For the Nerds: Bricks, Blocks, Bots, and Books

I used to solve the Rubik’s Cube — competitively. I never thought much of it until I, for some unknown reason, was recently compelled to tell a girl that story. I now know how nerdy it sounds. The girl and I no longer speak.

Erno Rubik among his Cubes.
Some of the things I grew up doing, I knew were nerdy (e.g., Dungeons & Dragons, LEGOs, computers, etc.). Others were just normal. Looking back on them or still being into them, one sees just how nerdy things can be. In a recent column on his SYFFAL site, my man Tim Baker serves the nerds some venom. Nailing several key aspects of the issue, Baker writes,

Thanks to the proliferation of information on the internet anyone can be an expert in anything, well a self-presumed expert. The problem is that people are choosing to become experts in things that might carry a certain cultural currency in fringe groupings but have no real world value. Comic books and niche music scenes are great, and add to the spice of life but no matter how often the purveyors of such scenes repeat the mantra, they are by no means important. They are entertaining and enjoyable but fail to register on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. So while cottage industries have popped up allowing those who are verbose enough to make a case that Led Zeppelin is essential to who we are, it does not change the fact that these experts are dabbling in the shallow end of the pool.

Now, if you know me, you know that I’m the last person to be promoting anything resembling growing up, but I will agree that since the widespread adoption of the web, nerd culture often gets completely out-of-hand. It’s also treated as a choice you can make, but as every true nerd knows, we’re born not made. As my friend Reggie Hancock puts it, citing the most recent nerd icon to end all nerd icons, Tina Fey:

Tina Fey is, unabashedly, a nerd. It’s not a badge of honor she wears, but a stink of reality. She’s not a nerd because she likes Star Wars and did an independent study of comedy in junior high school, Tina Fey likes Star Wars and did an independent study because she’s a nerd. It’s not a persona she assumes, she didn’t live with a dumb haircut for years on purpose, but because Tina Fey was born a nerd, lives as a nerd, and will die a nerd.

To the cheers and glee of nerdkind everywhere, John Baichtal and Joe Meno have edited a collection of ephemera regarding every adults favorite plastic blocks. The Cult of LEGO (No Starch Press, 2011) covers the blocks’ history, how-to, and hi-tech.

Nerd touchstones like comics, movies, LEGO-inspired video games (including Star Wars, of course), Babbage’s Difference Engine, and Turing machines are covered inside, as well as the LEGO font, image-to-brick conversions, home brick-printing, Douglas Couplandbrick artists, record-setting builds, and robots — Mindstorms, LEGO’s programmable robot line, by far the most sophisticated of the LEGO enclaves. Here’s the book trailer [runtime: 1:43]:

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If you want to build stuff with more than just plastic bricks, O’Reilly’s magazine, Make: Technology on Your Time, is the grown-up nerd’s monthly bible. Volume 28 (October, 2011) is all about toys and games. There’s a pumpkin catapult, a kinda-creepy, semi-self-aware stuffed bear, a silly, copper steamboat, a giant bubble blower… It’s all here — and much more. Check the video below [runtime: 2:18].

So, whether you know someone who dweebs over arduinos, has fits over RFIDs, or just loves to build stuff, Make is the magazine. It gets no nerdier. Also, check out the Maker Shed (nerd tools and supplies galore) and Maker’s Notebooks (my favorite thing from this camp).

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Oh, and if you can’t solve the Cube, there’s a LEGO Mindstorms Rubik’s Cube solver on page 245 of The Cult of LEGO. The machine takes an average of six minutes. For the record, my fastest time was 52 seconds.

Get on it, nerds.

Follow for Now is Now Available at BookPeople

Yep, nearly five years after its release, Follow for Now is now available at BookPeople in Austin, Texas. As you can see in the photo below, it’s in the General Science section, and I am quite proud.

It’s also in Cyberculture & History, and right now, in the New Arrivals.

So, if you’re in Austin and don’t have a copy, stop by and get yours.

Many thanks to Michael McCarthy and everyone at BookPeople for their support. And to you for yours.

Guy Debord: When Poetry Ruled the Streets

Writer, filmmaker, instigator, and revolutionary, Guy Debord is probably best known for his involvement with the Situationist International (McKenzie Wark calls him their “secretary”) and their concepts of the dérive and détournement, the former of which is one of the core ideas of psychogeography, and the latter of which went on to define the culture jamming movement. Their slogans were the words on the walls during the May 1968 uprisings in France. They published the proto-Adbusters of the time, and their spirit hangs heavy over the work of Shepard Fairey, Banksy, Joey Skaggs, The Yes Men, Kembrew McLeod, and other postmodern-day culture jammers and media hackers alike. Greil Marcus (1989) puts them in the lineage of resistance movements: Dada, Surrealism, Situationists, punk rock. Wherever we attribute his influence, Debord lived and loved in line with the thoughts he wrote.

Guy Debord on the set of 'Critique of Separation', 1960

Debord’s best known and best selling book is The Society of the Spectacle (Zone Books, 1994; originally published in 1967), and the “spectacle” concept it defined have remained a mainstay of media criticism ever since. Debord biographer Anselm Jappe (1999) wrote, “The spectacle does not reflect society overall; it organizes images in the interest of one portion of society only, and this cannot fail to affect the real social activity of those who merely contemplate these images” (p. 7). Debord (1994) himself wrote, “All that was once lived has become mere representation” (p. 12). Does that sound familiar? It should. He continues, “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (p. 12). Defined as such, the spectacle sounds a bit like fellow French thinker Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra, does it not? Debord clarifies, writing that the spectacle has two foundational attributes: “incessant technological renewal” and the “integration of State and economy” (1998, p. 11-12). Nonetheless, Debord’s work has yet to receive the widespread reverence it deserves.

One might be surprised that I implicitly seem to compare myself, here and there, on a point of detail, with some great mind of the past or simply with personalities who have been noted historically. One would be wrong. I do not claim to resemble any other person, and I believe that the present era is hardly comparable to the past. But many figures from the past, in all their extreme diversity, are still quite commonly known. They represent, in brief, a readily accessible index of human behaviour or propensities. Those who do not know who they were can easily find out; and the ability to make oneself understood is always a virtue in a writer.
— Guy Debord, Panegyric 1, p. 8.

One recent attempt to remedy Debord’s unsung unrest comes in the form of Vincent Kaufman’s biography Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry (The University of Minnesota Press, 2006; now available in paperback). Kaufmann assumes the role of “unqualified reader,” as he claims no previous fascination or familiarity with Debord. This perspective gives him and his book a unique approach among books about the Situationists. Lacking an “ideological axe to grind” Kaufman sees as imperative to understanding Debord and his life of rebellion, fortunes, misfortunes, adventures, exploration, drifting. “Perhaps it is only by boat that we can really lose ourselves,” he writes, recalling Slavoj Zizek’s metaphor for postmodern rootlessness, and Debord’s persistent pursuit of authentic experience. Of the numerous biographies of Debord and books about Situationists, Kaufman’s is among the best, most thorough, and makes a great introduction to his work and their world.

“I wrote less than those who write,” Debord once said, “but I drank more than hose who drink.” The title of his sixth and final film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), is a palindrome that he roughly translated to “we turn in the night and are consumed by fire.” If any one phrase could sum up the way the man felt about our media-mad, modern world, that one would do.

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When Poetry Ruled the Streets: This clip from Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) features Adam Goldberg and Nicky Katt as two of the gang of four, and Hymie Samuelson as Guy Debord. [Quicktime clip. Click the image to play; runtime: 2:30]:

References:

Debord, G. (1994). The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books.

Debord, G. (1998). Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. New York: Verso.

Debord. G. (2004). Panegyric 1 & 2. New York: Verso.

Debord, G. (2009). Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957 – August 1960). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

Jappe, A. (1999). Guy Debord. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Kaufmann, V. (2006). Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Linklater, R. (Writer/Director). (2001). Waking Life [Motion picture]. United States: Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Marcus, G. (1989). Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wark, M. (2008). 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International. New York: FORuM/Princeton Architectural Press.

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Apologies to Andrew Feenberg and James Freedman for stealing the title of their book for this post. Here is a mini-documentary of Feenberg’s time in Paris in the late 1960s and his archive of posters therefrom. [runtime: 8:36]

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Three Models in-Progress

Now that Spring semester is over, I can get back to the real work. One of my classes (Dr. Nick Lasorsa’s Theory Building in the Social Sciences class) inspired me to rediscover visual modeling (see Shoemaker, Tankard & Lasorsa, 2004 and Britt, 1997). I’ve always been a big fan of playing with ideas visually, but it had been a while since I’d tried to model any of the things I’ve been working through in my head. Below, I’d like to float three models in various stages of development.

I’ve been playing with this model for several years. Thinking through the creation and evolution of culture continues to lead me back to a mix between people and technology. I see people working on the prevailing culture through various bottom-up processes and technology shaping it from the top-down. There’s a lot more to it, of course, but that’s about as parsimonious as models get.

It has long been the case that media studies saw the evolution of media technology (and its relationship to our senses) as moving from an oral culture, to a print culture, to electronic media (i.e., back to a predominantly oral culture), as shown on the left side of my model above — Walter Ong (1982) and Marshall McLuhan (1964) both recognizing the shift from the ear to the eye and back. I believe, however, that the history of the theatre system has been widely overlooked in media and communication studies, having just as much to do with the evolution of electronic media as print has. Performance studies might bear this out, but I think it’s all but missing in our discipline. Print has been unduly privileged. So, I added a second column to the model to illustrate the theater’s place in the history of our current wired culture.

The last model in my head lately is just a new way to slice up the communication process. The ancient sender/receiver model and its many updated versions have served us well, but I want a model that would account for the channel and the message in a different, more nuanced way. If we break communicative acts into the three constructs above — content, context, and contact (each of which influences the others and can come in any order, but all must be present) — we can account for things left out of the original Shannon and Weaver (1949) model (upon which most subsequent models of communication have been based).

These are far from finished, but I’ve worked each to a point that I find useful. I’ve withheld a lot of my explanation and expansion on these preferring instead to see how well they stand with minimal support. Suggestions and discussion are welcome.

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Special thanks to Brian Spitzberg for teaching me this stuff in the first place and to Nick Lasorsa for the recent refresher.

References:

Britt, D. W. (1997). A conceptual introduction to modeling: Qualitative and quantitative perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Ong, W. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the world. New York: Routledge.

Shannon, C. E. & Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Shoemaker, P. J., Tankard, Jr., J. W., & Lasorsa, D. L. (2004). How to build social science theories. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Mark Dery: Post-Future Shock

Mark DeryMark Dery synthesizes the newest fringes of our culture into a united media interrogation of postmodernity. His books and countless articles place cyberculture, posthumanism, artificial intelligence, underground music, science fiction, etc. under a shrewd lens of inquiry and he returns adept insights and new ideas.

Overlooked and underrated, Mark Dery should be added to the short list of valid modern visionaries.

Roy Christopher: Many of the subjects in your analyses of cyberculture tend to have a “pro” or “con” view of the exponential progress of technology. What’s your personal take on our current overdrive technological progress?

Mark Dery: Well, if by “overdrive” you mean the runaway speedup of techno-evolution, I think we need to learn to philosophize in a wind tunnel. We tend to mime our speed culture rather than make sense of it. The smeared graphics and train wreck typography of designers like David Carson, formerly of RayGun magazine, are one example of this mimesis; “blipcore” techno that buzzes by at heart-attack tempos is another. We live in the age of blur; to understand who we are and where we’re going as a wired society, we need to be able to sketch an exploded view of the cultural bullet train as it streaks past at full throttle. The dug-in, hunkered-down stance of cyberpundits like David Shenk, who fulminates against “life at hyper-speed” and keeps his TV in his closet, is a bunker mentality. No one’s going to stop the world so we can get off. The info-vertigo we’re suffering from, the unrelieved sense of personal disorientation and social dislocation, is going to be a fact of life from now on — deal with it. Obviously, I’m not saying that we should throw out our moral compasses just because there’s no one true magnetic north, culturally speaking, anymore. My personal take on the breathless hyperacceleration of technological change and the social upheaval it’s causing is that, rather than consign unfashionably “humanist” notions of social justice and political change to the recycle bin of history, we have to learn how to be moral animals in a world where all the old, comforting bedtime stories about God and progress and the providential hand of the free market are deforming and disintegrating as our culture, our increasingly posthuman technology, accelerates away from our nature — human psychology, which is still bounded and shaped by those evolutionary artifacts we call bodies. That’s what a lot of my writing and thinking is about.

RC: With the enthusiasm for externalization and “leaving the flesh behind” that has come along with advances in technology, do you foresee a renaissance of the “Human Factor” coming as the next wave?

MD: We have to ask what “The Human” is? That’s the vexed question. When I interviewed David Cronenberg (in my parallel-dimension life as a journalist), he professed bafflement about the very notion that we’re becoming posthuman. To him, the media’s colonization of our inner landscapes and the cyborgian offloading — into ever-smarter, increasingly lively machines — of more and more of our mental and physical functions is all too human. Humans are tool-using apes — signifying monkeys — and technology is part of us, at this late date. Even so, there’s a spontaneous recoil from the suggestion that the alien in the mirror is us. That’s the parable of the Unabomber, who inveighed against technology while hacking together nasty little pieces of exploding hardware and writing apocalyptic manifestos on a rattletrap typewriter. Where does nature (what you call the “Human Factor”) end and culture (technology) begin? The Unabomber didn’t include the typewriter in his technological demonology, which is a curious sin of omission. According to the SF novelist J.G. Ballard, the typewriter is a cyborg incubator: it encodes us, stamping the linear bias of the assembly line, and all of industrial modernity, across our imaginations. The distinction between ourselves and our tools is becoming increasingly arbitrary — more and more of a reassuring fiction — and the anxiety provoked by the blurring of this once clear-cut distinction manifests itself in the fetishizing of the “Human Factor.” The “renaissance” you’re talking about is already upon us. Mail-order catalogues from Smith & Hawken and Pottery Barn and other merchandisers of gracious living abound in “distressed” faux antiques and pseudo-Shaker furniture and ersatz Arts & Crafts housewares — mass-produced talismans of a time before mass production, when the human touch left its traces on everyday objects. To be sure, these sorts of commodities are partly about shoring up one’s social standing with icons of timeless good taste, but they’re also about the veneration of the handmade, i.e., the human touch, and of objects “humanized” by the passage of time, transformed from generic things into weathered, worn, one-of-a-kind treasures with pedigrees and personalities.

RC: What are some of the newer areas of technological advancement and the sociological ramifications thereof (that you haven’t already researched) that have sparked your interest?

MD: The new plastics that have enabled the current renaissance in industrial design, emblematized by the soft, biomorphic, translucent “blobjects” spawned by the iMac. Quantum computing. Xenotransplantation and the engineering of transgenic animals. The far fringes of comparative ethology, where researchers are exploring the no man’s land between human and animal intelligence.

RC:
For those who haven’t yet read it, what can you tell our readers about your newest book, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium (Grove Press, 1999)?

MD: Like many, I feel as if contemporary America is an infernal carnival, equal parts funhouse and madhouse — a “pyrotechnic insanitarium,” to borrow a turn-of-the-century nickname for Coney Island. In The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, I wonder: Are social forces such as the yawning chasm between rich and poor tearing the fabric of American society to shreds? Or are our premonitions of cultural chaos just a toxic cocktail of turn-of-the-millennium fever and media-fueled hysteria? I find the answers in Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh ‘s visions of black helicopters and the Heaven’s Gate cultists’ fantasies of alien saviors; in Disney’s planned town, Celebration; and Nike’s dreams of global domination. Along the way, I puzzle over the popularity of blow-up dolls of Edvard Munch’s The Scream and wonder what, exactly, Jim Carrey’s talking butt is trying to tell us. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is a theme-park “dark ride” through contemporary America, a culture torn between angels and aliens, the smiley face and The Scream. Keep your hands inside the moving vehicle at all times!

RC: Who do you admire doing science right now? Who do you consider to be truly forging new paths? And who do you like that’s reporting these paths?

MD:
Truth to tell, I’m not much of a disciple of science. I read social histories and cultural critiques of science; my “hard” scientific reading is strictly Homer Simpson fare — magazines like The Sciences and Smithsonian, the science page of The New York Times (despite the unabashedly pro-business flackery of Times science reporter Gina Kolata, recently exposed in an excoriating cover story in The Nation). I’m a great fan of Stephen Jay Gould, a luminous scientific mind who has the political virtue of being on the side of the angels — that is, whatever side the unreconstructed sociobiologist Richard Dawkins isn’t on. And he’s ferociously funny — a vanishingly rare trait among popularizers of science. Also, the popular science writer Timothy Ferris is always enlightening and entertaining. But my favorite writer on science and technology remains J.G. Ballard, the SF visionary and postmodern philosopher par excellence, whose ruminations on our over-lit media landscape, stalked by “the specters of sinister technologies,” are an inexhaustible mother lode of brilliant insights and mordant bon mots.

RC: Do you have any projects in the works you’d like to mention?

MD:
I just signed on as editor of ArtByte, a magazine of digital culture — formerly a magazine of digital art, as its name suggests — whose roll call of contributing writers includes Bruce Sterling, Erik Davis, and other SF/cybercrit writers familiar to your readers. I’ve been charged with radically reconceptualizing the magazine as a smart, snarky meme-splice of I.D. (the American design magazine, not the British youthstyle mag), The Baffler, and the late, much-lamented Australian cyberzine, 21C, with a dash of Suck.com at its best. It will feature coverage and criticism of e-culture, targeting the terminally wired, and the incurably informed: readers who feel at home in what Alvin Toffler called “blip culture,” readers with rapacious media appetites who thrive on information overload but want to engage critically with the ever more mediated world around them. I’m frantically brainstorming a plan for global domination.

At the same time, I’m juggling several book ideas, one about the insect as cultural icon, another a social history of irony. Then, too, there’s “My Dinner With Hannibal,” the mash note to Hannibal Lecter I’ve always wanted to write — a literary dissection of the haute-couture cannibal in the age of Martha Stewart. With the return of ’80s-style greed-is-good meanness and conspicuous consumption (symbolized by the grotesque hypertrophy of the American car into the gargantuan SUV), it seems like an idea whose time has come.