Category: Interviews

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Nick Harkaway: A Dynastic Succession of Trouble

I’ve been away, immersed in Nick Harkaway’s intricately constructed yet sprawlingly seductive second novel, Angelmaker (Knopf, 2012; His first is The Gone-Away World; Knopf, 2008). To wrap a genre around this book is to force it into a jacket that doesn’t fit. It’s noir, it’s science fiction, it’s steampunk, it’s a lot of things — informed by a lot of other things (William Gibson calls it, “The very best sort of odd.”). “We live in a muddled-together age where the past continues to play out in the present,” Harkaway wrote on his site, “…with Angelmaker, I wanted that sense of the storylines of the past rolling on and on through us to the future, and a dynastic succession of trouble.” “Harkaway” isn’t Nick’s real last name, and his father is also a writer who doesn’t use his real name (John le Carré). Even given his own dynastic succession of trouble as such, I’m not sure whom to compare Harkaway to. His writing is more fun than David Mitchell, smarter than Chuck Pahlaniuk, richer than Neal Stephenson, and just plain better put together than most science fiction. He excels at story and style.

Another Nicholas (Negroponte) wrote in 1995, “Machines need to talk easily to one another in order to better serve people” (p.207). In Angelmaker, machines communicating is part of what signals the book’s major crisis. To wit, Harkaway recently wrote an updated version (of sorts) of Negroponte’s Being Digital (Knopf) called The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World (John Murray, 2012).

Roy Christopher: Your dad’s a writer too. Did he have an influence on your becoming a writer and subsequently on you as a writer?

Nick Harkaway: Not so much an influence as an understanding that it was a possible thing. For most people, writing is a mystery, and a career path for lunatics — I still get asked what my day job is. On the other hand, a lot of people think it’s a soft touch, which it most assuredly is not — but I knew from very early on that it was both possible and demanding. That’s a huge factor in determining whether someone takes the plunge or not, I think — just knowing it’s possible. (On that score, of course, I’d also already been a scriptwriter, so I knew I could wrestle with a story, turn out work fast, and respond to pretty robust criticism.)

As to Angelmaker, no doubt about it — I told my own story, of course, but I also slightly teased my dad. His work, after all, transformed the spy novel from high adventure to Cold War commentary; from dashing Bond to self-despising Leamas. And here I come along and take it back to this heightened romp, more like Modesty Blaise or Billion Dollar Brain or something. But there are similar roots, too — we both love Conan Doyle, Wodehouse, Dumas…

RC: I’m almost finished with Angelmaker and am only hoping it doesn’t become a movie because I don’t want my head’s version tampered with. How has your screenwriting experience influenced your novels?

NH: I see things in my mind’s eye very clearly. Not always, but I can’t write action sequences without being a little specific. At the same time, I know that everyone wants to imagine them flowing the way they do on the best movies, so you can’t explain the mechanics of Ippon Seio Nage, say, while you’re having the fight. At the same time it needs to feel as if you just did… It’s sleight of hand, all of it.

And I suppose I have a tendency to use movie shapes — like the Classic Myth Structure George Lucas used for Star Wars — because they’re dramatic and recognisable and they keep you on track. Writing the kind of books I write, with lots going on, you need not to get lost. Structure helps. A story spine is vital. And so is knowing what the voice is, the tone. With those, you can go all over the map and come home safe, and you know it, and your reader gets that confidence in you and settles, so you can take liberties and amaze them. The less secure they are, the less likely they are to go with you when you do something unusual — and that unusual thing is often why you’re there, so that’s bad. They close the book. And once they do that, you have a hell of a time getting them to open it again.

RC: You mentioned in this year’s Summer Reading List that you and William Gibson approach writing in different ways. As a writer and one interested in other writer’s processes, I wonder if you could elaborate on this.

NH: Gibson has a little piece about how he writes at the beginning of Distrust That Particular Flavor (Putnam Adult, 2012), and it’s amazing. It’s incredibly him. He starts with a sentence, out of nowhere. To me, that’s the hardest thing you can possibly do. To sit there and carve out a piece of writing from nothing, using a beginning to leverage a world inside your head. So here we go:

Abernathy, like a church mouse, craved simplicity and the smell of wood polish above all things; the intrusion of these men, these police men, into his world was like the arrival of a visiting bishop’s cat.

Here’s the thing: that sentence has enough tone to turn into a story. There’s a world buried in there but it is wedged and cracked and fuzzy and difficult. I’m quite tempted by it, but it would be an uphill struggle to bring it out. And it can go wrong. You can go down a blind alley and find that you’re just wrong about everything and you have to start again. The Coen Brothers once said that the best writing comes when you write yourself into a corner and then write out again, and you can see that in their stuff: sometimes they do and you can’t believe your luck, sometimes they don’t and you think “oh, ouch!” I do not like that feeling when it applies to my own work. It makes me feel sad for weeks. I like having a strong sense of the story before I start writing – not a roadmap, but a vibe. Like: “We’re going to Canada!” Okay, cool. Now let’s start the car.

I tend to start with a blinding image or a concept. An idea hits me and it has crackling energy all around it, tensions and balances made in. Basically it’s a fizzing bomb. And then I crank the beginning up and up and up so that it can support this fizzing thing, and the story is basically the position of items so that when the idea explodes they all fly along the right sort of paths and in the right direction.

I will admit, in honesty, that right now I’m incredibly drawn to Abernathy. I will have to try this kind of approach one day soon. I can see in him the beginning of that kind of bomb, but it feels like doing the whole thing in reverse, in the mirror. And you can already see that my instinct is to place him in conflict immediately, in media res, to flag that possibility of cat and mouse pursuit, and so on. I am or I have been so far a busy writer — not that I always produce busy writing – but Gibson has this incredible feeling of restraint, of time enough in the world. Which is deceptive, because he can wallop you with tension and pace whenever he wants. He’s that guy from all the martial arts movies with the wispy hair who sits all day long in stillness — and then you try to pour a glass of water on his head, and you can’t because somehow he already drank it and now he’s holding your shoes. I’m more like a conjuror. I stack the deck.

RC: I can relate. I never start from a blank page. Whom else do you enjoy reading?

NH: Oooooh, so many people. I just read Robin Sloan’s fabulous Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), and Ned Beauman’s The Teleportation Accident (Bloomsbury, 2013) — I got sent early copies of both, by editors with great judgement for what I’m going to like — but I love all kinds of things. Jeanette Winterson and Don DeLillo, Lois Mc Master Bujold and Rex Stout… I just finished John Scalzi’s Redshirts (Tor, 2012), and I thought it was stunningly good. It made me cry at the end, although that’s not hard because I’m basically a wuss. But if you want to see something interesting, examine Redshirts alongside Teleportation Accident. There’s a really interesting structural mirroring which I think comes from which of them is writing for which audience, but they’re closing on one another in this really intriguing way.

RC: You’re primarily known as a novelist, so how did The Blind Giant come about?

NH: The short version is that the John Murray imprint came to me and asked me to do it, and I wanted to. The slightly longer answer is that in the UK I was one of the first and loudest objectors to the Google Book Settlement, which I thought took a brilliant idea (a global digital library) and saddled it with the wrong method (a private company making an end run around the legislative process – consider that in the context of, say, BP) and the wrong endgame (a private company being the only entity with the right to display some books and becoming the de facto library of record). From that I ended up talking about digital books and the broader issues of digitisation a lot, and here we are. Well, no, that’s not quite true — I’ve always been a student of politics and society, and their relationship with science, technology and the individual.

RC: Tell me about the book. I’m avoiding reading it right now as I fear it may out-mode my current book-in-progress.

NH: Oh, yes, I know that feeling. I’m binge-reading right now because I’m between books. Well, okay, The Blind Giant is broad by design. That’s to say that it tries not to get into drilldown about specific issues or to “solve” them, but to look at where each issue folds into the next and how they all relate to one another. I realised after finishing the book that the whole discussion is framed in my mind partly as a conflict between our intentional actions and the emergent ones which come from our collective and somewhat undirected or unconsidered choices. We have a chance for the first time to begin to understand, in real time, what world we’re making, and even to change the direction of that making. That’s superb. (Hence the title: imagine for a moment that all your sense data arrived five or ten minutes late: You’d constantly be falling over, misunderstanding conversations, and breaking things. Our body politic has had a delay of ten to fifty years until very recently. No wonder it keeps getting into fights and staggering around like a drunken sailor.)

So the book embraces a little bit of recent history, an overview of the last hundred years, a discussion of deindividuation (the process by which ordinary people can do appalling things to one another, as seen in the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment), some stuff of the science of the brain and the sociology of the digital environment, the politics of us, the connection between copyright and privacy, the jurisprudence of intellectual property… It goes where the digital debate goes, because the thing about digital is that it’s our reflection. It’s not separate. It’s neither specially good nor specially pernicious. It’s us. And I didn’t try to crush opposing positions. The book has some footnotes, but they’re not like “nyah nyah, you are broken on my genius” footnotes, they’re like “this is where I got this idea from, okay?” So it’s a digital book in that sense too: it takes an iterative approach to the right answer – fail, get closer, fail, get closer. Although whether there’ll ever be a revised edition… who knows? The idea was that the iterations would be conversations arising from the text, persisting in the public sphere rather than falling back to paper. Because, you know, less work for me.

RC: What are you working on next?

NH: I have a first draft of a new novel — I’m calling it Tigerman Make Famous Victory, Full of Win, and I can already feel my editors wincing and wondering how to persuade me that’s an appalling title, but I’m really determined about it. It’s about a guy on an island which is about to be destroyed to contain a chemical waste problem. As a consequence, the island has become… Casablanca-ish. It’s a bit different from my first two. After that I have this thriller burning a hole in my pocket, and then there’s my story about cryonics and the other one about cricket and another one about a six thousand year old child… Oh, and there’s one which is basically a crime novel about tortoises which is also about the publishing industry, and… Let’s just say I have a lot of work to do.

————

Here’s the book trailer for Angelmaker [runtime: 2:01]; highly recommended reading:

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Mark Dery: Nothing’s Shocking

I read a review of a Weird Al Yankovich record several years ago (i.e., eons past Al’s 1980s prime) that pointed out that his schtick had become commonplace. When irony and parody become the norm, the edges move toward the middle. When culture jamming becomes culture, there’s nothing left to jam. When the news is just another reality show… After many binges on the fringes, learning the edge, culture jamming, and cyberpunking during the 1990s, chronicled in his books Culture Jamming (Open Media, 1993), Flame Wars (Duke University Press, 1994), Escape Velocity (Grove Press, 1996), and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium (Grove Press, 1999), Mark Dery is back with a collection of essays from the meantime: I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). It’s been twelve years since our last virtual sit-down, so I thought it was time to check in again.

@futuryst “Singing from the same hymn sheet” is a crap metaphor. “Examining the same entrails” is way better (Tweeted March 9, 2012).

I cracked open Dery’s first book in over a decade, and landed on the story about blogging, which, with an adept analysis of all-over-the-map, curiosity-collecting blogs like bOING bOING, explains further the plight of cultural criticism as Dery does it. Realizing I was getting ahead of myself, I backed up to Bruce Sterling‘s foreword, which coincidentally references the one piece I’d read. “This is prescience in conditions of historical inevitability,” Sterling writes about Dery’s blog piece (“World Wide Wonder Closet: On Blogging”). “I learn useful things like this by paying close attention to Mark Dery–not just to his writings, mind you, but to his career” (p. xii). Dery describes the situation himself, writing in 2003,

Years of tabloid media, reality TV, attacking heads, and, more recently, nightly news nightmares of doomed workers leaping from the World Trade Center, hand in hand, or journalists beheaded in your living room by jihadi or the slapstick torture at Abu Ghraib–home movies from hell that employed the visual grammar of porn–have cauterized our cultural nerve endings. Little wonder, then, that ever greater subcultural voltages are needed to shock us (p. 161).

The same laser-focused interrogation and machete-sharp wit that made Dery’s earlier books critical touchstones are here in rapid-fire form. Where his earlier work honed in on one subject or one genre of subjects, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is all over the place, a sniper-perch on the cultural sprawl where no one and nothing is safe. There are too many stand-out, entrails-examining moments to name, but his outing of HAL 9000 (“Straight, Gay, or Binary: HAL Comes out of the Cybernetic Closet”) is likely to become one of the most talked-about essays. No matter the topic, no one puts together a sentence like Mark Dery.

Appropriately, I believe, Dery’s next project is a biography of gothic artist and writer Edward Gorey for Little, Brown, but I’ll let him tell you about that.

Roy Christopher: Not to be impertinent from the beginning, but where have you been?

Mark Dery: Impertinence will get you everywhere. In 1999, I published The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, a portrait of fin-de-millennium America—paranoid, violent, economically stratified, ideologically polarized, demographically balkanized—as reflected in cultural phenomena that hyperbolized the zeitgeist: Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, the Heaven’s Gate cult, dug-in survivalists, fear-sick suburbanites circling the wagons in gated communities, jittery celebrities installing secret “safe rooms” in their mansions, Disney’s experiment in privatized governance and white-picket nostalgia (Celebration, Florida), apparitions of the evil clown in our media dream life, and the branding of everything, ourselves included. Like Escape Velocity before it, it was generally well-received, critically, although it suffered some critical brickbats, most notably from Pre-Cambrian feminist and professional bean-counter Elaine Showalter, who tallied up my references to women’s issues (whatever those are) and found the book wanting, and Michiko Kakutani at the Times, who had a fit of the vapors over my tendency to name-check Donna Haraway, which upsets the mental digestion of the paper’s readers.

But, contrary to popular belief, the rich pickings of the writing life fall somewhat short of a hedge-fund manager’s annual bonus, so I joined the professoriat, teaching courses in creative nonfiction (“The Popular Essay”) and media theory (“Reading the Media”) in the Department of Journalism at NYU. I toiled in the fields of corporate academe until 2009, when I returned to writing full-time. Teaching has its rewards, chief among them the privilege of rubbing brains with some of the brightest minds around and the unimaginably gratifying experience of hearing former students confess some small debt of gratitude for the writerly wisdom you’ve imparted. And it has its more dubious pleasures, notably: faculty meetings, committee meetings, the territorial threat displays of colleagues of very small brain, and the scenery-chewing hysterics of my department’s resident diva, an aspiring Sontag who dyed her hair an unconvincing magenta and who, in dead seriousness, once compared the department prohibition on holding her class in a communal study room to Nazi regulations in the Warsaw ghetto. Oh, and seeing yourself compared, on some RateYourProfessors-type site, to Snape. (Actually, that last was pure awesome, since Snape is my favorite character in the Potter movies—the only thing that makes them watchable, really. I’m always rooting for him.) In all seriousness, though, I couldn’t manage the trick of balancing the demands of classroom and writing desk. Some of my former colleagues were brilliant in the classroom and productive as writers; I respect them immensely. But teaching ate me up, leaving little time or energy for my writing. And, since my writing is at the heart of my sense of myself—it’s not just what I do, but who I am—there came a point when I had to choose between the financial security of an academic sinecure and the less tangible rewards of the writing life. Full disclosure demands that I say, too, that the politics of the institution conspired against me, but I’ll spare you the petty details of academic bloodletting. Anyway, I’m happy to be back where I belong, scribbling for a living.

RC: Since your books in the 1990s, the odd subjects you covered then have become the everyday. Where does that shift leave your current work? Are you headed further out into the cultural hinterlands?

MD: Well, it leaves The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium looking eerily prescient, I’m immodest enough to point out. I’ve been gratified by posts by apparently young readers, on GoodReads and Amazon, noting how contemporary that book feels. For example, the free-floating paranoia and anti-government conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant nativism of the ’90s militia movement is alive and well in the Tea Party and out on the survivalist fringe. As well, that late-’90s sense of American mass culture as a media-mad Tilt-a-Whirl spinning out of control, and of American society as a place where the center cannot hold and the worst are full of passionate intensity, is still with us, although it waxes and wanes, to be sure.

I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts collects essays from the past decade or so, and in a plot twist I never would have imagined, some of the more recent pieces mark a turn toward a more personal style, by which I do not mean what back-of-the-magazine American essayists typically mean, which is soppy confessionalism, but rather the use of myself as a prism for refracting the cultural dynamics and historical events around me, as, say, Montaigne did in Essais or Didion did in The White Album or Luc Sante does in Kill Your Darlings or Richard Rodriguez does in nearly all of his books. So I’m lighting out for the territories within as a way of making deeper sense of American dread and American dreams, to quote the book’s subtitle.

RC: Unlike other books of its kind, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is a strangely cohesive examination of America’s viscera over the past fifteen years or so. How much of it was written with the collection in mind?

MD: None of it. Each essay was what McLuhan would call a probe—a nomadic rover, wound up and let loose on the terrain of a media event, a cultural trend, an idea whose time has come, a historical premonition of our moment, the collective unconscious of America, whatever. But as its subtitle—“drive-by essays”—suggests, it’s an armchair version of the philosophical travelog, a tradition that stretches from de Tocqueville to Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare to Baudrillard’s America to Bernard-Henri Lévy’s American Vertigo.

RC: Tell me about the next book project. It seems a perfect pairing of subject and sensibility.

MD: It’s a biography of the writer, illustrator, and inimitable eccentric Edward Gorey. More than that I can’t say, since it’s still in the research stage. I haven’t put pen to paper, but must start soon, since I’ve got to deliver the manuscript sometime next year. Just saying that (“sometime next year”) inspires a thrill of terror so debilitating I may have to go lie down for a while, with a cold compress on my forehead.

RC: What else is coming up?

MD: I’ve just contributed a short essay to Hidden Treasure (Blast Books), an incomparably beautiful compendium “showcasing astonishing and rare” oddities and arcana from the National Library of Medicine: chromolithographs from the Atlas of Skin Diseases, magic lantern slides, Stereoscopic Pictures for Cross-Eyed Children (1942), Health and Hygiene Puzzle Blocks from the Number 10 Shanghai Toy Factory in 1960s “Red China,” an 1839 lithograph illustrating the postmortem examination of a man (?) with sexually ambiguous genitalia, a 1924 German tract extolling the virtues of nudism. It’s a simply breathtaking, a cabinet of wonders between two covers: 450 unforgettable images, accompanied by brief essays, ranging over the intimately alien landscapes of bodies rendered monstrous by injury, disease, or congenital deformity. Also, I’ve got a personal essay-cum-cultural critique of the Rorschach test in the works for The Believer, something for The Awl on Young Americans-era David Bowie as white negro and postmodern minstrel, and an essay on the future of the human body for a museum exhibition catalog.

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David Preston: Hacking High School

After a decade of teaching at the university level, David Preston decided to stop ignoring the ills we all know haunt those halls and dropped back to high school. He’s now trying to reform a place that desperately needs it. I got the chance to participate in a discussion with his literature and composition classes, thanks to David, Ted Newcomb, and Howard Rheingold, all of whom are hacking education in various ways. I can tell you with no reservations that David is making the difference. I want to keep this introduction as brief as possible and just let him tell you about it. Some men just want to watch the world learn.

Roy Christopher: What drove you from the hallowed hells of academia to teaching high school?

David Preston: (Hang on, let me hop up on my soapbox) Every generation thinks school can’t get any worse but somehow we manage. When I was a kid I hated school but loved learning (and still do), so when I graduated I thought I could liberate the other inmates by learning about the institution and how to fix it. After college I wrote about schools as a journalist and then I went back for a master’s and a Ph.D. in education. But in grad school I discovered the politics, how difficult it is to ask pressing questions without incurring the wrath of well-funded powers-that-be. Eventually I figured there wasn’t enough lipstick for this institutional pig and found my way into management consulting, where I worked with executives and organizations on learning and planning. Even though I was making good money and keeping my hand in by teaching courses at UCLA, the idea of school nagged at me because I could see the trend worsening. Really smart, highly-motivated students and executives told me how completely unprepared they were for life after graduation—and these were the successful people! Today’s students have it even worse. They don’t learn about their own minds, they don’t learn about how they fit in the larger scheme of things, they don’t learn how to use the tools available to them, and they don’t learn the basics of how to manage their bodies or their money. Forget the achievement gap and the union versus reform sideshow—even the best prep school curricula are designed for a world that no longer exists (if it ever did). Once upon a time the American high school diploma signified that a person had the tools to be self-sufficient; now it’s like one of those red deli counter tickets that tells you to line up at the recruiter’s office or financial aid. And the worst part is, today’s students know all this because technology allows them to see the world for themselves. They don’t have to be told that school is an irrelevant exercise in obedience.

I’ve been critical of school since watching my first grade teacher pull kids’ hair for getting math problems wrong, but after 9/11 I thought about the issue differently. I reflected on how our thinking influences the world we’re living in and the future we’re creating for ourselves. Whatever big-picture issue you care about—the environment, the economy, human rights, politics—is defined by how people think and communicate about it. And the institution ostensibly in charge of helping people learn to think and communicate is fucked. So, when a friend of mine suggested in 2004 that I take a “domestic Peace Corps” sabbatical and offered me an opportunity to teach high school courses, I turned him down immediately. But over the next couple of weeks I realized that you never hear anything about education policy from inside the classroom, and I’d get to be an embedded anthropologist. Boots on the ground. I wanted to find out what today’s students are actually like (they’re not the Digital Natives you read about!) and what actually goes on in school on the days they don’t give tours. I may have been fantasizing about Hunter S. Thompson riding with Hell’s Angels or Jane Goodall hanging with chimps when I said yes to going back inside the belly of the beast.

I taught at the country’s fourth-largest high school in LA. It had a year-round calendar with three tracks to accommodate five thousand students, most of whom didn’t carry books because they didn’t want to get jumped on the way home. But this one student, Zolzaya Damdinsuren, came into my class during a sweaty summer school afternoon and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. This is a whole other story, but the bottom line is that I spent a month in western China, Tibet, and Mongolia with Zolzaya and his family, and the experience changed me. By the time I returned I had decided not to return to my consulting practice. Instead I resolved to create learning solutions that would help people whether they were in school or not. I moved to California’s central coast and I’ve been hacking education ever since.

RC: Tell me about your current education project, the one you’ve been piloting for a while now.

DP: I’m helping students build a massively multiplayer online learning network. I started with the students in my high school classes. Initially, 100 students created 100 blogs and learned about online security, privacy, filter bubbles, search, online business models, and how to use social media to curate and broadcast information. We reached out to authors, we conducted a flash mob research project that created a mindmap out of a William Gibson interview in 24 hours, and we held video conferences with illustrious celebrities such as yourself. That was fall semester. Now we’re reaching out to recruit a study group of 20,000-50,000 people to prepare for the AP English Literature & Composition exam using both synchronous and asynchronous platforms. This is proof-of-concept: the ultimate goal is to create an online exchange that offers the resources and tools people need to acquire information, demonsrate mastery and build a portfolio of work. In five years I want to see a teacher make a million dollars, not because of some collective bargaining agreement, but because she’s that good. Maybe she’s an author, maybe she’s a mechanic. I want to create a model of community in which learning is an economic driver. I think the outcome will be a competitive market of entrepreneurs, job candidates and creatives who aren’t just eager to tell you what they can do, but eager to show you what they’ve already done.

RC: What insights have you found doing this work?

Until about two years ago I was focusing on interdisciplinary curriculum and information-referenced assessment models as ways to extend what I could offer students. But basically these were just ways of remixing the standard curriculum and providing more formative feedback to learners. Even my use of social media was essentially limited to conserving paper, helping absentees, and trying to make the same old lessons seem more engaging or entertaining.

You see that sort of thing all over the Web. Blended learning, virtual schooling, online lessons, LMS, SIS—some of the ideas and applications are really cool, but it’s all essentially Skinner’s Box 2.0. It’s what happens when anything good gets sucked into the school policy meat grinder. Apple in the world = Think different. Apple in school = Electronic textbooks. Peter Drucker said the worst thing management can do is the wrong thing more efficiently. Standardizing and streamlining is great if you’re starting with something of quality, but otherwise incremental change makes the problem worse because it reinforces the idea that change is impossible. You can’t lose twenty pounds by eating one less Twinkie a day. You have to radically, fearlessly redesign from purposeful scratch. That’s how evolutionary adaptation works: one day there’s no fin, then the water rises and—Whoa!—everybody who’s still alive and reproducing has fins. So I gave up trying to tweak the finless and started thinking more about where we are trying to swim. This took the form of a simple question: What does it take to be an educated global citizen in the 21st century?

The real opportunity of the Internet is creating a network that takes on its own momentum, grows, and exponentially increases its value. In fact, I think at this point network theory has a greater payoff in learning than learning theory does. The really cool part is that as the network grows and gains experiences, it also changes purpose and direction. School isn’t built to tolerate that, which I think is a big issue, considering the need for innovation in this country.

It’s exciting to be a part of something so dynamic. In too many places learners are forced to wait for an institution, or a government, or an economic sector to get its act together and do right by them. Learners don’t have to wait for Superman. They are Superman.

RC: Well, one of the things I wonder is where the funding comes from. That still seems to be a major problem with education reform, and I’m not just talking about funding for technology and other resources, but funding for teachers: One of the main reasons interesting and innovative people avoid teaching in high school is because there’s so much more money to be made elsewhere. How do we fund this revolution?

DP: Learning needs to become the economic driver. We need a learning environment in which learners and mentors select each other, co-create interdisciplinary curricula and demonstrate mastery in ways that translate to the broader economy and life in our culture. Such an open market would allow learning innovators to create revenue streams that feed communities and align compensation with perceived value and performance: if you suck you starve, if you rock you make bank. This is happening already. In Korea, teacher Rose Lee is known as the “Queen of English.” She makes over $7 million a year. If clients are willing to invest that much in university prep, imagine what they’ll do for top-shelf professionals who can prepare the next generation for economic success without needing the university at all. Creating a new economic sector around learning makes mentoring a much more dynamic and potentially lucrative endeavor than teaching ever was.

Until that exists, though, it’s still possible to integrate coursework and network once learners get the basics of the Internet and online privacy/security. It doesn’t take much money for an individual teacher to offer online learning opportunities. I started off guerrilla style. Everything I’m currently using with students is available for free to anyone who has access to the Internet—and every student has access to the Internet. It drives me crazy when I hear well-meaning adults suggest that we not work online with students because not everyone has a computer at home. We read books with students, and some of my students don’t have those at home either. This is Problem Solving 101. If you don’t have a computer at home you have an access problem. That would be a cruel proposition if the problem wasn’t super easy, but we are surrounded by solutions. Go to a friend’s; go to the computer center or library; spend $3 at the copy store. If an entire community is impacted to the point that an individual really can’t access the Internet, document the case that supports getting the community connected. Agitate. Citing lack of Internet access in 2012 is an admission of defeat that suggests a lack of determination and imagination.

RC: What are you up to off-campus?

DP: For the last six months I have been neck-deep in the work I’m doing with students. Writing curriculum, reading blogs, and replying to messages around the clock seven days a week. It’s insane. I’ve never worked harder as a teacher or had more fun. Now I’m documenting the process and starting to promote it. I’m writing a white paper, starting a blog, designing the system architecture for the learning exchange, consulting, and speaking about the proof of concept. Next event is the CUE conference in Palm Springs on March 15.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of liberating learning from school. Our present is competitive and our future is uncertain. My old mentor used to say that in chaos there is profit, but success in 2012 is not for the passive, weak, or risk-averse. Intellectual and financial freedom isn’t something that can be given to you. You have to take it.

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Sam Seidel: You Must Learn

Sam Seidel is a progressive pedagogue. He chronicles his forays into education reform on The Husslington Post. In his new book, Hip-Hop Genius: Remixing High School Education (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), he drops science on the High School of Recording Arts, where he’s implemented many aspects of the four elements in the classroom. In what follows, we discuss the book, the classroom, and how Hip-hop can help education come correct in the twenty first.

Roy Christopher: Most would agree that modern education needs an upgrade. How can Hip-hop help in this endeavor?

Sam Seidel: Hip-hop innovators have always found value in things that mainstream society has deemed valueless–whether it’s old records, the sides of train cars, or the lives of poor young people. Educators can learn from this by recognizing brilliance and beauty where it is often ignored. Much of the schooling that happens in this country fails to respect or build upon the intelligence and cultural competencies of students. Instead schools–encouraged by standardized accountability measures from the federal and state governments–try to force all students to be homogenous generalists.

RC: It’s more than just rapping lessons and turntables in the classroom, right? What’s at the core of this idea?

SS: The core of the idea is respecting young peoples’ brilliance and culture. Bringing turntables and rap songs into a classroom and acting like an expert on hip-hop culture doesn’t necessarily make you a hip-hop educator. You might be an English teacher who is teaching rap songs as texts. I’m not trying to position myself as the arbiter of who is or isn’t a hip-hop educator, but what I’m excited about is exploring new ways of teaching–and beyond that, new kinds of learning environments and leadership models.

RC: Is the success of the HSRA reliably repeatable?

SS: Just like a rapper using a punchline that has already been used in another rhyme is wack, educators shouldn’t just copy someone else’s work, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t study others’ styles closely. More educators could definitely see results like those at the High School for Recording Arts and there are many aspects of HSRA’s program that they could potentially borrow and build upon, but they shouldn’t necessarily try to replicate everything from the school. People can definitely look to HSRA for inspiration, examples, and even direct consultancy, but there is only one David T. C. Ellis, there is only one Twin Cities (well, I guess there are two of those!), and it would be unrealistic to think that you could recreate what he and his team have done there.

RC: Every time I try to spread the word about the power of thinking through Hip-hop, I invariably meet resistance. Do you find yourself defending your love of Hip-hop?


SS: Not so much. I don’t find those conversations very rewarding and I seem not to attract them. Sometimes people want to point out some of the negative elements of Hip-hop… Okay. I’ve never argued that hip-hop is all positive all the time. It is an immense culture. But, in this day and age, who can really front on the power of Hip-hop? The culture has transcended almost every boundary imaginable. My man, Stephen Buddha Leafloor does life-changing hip-hop workshops with Inuit and first nation young people in remote Arctic communities that can only be reached by plane. Hip-hop artists who started as rappers have clothing lines, footwear, and fragrances sold in department stores across the world. The President of the United States has rap songs on his iPod and uses Hip-hop slang. I recorded a song with an emcee from Mozambique, who rhymed in four languages in one verse. I mean people can say they don’t personally like the music or they think graffiti is vandalism that should be stopped, but they can’t front on Hip-hop’s relevance and power–so my point is, if we know it’s relevant and powerful, then what effect it has is all about how it is engaged.

RC: Why do you think people resist this culture so strongly?

SS: They’re haters. It scares them. I don’t know. Yesterday I was walking across a street in New York City and i heard a rap song rattling out of a dude’s car. The lyrics were, literally, “bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, fuck ’em all.” People hear something like that and form a lot of judgements–as if that song must represent the entirety of a multi-dimensional global culture. Don’t underestimate racism. Or classism. We’re talking about a cultural form that emerged from the hood. There’s a lot of people out there who will hate for that reason alone.

RC: So, it’s much more than just a generational difference?

SS: There can be a generational thing. As George Clinton points out in the Foreword to Hip-Hop Genius, the music of a generation often sounds like noise to the generation before. At the same time, it was my pops who brought home rap records when I was five years old. George Clinton is in his 70s and he loves the culture, so… It’s not just generational.

RC: What can we do to get past the stigma?

SS: We need to stop engaging it so much. People write whole books trying to validate uttering the words “hip-hop” and “education” in the same sentence. There’s a place for those arguments, but I think we need to just focus our energy on building beautiful things and proving that what we know works works. Jay-Z didn’t spend years arguing with music execs who weren’t feeling what he was doing, he went and did it himself and then they started paying attention. This has happened over and over again in the rap game. No Limit and Cash Money had to build their own empires before labels recognized that the south had a rap market. Success has a funny way
of smothering stigma.

RC: Whenever one tries to institutionalize an organic movement as such, there’s always a risk of making it lame and losing the students’ interest. How do we use Hip-hop in the classroom and keep it engaging?

SS: By letting the students run it. If they are creating art that reflects their interests and aesthetics, it will never get stale.

RC: What’s next for you and Hip-hop education?

SS: Now that Hip-Hop Genius has dropped I’ve been getting some great invitations to talk about it. The video we made about Hip-Hop Genius has also gotten a lot of buzz online which has led to other opportunities. I just started a book tour where I go to cities, visit as many cool organizations and schools as I can–specifically those related to Hip-hop arts and empowering young people–and then put on an event that features their work, the work of the High School for Recording Arts, and Hip-Hop Genius. The first few events have been dope! We’d love to bring it to more cities, so holler if you have ideas about locations we should add.

————-
Here’s the book trailer for Hip-hop Genius [runtime: 4:23]:

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Will Brooks: Build and Destroy

“I remember distinctly my first impression of him,” Henry Miller once described his first meeting beat writer and poet Kenneth Patchen, “It was that of a powerful, sensitive being who moved on velvet pads.”  My first meeting Will Brooks gave me a similar impression. Miller continues,

I feel that it would give him supreme joy to destroy with his own hands all the tyrants and sadists of this earth together with the art, institutions and all the machinery of everyday life which sustain and glorify them. He is a fizzing human bomb ever threatening to explode in our midst… There is almost an insanity to his fury and rebellion.

Brooks embodies these two extremes of Patchen: sensitive to a fault, deeply feeling the pain of his people, but ready to deliver retribution with no quarter and no question. Their poetry comes from the same place, a place of pure protest, pure passion.

For the past decade and a half, Brooks has been the center of one of my favorite bands, the noisy Hip-hop crew dälek. He and Brother Oktopus have roamed the globe, destroying expectations and eardrums. Their blend of drones, feedback, and banging beats often buried the vocals in the mix. Theirs was a united front, as much wall-of-sound as it was words-of-wisdom.

This year, Will Brooks emerged for dolo. Under the name iconAclass, he’s been making mad noise in his own right, but this time around the focus is on the lyrics. The beats are still banging, and the grooves are still deep, but the vocals are given center stage.

Henry Miller called Kenneth Patchen, “a sort of sincere assassin,” and I would say the same of Brooks. Allow him to reintroduce himself.

Roy Christopher: Tell me about iconAclass. How does this project differ from dälek? What’s the goal?

Will Brooks: Basically, iconAclass is my solo project. Written, produced, and mixed by my own hand. Shit, I even directed, filmed, and edited the videos! (see below) The only thing I didn’t do were the cuts. Those duties fell to long time collaborator DJ Motiv. This project something I wanted to do for a while now. I wanted to do a very stripped-down Hip-hop project where the lyrics were front and center. I also wanted the challenge of doing a project completely on my own. It was a lot of work, but I am very proud of the final result. The goal, as always, was to make the best possible songs I can make. This is a project that is representative of where my head is at, at this moment. It’s that plate of rice and beans, you know? It was that nourishment, that truth that I needed.

RC: Lyrically, you’re still keeping things rough and rugged, exploring similar themes to previous projects. Is this just more of a straight-up Hip-hop vibe?

WB: Yeah, definitely more “traditional,” I guess, but of course the lyrics got to be truth. I really don’t know any other way to approach music. Again, I definitely wanted to make the lyrics a focal point, where as in the group dälek, the lyrics were more of an instrument and under layers of sonics. In today’s musical climate I wanted to remind heads what Hip-hop is all about. I feel that production is very innovative in today’s music, but there isn’t a premium placed on lyricism. Don’t get me wrong there are heads that are still killing it on the mic — Random Axe, Slaughterhouse, Joell Ortiz on his own, Immortal technique, Pete Rock with Smiff n Wesson, Shabazz Palaces, Doh Boi, LONESTARR, John Morrison, just to name a few. I’m just proud to be a part of that Hip-hop underground that still has love for the culture and the craft.

RC: So, I have to ask: What’s the status of dälek the group?

WB: We are currently on hiatus. After fourteen years of doing it, I think both Okotpus and myself needed a break. We are still working on film scores together (we just finished one for a flick called Lilith) and running the recording studio together, but will be focusing on our respective projects (iconAclass and MRC Riddims) for the time being.

RC: I’m stoked on the book. What made you finally put your lyrics to paper for mass consumption?

WB: Back in 2002, William Hooker first suggested I put my lyrics in book form. I guess that planted the seed. While working on this project, graphic artist and long time friend, Thomas Reitmayer, who worked on the iconAclass album art, approached me with the idea of doing a book of my lyrics with some of his work. I thought it would be a cool thing to press up and have for the first iconAclass tour. It kind of built from there. Adam Jones from Tool was gracious enough to write the foreword, and we got some heads like Prince Paul and Joachim Irmler from Faust to contribute quotes. I was really humbled to have those guys be involved. I’m really proud of the final product. I just wish there were still book stores these days! [Laughs]

RC: Will you be blessing the States with a tour?

WB: We are hoping to at least set up East and West coast runs in the US in 2012. Would also love to play SXSW next year and Chicago. The logistics of a full US tour are very daunting, but we will make something happen for sure.

RC: What else is coming up?

WB: Been running the deadverse recordings record label with my label manager JR Fritsch. We released the deadverse massive TakeOver album. We got an iconAclass enhanced EP coming out in November, along with new releases by Oddateee, Dev-One, MRC Riddims, and EPs from Gym Brown, D.L.E.MM.A, and Skalla slated for 2012 and 2013. We are also planning on re-releasing Negro, Necro, Nekros (1998) in time for its fifteen year anniversary. I have also been DJing on deadverseTV as well as Mixcloud. I’ve been running a monthly deadverse night at a spot in Brooklyn called Don Pedros. It’s been a l lot of fun. Basically just the crew and affiliates DJing and performing everything from Hip-hop to House and Electro beats. Okto and I got a couple more film scores in the works to look out for. I’m definitely hitting the road heavy in support of iconAclass… And in the midst of all that, I did a couple of remixes (Black Heart Procession and Zombi), as well as some guest appearances and collaborations. Some of the collabs that are in the works are a project with Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino, a possible project with myself, Oktopus, Adam Jones from Tool and Heitham Al-Sayed, and I also might work on something with Joachim Irmler from Faust and Alec Empire. So, I’ve been a little busy…

———–

Here’s the iconAclass video for “Long Haul” [runtime: 3:33]:

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And here’s the clip for “I Got It” [runtime: 4:34]:

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————

Henry Miller quotations from  Morgan, Richard G. (Ed.), (1977). Kenneth Patchen: A Collection of Essays. New York: AMS Press, p. 33.

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Matthew Shipp / Knives From Heaven: Heavy Meta

In the 1980s, professional skateboarder Mark Gonzales used to disappear from media coverage for months at a time and every time he would return, he’d introduce the next, new trick. Once it was the kickflip, once the the stalefish, but he always set off a new trend. Antipop Consortium have cut a similar path. Their records are few and far between, but they always bump the bar a bit higher than it was before. Their 2002 record Arrhythmia (Warp) set the tone for 21st century metaphysical Hip-hop, and after a seven-year hiatus, Fluorescent Black (Big Dada, 2009) re-established what had been lost on heads in the meantime. Oddly abrasive to your expectations and undeniably smart in their creation are the way they work. Intelligent, innovative, and insightful are the watchwords.

The same can be said for Matthew Shipp, William Parker, and Thirsty Ear Recordings. The latter’s Blue Series, which includes collaborations with the former, as well as El-P, DJ Spooky, Dave Lombardo, Guillermo E. Brown, Vijay Iyer, and Mike Ladd, among many others, has consistently pushed the boundaries of Jazz, Hip-hop, and the expectations of all those involved. In 2003, it was as a part of this series that Matthew Shipp, William Parker, and Antipop Consortium previously met. Their aptly titled Antipop Consortium vs Matthew Shipp record sounds more like tension than balance, and it is on this tension that the grooves on their self-titled second outing, a collaboration with William Parker as well as Beans and High Priest from Antipop Consortium, Knives From Heaven, rely. Sometimes it sounds like the jostling of traffic swirling around you. Sometimes it sounds like dishes tumbling down stairs. Sometimes it sounds like the incessant churn of machinery. Sometimes it sounds like planets locked in wobbly orbit. No matter: It always sounds just like the future.

I first heard Shipp on the David S. Ware Quartet’s Dao (Homestead, 1995). I’d gotten review copies of that, William Parker’s Compassion Seizes Bed-Stuy (1996), and Williaw Hooker’s Armageddon (1995), which I was planning to review together for Pandemonium! Magazine of which I was then editor. Though I submerged myself in these three records and several similar releases, The Rocket‘s Steve Duda beat me to the review, and I never wrote mine. My taste for the fringes of progressive Jazz had been expanded though, and I’ve checked in with these folks on a regular basis since.

@vijayiyer “old music good! new music bad! except for mine!” — some jazz musician, every other damn day

Matthew Shipp not only plays, composes, and collaborates on Jazz’s edges, but he also thinks deeply about all of the above. When I heard Knives From Heaven, I knew it was time to get the man on the line.

Roy Christopher: This isn’t the first time you’ve been in the studio with these guys. How’d you end up working with Antipop Consortium in the first place?

Matthew Shipp: Beans use to work at a record store here in New York City, and I use to talk to him. He approached me before I had ever heard them. Of course when I heard them, I was blown away by their forward-looking aesthetic.

RC: What is it about their work that attracts you to collaborate?

MS: There is nothing cliché about how they go about it, and it has the feel of the same modern, New York zeitgeist that informs my own work.

RC: Are there any other Hip-hop acts you’d like to work with?

MS: Not really… I use to want to do something with Madlib, and I use to want to work with Kool Keith/Dr. Octagon, but I am completely involved in my own Jazz universe now.

RC: Hip-hop has flirted with Jazz regularly over the past twenty years, but the opposite hasn’t been the case. Knives From Heaven (again) illustrates the untapped potential of their mating. How do you see elements from the two genres working together?

MS: well first I am not sure if Knives From Heaven is Hip-hop flirting with Jazz or Jazz flirting with Hip-hop—

RC: I’d say it’s both.

MS: Well, first, music is music, and if you melt down the particulars there is room for dialogue between the various so-called genres. I think the so-called freedom of Jazz can be a point of inspiration for certain Hip-hop artists of a certain mental bent, and both musics have their own particular swing: The pulse of Free Jazz is a vortex of information, and all electronic musics thrive off of information, therefore it is up to the imagination and talent of the producer to cook a good meal. The palettes of both musics are different in some respects and similar in some ways so a good cook will figure out a blend that makes sense.

RC: Your work blends the architecture of composition with the spontaneity of improvisation. How does your process manifest songs? How do you decide where to start versus where to stop?

MS: I am always working or thinking about my musical language, so how do you start a sentence when you talk? Well, you know the language so well that you just start with the faith that words will come to you that match some internal imagery and the words will match whatever vague emotions and feelings you want to get across to the person you are talking to. It is very similar in this. Also, the deeper you get into your language the deeper the merger between form and content is which means if you have a deep organic concept. The architecture of composition and the spontaneity of improvisation will merge because they come from the same matrix, and form and content are one actuality, so there is some impetus that grows the structure of the piece or improvisation together with the content. And as far as stopping, that is instinct: If you know your language and your phrasing and your flow, you know when the ideas have played themselves out, therefore you know when to shut the fuck up.

RC: You bend time by mixing tradition with futurism. Do you see music in terms of eras?

MS: Yes and no. I see music as vibration that emits pulse and coheres in different ways. I see eras as each time period has its own constructs and organizational worldview… I don’t really believe in linear time so eras are an illusion to me, but a very real illusion: Every so-called time period has its own questions it asks of vibrations… But I do melt down all so-called time periods in Jazz to find some language that I can proceed to move into timeless period in.

RC: You’ve been making music long enough to have seen the changes in the technologies of recording and releasing, as well as listening and consuming. Are things getting better or are they getting worse?

MS: Worse. The world is too complex for its own good. There are too many possibilities and with the proliferation of all the technology and possibilities that we have, with all that, people are no smarter. In fact, you could argue that they are dumber and operate with less focus and concentration about what is really real.

—————

Check out the Knives From Heaven collaboration, and look for the new record called Elastic Aspects from the Matthew Shipp Trio out on Thirsty Ear in 2012.

Here’s a clip of Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Beans, and Priest working on the Knives from Heaven record at Spin Recording Studios [runtime: 3:06]:

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… and here’s Part 2 with Shipp and Priest [runtime: 2:50]:

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Zizi Papacharissi: A Networked Self

Zizi Papacharissi is an academic powerhouse. Whatever you’ve been doing for the last fifteen years, she probably makes you look lazy. She holds a Ph.D. in Journalism from my own University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. in Communication Studies from Kent State University, and a B.A. in Economics and Media Studies from Mount Holyoke College. Since getting those, she’s been busy: She is a professor in — and the head of — the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago, the author or editor of three books — most recently A Private Sphere (Polity, 2010) and A Networked Self (Routledge, 2010) — and countless articles and book chapters, and a frequent speaker and lecturer on issues of connectivity and community, as well as public and private concerns. Many thanks to Zizi for taking the time to discuss a little of all of the above with me.

Roy Christopher: If you had to sum it up for the uninitiated, what would you say your work is about? What are your major areas of concern?

Zizi Papacharissi: I am interested in social and political things people do online – and offline. I see little value in drawing a distinction between offline and online that treats the two as separate worlds and thus claims some of these interactions as real and others as virtual. To me, that is like suggesting that a phone conversation with some one is less real, because it becomes possible through the use of a medium. And many media historians have of course talked about how early reactions to the telephone prompted similar conversations about the complexion and reality of mediated conversations.

I do think it is meaningful, however, to think of offline and online spaces, and understand then how people traverse through these spaces in their everyday routines. People adjust and adopt their behaviors as they move from one space to another, so as to handle their interactions in a way that permits them to attain an optimal balance = happiness. Spaces draw out different aspects of our personalities and inspire us to do different things (or might leave us completely uninspired).  We also frequently design or reorganize spaces so as to suit our personalities. There are particular types of behaviors that work better or facilitate communication in certain spaces (for example, speaking loudly in crowded bars), but are utterly discouraged via the organizational logic of other spaces (yelling in a yoga class). I am very interested in how individuals develop behaviors that allow them to traverse through offline and online spaces fluently.

I do not find the term “social media” particularly useful. All media are social, in their own unique ways. To claim that some media are social implies that there are other media that are a-social, or anti-social. It also suggests social media are more social than other media not qualified by that label. I do not find that to be the case. The phrase also ascribes a certain  neutrality to the term medium, and I do not believe in that either (media are neither good, nor bad, nor are they neutral, á la Melvin Kranzberg). I prefer to think of technology as architecture — in case that was not abundantly clear already 😉

RC: danah boyd‘s equation for privacy entails context and control. With the convergence of technology and its blurring of boundaries you discuss in A Private Sphere (Polity, 2010) — especially those that define space and time, public and private, active and passive, producer and consumer — how are we to maintain control of these shifting contexts?

ZP: I agree with danah and find that this is a tremendously meaningful way of explaining privacy to the public and to policy-making communities. I have a slight preference for the term autonomy, over control. Perhaps it is because I am Greek 🙂 In A Private Sphere I use Deleuze’s work to explain how control is ultimately not about discipline. So, control, from the perspective of the individual or from the perspective of society, or institutions, is about offering a number of possibilities so that people can choose ‘freely’, while not being restricted yet still perfectly guided by a defined set of possibilities. Autonomy is about having the right to determine what those possibilities will be, to choose from them, or to refuse them altogether. Autonomy also is suggestive of self-reliance, independence, self-governance and reflexivity of the self – or individuation.

I suppose I find that ultimately, life is about philosophizing your way out of  the concept of control to a state of autonomy, and that might be why I am partial to the latter word. But in the end, you know, it is just a word. A definition.

RC: The web and mobile devices have changed the ways we connect with each other, but has social media really changed the nature of those connections? (i.e., some claim that Facebook is changing how the youth define “friendship.” I know what the literature says on this, but I wonder what you think.)

ZP: The youth has always redefined things, and I hope they never stop. It is what they do best! Otherwise, what is the point of being young?

On the topic of “friendship”, the literature shows that people handle their friendships in different ways across different spaces, and that has always been the case. We have always had friends from a number of social spheres (work, college, childhood, through mutual/spousal/ familial acquaintances), sometimes these spheres overlap and sometimes they do not, and we socialize with friends on a number of spaces, including spaces facilitated by internet platforms. Friendship means different things to different people. We also adjust and evolve our perspective on friendships as we mature through the different cycles of our lives. So everything that “the youth” is doing on Facebook needs to be understood in this context.

So, if anything, we might say that the word is being redefined, not the actual meaning of friendship, or closeness. It is a matter of language evolving, so as to reflect our practices. Weak ties can be actually be very strong, but is that really a term to be used to describe anyone? Who wants to be told:  “I do not consider you a friend, but you sure are a meaningful weak tie to me” or “Btw, I also consider you an important acquaintance.” So, as a society, we must come up with words that value and provide social context for these connections that may now be maintained and activated in more convenient ways.

Friendship  is an abstraction, a word invented to refer to and measure other emotions that are also aggregates and temporally sensitive. But friendship, or whatever it might be called in the future, is not going anywhere. It has always been a survival strategy for social beings, and will always be.

RC: Along the same lines, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that the adoption (or lack thereof) of communication technology in general changes the idea of communication (what I’ve been calling the “Tyranny of Adoption”). For instance, the diffusion of the cellphone has made it a personal assumption, a requirement in many cases (One can see this with social networking sites and lifestreaming media as well). How do we temper the spread of technology with our personal needs and desires?

ZP: I think we need to find a place for technology in our lives. In that sense, we blend technology with our own humanity and resist or challenge the tyranny of adoption. In our everyday lives, we routinely make decisions about what works or what does not. So, we do not choose to buy and use just any car, we buy the car that will fit our needs, our budget, our personality. We also choose to not buy a car, and rely on public transport. We choose clothing, houses, appliances that are compatible with our lifestyles and enhance our lives. We may not always make successful or optimal choices, but we are driven by the need to select. At the same time, our choices are shaped  by the options we have  at hand. And our socio-cultural context may present some of these options as more appealing  or popular than others.

I am not sure that we will ever be able to fully escape the tyranny of the popular, or adoption. Afterall, the capitalist backbone of our economic system rewards the popular. But I think of it less as a tyranny and more of as a habitus. Ultimately, they may both be understood as systems of control, but I suppose a habitus also embeds the notion of reflexivity, socio-cultural context, taste – it is a richer way to think about this. So, in a sense, we might think of not the tyranny of, let’s say, Facebook adoption, but rather, the Facebook habitus, as a way of socializing us into (and remediating) schemata, tastes, and habits  about friendship.

RC: Are you working on anything, have anything coming up, or just a topic I missed that you’d like to mention here?

ZP: A lot of people these days are interested in the notion of affect, or jouissance, and affective networks. I think there is a lot of potential in thinking about affect, as it permits us to understand content creation as both play and work; to look at the internet, in Trebor Scholz’s terms, as both playground and factory.  Lately I have been very interested in the performative aspect of play online, specifically as it applies to performances of the self in everyday life. So I have been reading a lot of performance theory, and working with the “as-if” aspect of play to understand how people imagine, perform, then redact and remix identities online.

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Yoxi Live Twitter Interview

The good folks over at Yoxi decided to interview me live on Twitter today mostly about my upcoming SXSW Interactive talk. Below is a transcription of the chat. I’ve edited it for chronology, continuity, and obvious text limitations, but overall it’s just as it appeared live.

Yoxi: Excited to have you as our 4th guest for #yoxichat. We’re stoked about your #SXSW panel!

Roy Christopher: Thank you! Glad to be here. I’m stoked on the #SXSW talk, too. Should be a hoot.

Y: Definitely! Speaking of #SXSW, what inspired your panel, Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices Are Divisive?

RC: In the midst of a book about technological mediation, I proposed this talk to #SXSW to work through some of those issues.

Y: Technological mediation, interesting! Tell us more about your research in that area!

RC: The book and talk are about all the ways we mediate our relationships with each other, our world, etc. through technology. Trying to develop a theory of technology that can account for new and old mediation alike.

Y: That’s great and truly relevant. Tech continues to consume our everyday lives.

RC: I’ve been exploring the land between thees lines for years, trying to assess it from the broadest possible perspective.

Y: If our “devices are divisive,” how do we find a balance in our digital lives?

RC: The same way we keep up with our lawns: sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. Technology is a part of our nature.

Y: Very true but if tech is part of our nature, how do we find a balance? Do you think people should just disconnect?

RC: Meta-attention is key: Assessing what one pays attention to and adjusting accordingly. Disconnection is not the answer.

Y: In terms of solutions, what advice do you have for teams in Yoxi’s Competition #2: Balance Your Digital Diet?

RC: I think “balance” is the wrong word. It’s more of a “tension,” and I think backing up and assessing it is the first step. Meta-attention and metacognition are not as widespread phenomena as they need to be. This is not elitism; it’s literacy.

Y: Thanks so much for joining us. Great thoughts. Hope everyone will check out your #SXSW panel. See you in Austin!

RC: Thank you for the time and attention. I appreciate it. See you in Austin in March!

————-

Many thanks to Arielle and Randy at Yoxi for their interest and for setting this up.

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Douglas Rushkoff: The User’s Dilemma

For over two decades, Douglas Rushkoff has been dragging us all out near the horizon, trying to show us glimpses of our own future. Though he’s written books on everything from counterculture and video games to advertising and Judaism, he’s always maintained a media theorist’s bent: one part Marshall McLuhan, one part Neil Postman, and one part a mix of many significant others. Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age (OR Books, 2010) finds him back at the core of what he does. Simply put, this little book (it runs just shy of 150 pages) is the missing manual for our wild, wired world.

“Whoever controls the metaphor governs the mind.” — Hakim Bey

Rushkoff agrees with many media thinkers that we are going through a major shift in the way we conceive, connect, and communicate with each other. His concern is that we’re conceding control of this shift to forces that may not have our best interests in mind. “We teach kids how to use software to write,” he writes, “but not how to write software. This means they have access to the capabilities given to them by others, but not the power to determine the value-creating capabilities of these technologies for themselves” (p. 13). We’re conceiving our worlds using metaphors invented by others. This is an important insight and one that helps make up the core of his critique. This book is more Innis’ biases of media than it is McLhaun’s laws of media, and it left me astounded — especially after reading several books on the subject that were the textual equivalent of fly-over states. Program or Be Programmed is a welcome stop along the way.

I first interviewed Doug Rushkoff in 1999. We’ve stayed in touch since and discussed many ideas over the intervening decade, but we haven’t recorded any of these exchanges. I used this book as an opportunity to ask him a few questions.

Roy Christopher: Program or Be Programmed seems to distill quite a lot of your thinking about our online world from the past twenty-odd years. What prompted you to directly address these issues now?

Douglas Rushkoff: I guess it’s because the first generation of true “screenagers” or digital natives have finally come of age and, to my surprise, seem less digitally literate than their digital immigrant counterparts. I’ve written a number of books applying the insights of digital culture — of its do-it-yourself, hacker ethos — to other areas, such as government, religion, and the economy. But I realize that we don’t even relate to digital culture from the perspective of cultural programmers. We tend to accept the programs we use as given circumstances, rather than as the creations of people with intentions.

So I wanted to go back and write something of a “poetics” of digital media, sharing the main biases of digital technologies so that people can approach them as real users, makers, and programmers, rather than just as passive consumers.

If anything in particular prompted me, it was watching the way smart writers and thinkers were arguing back and forth in books and documentaries about whether digital technology is good for us or bad for us. I think it’s less a question of what the technology is doing to us than what we are choosing to do to one another with these technologies. If we’re even choosing anything at all.

RC: You mention in the book that anyone who seems a bit too critical of digital media is labeled a Luddite and a party-pooper, yet you were able to be critical, serious, and hopeful all at the same time. What’s the difference between your approach and that of other critics of all-things-digital?

DR: I think the main difference is that I’m more concerned with human intention and how it is either supported or repressed in the digital realm. Empathy is repressed, the ability to connect over long distanced is enhanced. I go down to the very structure and functioning of these tools and interfaces to reveal how they are intrinsically biased toward certain kinds of outcomes.

So I’m less concerned with how a technology effects us, than how our application or misapplication of a technology works for or against our intentions. And, perhaps more importantly, how the intentions of our programmers remain embedded in the technologies we use. I’m not judging a technology one way or the other; rather, I am calling for people to make some effort to understand what the technologies they are using were made for, and whether that makes it the right tool for the job they’re using it for.

RC: You evoke Harold Innis throughout this book. Do you think there’s something that he covers more thoroughly or usefully than other media theorists since?

DR: I think he was better at looking at media shaping the nature and tenor of the social activity occurring on it, or around it. He’s the guy who would have seen how cell phones change the nature of our social contract on the street, turning a once-public space into lots of separate little private spaces. As far as media-ecology goes, he was probably the purest theorist.

RC: The last programming class I took was a Visual Basic class in which even the programming was obscured by a graphical interface: there was little in the way of real code. For those of us interested, what’s the first step in becoming a programmer now?

DR: I guess it depends on your interests. There are many different places to start. You could go back and learn Basic, one of the simplest computer languages, in order to see the way lines of code in a program flow. Or you could even just get a program like Director, and sequence some events. Hypercard was a great little tool that gave people a sense of running a script.

If I were starting, I’d just grab a big fat book that starts from the beginning, like Dan Shiffman’s book Learning Processing (Morgan Kaufman, 2008). You can sit down with a book like that and, with no knowledge at all, end up with a fairly good sense of programming in a couple of weeks.

I’m not asking everyone be a programmer at this point. Not this generation, anyway. That’s a bit like asking illiterate adults to learn how to read when they can just listen the radio or books on tape. I get that. But for those who will be living in increasingly digital spaces, programming will amount to the new literacy.

RC: Though you never stray too far, you seem to have come back to your core work in this book. What’s next?

DR: I have no idea, really. Having come “home” to a book on pure media theory applied to our real experience, I feel like I’ve returned to my core competence. I feel like I should stick here a while and talk about these issues for a year or so until they really sink in.

I’ve got a graphic novel coming out next year, finally, called ADD. It’s about kids who are raised from birth (actually, earlier) to be video game testers. I’d love to see that story get developed for other media, and then get to play around in television or film. There are also rumblings about doing another Frontline documentary. Something following up on “Digital Nation,” which I’d like to do in order to get more of my own ideas out there to the non-reading public.

I guess we’ll see.

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Astra Taylor and Laura Hanna (the filmmakers behind the film Zizek!) put this short video together to help illustrate the ideas in Rushkoff’s Program or Be Programmed [runtime: 2:18]:

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danah boyd: Privacy = Context + Control

danah boyd is one of the very few people worthy of the oft-bandied title “social media expert” and the only one who studies social technology use with as much combined academic rigor and popular appeal. She holds a Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley’s iSchool and is currently a Senior Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. As the debates over sharing, privacy, and the online control of both smolder in posts and articles web-wide, boyd remains one of a handful of trustworthy, sober voices.

boyd’s thoughts on technology and society are widely available online, as well as in the extensive essay collection, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out (MIT Press, 2009). In what follows, we discuss several emerging issues in social media studies, mostly online privacy, which has always been a concern as youth and digital media become ever more intertwined.

Roy Christopher: Facebook is catching a lot of flack lately regarding their wishy-washy Terms of Service and their treatment of their members’ privacy. Is there something happening that’s specific to Facebook, or is it a coincidental critical mass of awareness of online privacy issues?

danah boyd: Facebook plays a central role in the lives of many people. People care about privacy in that they care about understanding a social situation and wisely determining what to share in that context and how much control they have over what they share. This is not to say that they don’t also want to be public; they do. It’s just that they also want control. Many flocked to Facebook because it allowed them to gather with friends and family and have a semi-private social space. Over time, things changed. Facebook’s recent changes have left people confused and frustrating, lacking trust in the company and wanting a space where they can really connect with the people they care about without risking social exposure. Meanwhile, many have been declaring privacy dead. Yet, that’s not the reality for everyday folks.

RC: Coincidentally, I just saw yours and Samantha Biegler’s report on risky online behavior and young people. The news loves a juicy online scandal, but their worries are always seem so overblown to those in-the-know. What should we do about it?

db: Find a different business model for news so that journalists don’t resort to sensationalism? More seriously, I don’t know how to combat a lot of fear mongering. It’s not just journalists. It’s parents and policy makers and educators. People are afraid and they fear what they don’t know. It’s really hard to grapple with that. But what really bothers me about the fear mongering is that it obscures the real risks that youth face while also failing to actually help the youth who are most at-risk.

RC: NYU’s Jay Rosen maintains that his online presence is “always personal, never private.” Is that just fancy semantics or is there something more to that?

db: The word “private” means many things. There are things that Jay keeps private. For example, I’ve never seen a sex tape produced by Jay. I’ve never read all of his emails. I’m not saying that I want to, but just that living in public is not a binary. Intimacy with others is about protecting a space for privacy between you and that other person. And I don’t just mean sexual intimacy. My best friend and I have conversations to which no one else is privy, not because they’re highly secretive, but because we expose raw emotional issues to one another that we’re not comfortable sharing with everyone. Hell, we’re often not sure that we’re comfortable admitting our own feelings to ourselves. That’s privacy. And when I post something online that’s an in-joke to some people but perfectly visible to anyone, that’s privacy. And when I write something behind a technical lock like email or a friends-only account because I want to minimize how far it spreads, that’s privacy. But in that case, I’m relying more on the individuals with whom I’m sharing than the technology itself. Privacy isn’t a binary that can be turned on or off. It’s about context, social situations, and control.

RC: Hannah Arendt defines the private and public realms respectively as “the distinction between things that should be hidden and things that should be shown.” How do you define the distinction?

db: I would say the public is where we go to see and be seen while minimizing our vulnerabilities while the private is where we expose ourselves in a trusted space with trusted individuals.

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Ed. Note: It has come to my attention that what Jay Rosen actually said was, “In my Twitter feed I try to be 100 percent personal and zero percent private.” Apologies to everyone, especially Jay, for the misquote.