Mistakes on purpose

February 27, 2022
by Bobbie Johnson
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We are surrounded by ways to make mistakes. 

There are so many.

And so we err. We blunder. We learn to apologize.

But mistakes can also be made on purpose.

Sometimes that purpose is mystical. Navajo weavers introduce “spirit lines” into their rugs to stop these transcendent objects from trapping their soul. 

The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi embraces the beauty in imperfection and teaches acceptance and impermanence. (The idea of designing technology that can age, passim.)

Sometimes the purpose is more earthly. 

Trap streets are “cartographic fictions”—fake entries in maps, added in by the maker as a signature. China Miéville turned them into a whole world in Kraken. If you make the map, you know where the traps are; if you copy the map, you don’t spot the mistakes. You get caught.

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T-rex pounds down the track, smashing through trees and roaring wildly as it hunts down the jeep. Jeff Goldblum, folded up in terror and injury, cringes back and knocks against the gearshift. Laura Dern suddenly screams “Look out!” 

Did you see it?

It is easy to miss on the first attempt, or even the fifth. But keep looking, and the eye can eventually discern what the brain couldn’t: a brutal jump cut right in the middle of an action scene from one camera angle to a slightly different camera angle of the same thing. 

One of the biggest movies of all time, breaking one of the most basic rules of cinematography.

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There’s a line at the end of the first verse of The War on Drugs song “I Don’t Live Here Anymore” that sounds like “I never wanted anything / that someone had to give / I don’t live here anymore / I went along eeh will.”

In an episode of the Song Exploder podcast, lead singer Adam Granduciel explains: He ran out of words when he was writing and made a noise instead. Despite attempt after attempt in the studio to replace it with another line, he could never find a better answer. So it stayed.

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There are so many ways we can make mistakes, but also to make things that merely have the appearance of a mistake. Rug makers, musicians, film editors, map makers—all making deliberate choices to keep an error, or introduce one, in a piece of work. 

They know why, just like you do. There are moments when feeling overtakes theory, and when the wrong answer is the only way to get the emotion right.

Radar, week 8: Insatiable appetites

February 25, 2022
by Bobbie Johnson
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  • The NYT’s David Leonhardt, who has consistently argued for a kind of liberal’s relaxation of covid restrictions, has been a loud voice during the pandemic and often an incredibly frustrating one. This New York profile gets into a lot of good material on it. My favorite line: “He was exactly as tall as I expected.”
  • Paul Farmer, one of the truly unique forces in global health equity, died this week. I found this tribute one of the most honest and affecting.
  • Something else we have endless edacity for? Scam stories. Here’s a new one: a design agency, spun up while everyone works remotely, that never truly existed.

What are animals to us?

February 20, 2022
by Bobbie Johnson
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What are animals to us? 

They’re our friends, our families. 

They’re entertainment. They’re beauty. They’re food.

Sometimes researchers dress up as pandas so they can get closer to study them. To medieval poets, animals are teachers themselves.

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Some animals are threats to us.

Rampaging pigs are “super invaders” in the Bay Area.

Bats may well be the ultimate source of the covid pandemic.

Chinese virologist Zhi Shengli, whose lab is now the center of many people’s theories about the origins of Sars-CoV-2, has been working on bat coronaviruses for years. She spoke to Jane Qiu in a piece I helped edit.

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Some animals are threats to themselves.

Today the Canada goose is among the most common birds you’ll see, living in the lakes and waterways of big cities nearly everywhere, but in the early 20th it had been hunted almost to the point of extinction. 

John Green tells a story about them being the victims of “live decoys.” That is, a hunter would take a goose, clip its wings, and place it in a pond. The honking call was a siren song to other flocks, who would be drawn to the decoy and then promptly get dispatched by the men waiting in the bushes with guns. 

Live decoys were made illegal in America in 1935: now there are millions of Canada geese around the world.

The same idea is still in use elsewhere, though.

Judas goats are used to lead sheep or cows to the slaughterhouse.

In the Galapagos, they were used to help eradicate an invasive population.

Judas goats probably don’t feel guilty, but then again, they never asked for the job. They never asked to be taken to remote Pacific islands, either.

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So what are animals to us? They are resources to be harvested; technologies to be deployed. 

We’re using their organs for xenotransplantation.

We’re even turning them into explorers.

Phil Lubin, a cosmologist in Santa Barbara, has a neat and slightly bananas plan for interstellar travel that uses tiny vessels that can travel at immense speed. His latest idea is to send tardigrades into space. 

So now they’re emissaries now, too.

Perhaps they’ll be the first creatures from Earth to meet an alien race. 

I wonder what they’ll say about us.

Radar, Week 7: Reckonings and records

February 18, 2022
by Bobbie Johnson
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• I was rapt by the way this Katie Baker piece on Eric Schneiderman’s attempt at a #MeToo redemption tiptoed through such difficult territory.

• Hype as a scale.

• Scratching that Murakami-esque, middle aged vinyl dad itch: Listening Room on Instagram

• When she was worried about the state of the world in the 1960s, Pauline Oliveros started singing and playing long, extended drones on her accordion. She spent nearly a year on a single note, an A.

• How we broke the supply chain.

Inspired by gravity

February 13, 2022
by Bobbie Johnson
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Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans said if you inspire enough people to support your work just enough, you can earn a living from almost anything. A thousand people, a hundred dollars each, that’s enough to build on. A simple theory.

Li Jin recently put forward a modest proposal: what if you get 100 people who give much, much more? More money from fewer people.

Why stop there? Why not a single patron giving one thousand times as much? 

Because that’s art world economics. 

Because the point wasn’t the hundred dollars.

It was the thousand souls.

Portraits by Jean Smith

Money is gravity.

You need it to operate, but it’s not the point.

Nobody is inspired by gravity.

Kelly’s essay was written in 2008. The web was still just a little bit wild around the edges at that point. Patronage was still a weird experiment, and software was still given away, called shareware. The rules were still being written. 

That certainly doesn’t mean it was all better, but it was differently balanced.

The proportions had not been airbrushed; the cycle hadn’t established itself.

Today, being weird online means one of two things. Either you’re trying to get there before other people do, not missing an opportunity, changing the rules to your advantage. That’s the excitement some folks feel right now: they feel like it’s possible to rewrite gravity.

Or it means finding new proportions, new angles to see from, avoiding maximizing everything, knowing life is not moneyball.

Jean Smith tried music and a variety of odd jobs before she turned to painting. Today, she sells her portraits on Facebook for $100 each. 

“She could certainly charge more, but the egalitarian price is the point.”

Radar: Week 6

February 9, 2022
by Bobbie Johnson
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Loss and survivance

February 7, 2022
by Bobbie Johnson
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You can lose a lot of things. Your door keys. Your temper. The plot. 

If you’re particularly careless, you might even lose entire countries. 

Ukraine is on the edge right now. It’s not the first.

Doggerland was a piece of prehistory, a stretch of marshy coastline from when Britain was just an archipelago dangling from one corner of Europe. It was misplaced during the Original Brexit 9,000 years ago when the sea carved East Anglia away from the Netherlands. 

It was only rediscovered in the 1930s.

Today, Jakarta is sinking into the ocean. Rather than lose a capital city, Indonesia’s just moving it somewhere else.

You lose things as you grow older. People, places, memories. Some of them you can control, come back from. Some you can’t. 

Sometimes people disappear. Or they can be disappeared. Sometimes they’re gone, even if they’re not even really lost.

Roy Scranton wrote about what loss can teach us. When the Europeans slaughtered their way across the Americas, he says, “truly, a world ended. Many worlds, in fact. Each civilization, each tribe, lived within its own sense of reality—yet all these peoples saw their lifeworlds destroyed.”

I think about those lines, those lifeworlds, a lot.

Loss.

David Marchese asked Eddie Vedder about loss: he turned the story around.

Scranton introduced me to a new term to describe what happens when you lose it all. 

You fight back by commiting an act of survivance. 

That’s what Gerald Vizenor, the Anishinaabe poet, calls it.

Derrida wrote about survivance too. He called it something between life and death, the continuous reanimation of a living-dead being.

Indonesia is survivance. Turning the story around is survivance. The people of Doggerland were survivance, too.

Maybe we might all have to be it one day.

Radar: Week 5

February 3, 2022
by Bobbie Johnson
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• Beautiful images of polar bears who have moved into an abandoned Arctic weather station (drone footage on YouTube)

• Coober Pedy is a town in Australia where half of people live underground because it’s so bloody hot.

• The alien’s binary: Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on motherhood.

• Pew’s morphology of Republicans identifies five distinct groups.

• Mind expanding (to me) piece on the possibilities of Arabic typography.

The publisher’s dilemma

February 1, 2022
by Bobbie Johnson
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Media

The great gear shift in digital music—the one that took us from Napster piracy, through iTunes, to the enormous, on-demand library of Spotify—took little more than a decade. 

We all live in Lester Bangs’ basement now. 

I’d just moved to the US when Spotify appeared, almost out of nowhere. It felt different, looked different. What was this European revelation? Music online was a hard market, and streaming was even harder, in part because the labels like it that way. But Spotify outflanked its rivals, sometimes in good ways. It also bullied artists. It was part of a class that arrived with a pile of investment cash to burn as it elbowed its way into a market and then, on top of the mountain, installed itself as a new middleman. 

Now it’s like an old glove. It doesn’t really fit me any more, but it’s comfortable and I know it. But it’s worn away in all the places that feel familiar.

Today, Spotify’s under a different kind of pressure. A kind that won’t just go away. 

The change came when the platform dipped into publishing. It branched out into podcasting. It started rolling up the industry as much as possible. It paid Joe Rogan $100m to capture his audience, since when he has made googoo eyes at all kinds of rightwing ideology, brought in guests who issue misleading claims about covid, and promoted ivermectin. Disinformation expert Renee Diresta went on Rogan’s show: she says the audience hated her. 

So Neil Young started a new sort of pushback: Spotify is free to do what it wants, but artists aren’t obliged to help it make money. You don’t have to be a platform for everything, and you don’t have to be on every platform.

Everyone has their opinions. Daniel Ek has guidelines.

Me? I stopped giving it my money. There are better options.

Further reading

• “Two thirds of publishing is about failure”
• Don’t try to be a publisher and a platform at the same time
• Lester Bangs from the trailer for Creem: America’s Only Rock n Roll Magazine

Tree aesthetics

January 30, 2022
by Bobbie Johnson
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weeknotes

There are so many trees, and not enough. We need a billion trees, a trillion. But even a single tree can tell a beautiful story.

There are four hundred trees stacked in a vertical forest in Hubei Province.

Heatherwick Studio’s 1000 Trees housing complex in Shanghai is two years behind schedule but it’s here.

Tree aesthetics are here, too: We’ll see them more and more. Trees are our friends, our saviors. Hope in a time of climate change.

They call 1000 Trees “verdant and striking.”  I’m not sure this is what verdant feels like. But when other megacities strip their poor neighborhoods of shade trees, just one can be a lifeline.

The thing I remember about Shanghai is the hot, dirty smell; a crackling, sweaty garbage scent of people and possibilities that shook me up and took me over. Some parts of the city were verdant to me: the avenues of the French Concession were green and dotted with shade. But thatt was ten years ago, twelve years ago. A lot can change.

Trees are a kind of equity: you can find out your city’s score. There are more people than trees in San Francisco these days, but the coverage isn’t even.

You’re guilty of using too much carbon, but at least you can offset it by buying a tree. That’s why we need so many. Be careful, though: forest offsets aren’t always what they’re supposed to be.

At dusk one day, when it was warm and sticky, I took a few minutes to count the trees on our property. There were twenty three. Some of them are tall and proud, some of them only just getting started. Twenty three. Suddenly one thousand doesn’t seem like much, and a trillion doesn’t seem anywhere near enough.

Further reading:

• It’s not climate change, it’s everything change
• The Falkland Islands have no native trees.
• An argument that science have a court system like the law.
• What can a technologist do about climate change?