of the different music distribution systems that were reaching out to Simple Machines as potential partners because there were like dozens of different companies that were all starting up. They all had different business models. Some would buy your copyright outright, and some would license it, and some would encrypt your music, some would stream, some would download. We had no clear idea which of these options were better or worse. So, a lot of what we were doing was trying to understand the trade-offs and make our best recommendations based on guidance from different experts that we ran into in our travels. Very often, once we’d published something, other experts would come forward and disagree with some aspects of what we’d written and that back-and-forth would allow us to refine our recommendations and make the information even better.
We thought, let’s just do this until we can figure out what we want to do with our own catalog. Because we had like 80 releases and we had no idea what to do with them. Ultimately the music tech bubble began to burst, companies began merging and going out of business and getting sued by the major labels and we realized that that the emerging system wasn’t solid enough for us to recommend any of these companies. That’s when we knew we needed to set up an advocacy group. We couldn’t just recommend a good and trustworthy company, because that company would be out of business in a few months. Everything was in flux. Instead we realized we needed to advocate for a set of systems.
RC: That systems mindset is so important, zooming out enough to see the context of the changes you can and can’t influence.
JT: We believed that instead of just waiting around until everything was set in stone according to the desires of the most powerful companies, we could identify more artist-friendly systems we wanted to advocate for. That’s what it was about. And FMC served quite a useful purpose for a number of years, but then the bubble burst and the collapse of the marketplace put a lot of the idealists on their back foot and the concentration of control began to reestablish itself until it turned into the system we live with now.
It’s hard to remember the level of constant polarized propaganda that we live within now was once uncommon. Today controversial issues are sorted into a quick binary, and everybody finds themselves on one team or another in relation to most things. But that didn’t really exist back then. The internet started as a way to let a billion flowers bloom but ultimately played a starring role in fomenting that polarization. Just around the time that I left Future of Music. It felt like the copyright issues had become a total religious war. There was no discussion about the merits of the different opinions, and you were either on the team that were Luddites or you were artist-hating thieves. It was all caricatures, and in many cases the only ones who benefited from the public battles were the companies.
One of the main reasons I went to the Ford Foundation was to work on these questions at a systems level… I felt like we were not going to be able to build better systems if we were just focused on music. Music was the canary… It was the first industry where we could see the tech and society clashes, the trade-offs, the stakes. The systems that we were developing out of the music battles were on a path to impact all the other systems of journalism and publishing and film and democracy and everything else… as we’ve seen.
The systems that we were developing out of the music battles were on a path to impact all the other systems of journalism and publishing and film and democracy and everything else.
We forget that in the time before the internet there were public interest battles that led to rules that regulate newspapers, radio stations, TV…constraining the behavior of those who control the information pipelines. People fought to establish community-input requirements, ownership limits, and regulations to balance thought, constrain bias and propaganda. All sorts of rules and regulations existed for traditional media. But very few of those protections were extended clearly into the internet environment. Or if the rules did theoretically extend into this internet environment, it wasn’t clear how they would be enforced and by whom. So both the legacy media and the emerging tech companies went on the offensive and were able to use this moment of public disagreement and confusion as a fig leaf or fog behind which they successfully advocated for reduced regulation altogether. And that’s the world we’ve been growing accustomed to over the past 20 years. But it didn’t have to be this way.
Actually, the reason I started writing about music recently is because I feel like that same land-grab is happening all over again in the AI space. The optimism that I felt in the 90’s about the potential for the internet to transform society into a better place has disappeared and been subsumed into a kind of overwhelming powerlessness and pragmatic nihilism. An acceptance of how little protection we can expect from these surveillance and consumption systems that have basically threaded themselves through all of society. So, the piece I wrote for Fast Company was just trying to remind people of a time back when it was a smaller set of problems, focused on music. In retrospect it’s clear to me that we didn’t have to make the choices we made, and we shouldn’t have trusted the companies on either side to protect us because it’s now absolutely clear that they exploited us. And maybe we can learn something from that.
RC: Here’s hoping!
JT: I think part of this problem is now everybody is so dependent on the tech systems that validate them with likes and attention we’ve all come to think of ourselves as a brand, and everything’s intermediated in that way. There is so much time spent on navigation and optimization… that somehow if we do everything right, two-factor authentication and just the right amount of self-promotion and other bootstrappy bullshit, we can win the rigged casino game. It’s very strange to me, but we also just assume these bad systems are the best we can possibly have and that they are permanent. They don’t have to be, but we’ve lost the outrage and the imagination that we’d need to remake them.
RC: That’s one of the things you’ve been able to see very clearly, is that none of this is permanent. It’s going to change again.
JT: Right, right.
RC: There seems to be something fundamental about abandoning analog practices for their digital equivalents—or simulations thereof—that puts human authenticity in peril. Do you think that there’s a distinction there that’s meaningful?
JT: Yeah. The vertical integration of everything and the co-mingling and codependence of information, creativity, community, labor and the systems of delivery, commerce and connection all through a self-dealing commercial gateway mostly designed by technologists who never took a humanities class… It’s disgusting and it’s obviously tremendously dangerous.
You and I are a bit older and technology was perceived in a completely different way when we were growing up. So, to give you a personal example, I very, very reluctantly took a typewriting class in junior high because I believed I was going to be a powerful woman who was never going to work as somebody else’s secretary. The association to typing back then was clerical. There was a status association to whether you did the “thinking work” or whether you did “technical work” supporting the thinkers. And in the 80’s women were still very often seen as the supporters and not the thinkers. So, as a feminist, I felt reluctant to even learn typing because typing was associated with a service role I didn’t see for myself.
When the internet came, that shifted dramatically. If you couldn’t type or understand the value of typing as the gateway into the internet you were gonna seem outdated and square. I remember my mother left a pretty powerful job running a large non-profit. When she was trying to get her next job she had grown fond of saying, “I don’t even know how to type.” It was a badge of honor… a marker of her status as the type of woman who isn’t a secretary but who has a secretary. And I remember saying to her, “If you want to get your next job please don’t ever say that out loud again.” In the space of maybe five years “up” became “down”… and that’s just one example of how dramatic the shift was and how opaque and slow the cultural catch-up was for so many people, particularly my generation and those who were older.
RC: There are all of these invisible boundaries we find each other behind.
JT: When I went to Ford initially, that “othering” of tech was commonplace. Almost every single person who was recruited to run programs came from the academy, organizing, legal advocacy, policy advocacy—respected careers on the humanities side. Many of them carried with them bias-against, or incredulity or aversion-toward, tech as compared to the disciplines they studied and revered. This meant that they were incurious and had a gap in understanding just how thoroughly tech was transforming the landscape where they did their work. So, the smartest people, the ones with the power to stop it, sat back without contesting much of what the tech companies were doing till it was too late.
And it wasn’t until much, much later when I had a different role at Ford that we did research that allowed us to see that even the universities who were best prepared to graduate hybrid tech-experts, were actively siloing the tech away from the humanities. And we can all see how that turned out. So many of the clunky technical systems we are forced to use everyday (and live within) were designed by guys who were solving a technical problem on a deadline in a humanities-less void.
So, I think my major point is this one: We didn’t have to go into an environment where the internet was completely unregulated, because when you scratch the surface of the historic media rules—the rules that we have for telephones and the rules that we have for privacy and the rules that we have for equal opportunity and thousands of others—all of these rules should be enforced within the internet environment. But the advocates and the leaders who ran the nonprofits or the regulatory agencies that advocated for establishing and enforcing those historic rules were scared of tech, or functionally blind to tech. This meant that they functionally ceding enforcement. They back-burnered governance for long enough to normalize a digital world that lacks public protection. And while that was happening the tech companies became more powerful than the robber barons, and we all became complicit and dependent upon the systems they control.
RC: Is there a way out of that?
JT: There have been some moments of protest over the past 20 years, where artists have tried to demonstrate the value of their labor and their agency by saying, “I’m not going to be in your Spotify, or I’m going to build my own internet player that’s going to be artist controlled” or whatever. But in the meantime as the market becomes more streamlined and consolidated the stakes have become existential. The centralization of recommendation through the music players actually determines who can be seen as a legitimate artist and who is invisible. What’s worse, as the markets become integrated, how you are seen or “not seen” in those environments determines other things… whether you get enough attention to be paid any royalties whatsoever from Spotify… whether a venue will book your band without a certain number of likes or followers etc. We couldn’t even get a professional Spotify account for Tsunami if we didn’t have a Tsunami Instagram page to link it to. It’s way worse than I expected where all but the most powerful artists are forced to shop at the company store just to be in the game. And each post those artists reluctantly put out there to try to develop an audience is just more labor and content extracted to sell ads and train large language models, generating profits they will never share. So you go to Bandcamp to keep it real in the indie-sphere and that platform is actually owned by a Video game company and then they sell it… and you have to wait for the other shoe to drop… So, that just another reason to work with the largest companies that might not go away. Yuck.
I also wonder if that desire to be outsider and not self-promoting and secret is going to reestablish itself as a value in the same way that punk rockers said, I’m not going to look normal. I’m not going to sing pretty.
Kristen Thompson, who ran Simple Machines with me, shared an album where all the song titles were in Morse code, which of course makes it impossible for any of the algorithms to recommend their songs. There’s no way that this was an accidental choice, and that kind of decision does seem a little bit like an art project or as like a way of getting a different kind of attention because it’s so different from a word where constant self-promotion is just a precondition of being a creator or getting a next job or whatever we have at this moment.
So, I really don’t know how we disentangle those things. Maybe you don’t want to be on LinkedIn, but where do you get your next job? That’s where everyone’s looking. Maybe you don’t want to self-promote on social media, but if you’re going to try to do a tour, more and more often the clubs determine who they book based on numbers of followers.
RC: You’re speaking my language now. These are all problems I’ve been having.
JT: It’s that centralization of attention. I don’t think it has to be that way. We could have chosen a different way or built different kinds of technologies that would’ve allowed us to maintain agency, privacy and diversity… lots of smaller pockets of success coexisting… and we would’ve had more competition in those environments, and we would’ve had accountability because they’d be fighting for your business. It sucks that for the last 20 years, the people who were in charge ignored technology, and then—in my book I talk about it like the stages of grief. There was a very long period of denial and then, you know, bargaining and rage and negotiating, but so many of them still haven’t gotten to the place of acceptance. And when you’re in acceptance, you’re like, “Okay, the world we were in before, it’s over. My partner is dead now. I can’t have another vacation with them. It’s over,” you know? And now I’ve accepted this, and I am in my next life and it’s sad… but acceptance means I can begin to build a real life because anyone that pretends we’re living in the previous world is in denial.
I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s certainly how I see it.
RC: Oh, it does… When I talked to Ian MacKaye, he mentioned the fact that punk was the last youth movement that used paper, which just struck me as such a brilliant insight that I’d never really thought about. He’s talking about zines and flyers and stuff. What do you think about that idea of paper being punk?
JT: I think paper contains the human gesture in a way that many forms of digital creativity does not. It almost always involves a greater level of scarcity. You could have the gesture of a human image or a human choice in someone who makes digital art, but it’s immediately replicable, you know? So, there’s not that scarcity in the same way—like people trying to create the artificial scarcity through the Bitcoin type stuff and those whatever they were called that everyone was talking about—
RC: NFTs?
JT: Yeah, but there’s something else about the pace of paper. It’s slower. Tsunami’s putting out a box set and Simple Machines putting out a box set with Numero, so I was forced to look at my archives. I have like 50 journals, and I had something like 17 suitcases packed with ephemera and letters—even before punk rock: I have a whole suitcase of all of my junior high school and high school correspondence, and it’s absolutely transformational.
RC: Absolutely.
JT: In almost all of the letters that I received in junior high school and high school people used fake silly names. They drew art on every envelope. They created collages. They were poets. There’s poems in there. There’s pictures in there. We were using every bit of our creativity to communicate with each other. And soooooo much time. These letters took hours. I can barely be bothered to write a full email these days or to listen to a voice message. Our level of attention is so fragile. It’s just destroyed. I had such deep attention, but everything is constantly distracting and pleasing us with little dopamine hits. We’re always jonesing now.
I also think that there was more of a barrier in some ways, too. There’s a privilege barrier. You had to have enough time to write all those letters, or the ability to cobble together a group house and enough part-time jobs that you had enough resources to be able to go on tour. So, when I think of how inexpensive it was to live when I was younger and how expensive it is now, it’s really shocking to me, but aside from that there was also a physical and time barrier to getting things out in the world. There were a lot of great bands that just didn’t have the work ethic to put the 30 to 50 postcards together to send them out to the clubs to try to get shows, because that’s how we got our shows. You wouldn’t waste money on a phone call. You sent a postcard to a club suggesting they might want to book your band without any ability to hear you at all.
RC: This is a whole other world.
JT: Part of what I really liked about working at Ford was we’re funding these brilliant visionaries who are getting the grants. They are the people who do the work, and they should have the platform and the attention to use their brilliant voices and it’s been a privilege to amplify those voices. But it also does mean that except in a few very specific forums, I’ve put my voice away for 16 years, and a part of that op-ed was also about beginning to think about, Well, what does Jenny’s voice sound like,16 years later?
RC: Exactly.
JT: That’s why I’m trying to write a book as well, but it’s really hard to write a book. I don’t know how you wrote nine books.
RC: Well, I’m glad to help in any way that I can.
JT: I mean, what I should be doing is not an interview with you but writing. I’m supposed to be writing every day, and I get to do it a couple days a week.
RC: You and me both!
That Which Rolls
I’ve been riding bicycles—what the pataphysician, playwright, and avid cyclist Alfred Jarry called “That Which Rolls”—almost as long as I’ve been walking. I haven’t had a car since 1998, so bicycles have been my primary mode of transportation as an adult. Just after I built a new Big-Boy Bike a few years ago, a young friend asked me for some bike-building advice. I found myself qualifying my advice more than actually giving him any. I was trying to explain that I grew up riding BMX bikes, so I approach other builds from that background.
The friend in question was in his early twenties, and as I started explaining my involvement in BMX in the 1980s, I noticed his brow crinkling. He didn’t get it. The further I went, the more I realized that I was attempting to bridge a generation gap.
My bike-curious friend didn’t seem to believe that BMX could’ve been that big in my youth. During my competitive Freestyle (as BMX trick riding was called back then) days, I lived in Southeast Alabama. We had bike-shop-sponsored local contests every other weekend and regional ones monthly, as well as shows to do and the occasional national event thanks to the AFA (American Freestyle Association). From the early-to-mid-1980s to the early 1990s BMX was hectic: My age class in those national contests often boasted well over a hundred entrants. One thing I tried to explain to my friend was that though we played video games (e.g., Atari, Nintendo, arcade games, etc.), riding one’s bike was still way more exciting. Our hands were far more likely to be found on BMX grips than joysticks.
Therein lies the first major difference: The experience of a BMXer today is much more likely to be mediated by technology than it was during any previous era. Given the proliferation of technology into every aspect of our lives, that’s not much of an insight, but in addition to the lack of distractingly immersive video games, the riders of thirty years ago were also missing out on the parks. There were like three ride-able skate parks in the whole country. Now there are at least that many in every city of any size whatsoever. Where the past was spent riding curb cuts, banks, walls, streets, and backyard ramps, today the terrain consists of those as well as many human-made options. It makes for different bikes, different riding, different tricks, and different values.
Flatland used to be one-half of Freestyle BMX. Now it is obscured out-of-sight in parking structures and flat driveways. Its intricate moves and flowing connections do not translate to television coverage. The pedestrian spectator nor the beginning rider are able to tell the difference between difficult and impossible (I covered this more thoroughly years ago in a story for ESPN). The same can be said for other kinds of riding: flow and style are less valued than the big trick. One huge trick at the X-Games can make a career.
Riders still go looking for street spots and terrain to tackle, but back in the day—aside from backyard raps and plywood propped up on bricks—that’s all there was. The spread of skateparks changed not only the scarcity of spots, but the spread of information about those spots. Having a central place to meet and exchange ideas changes the dynamics of a local scene thereby affecting overall progression of the sport.
With that said, nothing has changed the collective knowledge of BMXers more than mobile technologies. Before cellphones, cameraphones, iPhones, smaller and smaller digital cameras and video cameras, and even the web, riders relied on a handful of magazines and zines to keep up on what was happening: new companies and products, who was riding for whom, and—more importantly—who was doing what new tricks. An individual or crew in some remote enclave could be light years ahead of the overall curve of the sport and no one would know. For example, when Kevin Jones burst onto the flatland scene in the late 1980s, it was due in part to his appearances at national AFA contests which were covered by the major magazines, but knowledge of Kevin’s progression was largely spread through the mail by zines and videotapes. Hiding such talent is much more difficult now—even if you try. Can you imagine Mat Hoffman’s Highest Air Ever happening in total obscurity today?
Mobile media can make one famous. Like the X-Games, one huge trick—or one huge crash—captured on camera and immediately distributed online might not make a career, but it can make someone an instant star.
John Oakes: The Fast and the Curious
Constraints—self-imposed or otherwise—can be a powerful tool. I have argued in the past the merits of pulling back, but John Oakes’ new book, The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without (Avid Reader Press, 2024), digs deeper into the history of abstinence of all kinds than I’ve ever dared. It’s erudite and well researched yet highly readable, historical and thorough without being unnecessarily verbose, and instructional and inspiring without the inherent condescension of a self-help manual.
John has been a friend and a supporter of my work for years now, so it’s an honor to turn it around and talk about his here.
Roy Christopher: You found an angle that cuts across so many other concerns. How did you arrive at fasting as the topic for this book?
John Oakes: It was something I fell into. Post-Trump—or what I thought was post-Trump—I decided to do an intense fast as a curative. A long shower wasn’t enough, celebrating wasn’t enough, meditation didn’t work… I needed to purge myself. A long fast seemed just the ticket, and it more or less was. And during a long fast (this was a week) you find you have a lot of free time, not buying/not preparing/not cooking food. I became curious about what was happening to my body—around Day Three or so you begin to feel a bit stoned, because of the various chemicals coursing through your body—and I searched for details. And then I started thinking about the role of fasting in religions, philosophy, and politics. The entire concept of pulling back appeals to me—and there wasn’t a book out there that combines these concepts. There are precisely a zillion how-to books on fasting that tell you it will cure everything from depression to old age, and a handful of academic books that look at aspects of the practice, but nothing that brought it all together. Plus, I like the idea of bringing a political perspective (the hunger strike and boycotts) to the discussion. Fasting has been integral to various political movements, from Russian civil rights activists in the 19th century, to suffragists and suffragettes, Irish and Indian patriots in the 20th century, to eco-activists in the 21st. Africans in the Middle Passage went on hunger strikes on such a regular basis that an instrument known as the speculum oris came into use by slavers to ensure force-feeding.
RC: Is there an underlying statement or message in The Fast that fasting is the path to?
JO: I would prefer to think I am simply reporting on the phenomenon and its spinoffs. BUT if pressed, I would say that fasting has so many applications beyond the religious or body-centric themes with which we are familiar. Judicious fasting can empower even those of us who are areligious and not body-obsessed. And it has been around a long, long time. It is for me a path to self-acceptance, to better understanding my place in the world, and it is a path that never ends. It is an important practice and it seems to me an effective one from a political standpoint. Even if hunger strikers don’t win their cause, they almost invariably force a dialogue—authorities may brutalize hunger strikers (thereby revealing their corruption), media may report on the situation, bringing outside attention to bear.
RC: I’ve found a lot of personal growth in going without things. I haven’t eaten meat since 1994, haven’t owned a car since 1998, haven’t had any alcohol since 2017, never owned a television… What is it about going without that is so powerful yet untapped by so many people?
JO: Good for you, Roy! That succession of “going withouts” is going against the grain for sure, and I find that admirable. I think we give ourselves a sub-conscious pat on the back when we refrain from doing certain somethings that we know we could do, that we know we have the right to do. (Of course, that doesn’t apply to all obligations; if, for example, we are supposed to pick up a child from school and decide not to do that, we are going to feel guilty.) Going without (to a limited degree) gives us strength because we suddenly realize we are stronger than we realize–whether it’s something as profound as resisting making a cutting remark or as trivial as eating an extra slice of pizza that we don’t really need. And yes, the nature of social media, with its lightning-quick responses, is anti-fasting. On social media, we’re swept along by our reactions (even if we don’t post) or our desire for reactions, and (with the help of corporations) we deceive ourselves into thinking we’re expressing individuality.
RC: Fasting in particular and doing without in general are not always seen as rebellious or revolutionary, yet they are the simplest means of undermining oppressors, manipulators, and the system at large.
JO: To me, abstention can indeed be revolutionary, but I am not sure how simple that act is. The act of withdrawal threatens the system—any system—which depends on participation. If, for example, you are a prisoner, you are expected to play the role of a prisoner; a businessperson or consumer, the role of a businessperson or consumer, etc. If you undertake a hunger strike (in the case of a prisoner) or a boycott (in the case of a businessperson or consumer) the act of withdrawal—fasting from food in one case and fasting from contact in another—becomes a powerful tool, even a weapon. The ancient Irish weren’t wrong to respect the power of fasting—“illegal fasting” even merited a fine in pre-Christian Ireland. Nothing terrifies Israel as much as BDS. But it is very hard to force people not to fast, or to boycott.
RC: You fasted yourself while writing this book. Have you done any form of fasting since finishing it?
JO: Indeed I have—in fact, at this moment I am on Day Five of a weeklong liquid-only fast. I fast for at least a week, twice a year, once in spring and once in the fall. It is my own personal ritual to assure the change of seasons!
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The Fast is available wherever you buy books.