Bearded Miracles

In 2004, Al Gore said that the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was “not the result of random acts of a few bad apples. It was the natural consequence of the Bush Administration policy.” Something similar should be said of this year’s financial meltdown.

As liberals (and I mean liberals in the strict economic sense, not those on the left side of the American political spectrum) try and spin the current financial crisis as merely the work of a few bad apples, they struggle to defend the principle of the free market itself. But let’s be honest. This financial meltdown is proof that when you de-regulate the hell out of the economy for two decades, “the market” does not deliver lower costs, increased “democracy,” higher standards of living, or anything else that liberals like to claim for it. Rather, it delivers the opposite: costs spikes, inequality, poverty, declining opportunity, etc. In his speech last night, president Bush claimed that the market regulations and federal bail-outs proposed to fix the financial system were only temporary expedients, necessary evils given his devotion to the free market. But regulating the market is not only necessary in times of crisis - it is always necessary. When markets are not regulated, socio-economic pressures build up until a financial crash of the kind we’re seeing today becomes inevitable. Too much boom always leads to bust. Hence the expedient regulations being hashed out today should not be seen as a quick fix to correct the action of a few bad apples; they should be seen as an attempt to stake down the whole tree. Regulation does not prevent the market from functioning, it allows the market to function. Markets do not occur “naturally,” in the absense of human actions, but are complex human products - technologies, if you like. Markets are the sort of trees that have to be staked, pruned and tended, like Bonsais. Regulation is not a foreign pressure applied to markets from the outside; it is their foundation, prior to them, necessary for their function. Markets do not pop up and then get regulated; human practices like regulation create them in the first place. They are recombinant human products.

Ironically, the liberals need regulation now to patch together their broken rhetoric which naturalizes and glorifies the free market.

For more on this social-constructivist view of markets, see Michel Callon, ed. The Laws of the Markets (London: Blackwell, 1998).

Our comrades in arms over at Lame Punk Slogan have justed dropped an exclusive new cover of an 80s favorite by Information Society, by none other than RHD’s own Beastmaster Romance. Check it out here.

In keeping with the theme of riddims from my last post, I wanted to share this wikipedia article on a particualrly popular riddim, “Sleng Teng,” reputed to be the first fully electronic riddim, created on a Casio keyboard. Also check out an article from the Jamaican Rhythm Directory, with banter about whether or not Sleng Teng might be the most versioned riddim, ever!

Riddims are to reggae what standards are to jazz - stock riffs, progressions, beats and melodies that can be re-interpreted by each and every new player. The difference is that for reggae, the “riddim” means mostly the drum and bass groove, with less accent on other rhythmic instruments like guitars, keyboards and percussion. This distinguishes riddims from standards, which are more often defined by harmony and melody (the “tune,” if you will).

In the 1970s, riddims, most often one-off records of drum and bass grooves, became the building blocks of reggae styles like dub and talkover. DJs would play the riddim record and then add effects, add other instruments, play other records at the same time, or add live vocals. The riddim gave the crowd something familiar to latch on to, and the DJ’s real art was to re-interpret the familiar record and make a new version.

In our digital, recombinant times, when the remix and the mashup rule the ether, and a lively culture of open-source internet remixing has emerged, the time is ripe for putting stock musical elements - or textual, or visual elements, or ideas - out there on the internet and letting the public rework them at will. Hence some web denizens have recently latched on to the web’s convenience for distributing reggae riddims. The Jamaican Riddim Directory offers a large database of information about classic reggae riddims, while MIDI RIDDIMS offers midi-made recordings of classic riddims (on another note, we mustn’t forget Phat Drum Loops, a veritable vault of classic breakbeats). Remixers delight! - and just more proof of reggae’s dynamic, pioneering influence in terms of remixing, sound-engineering, and musical styles (an argument we’ve pursued before - see also this post on DJ Spooky and track 17 from the Farewell Estate, “the future of dub”). Happy remixing!

Running directly contrary to our recent discussion on this imagined (for now) post-digital future, BLDGBLOG reports on “the digital replacement of the native,” through the proliferation of Wikified GPS-based travel guides.

“For their recent trip to Namibia,” a short blurb in Wired magazine explains, “Greg and Anja Manuel packed light: PowerBars, clothes, and a Garmin GPS loaded with Traveler’s Africa version 8.02, a user-generated map brimming with 50,000 points of interest. That last item meant they didn’t have to hire an experienced guide.”

Fair enough. The map looks beautiful, the idea is cool, and, within two or three trips, the GPS device does indeed save money; however, I can’t help but wonder what this might foretell for local economies, all over the world, based on guided tourism. For instance, a small group of American tourists comes through your village, eating PowerBars and looking at handheld GPS devices. They don’t go to any restaurants; they don’t ask any questions of anyone; perhaps they don’t even rent a hotel room.
For all economic purposes, it’s as if they were never there. They were more like surreal poltergeists wearing Vasque boots, reading Jonathan Safran Foer on a Kindle.

What better way to avoid meeting Namibians! Just use their electrical grid to recharge your gadgets, pay no taxes, and leave.

Here’s a technology that manages to be extremely participatory for a very specific economic set while entirely (indeed intentionaly) exclusionary to the rest of the world. So in a depressing twist, this device uses “crowd-sourcing” in order to allow for the total colonization of local knowledge by the proprietary technologies of the techno-gadget industry.

Last week, in the spirit of science fiction, the Beastmaster and I started a dialog about what our post-industrial future might look like. As we imagined this post-industrial future, we started to wonder what people living in a world without fossil fuels, combustion engines, and other trappings of industrial civilization would think of all the relics of the industrial era still existing in their days. The Beastmaster suggested that plastics might be the “key physical terminal material” to come out of our current petrol-based civilization, as well as a real emblem of 20th-century consumer capitalism. He wrote: “The fact that so many of our consumer goods are made of long-lasting plastic means that these items will really be around, probably in significant quantities, after the means of their production has become extremely rarefied.”

Imagine that. Imagine a future in which the wreckage of our civilization lies all around, waiting to be used or disposed of. How will people in the future use the junk we leave behind? In Medieval Europe, it was not uncommon to construct buildings of stones recovered from the ruins of Roman buildings, hence the architectural and archaeological “stratification” of a city like Rome, where you can see centuries-old buildings whose foundations reflect a totally different kind of construction than their superstructures do. These buildings reveal deep historical time, legible from the outside like the strata of the earth’s crust. They also remind us that recycling was not invented by environmentalists in the post-1945 era. Recycling has been the normal modus operandi of human civilization since time immemorial. Anthropologists and Cultural Theorists have also called this modus operandi “bricolage”. Bricolage specifically evokes the recombinant, a messy patchwork of stratagems woven together to form the tissue of everyday life - routines, tools, social connections, prestige, money, schedules, etc. But it also suggests an ethical orientation, a preference for using already produced materials to create new things rather than producing new things from scratch again. Seriously: waste not, want not. It is only since the chemical revolution of the 19th century, which enabled us to create non-biodegradable substances for the first time, that we have witnessed the global build-up of excessive quantities of consumer goods, massive waste of natural resources, wide-spread ecological damage, and the byproducts of an industrial civilization out of balance with the needs of the planet and our own species alike - e.g. garbage and the landfills to which it is banished.

When we here at RHD argue, as we have for the last three years, that recombinant culture (say, mashups) reflects something about the character of our current historical era (what we have called the “age of the recombinant”), we mean to say that all of today’s talk about ecology, fossil fuels and wars in the middle east has the same historical context as the mashup: an era of massive overproduction, a crisis of the world system based in industrial capitalism. De-industrialization is clearly upon us, especially from my point of view, writing from south-east Michigan. But I have to disagree with anyone who would claim that we are living in post-industrial times…yet. Today’s moment of crisis over ecology, energy, the petro-chemical industry, geopolitics, economic and cultural globalization, etc. - all of this has to do with the painful transition from an industrial to a post-industrial world, a transition we are still experiencing in full force.

BUT: the capitalist’s waste can be the bricoleur’s bread and butter. In an era of overproduction, there are always free resources to be found if one knows where to look. One must learn to scavenge, to recycle the waste of others, and then one can create NEW CULTURE without creating any NEW WASTE. This requires the ability to do what DIY-ers call “repurposing” materials, or what philosopher Richard Rorty called “recontextualization” - the ability to see beyond the “correct uses” of everyday objects, to adapt them to new uses, to customize, modify, disassemble, reassemble them, or scrap them for parts. This goes as much for the dumpster-diver hunting food as much as for the philosopher crafting new ideas - creating anything “from scratch” means re-using already existing materials. So the Beastmaster wrote: “Within this imagined-but-plausible future, the scope of recombinant material culture expands exponentially. That is to say, many fewer things will be produced, but many more old things will remain. Does this not create the conditions of the classic post-apocalyptic fantasy wherein the world of uses signified by our human-made physical world gets flipped on it’s head a la Mad Max?”

And Mad Max brings us back to where we started: science fiction. The Mad Max series imagines a new civilization rising from the ashes of an old one. It imagines a future in which humans become scrappy, resourceful collectors, traders, and customizers of abandoned consumer goods and military or industrial equipment from a previous age. From the vantage point of our current civilization, Mad Max’s future seems to be both futuristic and barbaric or primitive. It troubles our very conceptions of long-term history, our ideas about history being progressive or regressive, evolving or devolving, etc. But strange as Mad Max’s world may seem to today’s audiences, the recent flare-up in public discussion about global warming, financial crashes, and other apocalyptic scenarios suggests that such a world may not be far off. The key to surviving in such a world would be bricolage, a way of life that embraces recycling, the recombinant, and the whole DIY ethos, the will to be a creative and productive person rather than just a consumer. Imagining such a future in order to inform and critique the present - that is the very purpose of science fiction, after all, isn’t it?

Yesterday RHD ally in the blogosphere Lame Punk Slogan posted a fascinating tidbit about recycling used CDs by using a record press to stamp the grooves of a vinyl record into the plastic (see post here). This is a fascinating and practical process, not unlike the old Soviet technique of recycling X-ray film as LPs (Beastmaster Romance brought this fact to RHD a while back - see post here). But LPS didn’t stop with this new medium, also imagining a new post-electric player like the hand-crank phonographs common in European and American bourgeois parlors from 1900 to the 1930s.

The real purpose of LPS’s post, his “frame of mind,” as he put it, in thinking about these new media, was to connect this fantasy about technological change with the myriad of social, economic, and technological changes we are going to have to make to survive in a post-petroleum, post-industrial world - a world whose floodwaters seem to be lapping at our doorstep.

A very timely thought. As more and more people acknowledge the very real possibility that we may be on the cusp of some epoch-changing climate change, they also see the connection with industrialization - in other words, they also see the fact that in order to survive in a world that seems more fragile, we will have to use technology and natural resources differently, as well as changing our cultural values, attitudes toward ‘nature,’ public knowledge of ecology, patterns of behavior, and social organization. Hence LPS asked whether forms of media and ways of listening might change, too - the fantasy of the hand-crank disk player.

This new medium is a great idea, but how would one control against the major problem of the original hand-crank phonographs - that the disk turns at an uneven speed when directly tied to human work? This problem could easily be solved with a wind-up device, one that stores human work as energy for later. Take for example flashlights made for camping - you do the work of squeezing the trigger, the motion builds up a charge in the flashlight’s battery, the battery runs the light for a limited time. This kind of human-powered device - even electronic devices - may suggest a subversive principle in our resource-guzzling world: if you want electricity to power your horde (or hoard) of small devices, generate it yourself.

But then LPS asked a different question - one that is perhaps even more tantalizing. That’s the “archaeological” question about what future listeners to recycled media would understand about old, dead digital media. Presuming that the there was a turntable that worked like LPS suggested, direct drive by hand crank, how would future listeners understand that what they were listening to was made on an electrical device, let alone a digital device? How would they understand Aphex Twin? A very thought-provoking question. LPS’s imagined future, in which we live in a far more post-industrial place than we live now, is a great laboratory for thinking about the social and technological consequences of change. What would people in this future think of the colors of clothes made with chemical dyes - would they look gaudy, loud, arrogant? What would they think of the taste of pseudo food, Michael Pollan’s “edible food-like substances”? Would they recognize that Twinkies are intended as food? What would they think of anything made out of plastic, or more broadly, made from petroleum?

There is, perhaps, a new Luddism at work here. We at RHD have been interested in Luddism for a long time (see our track “saboteur saboteur saboteur” from the Farewell Estate). But, I hasten to qualify, we are looking for a high-tech Luddism, one which recognizes, like the first Luddites, the angry British textile workers of the 1810s who smashed factory machines, that anti-technology activism should never be based in a knee-jerk reaction against innovation. One must rather be selective and critical in his/her use of technologies, embracing those innovations which are safe, productive, and not harmful to humans or the earth, and working to stop the spread of technologies which help pollute, dehumanize, destroy, etc. Being a “Luddite” should never mean being anti-technology - especially not anti-high-tech out of fear, misunderstanding or mystification. Rather, “Luddism” should mean the ability to think against the necessity or inevitability of “progress.” Many social, economic and technological currents unleashed in the name of progress actually serve some much better than others, fostering social inequality, environmental damage, etc. So Luddism might provide just the perspective we need for understanding our future in a more sustainable way. Even better: maybe the entire two-hundred year adventure of industrialization is something of a historical wrong turn, based in enlightenment arrogance about the servility of nature. Britain’s original Luddites, remember, were responding to the industrialization of the textile industry. Long story short, imagining a better future for ourselves might require just the sort of evaluation and selective picking and choosing of technologies that Luddism provides - to help us choose which machines, knowledges and techniques from the industrial past are safe to take with us into the future, and which should be left in the dustbin of history.

Check out Clay Shirky’s recent article on Worldchanging.org, in which he discusses the “cognitive surplus” generated by the transition from passive television entertainment to participatory internet culture.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

“Gin, Television, and Social Surplus” by Clay Shirky

Right about now….

Myself, his lordship the EARL OF BANDWIDTH, is pleased to announce the web-only release of his new album, Dissphasia!!! It’s made up of b-sides and outtakes from my last three albums, and the last three years. 37 tracks!!! Nearly 2 hours of music!!! Want to hear what the future sounds like? I think if I root around in my computer enough, I can find out. As usual, this music is cost free, copyright free, and completely public: take and ye shall receive.

http://www.recombinanthumandragon.com/dissphasiapage.html

with loads of love,
- the Earl

Just when you think a rusty old instrument like dada has lost its usefulness, you trip over it, and it shocks its way back into your mind.

Witness a few examples of living dada I found on the web recently. Not that we here at RHD had ever forgotten dada’s usefulness, or thought it was obsolete - remember this track from my Paris days? We have always drawn inspiration from dada both in terms of method (recombination, recontextualization, juxtaposition, collage, satire), and in terms of pet themes: political corruption, intellectual dishonesty, war, capitalism, the political unconscious, social decay, economic depression. Dada provides a way of looking at the world that is perfectly suited to our own Bush-era malaise (American imperialism, economic recession, a war dragging on, a military industrial complex out of bounds, etc., continuing de-industrialization). This is why it was so great to be reminded of dada’s lasting punch by some recent remixes of old dada materials I found on the web.

First are two remixes of George Grosz paintings from 1926, paintings which were bitterly critical of politicians, capitalists and the army in Weimar Berlin to begin with, paintings which now have had the faces of scoundrels like Bush and Cheney, Jerry Falwell, Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch and Donald Rumsfeld photoshoped onto them.

1. Remix of “Eclipse of the Sun” (1926) by waagnfnp They folks at waagnfnp included this nice description: “Since the politicians seem to have lost their heads, the army and capitalists are dictating what is to be done. The people, symbolized by the blinkered ass, simply eat what is put before them.” See original here.

2. Grosz, “Pillars of Society” (1926) Remix See the original here.

3. Last but not least, a little light reading to come down off the heavy stuff, Kurt Schwitters vs. Crazy Frog.