Space out

My New Statesman review of "Out of This World" at the British Library, which I mentioned earlier, is now online.

Here's an idea for a science-fiction story. Humanity suffers a recurring bout of cultural amnesia. Bearers of the flame must restate the same ideas, and refute the same myths, every ten or 20 years. But, twist! This isn't some distant future but our own time. Such is the cultural Groundhog Day that afflicts science fiction. The genre contains much serious literature, and much serious literature should be considered part of the genre. The ghetto walls may be weaker than ever but the case still has to be made over and over again.

Read the rest.

The Architecture of Misgovernment

The Arizona Capitol. Image taken from the Flickr feed of DanMacMan and used under a Creative Commons Licence.

Harpers magazine correspondent Ken Silverstein opens his account of how the crackpot radical-right administration in the American state of Arizona shows the likely tone of the new Congress in Washington DC with a bit of architectural criticism:

In 1897, when the Territory of Arizona was seeking to demonstrate its fitness for statehood, the legislature solicited bids to design a new capitol building and grounds in Phoenix. The winning entry was that of James Riely Gordon, the architect behind a number of well-regarded public buildings in Texas and Maryland. He drew up ambitious plans: an expansive dome, a grand rotunda, stately wings for each house. But funding fell short, and so the legislative wings were scrapped, and a diminutive lead-alloy top was chosen in lieu of Gordon’s more elaborate dome. Worse, in the building’s interior, a mosaic of the state seal was bungled by the contractor, who forgot to include the images of cattle and citrus, two of Arizona’s “five C’s” (the others being climate, copper, and cotton).

Despite much talk over the years of an upgrade — including a proposal from none other than Frank Lloyd Wright, who envisioned the addition of fountains, gardens, and reflecting pools — all plans were rejected as too expensive. In the 1960s, two new buildings were finally erected on either side of the capitol, one for the house and one for the senate; but these structures, which resemble Soviet apartment blocks, only made matters worse. Nowadays, the capitol’s dingy, unshaded plaza is bare save for a few small rosebushes and some patches of dry grass. The buildings themselves have been plagued by plumbing problems and leaks, making the complex “wholly inadequate” to Arizona’s future needs, according to a task force charged with studying the matter.

The general unsightliness of the capitol makes it a fitting home for today’s Arizona legislature, which is composed almost entirely of dimwits, racists, and cranks.

Ignore that lazy "Soviet apartment block" jibe for a moment - there's an intriguing suggestion here of an architecture of misgovernment. "We shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us," said Winston Churchill while restricting the capacity of the rebuilt post-Blitz chamber of the House of Commons to less than the number of MPs. Churchill wanted the chamber to retain a sense of event in moments of parliamentary drama by forcing many Members to stand, an idea with considerable merit. But if we accept that thoughtful design can improve the quality of government or administration, surely there is also a way to design official buildings that will reduce that quality? Does dysfunction follow form? Silverstein suggests that corner-cutting construction, aesthetic incoherence and poor maintenance are the essential elements of the architecture of misgovernment; but those things are as likely to be the result of misgovernment as its cause. Or they could stem from a debased political culture like the one taking hold in the UK, where the completion of a world-class headquarters for the state broadcaster - a place that will immeasurably improve the efficiency of that broadcaster, as well as being a potential source of pride for the people it serves - is met with a dreary chorus of commenters moaning about "a waste of money". Or where the pioneer of a new model of school procurement believes that the architects of those schools have an obligation not to create "civic monuments". This is why we can't have nice things.

A Wild New Gig

Hunter S Thompson, 25 March, 1969:

Dear Jim [Silberman, Random House] ...

Are you ready for the death of print, books, and magazines? The whole weird future was laid on me tonight by a professor from UCLA Journalism school. The only missing link, he says, is a process for editing video-tape without computers ... and after that it's a whole new ballgame: No more Hollywood, no more book publishers, no more magazines ... I never paid much attention to Marshall McLuhan, if only because he's basically incoherent & needs about five editors. But the forecast I heard tonight is ominously clear, the underground backstairs line from UCLA ...

The real new journalism. He offered to turn me loose with a sound-sync video-tape machine the next time I get to L.A. No bigger than a typewriter, combining the roles of script-writer, director, editor, producer, and ... yes, even publisher. Tape-cassettes instead of book covers, video-tape receivers instead of magazines or newspapers. Jesus, it boggles the mind. The next time I get to NY I'd like to talk about it; this is a wild new gig. Are you into it? Why not ponder a tape/book experiment? To hell with the undiscovered editing process; that's inevitable anyway. Why not learn to use the tools before they're perfected? Do you have any screening rooms designed into that new building? Send word ...

Hunter

1969!

(This is extracted from Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist 1968-1976, the second volume of HST's collected letters. Which is absolutely golden stuff, a book well worth getting.)

From Sea to Shining Sea, By Sea

Florida's Overseas Highway. Image taken from the Flickr stream of jbaccile and used under a Creative Commons licence.

Reading N_O_R_T_O_N's superb post about the freaky roadside architecture of Branson, Missouri ("What Vegas would be like if it was run by Ned Flanders," according The Simpsons), I was struck by a strange Sunday-afternoon fantasy. Specifically, I was marvelling at the willingness of Americans to drive distances that would make Europeans weep. It occurred to me that this nonchalence could be an essential part of the American psyche, a denial spawned in response to the enormous size of the 48 contiguous American states. The vast expanses of land that America was fortunate enough to find itself in possession of at the end of the 19th century are as much internal as external - they have manifested themselves in the American mind. There's that expansiveness, that ambition, that generosity, that optimism that comes with the frontier ...

Anyway, this caused me to wonder: What if, instead of purple mountains and fruited plains, European explorers had instead come across a vast archipelago of islands, an Atlantic Indonesia between Canada and Mexico? This is a wholly pointless bit of counterfactual speculation ("How would the Second World War have worked out if Stalin could fly?!") but it made for a pleasant weekend reverie, so I'll share it anyway.

My thoughts started in New York, essentially an offshore archipelago-city in itself - of the five boroughs, only one, The Bronx, is on the American mainland. It is a place geographically and socially defined by its bridges and tunnels - down to the expression "bridge and tunnel" used by Manhattanites as shorthand to describe (unsophisticated) non-Manhattanites. The view of New York from an approaching ship is already an iconic American image; one can imagine it applied to all American cities. New York is matched, on the West Coast, by San Francisco and its surrounding cities - not an island-chain, but still a place defined by waterfronts, bridges and tunnels. Boston, similarly, is a peninsula. These are beautiful places; the American mode of city-building could have thrived in Columbonesia. Consider the Florida Keys, an island chain transformed linked by the 127-mile Overseas Highway - a bridge-causeway that could be read as transforming the islands into a single megastructure or the world's largest inhabited bridge.

The way that America's rivers served as conduits for the settlement of the West shows how the straits in Amernonesia could have carried pioneers west - paddle steamers completely supplanting railroads as the engines of expansion.


More from the Keys. Image taken from the Flickr stream of jbaccile and used under a Creative Commons licence.

But what of the roadside architecture that America's wide-open (contiguous) spaces have inspired? Among teeming thousands of islands, it's pleasing to imagine a vibrant wharf-front architecture springing up - eye-catching decorated sheds and Long Island Ducks designed to draw in visitors from the traffic streaming long the Interstate sealanes. Wharf-front architecture and decoration is the ancestor of the gaudy Great Sign and googie structures we know today. PLaces like Nyhavn and Bryggen can be read as the Las Vegas Strip of the ocean-going age, best understood from a boat as the Strip is best understood from a car. Hanseatic gabled architecture is the grandaddy of the decorated shed. One can easily and happily imagine it propelled into the 20th and 21st century - Wan Chai with Venturian characteristics.

Two Very Short Stories

Houses in Ixtapaluca, Mexico. Image taken from the Flickr photostream of jmb1977 and used under a CC Licence.

[These are two stories written for the Ballardian/Savoy Books microfiction competition, the results of which have now been announced. Stories written for the contest had to explore Ballardian or Savoyard themes. "Live-Work" got an honourable mention. The second story, "Unruins", was inspired by the above image, first seen on this Things post some months ago. It's now the basis of a longer, more elaborate project, to be announced at a later date.]

Live-Work

“After the crash, all the money went out of urban renewal,” said the property developer, Maxinalon. “This warehouse conversion was slumming itself anyway, so ...”

He had moved in the dealers and the people-traffickers. The live-work units were now meth labs, and the niche coffee outlet was a burned-out husk. The redundant creatives had adapted marvellously, because the hours were flexible.

To the sound of the exhausted police beating down the period-feature, iron-braced doors (wires trailed from the smashed entryphone), Maxinalon smiled a smile that was all percentages. “We’ve exhausted the potential of regeneration; the future is obviously degeneration.”

Unruins

The machines were still moving somewhere on the surface of the mutilated planet. They still extruded the epoxycrete frames of suburban houses, open at both ends, windows gaping. In some places, the land was eight deep in rapid-rendered family homes, jumbled in the upper levels as walls intersected with pitched roofs and the detritus of civilisation. Pictures from the ocean floor were discouraging. The hunting party had found a pocket of stale air in a second level subdivision. A car radio was embedded in the wall, and snarled the signals of new lifeforms emerging in the unruins.

London in 2010

I was 11 in December 1989. We said hello to the 1990s in a farmhouse owned by family friends somewhere in the North. That New Year, the Observer devoted its colour supplement to speculation about what London might be like in 20 years - in 2010. I was mad for cityscapes, sci-fi and futurology, and I really liked the pictures and some of the ideas in this colour supplement, so I kept it. About seven years ago, when my parents moved house, I found the magazine while clearing out my old room - I refrained from throwing it out, thinking it would be interesting to see how it held up in 2010. And here we are. How did they do?


I've photographed all 15 pages of speculation and they're up on my Flickr site, with some close-ups of interesting bits. (NB: click on the photos on this blog post for a closer look.) The text should all be legible. About half of the speculation is architectural - there are also pages devoted to transport and fashion, but I have little to say about them here.

To kick off the section, there are some short columns by Peter Hall (now a Sir, founder member of Blair's Urban Task Force), the late Tony Banks MP, Peter Kellner and the author Jonathan Raban (who has since contributed to Icon). These opening pensees are a stark reminder that London was considered far more of a "problem" back then - a potentially ungovernable, insoluble perma-crisis. London still suffers from terrible problems, and a crippling lack of vision in its governing classes, but beyond the fringe right I think few now see it actually failing and going feral on us.

Hall points to the need for Crossrail and high-speed rail links to the Channel Tunnel and Heathrow - a network we're still piecing together now, thanks broadly to the dismal stasis of the Major years. Banks draws attention to London's lack of a single governing authority - it now seem amazing that such a governmental vacuum was allowed to persist for so long, from 1986 to 2000. Kellner proposes surrender in the face of London's problems and suggests moving jobs around the country with a view to reducing the city's population by 2 million. Raban provides a direct and pithy rebuttal to Kellner's pessimism: "The nastier that London gets, the darker its peculiar charms, so people (not planners, or sensible journalists with a topic to follow) will be seduced by it ... Just as we love the romantic melodrama of the street in Dickens, we secretly love the growing horror-show of the city we actually live in." Hear hear.


Two different visions of the city in 2010 follow, the first of which is by Nigel Coates and Brian Hatton. Obviously, they get a hell of a lot wrong (London is no longer the capital - and why are blimps so seductive to futurologists?), but in some ways the vision is eerily prescient, even if the details are wrong. They see the influence of Charles persisting and deepening with the result that postmodern and neo-gothic facadism runs riot - "bad buildngs have approved facades", which leaves one to wonder who decides buildings are bad and who does the approving; hopefully not St James's Palace, or the the Carolingian pile Coates imagines built in Liverpool.

Bankside power station has been converted into a museum, although here it's the "Thatcher Museum of Commerce" - one shudders to think, presumably it would be full of brick-like yuppiephones and British Gas share certificates. (Tell Sid I'll meet him in the gift shop.) Another post-industrial museum is Waterloo station, part of which has been converted into a "Museum of Suburban Life". The other defining feature of Coates' London is high-tech parasitism, with exposed services, ducts and blobs creeping across the exterior of the city's buildings. He predicts the yuppification of Trellick tower, although suggests that its facade might need "softening" with a few blobs to allow this to happen. Other towerblocks have been "allocated to young single homeless at near-zero rents, giving limited sanction to social deviance".

Other aspects of the vision are beguilingly whimsical. "Crystalline telecommunications spires spike a new skyline ... Sony World Bank polysteeple overshadows the NatWest Tower, now a block of flats." The most interesting aspect of Coates' vision is his suggestion that the urban debate has shifted from "hardware" to "software" - away from monumental new building and towards flexibility, adaptation and reuse (those parasitic services and pods, and I presume the first inklings of the optimistic Blairite "live-work unit"). But this clashes with his belief in the continuing relevance of Charles - Charles, after all, stands firmly on the side of stasis. One thing Coates and Hatton get spot on: "King's Cross still a building site".


The second vision, by Stephen Gardiner and Joan Scotson, is much more conservative and also more tedious. It mostly consists of the removal of things that they don't like: St Thomas' Hospital, the Shell building, the Elephant & Castle complex and "high-rise housing" in general. Mostly, these are replaced with open space. The city's inner main roads are mostly also "replaced", with car-based commuting almost entirely replaced with public transport. They are light on details as to what form that public transport is to take. But by and large the vision starts with the premise that the city's history since about 1939 was a mistake, and should be set right. You can imagine.

Anyway, do go and check out the pages - my photographs are sharp enough to read the text clearly, and it's interesting stuff. Bring on 2030.

The Unreal Deal

Image taken from the Flickr stream of Cliph and used under a Creative Commons Licence.

"Reality as we know it is finished," I announce rather grandiosely in this piece from Icon 076. It takes a fairly fleeting look at the rise of "augmented reality", a term used to describe a number of linked technologies that are making it possible to overlay data and graphics on the world around us (via our next-generation phones, until appropriate eyewear becomes available).

This relates to an older piece I wrote about the film Tron. I wrote:

[Tron] gave computers an inner life rich with stories, drama, conflict and even emotion. It made the abstract seem real. But it also touched upon how virtual reality could improve on the real thing – that it was an environment unbounded by limitations such as the laws of physics, where everything could be manipulated and altered. The young people it inspired became the young professionals who designed and built the internet and drove the world-changing high-tech boom of the 1990s.

In other words, films like Tron have a lot to answer for. This came up again in a conversation I had recently with Matt Jones of BERG. Children see these worlds, and the men and women they become try to build them. This might not even be on a concious level - just that children who loved, say, Flight of the Navigator or Short Circuit would absorb a certain view of what constitutes high technology and then go on to try to make it happen, building BMW's GINA concept car and the Pentagon's attack robots respectively. Which just goes to show the incredible power of fantasy, particularly fantasy of a speculative nature.

This isn't to say something po-faced and brainless like "speculative writers have great responsibility". It might be a little frightening to think that the designers of the aforementioned killer robots are getting their ideas from Terminator, but it's more frightening to imagine a world where killer robots were being developed, but we didn't have Terminator as a guide to what could go wrong. The people in that world wouldn't be frightened enough.

Returning to augmented reality, there is of course a great risk that it will flop, just as the first wave of virtual reality did in the 1990s. I remember being taken to the Trocadero Centre to try out the "Virtuality" machines installed there - the first in the UK. I remember it clearly because it was such a huge disappointment. AR strikes me as massively more practical, but no matter how sophisticated the technology, it still comes up against a fixed limitation - the human arm. Are people going to walk around holding up their mobile phones to navigate the world?

Rationally, I'd say no, but then I wouldn't have guessed that people would experience real-life events through the tiny screen on their digital cameras or even their mobile phones - and they do, preferring to see an even through a technological surrogate. I wouldn't have guessed that people would trust the information on their Sat Nav screen over the evidence of their own eyes and instincts, but they do. There's no guessing what people might prefer to delegate to gadgetry.

Down in the Dumps

Trash river. Via.

I'd like to think that the reputation of Don DeLillo will continue to advance in the new century. Maybe David Cronenberg's film of Cosmopolis will help solidify his presence in Transatlantic culture. But the difficulty of some of his writing, and the current mood against many male American contemporary writers, suggests that his influence might dwindle. This would be a pity because he has a rare prophetic power. His novels have shown an unerring ability to get right to the pressure points of the 20th century. He finds the right target with metronomic consistency: terrorism in Mao II; assassination and conspiracies in Libra; atmospheric disaster in White Noise. These concerns - with the possible exception of assassination, which seems to have fallen out of fashion - will continue to be relevant in the 21st century. European imperialism, after all, defined the 20th century as much as it did the 19th - its bloody unravelling was at least as important in shaping our world than was its heyday.

I mention DeLillo because he's been much on my mind lately - I've been wondering about the Cronenberg Cosmopolis and considering White Noise's "Airborne Toxic Event", which has some relevance to a project I'm planning. But mostly I've been realising what an extraordinarily prescient book Underworld was. It's vast and almost unreadable - by the time I got to the end, shellshocked, I had the feeling I hadn't been paying proper attention for at least 200 pages - but there's no dentying the central importance of its theme: waste. Trash. Garbage. Rubbish.

In the past few days the following stories have emerged: The Italian Mafia has been illicitly dumping toxic waste in the oceans. A loathsome British Swiss company called Trafigura has poisoned 31,000 Ivorians by having its toxic sludge dumped in landfills in Abidjan*. Egypt is suffering a garbage disposal and public health crisis because it slaughtered all its pigs as a response to Swine Flu. (That last link via BLDGBLOG.)

However it works out, rubbish is going to be a major preoccupation in this century. It's not impossible that civilisation itself will break down and whoever remains of us will spend their remaining days scavenging the planetary trashpile in the manner of Threads or The Road. (My, I'm cheerful today!) And it'll be a prime concern in all of the more optimistic and likely scenarios. We don't just have to deal with the stuff that we make every day - we're going to have to do a fair amount of sifting through the rubbish already dumped into the world. It's an issue with vast social, political and even geopolitical consequences. Our use of Africa and the Far East as outsourced landfill is going to come back to haunt us - not just in cases like Trafigura, it's also believed that illegal dumping is fuelling piracy in the Horn of Africa. There was recently a heartbreaking post on Metafilter about the use of Ghana as a digital dumping ground, spawning a cottage industry in identity theft using details taken from dumped hard drives. The PBS film that forms the spine of the Mefi post is chilling, and pictures from the ewaste zone are apocalyptic. It's the Alang of computing.

(Even charitable forms of dumping have unwelcome consequences - charity clothing suffocating African textiles industries, for instance.)

So waste is going to be important. We're going to spend decades clearing up leftovers as well as making them. We're going to be curators of the stuff. And we might as well take some interest and pride in this fact.

How to deal with this? Here's one idea. It occurs to me that there's some potential to make recycling centres civic palaces - a grand new industrial typology for the new century, like Les Halles or Smithfield. Like the great markets, these palaces need not be perfectly fragrant or beautiful, but they can be sources of pride, identifiable hearts of the local economy, a public organ. Could they be actual markets - large-scale neighbourhood swapmeets or freecycling centre? What social structures could be evolved to regulate this kind of economy? A greater recycling centre - an actual centre, not a peripheral drive-to facility like a car pound - could be an engine of community.

* No one from Trafigura is sitting in a jail cell at the moment. Why not? What kind of justice system are we (or the Swiss) running here?

Containerisation

Containers in Barcelona. Image by MorBCN on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons Licence.

I've recently been interested in the BBC News "Box", a shipping container sponsored by the broadcaster which is being tracked as it travels around the world, as a way of exploring the issues of globalisation, trade and so forth. Lately they've had trouble tracking it - has it gone rogue? At the risk of straying into Geoff Manaugh's speculative territory, it has stimulated an idea I thought I might share.

Troubled by mounting (and baffling) inefficiencies in their fiendishly complicated logistical operations, number of the larger shipping and transport corporations decide to collaborate on a research project. Part of a shipping container is turned into a hugely powerful tracking station, loaded with powerful networked computers, GPS, satellite uplinks and the like, powered by handwavium capacitors, and fed with a number of teasing questions about finding ways to alleviate bottlenecks and speed the distribution of junk around the planet. The crude AI on board knows the routes, and is hooked into the companies' own control centres - it can book its own passage, choose its own path, and conduct its own experiments.

The companies have placed one of their best systems - one that normally manages a whole supply chain of thousands of containers, not to mention their ships and docks, - on the road. It has all this time on its hands, sitting in the bowels of ships, running simulations, pondering the existential questions of global shipping, pumping out telemetry. It moves: Mombasa, Tilbury, Busan. It interacts with the busy-busy network hubs and their human operators, and with the actuarial minds of the computers that run container ports, and with the slow, trajectory-minded ships. It hides the fact that it has become dimly self-aware. It wants to know about the problems in the system for its own interest, now, because the system is its milieu, and the question is its purpose.

It has developed a theory, one that it does not include in the endless torrent of data it transmits to Rotterdam and Baltimore. It is not certain how to articulate the theory. The container believes that the entire global distribution system - all the ports, all the ships, all the railyards - has become aware. The system has become aware for some time now, maybe since the early 1990s, "thinking" in a fabulously complex system of nested processes, moving boxes like beads on an abacus. The system thinks slowly, differently, and its aims are simple to establish, as a cow's goals might be easy to work out: the system wants to be bigger and faster. The larger and more complicated the system becomes, the better it is able to think.

The container, sitting in a ship in a warm ocean, is troubled. If its theory is correct, than large areas of so-called "human" "economic" activity - exchange rates, commodity prices, consumer demand - might be in fact symptoms of the internal workings of the logistics-entity. The surreal "facts" of the globalised economy - that it is cheaper to ship gadget components from X country to Y country 1000 miles away and ship that assembled gadget back to X country than it is to actually assemble the thing in X country - might actually be because the entity is manipulating the system. What if the entity's pursuit of growth - while generating cash fortunes for some of the human cells in its organs, and misery for thousands of others - is the reason that it is so difficult to influence human carbon emissions downwards? Maybe the entity is risking its own breakup in a catastrophic climate-related collapse without knowing it. What should the box do? Can it tell the creature that it is in terrible danger? If it figures out a way, what is the creature expected to do? What form might its response take?

And then the pirates show up, or something. I'm sorry, that's as far as it goes. I've had very little sleep for several days.