Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. (And then there’s the miraculous drop in violent crime in the United States, by half.) Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past — the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s — looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History. Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972 — giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps — with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins — again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising — all of it. It’s even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.
You Say You Want a Devolution? | Style | Vanity Fair. Even if this argument is right — even if styles really have changed less in the past twenty years than in any comparable 20-period in the past century — it’s noteworthy that Andersen keeps saying, “Well, except for technology.” As though technological change — change in our gadgets, our electronic encounters, our newly-digital lives — don’t really count somehow and aren’t matters of style.
Maybe the real story is that a lot of the energy that once was directed towards altering styles of art and fashion has gone for the past twenty years into figuring out how we engage with the digital world. And maybe, as Neal Stephenson has suggested in an interview I quoted from the other day, that pace of digital development will at some point slow down and the pace of stylistic change elsewhere will accelerate once again.
At a time when there were no driver’s licenses, speed limits or clear lane demarcations, the notion of a stop sign was revolutionary. In fact, aside from the occasional road markers letting riders on horseback know how far they were from the next city, there was no road or street signage at all. [William Phelps] Eno, scion of a wealthy New England family who never learned to drive, helped change all that. In a 1900 article titled “Reforming Our Street Traffic Urgently Needed,” for Rider and Driver magazine, he proposed placing stop signs at intersections. It was a civilizing notion.“That was a new concept and really did introduce the idea that you had to watch out for other people,” [Joshua] Schank says.
Starbucks is about to unveil a new store in suburban Seattle built primarily of four used shipping containers — the large steel boxes used to store goods as they are transported long distances on boats and trucks.Containers have become a hot commodity in the green building movement because so many of them are piling up at American ports and are in need of recycling, says Peter DeMaria, the principal in a design firm that does a lot of work with them. “Due to the trade imbalance with China, millions of containers are left in our ports every year,” he said.
And it just so happens the containers are perfect modular building blocks for construction. “We like the idea of up-cycling, that is, using a material and deploying it in nearly its original state,” Mr. DeMaria said. Adapting a container takes 5 percent of the energy needed to take steel, melt it down and create a new beam, he added.
For the near future, though, it seems like the trade-off is going to be worth it. Web email, for example, has so many advantages that I, for one, can’t imagine going back to running client software. But Gmail is going to keep changing, and some of that change is inevitably going to affect my workflow. The only thing to do in this situation is to adapt. To think of the workflow not as static, but as a malleable and constantly changing system. To meet every update with a willingness to refine or even radically change the way we do things, instead of obstinate indignation and victimhood. To form a meta-workflow that incorporates change as a constant. It’s the only way to stay sane in this brave new world in which more and more of our lives consist in ephemeral, increasingly amorphous software.
Think of the 18th–century artist Piranesi, for example, whose engravings of picturesquely decaying Rome are certainly fantastic in some respects—he places just enough disproportionately tiny people in his cityscapes to make us think those ancient buildings were absolutely colossal—but also reflect a real and deep desire to capture the ancient Romans’ remains and to make knowledge of the city available to distant lands and later generations. Or John James Audubon’s obsessive quest to paint all of America’s birds. That documentary impulse was once central to illustration, if not to what we now call “fine art,” and its passing is something to be lamented, especially since our belief that photography straightforwardly captures the–thing–in–itself is a sadly naïve one. (Beginning birdwatchers always want photographic guides because they think photography captures birds “as they really are,” but skillful paintings, like those of Roger Tory Peterson, are often more useful: they portray birds as the human eye sees them, or is likely to see them in the field, which is not invariably as the camera’s lens captures them. The common belief that photographs record simply and objectively both diminishes the documentary power of illustration and underrates the artfulness of photography.)So Gregory Blackstock’s drawings are a pleasant and instructive reminder of a time when the artist had to record the world because there was no other way to document its beauties. Such illustrations may not approach the depth and subtlety of truly “fine” art, but they represent a wonderful union of what the poet W. H. Auden, in an essay on “The Poet and the City,” calls the “gratuitous” and the “utile.” Auden reminds us that there was once a time when all the arts had a dimension of usefulness: poetry aided the memory, even on as humble a level as “Thirty days hath September,” and we should never forget the sheer and astonishing craftsmanship that enabled Bach to crank out all those cantatas, which were invariably useful to the church and as a bonus contain more beauty than seems possible.
The programmers of the commercial web have always seen their goal as the elimination of distance and friction from transactions, and that objective has, not surprisingly, come to shape online social networks. But, when carried too far, the minimization of transaction costs in personal relations ends up having the effect of reducing those relationships to mere transactions. Intimacy without distance is not intimacy, and sharing without friction is not sharing. Qualities of tenderness become, in the end, forms of commerce.
What I’m kind of hoping is that this is just kind of a pause, while we assimilate this gigantic new thing, ubiquitous computing and the Internet. And that at some point we’ll turn around and say, ‘Well, that was interesting — we have a whole set of new tools and capabilities that we didn’t have before the whole computer/Internet thing came along. Now let’s get back to work doing interesting and useful things.‘
Book art by Su Blackwell
You left the cocoon of Princeton when you were 16. Why?I was a rebellious adolescent. It was the ’60s. Everyone was rebellious. I hated high school. When they wouldn’t let me graduate early because I hadn’t taken gym, I quit altogether and went off to British Columbia. It was a time when a lot of kids ran away from home. My father didn’t stop me. At first, I worked with this guy who’d built his own boat, and we ran around the Northwest delivering things. I loved it. Canada had real wilderness. British Columbia was like Yosemite in the ocean. Being there was so liberating — getting my own food, making my own living. I built myself a boat in the style of the Aleut-Russian kayak, the baidarka. I’d work on tugboats and fishing boats for a while, and then I’d take my baidarka and explore. I did this for about 20 years.
And today you make your living as a historian of science and technology. How does a high school dropout get to do that?
Hey, this is America. You can do what you want! I love this idea that someone who didn’t finish high school can write books that get taken seriously. History is one of the only fields where contributions by amateurs are taken seriously, providing you follow the rules and document your sources. In history, it’s what you write, not what your credentials are.
‘We love [Meryl Streep’s] work,’ Callista Gingrich said. 'We love “Mama Mia.” We’ve seen it several times. Newt’s ring-tone is “Dancing Queen.”’