derided

"The peddlers and the maritime workers were coming to the U.S. when the immigration laws were closing..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 22:18:27 +0100

“The peddlers and the maritime workers were coming to the U.S. when the immigration laws were closing in on them. The U.S. passed a series of racist laws that basically said if you were Asian you couldn’t enter the U.S. like other immigrants and you weren’t fit to become U.S. citizens. On top of that, the peddlers were going into the heart of the south when segregation laws were being imposed, and in a period that had the highest rates of lynching of black men in U.S. history. They survived by building networks of kin and relying on the help and partnership of others within U.S. communities of color. Other historians have documented the cases of anti-Indian violence that were occurring in this period on the west coast – the riots and driving-out campaigns that targeted Punjabi laborers in California and the Pacific Northwest. With the peddlers I looked at, who were moving through the Jim Crow south, they were facing much more individual levels of threat.”

- Interview with Vivek Bald, author of Bengali Harlem in the WSJ - so interesting to trace these erased immigrations, that of Bengali peddlers and sailors and maritime workers to the US - often with immigrants intermarrying into other communities of colour, and having to navigate segregation & Jim Crow. Contrast this great N+1 article on White Indians and the desi lack of solidarity with other peoples of colour and deracination, especially in the US today. The erasure of certain types of immigrations and immigrants has far-reaching effects.

"Santander’s narrow downtown streets are dotted with electronic signs that direct drivers to the..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:08:00 +0100

“

Santander’s narrow downtown streets are dotted with electronic signs that direct drivers to the nearest available parking spaces, reducing traffic congestion. Sensors are being installed on dumpsters to signal when they need emptying and are being buried in parks to measure soil dampness, preventing sprinkler overuse. Coming soon: wireless-enabled meters that monitor water consumption at homes and businesses, phasing out door-to-door meter readers. Mayor Iñigo de la Serna says the effort, known as SmartSantander, will cut city waste-management bills 20 percent this year, and he projects a 25 percent drop in energy bills as sensors conserve use in public building systems. “Smart innovation is improving our economic fabric and the quality of life,” the mayor says. “It has changed the way we work.”

The 20-person SmartSantander development team, which is led by University of Cantabria engineering professor Luis Muñoz, has also pushed residents to help collect and make use of data. Anyone in the city can download a mobile app to complain about potholes or other nuisances and receive updates from officials. A separate app tracks the availability of buses and taxis in real time. Still another city-provided app lets people wave their smartphones over barcode decals in shop windows to get price information or place orders. “This is the future, and we are already there,” says local shoe store owner Angel Benito, who has received orders from customers using the app.

”

- Spain’s Santander, The City that Runs on Sensors in Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Incredible stuff; later on the article talks about the potential for companies to test products in this connected environment. It’s so easy to imagine a future in which all our usage behaviours and dwell times and choices will be analysed & used to iterate design, physical objects as service, everything is an always-on game. The smart city is the new focus group. Use is testing, nothing is perfect, everything is constantly watching and altering and smoothing itself to fit more perfectly into our commutes, our streets, our routines and our other products. The connected world is an ecosystem, data analytics is how it will mutate.

"While this email is obviously absurd, it’s the same general logic that we will be confronted with..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:34:21 +0100

“

While this email is obviously absurd, it’s the same general logic that we will be confronted with over and over again: choose your team. Which would you prefer? Bombs or exploits. Terrorism or security. Us or them. As transparent as this logic might be, sometimes it doesn’t take much when confirming to oneself that the profitable choice is also the right choice.

If I absolutely have to frame my choices as an either-or, I’ll choose power vs. people.

”

- From Moxie Marlinspike’s blogpost about receiving a telecom surveillance brief from Saudi company Mobily to monitor communications on services like WhatsApp, Twitter, Viber, Line. Worth a read, especially for further thoughts on what it means to be a “hacker” in an increasingly capitalism-driven world, where the sousveillance or disruption of hacking is now much more easily leveraged by governments and those in power. It isn’t “security services” vs. “hacking” any more, that simple narrative doesn’t work - Moxie’s formulation is more accurate: power vs. people. (How does this all fit into the machine-gaze, there’s the question: who controls the code?)

This is from ‘Rajputs of Rajputana’ by MS Naravane...

Fri, 17 May 2013 01:11:00 +0100

This is from ‘Rajputs of Rajputana’ by MS Naravane published in *1999*.

Please note how he describes how the Queen’s maids “could not say ‘No’” to the king, and yet, he miraculously concludes that there was “no rape” in Rajput society. Poor MS Naravane will not be able to say no when I threaten to beat him about the face with his own sorry text, but though there will be a great deal of violence, it will be consensual. Clearly.

Samsara research is sometimes quite sapping to the morale.

nostalgiachan: Some of the StoryNexus doodles I’ve worked on...

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:17:00 +0100

Sydan from Fallen London and Ilvala Soma from Samsara

Sydan Kuu Loska of Winterstrike and Sydan Martin of The Silver Tree

Contes (Arrel and Annwn versions) from The Annwn Simulation 1985

nostalgiachan:

Some of the StoryNexus doodles I’ve worked on over the past week or two. Here we have:

Sydan, the high-class authoress with a violent streak and a tinge of kleptomania from Fallen London

Ilvala Soma, the gentle but iron-willed dreamwalker who loves a good (literal) mindscrew from Samsara

Sydan Kuu Loska, Scarf and Feather Society member and Ironbird reformer from Winterstrike

Sydan Martin, highly-suspicious spy from The Silver Tree

Contes, in both her Arrel tradgoth attire and her Annwn bard gear from The Annwn Simulation 1985

Seriously, I’ve done better work on notebook paper in the last week than I’ve probably ever done in a sketchbook. Notebook paper is seriously magical.

Oh man, lovely Storynexus fanart, including a character from my game Samsara. No, no, I am not overexcited at all. Oh no.

explore-blog: If you really want to know a people, start by...

Fri, 03 May 2013 13:47:07 +0100

explore-blog:

If you really want to know a people, start by looking into their bedrooms.

Shereen El Feki, author of the provocative and intelligent Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World, on how politics of sex give a lens on society.

(↬ The Dish)

"As is the case with good orators, Mr. Modi is able to project an image of his choosing. But he is..."

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 13:27:00 +0100

“As is the case with good orators, Mr. Modi is able to project an image of his choosing. But he is also a projection of the Hindu middle class, which wants to believe — and persuade everyone who does not believe — that it does not adore Mr. Modi for being the man who headed a state government that, more than a decade ago, appeared to neglect its duty to protect hundreds of Muslims from being slaughtered in one of the country’s deadliest communal riots, but because he is modern and smart. It is not an image he has always lived up to.”

- Politicians Courting the Privileged by Manu Joseph.

Definitely worth a read, if you’re interested in the movements and motivations of the newly politicised great Indian middle class. Also dotted with remarkable observations:

Rahul Gandhi as “a man who has the bearing of the disturbed Prince Gautama who has just discovered poverty in his kingdom and is on his way to becoming the enlightened Buddha under a fig tree”. The Indian middle class as wanting, now, “a great manager at the helm of the nation”. Government as business; a huge turn from the Fabian origins of the nation (arguably only at the very top level) but even the crusading Satyamev Jayate-style social righteousness that’s characterised the last, maybe, five years.

Maybe even more problematic are the two “poles” that we seem to have here: Rahul Gandhi, the scion of a political dynasty, more akin to a princeling than a political candidate who is so hereditarily entrenched in the system that a vote for him feels uncomfortably undemocratic. And Narendranath Modi, a smirking Hindu nationalist with blood on his hands and an iphone in his pocket.

I suppose it’s slightly less painful to look at them both through the lens of India’s business success stories instead… (And hey, who hasn’t had an entitled manager? Or a thoroughly evil one?)

"Where land mines are indiscrimate, cheap, and brutal, drones are discriminate, expensive, and..."

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 18:25:52 +0000

“Where land mines are indiscrimate, cheap, and brutal, drones are discriminate, expensive, and brutal. And yet they are insufficiently discriminate: the assassination of the Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan in 2009 succeeded only on the seventeenth attempt. The sixteen near misses of the preceding year killed between two hundred and eighty and four hundred and ten other people. Literature fails us here. What makes certain Somali, Pakistani, Yemeni, and American people of so little account that even after killing them, the United States disavows all knowledge of their deaths? How much furious despair is generated from so much collateral damage?”

- From Teju Cole’s article A Reader’s War in the New Yorker.

From elsewhere in the article, “I know language is unreliable, that it is not a vending machine of the desires, but the law seems to be getting us nowhere.”

And again, ” In Andrei Tarkovsky’s eerie 1979 masterpiece, “Stalker,” the landscape called the Zona has the power to grant people’s deepest wishes, but it can also derange those who traverse it. I wonder if the Presidency is like that: a psychoactive landscape that can madden whomever walks into it, be he inarticulate and incurious, or literary and cosmopolitan.”

Olivia Rosane’s excellent response to Cole’s article calls the insistence on the fundamental equality of other people “exhausting, alienating”, and I think that’s right. Fiction can in some way be a shorthand, a machine (in the traditional sense) for evoking a response, a set of emotional triggers preserved in amber that doesn’t lose its voice or get tired or feel downhearted or decide to just give up on a comment thread.

Yet the literary exercise of sympathy is clearly not enough; I can’t help but feel that war is an writerly occupation rather than a readerly one,

"If the language justifying drone strikes in sovereign states appears to directly parallel the..."

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 13:58:00 +0000

“

If the language justifying drone strikes in sovereign states appears to directly parallel the language of the Responsibility to Protect, it’s no accident. Although the R2P doctrine was developed in response to genocide and other mass atrocities, the language of R2P was easily turned to other purposes. That’s not entirely inappropriate, either: R2P’s underlying logic is equally applicable to terrorism, which is itself a form of human rights abuse (and one that can have devastating consequences for civilian populations).

As I have argued elsewhere, you “might even say that the R2P coin ought logically to be seen as having two sides. On one side lies a state’s duty to take action inside its own territory to protect its own population from violence and atrocities. On the other side lies a state’s duty to take action inside its own territory to protect other states’ populations from violence. Either way, a state that fails in these duties faces the prospect that other states will intervene in its ‘internal’ affairs without its consent.” In a sense, then, it was the human rights community’s critique of sovereignty that helped pave the way for drone strikes.

”

- Thoughtful article by Rosa Brooks - law professor at Georgetown and past US state department advisor - on the flipside of the idea of ‘humanitarian interventionism’. She articulates something that I’ve struggled to in the past - both because ‘humanitarian interventionism’ and its neoliberal rationale feel uncomfortably imperialist in many senses (‘the western liberal’s burden’?) though of course the cost of not acting can be incredibly high in the short and medium terms. And partly because of the idea of sovreignty itself is a sticky one for me, personally and politically- the nation-state is hardly a system of organisation without its problems, abuses and failures, but then again I am also acutely aware that my country has only existed as an independent nation for fifty odd years. The consequences of our lack of sovreignty, our colonial past, are still being played out. So: a tangled moral, legal, social problem:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/02/14/hate_obamas_drone_war

"Playing video games before bedtime may give people an unusual level of awareness and control in..."

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 11:54:42 +0000

“Playing video games before bedtime may give people an unusual level of awareness and control in their dreams […] “If you’re spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it’s practice,” said Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. “Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams.””

- Video Gamers Can Control Dreams, Study Suggests | LiveScience (via new-aesthetic)

"What makes Hinglish especially quaint is its love of the continuous tense and the way it dispenses..."

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 19:16:00 +0000

“What makes Hinglish especially quaint is its love of the continuous tense and the way it dispenses with articles like “the” and “a”. My own favourite examples are “head is paining” (headache) and “mother serious” (mother is very ill) - both handy excuses for leaving work early.”

- An interesting if rather obvious article about “hinglish” by Zareer Mansari, will have to catch the radio show Goddess of English.

The quote above though is just incredibly angering in an article that is purportedly calling Hinglish “an authentically Indian hybrid” - surely we can do away with the snobbery and oh-isn’t-that-quaint when we’re trying to have a conversation about a legitimate linguistic form in what is probably the country with the second largest English speaking population in the world, behind the US. By sheer numbers, if nothing else, Indian English (and I wouldn’t call it Hinglish by any means, the accent, vocabulary, inflection and grammar vary hugely between regions & mother-tongues) is legitimate.

It also ends with a disappointingly prescriptive call for “standardisation”, which feels gloriously Victorian. It assents to the colonised view of English as a ‘money-making language’, its use and value are in its ability to allow the Indian to participate in the coloniser’s economy. The line drawn between colonialism and capitalism/westernisation seems a little bit too pat here, worthy of further unpicking. The Dalit perspective that the article begins with in itself complicates this - English as an escape or shortcut through the mire of marginalisation, casteism and oppression both historically and contemporaneously.

So, I think the main problem here is the article conflates two different issues: English and its value internally as a lingua franca between a multilingual society, and English as an avenue to communicate with the wider world.

Though the old tradition of looking outside India for prosperity still holds for many Indians (either working abroad, or with family members working abroad, or working in call centres or sweatshops that serve a primarily western demographic) the inverse is also becoming true: many western industries & multinational corporations are looking towards India as a new market. The power relation isn’t quite so one way. Crudely: if a Hollywood studio wants to make a hit movie for an English-speaking Indian audience, they’d be better served scripting it in Indian English rather than demanding that their audience standardise to RP, sharpish.

We need to stop thinking of Indian English(es) as bastard forms or somehow less valuable or authentic. Speaking differently doesn’t equate to speaking badly; it doesn’t need to be fixed.

The examples the article comes up with at the end for ‘dysfunctional Hinglish’ “caus[ing] havoc when clear and precise communication is required, whether on a simple taxi ride or in more serious situations like hospitals and law-courts” are frankly disingenuous - I mean, these are problems anyone using language in a precise situation faces. These “dangers” are quite simply a screen to justify a call to standardisation that is based almost entirely on the rather patronising argument that, well, at least it would make it easier on our western/ised ears when we phone up Bangalore to get our computers fixed. (Begs the question of what “standardisation” would entail. The vaguely Oxford-accented Indian English of the educated, urban elites? The conversational Indian English of a character in a Rahul Bose film? The studied, erudite profanity of a Salman Rushdie narrator? Probably not the English of the kid of the writer’s family’s maid in Bombay, I’d wager.)

Most of these instances - law and medicine - have a defined terminology (often Latinate in origin) and a different register/diatype for precisely these reasons. The idea that Indian English(es) can somehow cause a breakdown of communication in the law courts is ridiculous. And it’s the responsibility of doctors to understand patients, whose complaints need to be translated even with shared language. Between doctors, again, is a specific register that sits to the side of one’s proficiency in conversational language.

Partly, the difficulty here is because the article makes no such distinctions between registers or modes (written/speech) or even context. On a completely anecdotal and personal note, my accent & dialect wander enormously depending on who I’m speaking to and in what context. It’s cut-glass RP for telemarketers who’ve annoyed me, a certain kind of casual Indian English when I’m around my parents, a slightly different sort again when I’m speaking with my grandparents (and then, probably different depending on whether we’re on the phone, or emailing, or whether I’m in London, or Bangalore), just as I might speak differently when I’m at the pub with mates in London or at a job interview. It’s all about communication, and while standardisation might seem to be the easiest or best way of communicating, I think those examples prove otherwise.

It’s worth saying again: these Indian English(es) are not borrowed, or bowdlerised, they are in fact new standard Recieved forms. The variations in fact just legitimate rather than undermine their position as standard forms, most linguistic theorists will agree that the standard form is a hypothetical construct expressed in a variety of different ways by individuals and groups - in India, and, well, everywhere else.

I’m not arguing against giving people linguistic choice, the ability to adapt, even to assimilate - but dismissing those who raise concerns about the drive to a Macaulay-esque call for English education (without decoupling it from the colonial ideas that drive it) as “nationalists” or language chauvinists is unforgivable. There are real issues here: the loss of local languages and culture, the enshrining of cultural prilivileges of speaking english and the disproportionate representation of urban elites & middle classes in that group, the tangle of colonialism and oppression that doesexist.

The call to standardisation is, then, just one part of my problem with this, but an important one: the idea that all our Englishes need to be perfectly sanded off and smooth and featurelessly interchangeable (so that we can in turn be featurelessly interchangeable cogs in a global capitalist machine) is outmoded, and deeply saddening, and more than anything totally unnecessary. Trust me, if you’re having that much trouble communicating where you need to go to a taxi driver because he speaks a slightly different English than you do, then, here’s a thought - maybe try listening a bit better?

Snarking With The Subaltern: Ramayan in neon

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 19:09:03 +0100

Snarking With The Subaltern: Ramayan in neon :

woh-battameez:

[Context: Zee Tv is airing the Ramayan. Again. And this time it’s not the 90’s version, it’s shot with new-age techie-effects. It’s all very amusing and set to air on every Sunday, one of the new attempts of having “Indian culture” invade in our lives, now that Satyamev Jayate has died].

Me: Have to admit, there is a sinister part of me that is so happy to see Ramayan in all its super-dude, tight abs, shiny goldish-brown bronzed over skin and really, really tight blouses for the ladies glory.

"Asian intellectuals couldn’t help but notice that Europe’s much-vaunted liberal..."

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 18:52:18 +0100

“

Asian intellectuals couldn’t help but notice that Europe’s much-vaunted liberal traditions didn’t travel well to its colonies. Mohammed Abduh, the founder of Islamic modernism, summed up a widespread sentiment when, after successive disillusionments, he confessed in 1895 that: “We Egyptians believed once in English liberalism and English sympathy; but we believe no longer, for facts are stronger than words. Your liberalness we see plainly is only for yourselves, and your sympathy with us is that of the wolf for the lamb which he deigns to eat.”

In 1900, British atrocities during the Boer war and the brutal western suppression of the Boxer rising in China had provoked the pacifist poet Rabindranath Tagore to compare, in one unusually violent image, such bards of imperialism as Kipling to mangy dogs. “Awakening fear, the poet-mobs howl round / A chant of quarrelling curs on the burning-ground.” Writing in 1907, the Indian nationalist Aurobindo Ghose was even harsher on lachrymose claims about the white man’s burden. As Ghose saw it, previous conquerors, including the English in Ireland, had been serenely convinced that might is always right. But in the 19th century, the age of democratic nationalism, imperialism had to pretend “to be a trustee of liberty … These Pharisaic pretensions were especially necessary to British imperialism because in England the puritanic middle class had risen to power and imparted to the English temperament a sanctimonious self-righteousness which refused to indulge in injustice and selfish spoliation except under a cloak of virtue, benevolence and unselfish altruism.”

There is something to Ghose’s tirade. Free-traders and freebooters may have found merely convenient the idea that Asia was full of unenlightened people, who had to be saved from themselves. But many European and American intellectuals brought to it a solemn sincerity. Even John Stuart Mill, the patron saint of modern liberalism, claimed that “despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, if the end be their improvement.” By 1900, such views had hardened into propaganda, and a mania for imperial expansion, drummed up by the press and politicians, had become part of the political life of European societies.

”

- The ruins of Empire: Asia’s emergence from Western imperialism, by Pankaj Mishra.

Interesting, and spot-on about the origins & sympathies of the “humanitarian” militarism of recent Western campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya. “Intervention” as a thin screen for colonialist practice, backed by imperialist righteousness. Though it would be useful to talk a little bit more about class & economy - the poverty of ex-colonial nations in Asia and Africa only adding to their percieved inferiority. Surely one of the pillars holding up the dogma is that of capitalism, and its confusion of wealth with value? So of course, there is a great incentive not to question the legitimacy of the wealth and economic power, allowing imperialist notions to remain unexamined, and seep into internal politics. There must be a connecting line between neo-imperialism on the world stage, and internal approaches to the poor, immigrants, & other minorities.

hautepop: Pictures and Vision by Robin Sloan, May 2012 the...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 22:10:09 +0100

hautepop:

Pictures and Vision by Robin Sloan, May 2012

the titanic showdown between Facebook and Google might not be the News Feed vs. Google+ after all. It might be Facebook Camera vs. Project Glass.

It might, in fact, be pictures vs. vision.

Facebook is the world’s largest photo-sharing site. Google’s new Project Glass augmented-reality specs are about sharing your vision.

Google is getting good, really good, at building things that see the world around them and actually understand what they’re seeing.

In this context, Google+ is not the company’s most strategic project. That distinction goes to Glass, to the self-driving cars, and to Google Maps, Street View, and Earth: Google’s detailed model of the real, physical world.

Maybe in twenty years we’ll think of Google primarily as a vision company—augmenting our vision, helping us share it—and, oh wow, did you realize they once, long ago, sold ads?

I am absolutely not going to mention the N** A******** here

What I like about Sloan’s piece is that it suggests an inversion of what Google Goggles is about. The usual approach has been to think about the glasses as an extra screen where Google can project information - augmented reality, but also omnipresent ads. Glasses as a means to serve more Google Stuff.

But what if Glasses are about looking over showing? What if they’re more observant than instructive? What if they’re about what you see? What if they put the user’s vision first? …& take all that the user sees and do a fuckton of processing up in the cloud and then use it for recommendations on all the other screens and devices where we’re more amenable to ads and suggestions rather than bombarding a thousand advertisements millimetres from our corneas…

…What if Google Glasses are more a camera than a display? It’s a much less aggressive user experience - feeling like one that’s built around you, the user, that helps you share moments in how you see the world (witness that second photo up top).

And that is a really fundamental human drive: this is how I see the world. This is who I am. Understand me. Sharing moments of vision is sharing a really personal kind of connection. Currently that’s mediated by cameras/phones - what if it comes from a device a centimetre from your eyeball, and what if viewers can see those images on a screen a centimetre away from their eyeballs?

Step closer to getting inside each others’ minds, innit.

"[On Cat’s Cradle] Presented in lieu of a thesis, the novel finally got him his master’s in..."

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 23:02:51 +0100

“[On Cat’s Cradle] Presented in lieu of a thesis, the novel finally got him his master’s in anthropology.”

- From William Deresiewicz’s retrospective ‘I Was There: On Vonnegut’, reading vonnegut at the age of 48. It’s interesting as an overview of his work - though, I think, terribly wrong about Cat’s Cradle - which he describes as adolescent, not deepening the themes of Player Piano or Mother Night. However, read it to be reminded of Vonnegut’s magnificent phrase and insight - it’ll make you want to reread your favourites, and seek out the one or two in the oeuvre you haven’t read. Plus, dear lord, he presented Cat’s Cradle in lieu of his Masters thesis. We miss you, Mr Vonnegut.

"The Muslims, in whose name books have been banned and writers harassed, are among the poorest people..."

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:58:00 +0100

“

The Muslims, in whose name books have been banned and writers harassed, are among the poorest people in India, which has been officially confirmed by an Indian-government report released in 2006. Now that elections have begun in Uttar Pradesh for its 403-seat assembly, the Congress Party has taken up one of the report’s recommendations and announced a 4.5 percent affirmative-action “subquota” of seats for Muslims. Elections trump ethics. As the social scientist Ashis Nandy told me in Delhi, on the morning after I fled Jaipur, “India is not a democracy, it is a psephocracy,” by which he meant that it wasn’t the rule of law but electoral calculation that governed the lives of Indians.

The controversy that erupted at the Jaipur Literature Festival is neither only about the freedom of expression nor only, in any representative way, about the sentiments of all Muslims. We cannot distance it from the crazy mix of celebrity, money, and media in the frenetic landscape of a market-friendly India.

”

- From Amitava Kumar’s excellent piece on reading Rushdie at the Jaipur Literary Festival - engaging with Rushdie as a literary critic, and with the complexity of this political act of speaking out in India (at that time, now)

I didn’t see Kumar read Rushdie at the Festival - but I was there the next day, reading the papers that buzzed with the possibility of his appearance, the ejection of the writers, walking through metal detectors and hearing people talk about whether there would be a (violent?) protest and the upcoming elections as they sipped beers and nodded along to Tom Stoppard. Not all of them were liberal intellectual khadi-wearing stereotypes either.

Kumar talks about “market-friendly India” - a perfect phrase, even in terms of the way we approach democracy. Half-bamboozlement and bribes, and half undercover Tehelka-style stings with their soap-opera revelations and hectoring TV chatshows.

"Somebody like Coke decides to create content like a network does or like Netflix is doing now. I..."

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 22:18:00 +0000

“Somebody like Coke decides to create content like a network does or like Netflix is doing now. I can’t help but think that’s not only a possibility, but a certainty. We’ve seen so many fantastic TV shows over the years somehow fail in the ratings—Friday Night Lights and Arrested Development were critical darlings but the networks didn’t know how to make them succeed, and there are whispers of Community, one of the best comedies on TV, possibly getting the ax at some point. Maybe some of these critically-acclaimed, audience-lacking shows get picked up by a company like Coke, retaining all the creative people involved, and they find a way to incorporate the product into the show, or at the very least, simply have people watch new episodes on The Coca-Cola Channel. Big huge Coke logo surrounds a media player of some sort, and they just let the show be. If picking up shows like that work, who’s to stop them from making their own programs?”

- Every brand will be a studio. ReelSEO.com

Not that this insight is in itself particularly new - brands have often had their fingers in the entertainment pie, supporting rather than advertising - viz. The Colgate Comedy Hour. Sort of, a step to the side of integrated branding. It’s not the Subway sandwich made into a plot element or - as the article mentions - ET following Reese’s pieces - but just brands following the focus of people’s attention. Hovering just to the right of the content itself and going, hey, we paid for this. and you like it. we’re kind of alike, aren’t we? we sort of like the same things. hey kid, i think you and me could reinforce each others’ cool…

But - as the article points out - it’s the emotional connection between audience & content that the brand is trying to leverage. It’s never going to be about “engaging content first, selling product second” - it’s selling product first, and if engaging content does that - then that’s what advertising will mutate into. But what will that world really look like? Will it be brands paying content creators to get the antagonists to drink their rivals’ soft drinks. Content creators threatening to ridicule a brand unless they’re given a healthy chunk of cash (aren’t there already stories about reality stars or celebrities “inappropriate” to luxury brands’ images being paid not to wear their products?).

All of which is fine - art isn’t some kind of ivory-clothed maiden unsullied by the touch of rough commercialism. It has always existed under the eyes and wandering hands of the marketplace of attention.

What might be different about branded content is the way in which we read our art - will the characters in our branded webseries and corporate-sponsored ARGs be reduced to consumers? Is their headache evidence of a brain-tumour or an excuse to do a cutaway of a packet of tylenol, are they starting an exercise regime because of that near-death experience last season or to showcase Nike shoes? Is that broken family getting back together because they’re worked through their issues or because it better represents Coca-cola’s brand values? How long before a brand-exec asks to tweak a piece of content to better appeal to the brand’s demographic?

In an ideal world - these choices would work in a personal/artistic context as well as a market one - but as viewers, we will necessarily begin to parse our texts commercially - whether the text calls for it or not, the characters will all live in a Gibsonian coolhunting future, all content layered over by a compulsive American Psycho narration of product-as-meaning.

Will anyone in a video be able to wear, buy, read, watch, mock, eat, drink or admire anything without the question of whether they’ve been bought off raising itself in the audience’s head?

(Another question: will brands start suing each other over their representations in branded content?)

Will this mean a focus on the contemporary-setting series? Or maybe even a move away from it - to avoid these kinds of choices? Or a kind of BBC-like artificially brandless world, full of Facepages and GNNs and Moogles?

Or maybe the studios will become the next brands? We’ve already got True Blood themed clubs - is it so hard to imagine a world where all real products begin their existence virtually, in a way the apotheosis of this idea of “brand values” - in their Aristotelian, screen-mediated form, the product is exactly what it wants to be, it has an emotional and narrative purpose - as seen on TV, and nowhere else, until its in your hand, and yours and yours. This already exists - American Girl dolls and Moshi Monsters already exploit this symbiosis - merchandising is the future.

Roll on Oceanic Airlines and Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes and True Blood cocktail mixes and Sex and the City clothing lines and Game of Thrones restaurants (oh wait, we already kinda had those.) Maybe the future of content is branding?

This evening I’ve been thinking about shipwrecks and...

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 02:48:00 +0000

This evening I’ve been thinking about shipwrecks and storms; acts of nature & vandalism; magic. And how unmagical the destruction in games can be - are there any metaphorical ruins amongst the breakable scenery and glossily saturated music-video exploding cars? Where are the games that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply. The first person shooter is the Michael Bay film: a clear-eyed & meaningless burning the world down. But what if we chose to destroy not out of lipserviced duty but genuine self-destruction? Vengefulness or grief, horror or arrogance, hands shaking on the controller as you yearn to or shrink from pressing the button. Or maybe I just wanted LA Noire to make me feel like Casablanca.

"The newspaper article is still idealized as a ‘final document’ – onto which comments are intrusions..."

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:11:13 +0000

“The newspaper article is still idealized as a ‘final document’ – onto which comments are intrusions of the living internet. Spaced apart from the authority of the paper, the unknown is quarantined, held to wriggle at the bottom of the frame.”

- But it’s a “final text” that - on the online versions of newspapers, at least - is being revised, but furtively. How can “comments” move beyond annotation or intrusion? Do they need to be a formalised part of the text - surely the future envisioned by this thought is newspapers-as-wikipedia - a constantly frothing & upturning collaboration - which has its own problems.

Moving away from that perhaps the fact that facebook sign-in is enabled is more interesting - alongside frictionless sharing becoming the norm - the trend is brand creation rather than anonymity or multiple disposable identities - will that lead to accountability? Privacy is dead, and we’re ok with signing our real names to its death warrant.

"The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there..."

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:44:33 +0000

“The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, vir- tual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Startingfrom this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am.”

- Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”

I’ve read this passage so many times in the last few days that I’ve basically committed it to memory. This is as close as I’ll ever get to saying that reading Foucault feels like a giant philosophical hug. But there is hope in this essay.

(via modernandmaterialthings)