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Godflesh Streetcleaner: My 33 1/3 Book Proposal

I proposed a book for Bloomsbury Academic’s 33 1/3 Series on Streetcleaner by Godflesh. This being one of my all-time favorite records by one of my all-time favorite bands, I really wanted to tell its story. I knew it was a long shot: Bloomsbury received 471 proposals in this round and are planning on publishing a mere twenty titles. Today they narrowed the pile to a “long list” of ninety-four, and mine was not one of them. So, in lieu of the book, here is the Sample Material and Table of Contents from my proposal. Enjoy!

GODFLESH Streetcleaner (Earache Records, 1989)

“It’s just a matter of time, for me, before our ultimate extinction, and I can’t say we don’t deserve it.”1 This quote from Justin K. Broadrick sums up quite a lot of his motivation as an artist. His prolific career involving countless bands and projects spans over three decades. But it also says a lot about what many would call his most important band and their most important record. That band is Godflesh, and that record is Streetcleaner. “I don’t have a very optimistic view of humanity,” Broadrick said in the early 1990s, not long after Streetcleaner had been unleashed on the world. “Eighty percent of it is shit, and as a whole, mankind is very weak and without any kind of purpose. Once in a while, people need to be crushed emotionally and intellectually to be reminded of reality. That’s the basic purpose of our music…”2 Rebelling against their backgrounds and the very metal scene that spawned them, Broadrick says, “[W]ith Godflesh we were like, fuck everyone. And that was obviously cultivated even further to make an album like Streetcleaner.”3

In the late 1980s, metal was fast and heavy. The underground was ruled and regulated by thrash, death metal, and grindcore, each with its own set of stringent rules and rabid fans. Today’s wildly popular black metal was still in its infancy. Godflesh’s debut was sluggish in comparison, and they used a drum machine instead of a live drummer, anathema in the stodgy metal underground. “For at least the first year that we played,” Broadrick remembers, “there were people chanting, ‘Where’s the drummer?’ or ‘You’re too fucking slow!’”4 Their initial reception was not promising, but as Broadrick put it at the time, “It’s got a sound, and it’s unique. And it’s fucking heavy.”5

When Godflesh’s first full-length record came out on November 13, 1989, I was just out of high school. In an issue of SPIN Magazine at the time, Faith No More’s Mike Patton described Streetcleaner as the sound of your Walkman’s batteries running down. That was enough of an endorsement for me to seek out the record. As well versed as I was in the metal of the time, what I found was like nothing I’d ever heard. Streetcleaner plods along at the pace of some giant factory, guitars and bass pummeling to the sound of machines rumbling. “Godflesh is totally borne from those first twenty four years of my life that I spent in Birmingham,” Broadrick remembers. The bleak, industrial environs of Birmingham gave birth to other dark, heavy, canonical outfits like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. The oppression of being “amongst crowds of people, being surrounded by concrete,” as he puts it, shaped who Broadrick is, and the way he expresses it. “To me, I don’t think Godflesh would have existed if I’d come from another environment. It’s absolutely a reflection of the environment that I grew up in.”6 The overall sound is simply crushing, and Streetcleaner is a genre-defying and a genre-defining record. In fact, the newly reunited Godflesh performed the record in its entirety at Holland’s Roadburn Festival last year, illustrating its lasting influence. “It is an angsty record written by a couple of teenagers,” he said of the performance, “and it still resonates now. In fact, even more so, to some extent.”7

“With Godflesh, we try to aim at something quite off balance, off kilter, a lot different from anyone else,”8 he told me in 1996. Since its inception, Godflesh has been Broadrick and Christian “Benny” Green with their drum machine, and as strange as it may seem for a band as heavy as Godflesh is, hip-hop has been an obvious element in their overall sound. “I think hip-hop is more important than any sort of rock music,” stated Broadrick matter-of-factly. “Most of the beats are fatter and heavier than your average rock n’ roll riff.” One of the major sonic tenets of Godflesh is that under the monolithic basslines and ear-searing guitar riffs lie hip-hop’s most brutal break beats. Not realizing what a total hip-hop head Justin is, people tend to miss the often low-key references to the genre in Godflesh’s music. “I’ve done lots of interviews with these metal magazines and they’re really confronted by the hip-hop thing like, ‘what the fuck is this?!’ They really don’t get it that I’m really into hip-hop.”9 The next year, Broadrick was even more frustrated with trying to shed Godflesh’s metal skin: “All of these metal magazines are so pissed off at the way that metal has been treated that they don’t even want to take a look at something like hip-hop,” he told me. “I try to stress to them that I’ve always hated metal. I’ve just used and abused it. I think people like to think that before we made Streetcleaner that we were some long-hair band who’d just discovered industrial music when that’s not the case at all. The first music I was into was punk rock. It’s so hard to convey these ideas to these people. They always come to me with how metal should go back to what it was in the eighties, and I’m like, ‘bloody hell!’ I’ve always found metal rather conservative.”10

In a more recent interview, he describes the collision and collusion of genres inherent in Godflesh’s sound:

I guess one of the things about metal is that it’s really stigmatised, even with myself in Godflesh, when we first became somewhat popular, I was very eager at that time to distance myself from metal, and I think that’s because at the time there was very little like Godflesh. The most popular metal when Godflesh became popular in 1989/90 was the back-end of the hair metal thing, and Godflesh played with a lot of bands, a lot of tours in America like that, and I became quite repulsed by the whole circus of heavy metal. But, essentially, I’ve always been excited by what’s central to heavy metal, which is the sound, the texture of heavy metal. That was it, for me. Godflesh was about pure reductionism, minimalism, reducing heavy metal to its absolute primitives. But also… these elements of electronica, machines, quite literally the very primitive stages of being able to program computers and use machine beats, which for me, initially, was as informed by Public Enemy and Eric B. and Rakim records as it was anything beyond that and being able to create beats bigger than a human drummer could do.11

To wit, the beat on the song “Christbait Rising” from Streetcleaner was Broadrick’s attempt to copy the rhythm break from 1988’s “Microphone Fiend” by Eric B. and Rakim.12 “We have our own bastardized idea of what we can do hip-hop-wise… It comes out even more perverted this way.”13

Godflesh has always pushed limits in one direction or another. Streetcleaner is the germinal industrial-metal hybrid sound that bands all over the world are still trying to recreate — and Godflesh continued innovating and never looked back. Since officially disbanding Godflesh in 2002, Broadrick has been busy with a band called Jesu (whom he named after the last song on the last Godflesh record, indicating a continuation of sorts of their sound), and his original musical outlet Final, among other various remixes and collaborations. With the reuniting of Godflesh in 2010, Broadrick admits that he finds himself at home in the band. “I think Godflesh is still presenting exactly what I grew up with and exactly what runs through my blood, “ he said in 2011. “It’s really important that that sense of expression is back in my life. I think I’d lost it through Jesu. But really, it’s not just some re-visitation for me, it really feels like I’ve gone back to what I am in a way.”14

Justin Broadrick was born on August 15, 1969 in Birmingham, an “unpleasant” area that he describes as “the Detroit of England.”15 His first few years were spent on an actual hippie commune before his family – he, his mom, and stepfather; his real father was a heroin addict whom he didn’t see until he was fifteen years old – moved into a council estate, the projects of England. By the age of twelve, Broadrick found Punk rock and industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse, as well as krautrock like Can and Brian Eno’s early ambient work, all of which would inform his own musical output. He started messing around with some of his stepfather’s music gear, and taught himself guitar. “[W]hen I began to play guitar,” he explains “I mastered one bar chord and realized that I could any Crass song I wanted. That was pretty satisfying in itself. Music was like a dirty word when I went to school in 1978. Everyone was just into football hooliganism. But at home, I was absolutely inspired at a very young age to act in my environment, both in the form of music and to some extent against the oppressive environment I was in.”16

In the early 1980s, zines and tapes were heavily circulating through underground networks. Broadrick’s interest in extreme music and in finding like-minded individuals naturally landed him in the middle of this subculture. He started his first band, Final, and recorded many cassettes. Through these exchanges, he joined a band called Fall of Because. Benny Green, Paul Neville, and Diarmuid Dalton – all of whom Broadrick still works with in different projects – made up the rest of the band. Broadrick joined them on drums, replacing their drum machine. Fall of Because’s one recorded demo (which was compiled with live clips and released as the record Life is Easy in 1999) hints at the cold nihilism that would become Godflesh’s signature sound.

Broadrick had two more short stops before forming Godflesh proper: He played guitar on the first side of the first record by Grindcore pioneers Napalm Death, and drums for the down-tuned, sludgy, metal band Head of David. “Head of David already had an album out,” Broadrick explains. “They were the only people I knew who had fans and actually had a record in the shops. It wasn’t just opportunistic for me, that first Head of David album I actually adored. I thought it was fucking amazing. With Napalm Death, we played with them a few times, and they were absolutely stunning. When their drummer left, they saw me drum with Fall of Because and invited me to join.”17

His exit from Head of David was the real beginning of Godflesh “They wanted to lose a lot of the noise and the qualities that had attracted me to that band,” he said. “So, when they kicked me out of the band, I thought, right, I want to do something that takes the basic premise of where I wanted to go with Head of David, low-tune everything, make it brutal,”18 to take it “to the gutter, make it more machine-like”19 In the meantime, Fall of Because had broken up, leaving Benny Green free to join Broadrick’s new project. “Godflesh really became my vision, and Ben Green was really into the same type of stuff… and we already had our songs from Fall of Because so we began with those… I was really influenced by people using drum machines, most notably some of the hip-hop at the time: Public Enemy, Eric B & Rakim. When I first heard some of those records, I was astonished at the brutality of their drum machines, and I really was excited by that sound. I really wanted something inhuman sounding and beyond human capability. And I was already a drummer, so I knew what beats I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear them in the most disgusting, heavy fashion going.”20 Their self-titled debut EP on Swordfish Records made the promises that 1989’s Streetcleaner finally delivered on: songs awash in wailing, scraping guitars, dirge-like, lumbering bass lines, brutal, machine-driven beats, and Broadrick’s anguished vocals. It was like nothing else at the time. The second wave of industrial music, a beat-driven and mechanistic subgenre that found its roots in Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten, and Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, was in full swing. Though no one else was mixing metal with machines quite like Godflesh, fueled by the popularity of Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails, and the output of Chicago’s WaxTrax Records, the movement gave audiences a cultural reference point and made Streetcleaner an underground hit for Godflesh and their label Earache records. It wasn’t long before the majors came courting.

“I remember being stunned when I heard that first Korn album,” Broadrick said in 2007, “because there’s so much Godflesh in that, but used in this commercial way. It was weird. Like, wow, I guess it had to happen at some point; somebody had to take these sorts of sounds and make them digestible.”21 Everyone from innovative rappers like El-P to more obvious followers like Isis acknowledge the record’s prescience. “At the time when Isis started,” singer and guitarist Aaron Turner said, “there weren’t a lot of other bands exploring that territory; Godflesh were one of the few founding fathers of that sound. They were taking influences from a number of different places and didn’t really fit in anywhere.” Isis covered the title track from Streetcleaner as homage to its influence on them. “Justin has been ahead of most musicians,” attests Alap Momin of noisy hip-hop group dälek, “reinventing genres from grindcore to hip-hop to drum and bass and more for almost twenty five years. It’s pretty insane when someone can pull that off once, but to do it repeatedly in a variety of genres is really ridiculous.” Burton C. Bell of industrial metal band Fear Factory said, “Streetcleaner is a fantastically produced and written record; every song is an opus.”22 The full reach of Streetcleaner’s influence is difficult to gauge, but it’s safe to say that much of what is considered metal in the twenty-first century wouldn’t exist without it.

Notes:

1. Turner, Luke (2009, November 18). Greymachine: Justin Broadrick and Aaron Turner United. The Quietus.

2. Rene. (1992). Godflesh interview. Propaganda Magazine, #19, pp. 40-41.

3. Bartkewitcz, Anthony (2007, March). Vision: Escape: Justin Broadrick. Decibel Magazine, pp. 68-74.

4. Bartkewitcz, 2007.

5. Mundrian, Albert (2007, March). Just Words from the Editor. Decibel Magazine, p. 8.

6. Horsley, Jonathan (2011, October 7). Justin Broadrick interview: Godflesh, growing up and anarcho-punk. Decibel Magazine.

7. Koczan, J. J. (2011, May 6). Jesu Interview: Justin Broadrick Confirms New Godflesh Studio Album, Discusses Jesu’s Latest, Imperfection, Self-Indulgence, Roadburn, and Much More. The Obelisk.

8. Christopher, Roy. (1996, October). Godflesh: Uneasy Listening. Pandemonium! Magazine.

9. Christopher, Roy. (1997, December). Godflesh: Heads Ain’t Ready. SLAP Skateboard Magazine.

10. Christopher, 1997.

11. Horsley, 2011.

12. Valcic, Vuk. (2010, June/July). Godflesh revisits Streetcleaner. Rock-A-Rolla Magazine, p. 28-29.

13. Christopher, 1997.

14. Horsley, 2011.

15. Nasrallah, Dimitri. (2010, September). Justin Broadrick: Napalm Death – Godflesh – Techno Animal – Jesu – Pale Sketcher.

16. Nasrallah, 2010.

17. Nasrallah, 2010.

18. Nasrallah, 2010.

19. Bartkewitcz, 2007.

20. Nasrallah, 2010.

21. Bartkewitcz, 2007.

22. Bartkewitcz, 2007.

 

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction: On the Grind: The Prequel – in which we find out where Godflesh and Streetcleaner came from, including Justin K. Broadrick’s fraught beginnings, his first band Final, Napalm Death and its separate ways, his brief stints in Fall of Because and Head of David, and his forming Godflesh proper. An introduction to the analysis of subcultures (specifically music subcultures; cf. Dick Hebdige, Simon Reynolds, et al.), which is imperative to understanding the formation of Godflesh and the creation of Streetcleaner, will be included here.

2. Streetcleaner: The New Blueprint – the record that’s a little bit grind, a little bit industrial, a little bit something else. This chapter will be not only an in-depth look at the making of Streetcleaner, including discussions with Broadrick and his bandmates, but also at the cultural conditions – socioeconomic, technological, and musical – that influenced its creation.

3. Hip-hop: Under the Influence – No drummer could do what they wanted done; it took the power of a machine. Making sense of the genre-bending and blending of Godflesh’s debut through Broadrick’s punk roots, metal beginnings, and hip-hop obsession, and how they all influenced the sound of Streetcleaner.

4. Stray Pavement: What Hath These Clean Streets Wrought? – which will investigate the influence of Streetcleaner, from its industrial Imitators (e.g., Fear Factory, Stabbing Westward, Gravity Kills, etc.) to its contemporaries (e.g., Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Skinny Puppy, etc.) and its lasting influence, from the rap-rock fusion (e.g., Rage Against the Machine, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, etc.) to nu-metal (e.g., Korn, Deftones, Tool, etc.), and what Broadrick thinks of his creation’s legacy.

5. Potholes in My Soul: Growing Pains and Dead Batteries – A brief look at the rest of the Godflesh oeuvre, the dissolution of the band, and why Streetcleaner still stands out as the classic that it is.

6. Conclusion: Go Spread Your Wings: The Soul of a New Machine – A parting glance at Broadrick’s post-Godflesh band, Jesu, and what the future holds for the recently reunited Godflesh as well as the recently reissued Streetcleaner.

————————

Many thanks for the time and consideration of David Barker, John Mark Boling, , and the whole team at Bloomsbury Academic for the opportunity. And congratulations to the ninety-four on the long list!

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Hip-Hop Theory Talk

I’ve been working on a new book called Hip-Hop Theory: The Blueprint to 21st Century Culture about how Hip-hop culture preconfigures many of the forms and norms of the now. I gave the following talk to my class at The University of Texas at Austin, which shows me fumbling through some of the major concepts from the book [runtime: 37:01]:

Here’s a brief overview of the book:

The many innovations of Hip-hop now undergird our Western culture. From appropriating technology and reinventing language to street art and advertising, as well as the intertextual nature of our evermore connected mass media and communication. The DJ’s innovative use of the turntable preconfigured sampling technology and made the sample a viable currency of music making and sampling itself the battleground of creative work and copyright law. To wit, technologically enabled cutting and pasting are now preeminent practices not only for musicians but also filmmakers, designers, storytellers—culture creators of all kinds. Graffiti artists’ repainting of the urban scenery with images and letters prefigured the ubiquity of street-styled advertising. This book is about is the many ways that the foundations of Hip-hop appropriation – allusions and creative language use, as well as technology and self-reference – inform the new millennium, how an understanding of Hip-hop culture is also an understanding of 21st century culture.

Thank you (and my classes) for indulging me. I’ll post more on this project as it develops.

 

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remixthebook: Guest Post and Tweeting

In 1997, I wrote a piece about turntablism for Born Magazine called “Band of the Hand.” Years later, I wrote a related piece for Milemarker‘s now defunct Media Reader magazine, called “war@33.3: The Postmodern Turn in the Commodification of Music.” I’ve been revisiting, remixing, and revising these previous thesis pieces ever since. I eventually combined the two and posted them here, but I’ve also written other things that spin off from their shared trajectories.

This week, I am proud to be guest-tweeting for Mark America’s remixthebook (Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2011). In addition, I posted a piece on the remixthebook site. remixthebook and its attendant activities situate the mash-up as a defining cultural activity in the digital age. With that in mind, I tried to go back to the writings above and update them using pieces of relevant things I’ve written since. If you will, my post is a metamix of thoughts and things I’ve written about remix in the past decade and a half or so, pieces which also represent material from my other book-in-progress, Hip-hop Theory: The Blueprint to 21st Century Culture. It’s a sample-heavy essay that aims to illustrate the point.

Here are a few excerpts:

Culture as meaning-making requires participation. In addition to the communication processes of encoding and decoding, we now participate in recoding culture. Using allusions in our conversation, writing, and other practices engages us in culture creation as well as consumption. The sampling and remixing practices of Hip-hop exemplify this idea more explicitly than any other activity. Chambers wrote, “In readily accessed electronic archives, in the magnetic memory banks of records, films, tapes and videos, different cultures can be revisited, re-vived, re-cycled, re-presented” (p. 193). Current culture is a mix of media and speech, alluded to, appropriated from, and mixed with archival artifacts and acts.

…

We use numerous allusions to pop culture texts in everyday discourse, what Roth-Gordon calls “conversational sampling.” Allusions, even as direct samples or quotations, create new meanings. Each form is a variation of the one that came before. Lidchi wrote, “Viewing objects as palimpsests of meaning allows one to incorporate a rich and complex social history into the contemporary analysis of the object.” It is through use that we come to know them. Technology is not likely to slow its expanse into every aspect of our lives and culture, and with it, the reconfiguration of cultural artifacts is also not likely to stem. Allusions – in the many forms discussed above and many more yet to come – are going to become a larger and larger part of our cultural vocabulary. Seeing them as such is the first step in understanding where we are headed.

…

Rasmussen wrote, “there is no ‘correct’ way to categorise [sic] the increasing diversity of communication modes inscribed by the media technologies. Categories depend on the nature of the cultural phenomena one wants to investigate.” Quotation, appropriation, reference, and remix comprise twenty first century culture. From our technology and media to our clothes and conversations, ours is now a culture of allusion. As Schwartz so poetically put it: “Whatever artists do, they are held in the loose but loving embrace of artists past.” Would that it were so.

The whole post is here.

Many thanks to Mark America and Kerry Doran for the opportunity and to everyone else for joining in on the fun. Here’s the trailer for the project [runtime: 1:21]:

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David Preston’s Literature & Composition Class Talk

On November 2nd, I was invited to talk to Dr. David Preston’s Literature and Composition class via Blackboard Collaborate and Howard Rheingold‘s Rheingold University. Here’s a screen capture of that talk [Warning: It’s long. Runtime: 1:02:21]. Topics include a few of my projects, the web, advent horizons, collaborative learning, technology in the classroom and in the lives of the youth.

Many thanks to Ted Newcomb and Howard Rheingold for hooking this up, to David Preston and his students for their time, attention, and participation, and to Linda Burns for saving the video. This was a great opportunity and a humbling and inspiring experience.

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Me at SXSW 2011: Interview by Jah Furry

This is a short clip of me yammering on about my recent projects (Follow for Now, Disconnect the Dots, and The Medium Picture) at SXSW 2011. My man Shahriar Shadab filmed and edited this [runtime: 3:07], and Jeff Newelt did the interview. Many thanks to them for indulging my goofy ass, and thank to you all for indulging me further.

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I’ll probably be putting this right on the front of the site as well, because it’s a decent summary of what I’ve been up to lately.

Thanks to everyone for your continued interest,

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Follow for Now on Brain Pickings

My interview collection Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes (Well-Red Bear, 2007) got some updated shine thanks to cognitive curator Maira Popova and her excellent site Brain Pickings. Here are a few excerpts:

The book was originally published in 2007, which makes it a rare, paradoxical and infinitely fertile cross between sort-of-contemporary cultural critique of the present and near-prophetic time-capsule of the recent past, swiftly fluttering across disciplines and ideologies to deliver a powerful cross-pollinator of modern intellectual and creative curiosity…

The time elapsed since the book’s publication makes it particularly fascinating to reverse-engineer how the ideas in recent popular books by these thinkers originally germinated…

Relentlessly stimulating and insight-packed, Follow for Now is the kind of book I’d like to see published every decade, and devoured every subsequent decade, from now until the end of humanity.

You can read the full write-up here. Many thanks to Maria for the kind words and attention, and to my man Jeff Newelt for making the connection. These two truly get it, and it’s inspiring to have connected with them.

As always, Follow for Now is available from Powell’s, Amazon, on The Kindle, at various retail outlets, and from its very own site.

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Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices are Divisive — My Talk from SXSW Interactive

I’ve been thinking about all of the ways we change our world with our technology for years now, but more so lately as my book-in-progress, The Medium Picture, comes into better focus. This talk itself is brand new and not quite complete. Regardless, I decided to take my own advice and get it out there. I did this one for the first time at SXSW Interactive 2011. Judging by the post-talk discussion, these ideas are generative if not fully formed. In what follows, I expand my speaking notes, including bits from my thinking aloud in old posts from this site, references, my slides, and a video clip. Also, the audio from the talk is available on the SXSW site.

—————-

Technology is not taking over our world. It already did. Take a look in any coffeeshop, and you’ll see humans strapped to machines, ignoring one another. Take a look at any street in the city, and you’ll see humans strapped into machines, ignoring one another. Your cognitive surplus is sitting in traffic. We shape our technology and it shapes us. Marshall McLuhan said that, but his thoughts have become such a staple of our vocabulary that no one even cites him anymore. Chances are, your feet are literally shoe-shaped. Some of us have bodies that are car-shaped. Our technology frees us from so much physical labor, but we to exercise. We drive our cars to the gym to run on treadmills. The very existence of gyms points to a disconnection between our physical bodies and our work.

When I first started thinking about this disconnection, I was on my way to class and then the climbing gym. I realized that I had the option of taking the elevator to class on the seventh floor and then going to the gym to climb afterward. It struck me as odd that the two actions were completely disconnected. Getting to a higher floor in one building and the act of climbing up the wall in another were totally disassociated, even though they were essentially the same act.

We love our technology. Walk into an older building, built before elevators were standard, and you’ll see grand staircases filling its atrium. In newer buildings, one can scarcely find the stairs. They’re tucked away out of site, while the shiny elevator doors are on display. We showcase our latest mechanical marvels.

Also when I started thinking about these disconnections, I went looking for an example of connection. I found a map showing a direct link from the brain to the act of riding a bicycle — something our bodies never forget how to do. In addition during this, I started riding a fixed-gear bicycle. That is, a bicycle that has a direct connection between the front and rear gears and the rear wheel (the pedals and the rear wheel are thereby working in concert at all times, so that the bicycle doesn’t coast). Given the extra work and hazards associated with such a vehicle, people often ask me why? What’s the appeal? Well, one of the reasons that fixed-gears are so seductive is the direct connection one has to the distance traveled and the control of the motion. No matter the terrain or conditions, your body is always at work negotiating the ride. You and your brain are directly connected to your environment. Once you start coasting, the disjunct begins.

If you want to investigate this simple disconnection a bit further, think about your activities from the point of view of your pets. Think about what you’re doing from the point of view of your dog (your cat won’t care what you’re doing). If your dog is confused by your sitting and staring at a screen or a paper for too long, you are disconnected.

A beginning is a split, a disjunct, a bifurcation. At the beginning of every story, there is a phase during which one feels a bit disoriented: the first pages of a novel, the first scenes of a movie or play, the first notes of a song, the first song of a record, the part of the performance where the audience members are still finding their seats. You don’t know where we’re going from here.

The introduction of every new technology gives us the same feeling. Significant advances in technology are disjunctive. They are beginnings. They are bifurcations. Feared and disparaged at first, technological contrivances are eventually welcomed in and change our world. They literally change our minds. They change our relationship with our worlds and with each other.

If you came here looking for the contemptus mundi, it-s-all-going-to-hell point of view, you’re in the wrong place. Technology is a part of our nature. The singularity already happened. It was called “agriculture.”

These concerns are not new. People have been worrying about technology taking over our lives for as long as we’ve been externalizing our knowledge and tempering our world with tools. This is a painting by Harry Grant Dart from a 1911 issue of Life Magazine — one hundred years ago. It depicts an extreme example. A man is shown seated in the middle of a room where speakers, tubes, ducts, projectors, and printouts provide his every need – comfort, nutrition, information, entertainment. He needn’t ever leave his chair.

More recently (same slide), artist Jeff Nicholson depicted the main character in his 1994 comic Through the Habitrails enduring technology-enabled, all-at-once weekends. His work week leaves him so drained of enjoyment and so far from his interests that he seeks to fill the gap as quickly as possible. “My stimuli is taken directly to my nerve endings and orifices,” he wrote, “and I take it in and in and in with clenched teeth and a fibrillating heartbeat.” Attempting to reconnect the disconnected parts of his life, Nicholson’s nameless protagonist relies solely on technology.

Context: This is where we’re going from here:

  • Disconnection
  • Threshold
  • Bridge

This is the process of technological mediation, a process that happens in three stages: disconnection, threshold, and bridge. First, there is a break, a split, a disconnection. As with a new invention or application, a new path is formed deviating from the old. This break leaves a threshold to be traversed, a chasm between what was and what is. Crossing the threshold requires a bridge, a new metaphor. When one first hears a novel metaphor, there is a new way of seeing something, a break from the old (disconnection). The existence of this new knowledge leaves an obvious gap between it and the old way (threshold). Before long, the metaphor becomes the only way we think about the idea (bridge).

Technology is quickly antiquated, so this process happens very quickly. Think about when you see picture or movies that have cathode ray tube monitors or televisions in them. They look old! But it’s only been in the past few years that we’ve switched to flatscreens. Just saying the word “MySpace” gets a chuckle. Again, it’s only been a few years since it was not only relevant, but part of the zeitgeist.

We’re no good at predicting these things either. Sure, we can tell that cell phones are going to get smaller and become ubiquitous, but in other ways, we’re clueless. I watch Blade Runner (1982) on a regular basis, and for all of its prescience, it completely misses a couple of key things. In one scene Deckard is reading a newspaper (not a fancy, animated Minority Report newspaper either), and in another he uses a payphone. In the movie’s defense, it was a video payphone, but I seriously doubt that either of these technologies will be extant in Los Angeles in 2019.

Here’s how silly our predictions look. This is Steve Newman’s “Telepaper” story as broadcast on KRON in San Francisco in 1981 [runtime: 2:17]:

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Disconnection: We employ and implement technology to mediate the spaces between…

  • Ourselves and each other — The most obvious and least interesting of these disconnections.
  • Ourselves and our work  — Steven Johnson pointed out in Interface Culture (Harper San Francisco, 1997) that the Graphical User Interface makes us feel closer to our work on our machines, but that it’s actually a layer of abstraction between us and the work that’s going on inside the computer. It is a metaphor that we often acknowledge we are using.
  • Ourselves and our world — Clothes, cars, roads, buildings, cities, etc. As Max Frisch once put it, “Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn’t have to experience it.”
  • Ourselves and our selves — Our minds are colonized by our technologies. Our minds are literally different when a new technology exists. New knowledge and new stuff physically and chemically changes the make up of what’s in your head. Howard Bloom uses the example of bags used to carry things. In his “Jack the Pelican presents” lecture from 2003, he explains it by saying that our brains are different when different inventions exist. That is, we have different thoughts and dreams after certain ideas and innovations exist in our world (the material to the spiritual). Before bags were invented, one could only carry what would fit in one’s hands. After bags, well, it depends on the bag and one’s fortitude for carrying.

All of our technologies have both the potential to augment human abilities and to obstruct them. For example, think about talking on the telephone. On one end of the spectrum, the telephone allows us to communicate with each other over vast distances, rendering our physical location almost irrelevant (augmentation). On the other end, the voice-only nature of the telephone strips our communication of facial expressions, gestures, and other nonverbal cues (obstruction). One can play this game with every machine and device we’ve conceived and implemented.

Every new technology frees us from something while binding us to itself.

We’ve used metaphors to conceptualize and understand phenomena since early Greek philosophy. Thinking theorists over the years have compared the human mind to the clock, the steam engine, the radio, the radar, and the computer. The latter of which has been the most useful and generative, and its use is so common that we rarely give it a second thought. If the explanatory power of the metaphor in use is successful, the metaphor becomes obsolete. If a metaphor obsolesces into general usage, it is forgotten as a metaphor. These splits, these breaks, these thresholds, between disorientation and orientation and between acknowledging a metaphor and just using it — the beginning, the space between the two, and how we handle the transition — are where the process of technological mediation happens. Something is lost every time we cross over that space.

Donald Norman calls the threshold between our goals as users of technology and the interfaces of the physical systems we use — the mappings between the two — “distance.” The “gulf of evaluation” is what we have to figure across the gap, and the “gulf of execution” is what the machine does. I use his as an example of the threshold in all of these situations.

Threshold: In The Young & The Digital (Beacon, 2009), Craig Watkins points out an overlooked irony in our switch from television screens to computer screens: We gather together around the former to watch passively, while we individually engage with the latter to actively connect with each other.

And we want to get in there so bad... Think of Tron and Lawnmower Man: We’ve gone from wearing goggles and gloves in order to enter the machine (e.g., most typical virtual reality systems), to using our bodies as input devices (e.g., Wii,Kinect, etc.), bringing the machine into the room.

The size of our devices are now decided by the size of our appendages. We can make cellphones and laptops smaller, but then we wouldn’t be able to hold them. We have to design at human scale.

Advent Horizon: I call the line we draw at the edge of our level of comfort with technology our “Advent Horizon.” We feel a sense of loss when we cross it. From the Socratic shift from speaking to writing, to the transition from writing to typing, we’re comfortable — differently on an individual and collective level — in one of these phases. As we adopt and assimilate new devices, our horizon of comfort drifts further out while our media vocabulary increases. Any attempt to return to a so-called “Natural State” is a futile attempt to get back across the line we’ve drawn for ourselves.

Evidence that we’ve crossed one of these lines isn’t difficult to find. Think about the resurgence of vinyl record sales, or the way we teach computer animation. The former is an analog totem from a previous era, the latter is analog scaffolding for the digital world. Fans of vinyl records are either clinging to their youth or celebrating the only true music format that ever mattered. A vinyl record is a true document of a slice of time. I visited Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida last summer. In their animation and game design programs, students take illustration, flipbook-style animation, and 3-D modeling — real-world 3-D, like sculpture — before they ever sit down at a computer. Clinging to a previous era and having to back up to learn something new: These are evidence that an Advent Horizon has been crossed.

Bridge: Touchscreens are making strides to reconcile these limits, but the QWERTY keyboard is still our most ubiquitous bridge into the machineworld. Writing is a bridge. It is an interioralizing technology that externalizes knowledge and memory. No matter which story you believe about its origins, the QWERTY keyboard has changed our behavior.

The shift from writing to typing is also worth mentioning. The two acts — much like browsing for an item in a physical store versus searching for the same item in a database online — are related in only the most tenuous way. Typing an “L” and a “B” versus hand-writing an “L” and a “B” are just not related.

Technology curates culture. Aspects of our lives only matter because a certain number of us have decided that they do. Often called social construction and often harshly critiqued as uselessly postmodern, the concept is testable. Go to your local coffee shop or restaurant and try to walk behind the counter. You will be swiftly ushered back to the other side of the counter if not out of the establishment. Whether or not there is an actual physical barrier in place, there is an accepted area for the employees and one for the patrons – that’s social construction. As a society or culture we tend to agree on a great many of these constructions. We decide what matters.

Technology makes decisions for us. Often there isn’t a choice as to what is easier, more convenient, or more fun, much less what is more acceptable. Often the technology in place makes only one path available.

The tyranny of adoption. Many times we find that those around us have moved across an Advent Horizon en masse, leaving us behind, or forcing us to cross our line. The opposite is also true. If you’re the only one who adopts a technology, it’s useless until your friends start using it. MySpace works as an example here as well: It’s still viable if all of your friends are using it.

Last year here at SXSW, a friend of mine was exchanging contact information with this woman he’d met here. They both had iPhones, so he wanted to use an app called “Bump,” where you just bump two iPhones together and the contact information transfers from one to the other. Well, the lady he was trying to, er, “bump” didn’t have the app, so they had to enter their information in manually. That’s the tyranny of adoption.

“The Machine is not the environment for the person; the person is the environment for the machine.” — Aviv Bergman

“The long-range question is not so much what sort of environment we want, but what sort of people we want.” — Robert Sommer

We have to think cumulatively about what we design. Technology curates culture. Technology is a part of our nature. How will we control it? The same way we do our lawns or our weight: Sometimes we will; sometimes we won’t, but we have to remember that we’re not designing machines. We’re designing ourselves.

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So, there you have it. Again, the audio is here, and references are below. Please feel free to offer feedback in the comments below, or tweet about it using the #divisivedevices hashtag. Thanks to those who braved the time change and came to see it live, and as always, thank you all for your time and attention.

References:

Christopher, R. (2007). Brenda Laurel: Utopain Entrepreneur. In R. Christopher (Ed.), Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes. Seattle, WA: Well-Red Bear.

Johnson, S. (1997). Interface Culture. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.

McLuhan,M. (1964). Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Norman, D. (1986). User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-computer Interaction. New York: CRC Press.

Ong, W. (2002). Orality and Literacy (2nd Edition). New York: Routledge.

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: Penguin.

Sommer, R. (2007). Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design. Bristol, England, UK: Bosko Books.

Watkins, S. C. (2009). The Young & The Digital. New York: Beacon.


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The Austin Chronicle: “The World is Your Cubicle,” featuring Me

For Nora Ankrum’s recent roundup of SXSW Interactive panels and talks having to do with distance working, “The World is Your Cubicle,” she interviewed me about my SXSWi talk Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices are Divisive and my book-in-progress, The Medium Picture.

Here’s the excerpt that features me running my mouth:

“Having a beer with someone is still one of the most connecting things you can do,” agrees Roy Christopher, a communication studies doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin. Still, he says, “the nature of being human is having technology.” Christopher is currently writing a book about human relationships with technology, which he’ll discuss in his panel, Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices Are Divisive. “Every new technology falls on a continuum between obstruction and augmentation,” he says, and as such it poses unexpected paradoxes. For instance, “Everyone says ‘location doesn’t matter’ – but it makes location all the more important because you can choose to be anywhere.”

Admittedly, that last insight is not mine. Nicholas Negroponte pointed that out in his book Being Digital (Vintage, 1996). I’ll claim at least the synthesis of the rest though. I’m anxious to talk about this stuff at SXSW Interactive and in the new book.

Many, many thanks to Nora Ankrum and The Austin Chronicle for their time and attention.

 

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21C Magazine: This is Your Brain Online

I compiled my thoughts on a bunch of recent books about the internet, social concerns, and brain matters into a piece called “This is Your Brain Online: Recent Books on Cognition and Connection” for 21C Magazine, many of which have been hashed out right here on this site.

Here’s an excerpt:

Regarding public cell phone use, comedian Bill Maher once quipped that if he wanted to be so privy to one’s most intimate thoughts, he’d read his or her blog. Nancy Baym addresses this technologically enabled collusion of public and private, as well as the more traditionally debated clashes, in Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity, 2010). Baym’s is by turns all-encompassing, in that she covers nearly every epistemological viewpoint on so-called social media expressed thus far, and all-purpose, in that anyone can read this book and see how these structures of knowledge apply to their own use of technology. In her study of technology’s influence on social connections, she breaks it down into seven key concepts: interactivity, temporal structure, social cues, storage, replicability, reach, and mobility. Sure, any time one attempts to slice up such a malleable and ever-changing landscape into discrete pieces one runs the risk of missing something. This process, one of closing off an open system in order to study it, is necessary if we are ever to learn anything about that system. Nancy Baym has collected, synthesized, and added to the legacy of digital media and indeed technology studies at large. This book is a great leap forward.

Many thanks to Ashley Crawford for the opportunity to contribute to 21C. Read the full piece here.