Recently, I've been noticing an increase in discussion about the state of our consumerist society and how the
quality of every product and experience has declined while prices have increased. How options have dissolved,
and what's left is empty and hollow. Everything requires a subscription. There are several streaming platforms
that everyone subscribes to, but none have the movies we want to watch. Social media bombards us with more ads
than actual content from our friends; it algorithmically prioritizes certain content based on how long we
interact with it, regardless of how positive or negative it is. Nobody can afford to own a home, jobs are
requiring more and paying less. Rent is high, but the quality of our spaces is low. Everything, it seems, is
minimum in, maximum out.
This phenomenon is honestly depressing and has left many of us wondering what happened to the seemingly
idealistic world our parents were raised in. To put it in the words of a post I saw: "everyone is paying more
for fewer products with less disposable income". I feel this, and it makes me feel angry towards the reality
we've allowed to develop, and that we continue to put people in power who not only allow this to happen, but
profit off of it because they are in the tiny minority of people with the money and connections to benefit from
it. But what I've found is that in order not to get beaten, I need to stop playing. This doesn't work for
everything, of course. I can't "not play" healthcare, and I need to work for my food and shelter. But in a
day-to-day existence, I can opt out of my main sources of entertainment being centered around a television. I
can opt out of paying exorbitant amounts of money for books and clothes and find my things second-hand from
small shops. I can opt out of the raised prices of Uber rides by riding my bike or taking the bus. I can opt out
of services that prey on us to subscribe to their services and choose to spend my time in ways that require
little to no money to leave me feeling fulfilled.
I speak only for myself on this, but life can be peaceful and fulfilling with very few commodities. Take away
something and see how you adapt your routine without it. When Steph and I moved to NYC, our apartment had no
(and still doesn't have) dishwasher, microwave, washer, or dryer–and now we have no TV. Contrary to what I
expected, I haven't missed any of these things, and we've completely adapted to living without them. I'm not
going to say I wouldn't be glad to have some of these things, but I've noticed many improvements in my life
without them. My food tastes better because I'm cooking fresher meals. I feel more present in my space because
I'm doing more housework by hand. I spend more time deep in thought and have more time for reading and writing
because watching TV isn't as convenient anymore. I think as a society we have optimized ourselves into a higher
quality of life–it's one of life's great paradoxes. By optimizing work, we're expected to produce more. By
making entertainment so easy and mindless, and by making socializing so impersonal online, we've forgotten how
to talk to and keep up with real people, how to enjoy living a regular daily life in the real world.
Opt out, refocus. Find a way to live that's cheap and accessible and detach you from the oligarchical corporate
systems that want nothing but to enslave us.
Travel is a curious thing. In many ways, travel as we know it is an extremely new experience. Before the
invention of airplanes, travel was significantly more difficult and not accessible to the average person. It was
reserved for those with time, money, or for those whose careers required it of them, i.e., sailors and
merchants. But with the inventions of airplanes and cars, suddenly, in the mid-20th century, anyone could travel
almost anywhere in the world. Tourism became a massive industry, and places once sleepy became destinations,
entire economies sprouting out of the new phenomenon. There are so many ways to travel, but this corporatized
view of it lives on just as strongly as it always has, with travel guides, must-see photo op destinations, and a
finite list of sites to check out your list as quickly as possible. Steph and I just returned from 10 days in
Paris, the French countryside, and Amsterdam. The latter half was spent with friends, and we didn't encounter
this travel cadence very often there, but in France, it could be argued that we were visiting during the peak of
this high-season tourism. One caveat that I'll make here is that Paris is, in many ways–I say this full
acknowledging that I'm making a broad generalization of a very large, complex, and diversely complicated city–a
city of monuments built for tourism. The Seine, the palaces, the statues, the fountains, the museums, and the
cathedrals have been built or retrofitted for the world to view when they visit Paris. It's astonishing how many
things there are that are so incredibly famous and well-known. In August especially, this means waiting in 1-2
hour lines, never-ending ticket reservations, tight spaces, over-crowded, phones swinging in your face at every
turn, of people trying to capture the moment that they were there. It's hard because Steph and I as designers
and artists have a genuine desire to visit many of these places for their beauty and the inspiration they give
us, but it seems the vast majority of folks who travel to these places care only for how it will make themselves
be perceived by their peers, and this quest to take the photo and move on to the next thing was frustrating and
distracting to be around.
Regardless, we were still able to gain experiences and create the types of memories one hopes to gain through
travel. We saw the stained glass in Saint-Chappelle and stayed until closing time, where we were the only ones
there and had a conversation with a worker who was developing his own personal AR tool to study the hundreds of
stories recorded in the designs of the windows. We mused on the role of royal religious buildings, such as those
that were both a gift to god, but more so a symbol to the world of their wealth and prestige, on their value and
their importance to art, but also on their vanity. We attended mass at Notre Dame and smelled the incense from
the thuribles and heard the singing and organ music echo throughout the ancient walls. We thought of how
different cathedrals feel when they see continuous use over time compared to those that became museums long ago,
and how they have more energy and spirit inside of them. I stood in front of some of my favorite Monet paintings
that I've dreamed about seeing for years, and was moved nearly to tears by his painting of his dying wife. We
learned about the intricacies of the French Revolution and what they stood for as we analyzed the paintings of
Jacques-Louis David, who painted for the emperors before and after the revolution, but was also a strong Jacobin
who voted to have the king beheaded and painted propaganda for the cause. In all these places where tourists
challenged our peace, we remained strong and were able to still draw inspiration, because we knew why we were
there and why it was important.
Some of our best experiences in our travels were because of the people we met off the beaten path. In our bed
and breakfast in Béhen, our French host came to say hello as we were sharing a bottle of wine on the front lawn,
and he was carrying a plate with his dinner. We invited him to sit with us and had a wonderful conversation
where he told us about the property and neighboring towns and their use by the occupying Germans in WW2. We
learned about their methods and what gave them away, of how they caused the nearby town of Abbeville to be
burned, and of how the French people still bear scars from that time almost 100 years ago. Of how his father,
who purchased the property in the 50's, planted trees in every crater created from the falling mortars. To hear
these stories from someone who lives where it happened and still grapples with its effects was priceless.
Another man we met was Mr. Rosenkrans, a Dutchman staying in our Paris hotel who was visiting his daughter
nearby. He offered to show us around his town, Leiden, if we ever came. As luck would have it, we did go there
not even a week later, so we took him up on his offer. Peter, an 80-year-old retired professor of internal
medicine, invited us into his beautiful home from the 1600s for tea and then walked us around the town to show
us its most important landmarks. I had never heard of this town, but it was unbelievably beautiful and historic,
with a reputation for being a city of scientists, artists, and scholars. In this town, Rembrandt was born, the
Pilgrims of the Mayflower set off for America, 16 Nobel prize winners made advancements in science, and the
tulip was cultivated before being introduced to Western Europe. We learned so much from Peter, and he was sure
to show us his first home and the home of his now passed wife when they first met half a century ago.
I feel it is our duty to travel in a way that expands our understanding of the world. To experience a new
language, culture, and history, and to talk with the people who live there is a sacred experience, one that not
many throughout time have had the luxury of experiencing. To go and treat a city like a theme park is not only
disrespectful to the residents who live there, but it is a missed opportunity to change your mind, mold it into
a new, more refined shape. Speaking with people and forming relationships in the regions you visit reminds us
all that we are humans with dreams and desires, experiences and histories; we can see ourselves in each other,
and in these bonds we can find peace. Everywhere we've been in the world, I've held on tightest to the smallest
and quietest places.
Yesterday my mom sent me an email with twenty video links on Google Drive. The videos had names like "1st
Birthday Party.mp4", "Relaxing.mp4", "Nap Time.mp4", "Jake and Friends.mp4", "Jake Messing Around.mp4", "Jake
Lip Syncing.mp4". For decades we've had video tapes recorded on a handheld camcorder sitting on a designated
shelf in my sister's old bedroom closet. Recently, finally, my mom sent them to be digitized. I knew some of
them were from when my sister was a baby, or from my parent's wedding, but I haven't had many opportunities to
sit down and watch them. So last night when Steph was out at a party and I was home alone, I sat down and
watched them. I don't have a lot of videos from when I was a kid, there are some YouTube videos still up of me
and my friend Kyle in 2007 solving Rubik's cubes set to double-speed so they look super fast, but that was about
it for a long time. Only recently I thought to download them off the internet and slow them back down in a video
editor to hear our voices as they were for the first time in almost 20 years.
Watching these new videos of me and my friends playing together in 2006, silly dumb 10 year-old boys staging
overly violent puppet shows with our stuffed animals, imagining that we're going crazy, playing with my
childhood dog, hearing my friend's laugh again, I was predictably washed away with memories and nostalgia. It's
scary how dim memories become without reminders. 19 years isn't a very long time, and yet it's a lifetime in a
lot of ways. The world is so different now, but these videos took me back to my parent's unfinished basement, my
childhood bedroom, and re-surfaced a million other memories of us playing Jet Set Radio on my friends Xbox in
his basement while listening to Queen, light saber duels in the front yard, walking home from school and sitting
on the planks covering the irrigation ditch that led out to the farm fields which have long since become
cul-de-sacs and homes.
The older videos titled "1st birthday party", "relaxing", and "nap time" were all of my sister when she was a
year old in 1993 and my mom was only 26. The parties especially entranced me. 36 minutes of the camcorder set up
on a tripod in the front yard trained on my whole family only 30 years younger, my parents younger than I am
now, my grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, some teenagers, some babies, I was struck with just how much
everyone had lived entire lives before I was even born. Some of those children would go on to face unimaginable
hardship. Some would become great people. My parents were so young and sweet and excited by my then-baby older
sister. I watched the body language and dynamics I was blind to as a child but now seemed so obvious. Tensions,
discomfort, love, care, companionship. It was like looking into a crystal ball or a portal to another dimension
of a world that feels familiar but has been long forgotten.
Life passes frighteningly fast, but so much life can be lived in such a short amount of time. Some days I feel
like I'm getting old too fast, and some days like today I feel like I'm just barely starting to live. I've
meditated on this before, I still believe in my theory that life passes too quickly when you become too
comfortable. Things slow down for the better and life is richest when you become uncomfortable, take risks, and
push yourself outside of your comfort zone. I'm grateful for these videos and for their insight. They gave me
fresh eyes to see my parents more than any of my other family. I could see their love for my sister, and by
proxy for me, though I wasn't born yet. I wonder what it will be like for the children of our younger
generations who will have every day of their entire lives recorded somewhere. How much more will they remember,
how much more will they see? Will it be too much? Will they appreciate it or take it for granted?
I've been thinking about the internet today and how there still exist communities keeping it alive the way it used to be. Over the past few years "Dead Internet Theory" has entered the public conversation more and more, especially with the Ą̸̻͎͕̰̲̯̝̲͉̬̳̎͗̃͜ͅI̸̹̲͉̼̳̘̙̬͖͍͖̅̿̀̅̄͗͌̎͌̇̔͝ revolution. It's the idea that because of the sheer amount of bots creating websites, profiles, accounts, and content, that it's become so bloated that the internet is essentially "dead". Honestly, this might be the case for the big social media platforms. F*ceb**k is filled with posts made by bots, and the comment sections are filled with... you guessed it. Bots. On Inst*gr*m you constantly receive follow and message requests from spam bots, you find accounts with thousands of followers but only a few dozen interactions on their posts. Bots. P*nter*st is all AI content. These corners of the internet could be considered dead, or at the very least, dying. But we forget that the internet existed for decades before Big Tech swooped in with their big box social media platforms. For decades people learned HTML, harnassed platforms like GeoCities (or con contemporaneity, Neocities), and carved out their own corners of the web for themselves and their friends. Maybe because of this the web wasn't for everyone, but it was open to everyone, and it was beautiful. With the migration to more accessible social media platforms like the aforementioned FB, IG, Twitter, etc. a lot of these spaces were abandoned, their hosting subscriptions left to expire and to fade away into the past. But there exist communities still who keep this part of the internet, the true internet, with soul personality and connection, alive. I'm not naive enough to think someone like my mom will create her own website from scratch, those who created the first web blogs were the "nerds" of the day. To reintegrate into this part of the web, you have to be a certain type of person and personality. Most folks will likely leave the internet altogether (I've already seen this happening). We will still have to deal with the consequences of a dead internet, i.e. useless Google search SEO, lack of availability (or extremely high prices) of domain names, etc. But I think the more people learn about the communities that still exist who are creating their own websites and connecting with each other through them, we might be able to bring more into the fold and resurrect that which made the internet so amazing in the first place.
This morning I'm looking back on past friendships and trying to understand their nature. Friendships are, by their nature, conditional and liquid, and yet they are imbued with nostalgia and often a level of guilt. One of the primordial conditions of friendship is loyalty. A relationship between two beings is formed when the other can be relied upon, when a level of trust is formed and when the two can work together in understanding of each other. This is why the first friendships formed when a child learns to play with another, both relying on one another for entertainment–and these friendships end just as quickly when their underdeveloped ability to share produces conflict and the play date ends in tears. As a teenager, friendships form in school as the brain develops and adolescents learn to depend on each other for belonging. Social circles form and watch each other full of trepidation, analyzing their differences and similarities. It is in adulthood where friendships become perhaps the most complicated. For 8-9 hours a day, your friends are your coworkers. The similarities and loyalty you have for one another is built on necessity of your work situation. You may have nothing in common, but you rely on your interactions with one another to establish a base of trust to overcome work challenges. Inside of coworkers, there may form tighter bonds–you may share similar interests, feelings, concerns, and a friendship might extend beyond work hours. As an adult, you learn to have different friends for different purposes. There are those who you see at parties, those who you spend one on one evenings lost in conversations. Those who you go to concerts with, those who you meet occasionally for drinks, those who you message online but never make plans with. The ranks are always shifting and people often shift from one position to another. In all friendships, there may come a time when a change in circumstances means a friendship ends, or becomes dim. When you no longer need to, or can depend on each other, the friendship drifts to the final rank–one of occasional check-ins, the "how have you been"s, the "what's new in your life?"s, the "congratulations!" and "happy birthday!"s, and eventually the "what have they been up to?" when your connection fades to where your only link is another mutual, now closer friend. It is in this fading that we find guilt, maybe because the distance was one-sided, and one of the two feels like it was their fault. But it is important to never force a friendship and to accept their seasonality. The most important friends are current, they're the ones you can depend on right here right now for support, and we should cherish them while they're here knowing that while it may not last forever, their impact on your life inevitably will.
In my opinion, earnestness is a virtue, and one that does not come easily as it requires a level of self-sacrifice and innocence. Sincerity and conviction for a particular thing or idea is synonymous with care, a quality that is not celebrated–especially in our contemporary hyper-online culture. The opposite quality, irony, is a hallmark of the younger generation. On the internet, everything is forced under a microscope to be analyzed and scrutinized. To hold onto a particular idea or action to firmly is to put yourself in the line of fire–and those who fear earnestness quickly find acceptance among their invisible tribe by laughing at this display and branding it as "corny" and "cringe worthy". I myself felt (and still often feel) the heat of irony as I spent nearly half my life in spaces like Twitter. I've had to consciously analyze my responses to certain displays of earnestness and ask myself why I felt the way I did. In every occasion, the answer had nothing to do with what I was criticizing, but everything to do with myself. At our core, I think we are a deeply earnest species. We cling to meaning and exist on the pretext of belonging in order to survive. We are social creatures and demand acceptance. To show sincere, deep conviction for something is vulnerable. It's exalting your ideas and interests above the rest, taking a risk and trying something new, making known something that likely incubated in privacy, but has become important to you. I love earnestness, and I love those who take this risk and risk the spotlight illuminating them. It is courageous, and it makes me want to be passionate like them.
This morning I was reading "If On A Winters Night A Traveler* by Italo Calvino, and in the chapter the narrator
speaks of the symbology of an anchor as a message to "attach, cling, delve, and end a fluctuating condition and
remain on the surface–but also to cast off, set forth towards open sea. I love the idea of interpreting objects,
or even animals and patterns, as symbols of virtues one wishes to keep close and top of mind. It seems to me
that the use of symbols as such was once a prevalent part of the human condition, and you see symbols like these
woven in the fabric of everyday life for those in the past. Even up until the late 19th and early 20th century
symbols were everywhere. I think of the Victorian Green Man that is carved throughout architecture from that
time as a "symbol of rebirth, representing the cycle of new growth that occurs every spring."
Before reflecting on what things are symbolic to me and how we might reintroduce them in modernity, one has to
ask why they have gone? It's perhaps a narrow point of view, but I see a lot of things like this stemming from
the industrial revolution and the slow commodification of all aspects of life. With the slow dissolving of
craftsmanship and the mass production of all things in life, our basic surroundings have become duller, flatter,
simpler and cheaper to manufacture and maintain. Along with this came the commodification of culture and ideas
which have also, in many ways, become duller, flatter, simpler, and cheaper manufacture and maintain. Virtue and
profound inner contemplation are all but lost unless these things are placed upon you by a higher authority such
as a political or religious leader. But these too run their organizations more like businesses to be optimized.
To bring back wisdom once understood over 100, 200 years ago, these things must be acknowledged and rejected.
One must shift their focus towards things which are long form, well thought out, made with skill, effort,
contemplation, research. One must spend time lost in thought without the influence of others barraging them at
every moment.
So, how to reintroduce symbols into my life? I think I would like to spend some time writing about the things
around me and admiring their virtues. It would serve both as a form of meditation and prayer, as well as an
exercise to understand what I value in life and want to incubate in myself. I would also like to spend time
reading of existing symbols from the past–perhaps this would serve as a good starting point in this practice.
The end goal would be to work these symbols into my daily life. To choose objects I acquire based on their
meaning, to inject them into my art. Even find ways to include them in my clothing and everyday objects. This is
something i love when I visit museums–when something as simple as a belt clasp or a hand mirror are decorated
with symbols which tell a story to remind its owner of something important in every moment of every day.
Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, aka the detonation of the first atomic bomb, a day that
has changed and will forever change the history of our planet. It fore-shadowed the bombing of Nagasaki and
Hiroshima, the cold-war, and the looming fear that persists to today. It symbolized, perhaps, a great
conglomeration of human nature. Those who developed it in the name of science too blinded by their curiosity to
question its consequences. Those who paid for it and dropped it on human beings in the name of power and
preservation, even harmony and balance. To me the air weighed heavy yesterday thinking of the untold suffering
something seemingly so small could bring to the human race. And to think we saw what they could do and still
continued to develop them 1000 times past their original power.
I think of the people who were there at the Trinity Test, the scientists and military personnel who watched the
first light of the blast, who saw the mushroom cloud rise into the sky. I think of the people in Japan who were
there when the bombs were dropped, who saw their cities burn and their families die. I think of the people in
Ukraine and Russia today, who are living through a war that is tearing their countries apart. I think
I see today stories and images from Gaza, children crying and starving, bloody and orphaned, entire cities
leveled without nuclear weapons. I see Jews in New York City, regular people who go to work every day, clinging
to their Zionism saying its justified, that they were promised that land and that the conflict was instigated by
the Palestinians. Humans have this incomprehensible capability to destroy each other, to destroy themselves, in
conquest of individuality, dominance of their own tribe over another.
I look at the energy used in war, the nuclear fission reached to detonate an atomic bomb and its similarities to
the nuclear fusion which lights our sun and provides us with life. It's such a strange juxtaposition. The first
light of the blast of the Trinity Test, the first light of the morning. Life and death. I think back on the Thom
York lyric from I Am A Very Rude Person: "I have to destroy to create".
When we destroy ourselves, when every human on Earth is gone, when all life has been wiped away, the Earth will
regrow and new life will take its place. The system is in balance and when we tilt the scale too far in our own
favor, it will re-balance itself. And we will be forgotten.
There's something strange in life about what ones focus shifts towards based on the environment you're in. As a teenager and when you're single, it's about being outwardly interesting and posturing yourself to be desirable for making friends and attracting lovers. Since being married, I've noticed that when we have single friends, they're significantly more busy with social gatherings, and they share far more selfies on social media. It's like in that stage, you're almost marketing yourself. I haven't been in this stage for a very long time–I suppose I was in limbo for several years having been newly married, but still getting my footing. I went several years between 2016 and 2020 where I was in a liminal space with no real focus besides survival and escape. But once I started MDD, I transitioned into a new stage of life, and my focus became more of discipline in my field and in always striving to do something that was cool and interesting to my peers so they would remember me and think of me when we graduated. Now I'm graduated, and I still feel like I'm in that stage as I look for work and meet new people, but I feel myself outside of my career slipping towards a new stage, one of seeking peace and clarity. I had a brief moment in 2019-2020 where I was here, but as a coping stage to deal with my faith crisis. Now, perhaps, I am doing it for similar reasons to survive unemployment and the anxieties surrounding it. But I feel like I want to constantly be grounding myself, strengthening my mind, seeking inspiration through reading and writing, being outside fully present and unplugged from the internet. I feel excited for one day when I am comfortable in my career and I can fully dedicate myself to these things as I find a lot of fulfillment in them. I do think someday I'd like to become more of a researcher, write a book, dig for understanding.
As a designer and as a creative coder, the AI revolution has been full of complicated feelings. I have felt both the excitement and wonder of software engineers when new almost magic-seeming capabilities have being developed in insanely short time frames, and the horror of artists and graphic designers who are seeing their jobs be automated and replaced in real time. So where do I stand? Over the past couple years after spending time in these cross-boundary spaces of creatives and programmers, I have noticed certain patterns emerge when it comes to thinking about technological innovation. Very often I see software developers spending a lot of time on "how" and whether they "can". But in the process, I have seen an absence of asking "why" and whether they "should". So in favor of challenging this mindset, why AI? Why should it be developed? In the case of many historical innovations, the answer is often the automation of laborious tasks. For some this might be summarizing emails, filling in repetitive data in spreadsheets, or auto-populating text. LLM's have been a game changer in automation and I myself use it for this very purpose very often. However, among the most advertised uses of AI has been image generation and now video generation with audio. Why should this be used? What is this automating? The most common argument is accessibility. In most cases its just because its impressive. But aside from the horrifying consequences of being able to create any video with audio that you can imagine that's imperceptible from reality (and increasingly so), to automate creativity is to automate the jobs which are most pleasurable, and replace the expression of human imagination with nonsensical regurgitation of human imagination which has been stolen, blended up, and spewed out by an algorithm. It hearkens back to the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century where artists and designers began to emphasize the skill and craftsmanship of the decorative arts in protest to the soullessness of the industrial revolution. They understood something that we have now seemingly forgotten. That the whole reason art exists is because its human. By creating art, human imagination and emotion is made communicable and understood. Art has a soul when its made by a human. I circle back to my complicated place in this debate as a creative developer. Why is it so different for someone like me to create art with code? The answer is idea and intent. For me, programming is my medium, but the idea and execution is totally my own. I had to learn a skill, research the idea, and execute it with the tools available to me. AI, on the other hand, allows the user only the idea, but automates the approach and execution. Great ideas cannot be simplified to a sentence prompt. They are built on technique and skill.
Over the past few years I have spent a lot of time sorting through the beliefs and values I've acquired
throughout my life now that my faith in a god has been replaced with an open curiosity of the mysteries of the
universe. I once thought I knew exactly how everything worked and had conviction in the religion of my family
and community. But since that was completely lost and I was left like a child, I allowed myself to be for a
while without trying too hard to understand anything. Ideas are powerful and can be dangerous. I've been weary
of allowing myself to reach any conclusions when suggested to me by someone else. Of course most ideas and
thoughts I have are derivative, but as time has passed, I have followed my heart and the facts of science in
determining how I feel about existence and in deciding what I think the purpose of everything is.
In 2022 I took psilocybe cubensis for the first time. It was unlike anything I've ever felt and was not what I
expected. In my blank slate state, I was forced to confront the feelings of my soul and my place on the planet
as a creature on it. I felt strongly as I looked at the trees around me and watched the dead leaves on the grass
that I was part of a huge system, one that depends on itself, every organism working in unison to live and die
and cycle through itself, totally in balance. I felt that to live and die and become part of the soil, for grass
to grow from my flesh, to be part of this system, was the purpose of life and is inherently meaningful. I've
taken psilocybe cubensis a few more times, and on the most recent occasion in 2023 in the Netherlands, I felt
the closest to full understanding this meaning in feeling. I could feel the energy vibrations of the trees as I
neared myself to them.
Since then, I've thought about energy and the nature of it. How energy from the creation of the universe is the
source of all life and existence, that this energy originated from somewhere. I suppose one could say its
sacred, although it just is. I've formed my beliefs around these experiences and concepts, and recently I
decided to investigate whether I'm the first to draw these conclusions. What surprised me was that these ideas
and feelings appear to be the root of some of the oldest philosophies in the East, namely in Daoism. Recently
learning about Yin and Yang, Wu Wei, I learned that I on my own came to believe my own form of Daoism, or
something very similar. There's something validating to find that people for thousands of years have been living
with a similar view on life. I resonate with the ancient Eastern philosophies. I feel like these people had it
figured out and understood harmony and discipline and how to make their own existences in balance with the
energies of the universe. So I will keep learning and studying, and hopefully I too can become like the plants
and the animals and the trees and the water to be in balance with this wonderful and complex system.
I'm not sure I believe people are simply individuals. It's like the parental warning for choosing good friends:
"You are who you surround yourself with". I'd like to extend that saying further–"you are _what_ you surround
yourself with". Like everything in life, this phenomenon is both a cycle and a balance. An individual's mindset
can quickly deteriorate their environment and attract negative influences, which will in turn perpetuate the
deterioration and negativity in their life. Unless interrupted, the cycle becomes a corkscrew, spiraling down
into ruin. In today's modern age, for many, simply having the humility and self-awareness to interrupt this at
all is an arduous step. By no means am I perfect, but I feel that I have mastered this aspect of life and would
like to consider what life looks like when you reverse the direction of the cycle in an upward-moving screw, one
that ascends and uplifts into a happy and fulfilling life. Once a balance has been reached and the cycle has
stabilized, refinement comes through curation. One should never settle or grow too comfortable; life is best
lived when constant evaluation is done to assess all things that penetrate the senses and enter the mind, and to
determine whether they are the best thing. The objects in the home, the things that you touch day-to-day, the
people you speak with, the music you listen to, the content you see, the things you feel, the sites you see;
everything should be analyzed closely and should be adjusted, thrown out, removed, and replaced to better align
with what's important to you.
For me, this is why I care so much about antiques and using old things in my home. First and foremost, things
used to be made with higher quality. Pre-industrial revolution, the objects of the home were crafted by hand by
someone with skill. Time went into the creation of that object, from acquiring the materials and processing them
to shaping them and crafting them into a usable item. Objects were made to last lifetimes. Even into the early
20th century, when machines began replacing many of these processes, durability and longevity were still
important to people, and these objects still exist en masse today, just as useful as they were when they were
made 100 years ago, or easily repaired to be useful again for another lifetime. Second, antiques contain
stories; they've often been used by hundreds of people. They were created by people whose children and even
grandchildren have been born, lived, and died. These objects contain souls, and that to me is extremely
important. Third, contemporary objects are often made with a limited life-span in mind. In many cases, they're
designed to fail so as to be replaced, over and over. Capital gains are the priority of manufacturers, so
corners are cut, materials are weakened, processes rushed, all to create as many objects as possible for the
lowest possible cost so the consumer purchases their product, uses it, breaks it, and buys the same thing again.
This is exactly the problem with the industrial revolution and late-state capitalism. It is thoughtless,
harmful, and soulless. It is a downward spiral of waste and greed. To give old items a new life detaches me from
this system, and is more aligned with my convictions of living in harmony with the planet and in maintaining a
balance in all things.
I'm not the first person who considers the souls of objects. The Arts and Crafts Movement was centered around
this concept. The Victoria and Albert Museum says of the Arts and Crafts Movement, "The birth of the Arts and
Crafts movement in Britain in the late 19th century marked the beginning of a change in the value society placed
on how things were made. This was a reaction to not only the damaging effects of industrialization but also the
relatively low status of the decorative arts. " I was first introduced to this ideology when visiting William
Morris's summer home Kelmscott Manor in England in 2022. I was moved as I marveled at the artifacts in the home,
at their beauty and quality, their simple forms, and the echoing of medieval craftsmanship in 19th/20th century
decor. Then, as I read the plaques throughout the home and learned of Morris's work in forming the Socialist
League, The Society for the Protection of Ancient Building, and in protecting historical sites, advocating for
the revival of handcrafted objects, and in making these things commonplace in everyone's homes, I felt a fire
lit in my heart. This visit changed my life and shaped my political and even spiritual views. I've written much
on energy and the transfer of energy in ways that inspire and are in harmony with other energies, and to me,
Morris understood this and fought to preserve it.
I've ranted extensively on this, but it feels like every time I've gotten all of my thoughts and feelings out into writing, a new advancement comes in the world of AI to make me feel like I need to write again. It has become clear to me now that AI will soon, in the not-to-distant future, be capable of creating any media a human can create in a way that's indecipherable to human work. It might even look better. Today I saw a LinkedIn post (which is perhaps the most delusional of all AI echo-chambers) celebrating the AI video creation platform "Flow" developed by people from Google. It's really good. It is turning out videos that are both surreal and insane while maintaining their realism. The comments on the post are all software engineers or other professionals in the tech sector responding with flame and clapping emojis, the wow factor has them totally bewitched. And yet, as a designer and an artist, I'm watching from the outside in horror knowing that not only my livelihood and passions will be at risk, but that companies will soon replace all human creativity with AI because it's faster, easier, and cheaper, completely ignoring what makes these creations special in the first place. What will happen when the wonder at technical innovations wears off and we're suddenly living in a world where we can no longer trust we we see? Where the process and the skill is replaced with algorithms? What will anything mean anymore? I feel so angry with these developers who only care about thinking if that can without any thought of whether they should.
After parting from Christian theology six years ago, the world around transformed into a formless vestige of
empty meaning, it was like being born again. Suddenly I had to listen for the first time in my entire life. I
was brought up being told that we were the center, that as a child, I was smarter than the most learned of
academics because I knew the truth of the gospel of Christ. The world and its mechanics, even the very idea of
existence was all explained, it all made sense. So as a twenty four year old infant, I grappled with good and
evil, cause and consequence, yin and yang, from a completely zoomed-out perspective. Over the years as I've
listened closer than ever before, and as I've scrutinized everything I read and hear, I've started to mold an
idea of what I feel like is the core of how I see and understand the world. Energy is at the core of everything.
The big bang 13.8 billion years ago expanded and its energy went into stars and planets. Those stars
subsequently allowed for life to flourish on earth. Energy from the sun makes plants grow and those plants
become food. Animals and humans grow from that food, and begin to influence each other. It's the butterfly
effect. I am typing this on my computer right now because of the energy of millions, maybe billions of other
people before me at this very moment. Their energy to live and die, to procreate and create me, to create those
around me, the people who make my clothes, who grow my food, who build the microchips in my computer and in my
phone. The people who write the books I read, who impress upon me with their ideas on the internet. Every idea,
in a way, is derivative from the ideas of others. We aren't brought up in a vacuum, we are impressionable
creatures–its our ability to influence that allows for the development of communities. Communities of two,
three, ten, two hundred, ten thousand, eight million, eight billion. This idea that we are part of an infinite
system of interconnected energy is full of purpose and meaning. We are simultaneously so small and insignificant
and yet, how we use the energy we've been given can have tremendous consequences. A simple idea can grow and
spread to the minds of thousands, a kind gesture or a beautiful work of art can inspire kindness and culture.
Energy is infinite, but it's also a scale and a spectrum. A balanced system supports itself, we hear perhaps the
most about this in ecology. In a balanced ecosystem, predators thin the herds which prevents overgrazing which
protects the geological landscape which influences the weather as well as the well-being of other species. We
hear a lot about how our influence as humans is endangering species, how pesticides are endangering bees, which
are vital to pollination, which is vital to our food supply. The system needs to be balanced, and will do so
itself if necessary. As humans, we need acknowledge and embrace this balance if we are to survive. So often we
think we are the center of the universe and that everything was given for us to use and consume. This ideology
is at the center of many religions and at the center of capitalism. It's harmony versus dominance. Good and evil
energies are always at odds keeping each other at bay and keeping things in balance. When the scale tips, it all
slides off and re-balances itself. I don't think humans will ever go away, but empires will crumble as soon as a
threshold is reached and the earth reacts to what we have done to her.
Returning to individual energy, I want to get at why this understanding of the world has become core to my
personal beliefs. I don't know what to call this ideology, surely I'm not the first to think through this, but
for me this belief is why kindness, peace, harmony, and creation are so important to me. There is no personal
reward beyond my own peace, harmony, and fulfillment, but the best way to bring balance to this system is by
creating things that inspire and connect, which influence people to self sacrifice and to be selfless. If I can
reach the hearts of others through sharing my own ideas and through kindness and self sacrifice, hopefully they
too will do the same and the butterfly effect will spread its wings and change communities, even the world.
The last thing I want to touch on is the energy of objects and why I feel its imperative that humans be at the
center of creating art and ideas, not machines. Machines should only be used in the creation of art as a tool to
emphasize the human, to ask questions, and to generate new ideas. For a machine to create the final product, as
is the case in AI imagery, is wrong. When a human puts energy into learning new skills and developing their
craft, what they create has a soul, or an aura as Walter Benjamin once said. All the energy surrounding that
work of art gives it something that is immediately felt. AI art is an empty gimmick, trained to only hold the
visual similarities of real art, and unfortunately, it removes opportunity for real humans to create which in
itself is a fulfilling process. By automating pleasurable labor, we are going against the system of harmony,
exploiting that which is joyful and putting stress and soulless labor onto the lower-class.
I am drawn so strongly to the ancient. I find myself filled with wonder pouring over archives and books of
medieval art, fascinated by the craft. I listen to old music, religious chants, piano melodies, compositions and
symphonies that are hundreds of years old. Something draws me to lands, buildings, things built in a time
completely different from our own. Everything is derivative of these places, these sounds. I can't help but feel
an energy emanating from the past, as if there are secrets lost to time waiting to be uncovered and understood.
I know I'm not alone in this, I keep finding others on the internet who, like me, are fascinating to hear the
"oldest written song" played out loud, or to taste the "oldest written recipe". It's as if making manifest these
old records, we are being transported back in time. I always wonder that if by connecting with those from
hundreds or even thousands of years ago, we might understand something that they understood that we have lost
sight of among the distractions of modern life.
I have been studying and researching visions as of late. I consider myself agnostic, pessimistically perhaps; my
experiences with religion have been that of complete dedication and disappointment. It's hard to imagine a
relationship with religion and spirituality that is separate from that of what I learned in the Mormon church.
Yet I feel a draw to the feelings I have in connection to ancient religion. The wonder, the mystical awe of
feeling like something supernatural just happened, that perhaps an outside hand played a part. That said, though
I crave spiritual experiences, I am resistant to looking for excused to claim a god had anything to do with the
small medial occurrences of every day. I don't know if these things exist, hence my pessimistic agnosticism.
Regardless, I am fascinated by those who have had visions, especially in antiquity. If anything, I think these
occurrences reveal the human psyche of the time and how people strove to make sense of their surroundings. These
were the people who were bleeding out sick patients to get the "sick blood" out of their bodies as a treatment
for illness. We just understand the mechanics of the world so much more differently now. Visions are a thing of
the past. But there is something that still entrancing me about a person seeing vivid hallucinations revealing
the workings of the universe.
Growing up in Utah, Salt Lake City was “the city”. To everyone around me, Salt Lake was the most dangerous place
you could live. Large amounts of homelessness, crime, poverty along state street, the Rio Grande. When we
decided to finally leave Pleasant Grove to move to Salt Lake in 2022, family looked at us with worry in their
eyes and warned us to be careful. People like my brother in-law would talk about how he could never live in Salt
Lake City, that it was “over-crowded”. Now that I live in New York City, these thoughts are laughable. Salt Lake
City is about as small and suburban as you can get while still living in an urban metropolitan area. It’s funny,
I never felt like I identified with these sentiments, even though I grew up in a small rural developing farming
community along the Wasatch Front just like all these other people. I knew there was inherent risk and danger
that comes with density, but that even so it is uncommon, especially if you’re smart. Now that I’m here in
Brooklyn, I feel an energy that’s completely different, towards people in particular. I feel so much more
patience and tender care for the stranger walking down the street. I love speaking with an Italian man who
immigrated here to start the laundry mat where I wash my clothes. I love interacting with the cashiers at the
market and bartering with the Turkish man at the antique store. People walk down the street in front of my
apartment and I hear the father talking to his ten year old son like a grown man, asking him how he feels about
a relationship. The mother at the train station asking her daughter if she remembers their family friend who’s
on a trip in Italy. Cheering a few blocks away at the park, maybe it’s a protest, maybe it’s a parade. Who are
all those people crowded by the Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Cathedral? Turns out there’s a grand annual Irish
fair. There’s always something happening in the city, and everything that happens is supremely human. People
don’t like cities because of the density, because its too crowded, but that density has never made me feel more
human in my life. We have more friends, we leave the house more, even without trying to.
I’m reading My Struggle, Book 2 by Knausgaard, and he talks of leaving Stockholm to stay with his mother in-law
in the forests of Sweden and how peaceful it makes him feel. I grew up with that peace being something you take
for granted. People spend time in nature everyday, in 30 minutes you can be in the mountains climbing a
cliff-face, casting a fishing line into a glacier run-off stream. I am so grateful I was raised around that, but
now spending time around humans and feeling human, I can’t help but think I will appreciate those moments so
much more when they’re infrequent. I think the human mind needs people. It makes you a decent person to learn
how to be around others, and when you get a break from them, it feels like a load taken off.
I'm thinking about this passage from My Struggle: Book 1 by Karl Knausgaard.
As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its
meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too
small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large,
such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the
scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it
knowledge.
Reading this I was moved by my own experience with this phenomena. Unlike what Knausgård is describing
with this being a phenomena which is inflicted with age and time, I felt this when I restructured my
beliefs post-religion. As a Mormon, the world and every experience is imbued with meaning. I used to
take every breath, every action, as a message from God. If I was doing something that I was taught to be
wrong and something interfered, it was God stepping in. When grandma died, God was taking her home. I
thanked God for the rain, for the sun, for wind. When I left Mormonism and my understanding of the world
crumbled, I was forced in my early twenties to build the world back up again from books, research and
science. While I am infinitely more grateful for things now that I truly understand how they work (not
to say i understand everything or even most things, it's just that I have confidence that most things
can be understood), there is a certain distance I feel from the world now that it's no longer shrouded
in the supernatural veil of God's will.
Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and
phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where
all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is
when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races
through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty,
sixty... Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is
distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning.
I feel pressure now that I feel my life has been adequately demystified to add resistance. I'm only
twenty-eight years old, but just the other day I was twenty. I'm only now starting my career, but
yesterday I was graduating high school. I feel like if I settle down now into a routine that I will
uphold for the next twenty years that I won't know where that time has gone until it's gone. And then
what does life mean? Whatever magic exists now that I'm agnostic will fade away. Steph and I move to New
York in a month, and the process is deeply uncomfortable and anxiety inducing. But for a brief period of
discomfort, we will uproot our lives and shift ourselves into a new world where we're forced to adapt.
There will be so much knowledge to obtain and I think that resistance is necessary for our lives to
progress and to give us meaning.
I feel imbued with memory. Not memory in a sense of remembering something that’s been, but memory as a feeling, as a premonition, a hierophany. A consternation envelopes my thoughts that I have forgotten much of my life. I think this is normal for those who have tried in some ways to forget. Memory isn’t selective, it’s specular, it manifests itself in relation to where you are and where you want to be. I fear that in my pain and abnegation of my past that my memory too has been renounced in collateral. Swaths of my childhood, of my time in Colombia, of the first few years of my life with Steph — it’s already faded into a semblance of a memory. Minute instances spread so thin that they have no substance, as if to remember this is to have it told to me by someone other than myself. Something about memory makes me feel so sad, so afraid. It’s so tragic, so fragile. Steph documents obsessively and nostalgically collects every detail of her life, and I understand why. To archive is to remember, to remind. So little exists of who I’ve descended from. A few knives from my dad, a fishing reel from my great uncle, a belt buckle from my grandpa, a security badge from my great grandpa. The rest are scans of photos, simulacra of the originals, lost to time. Their homes are crumbling in the desert, abandoned and lost. The oldest writings I have in my lineage is a single line from my 3x great grandpa Joshua Sherwood, a pathetic and desperate request for a raise in VA pension for fighting in the western frontier Indian Wars. He writes, "Could you give me a little raise of pension on account of old age? I am now 76 years old and my wife is 68. We are not able to work much and it would help us to live… If you can help us out in this matter it will oblige." The oldest memory in my tree of his own words, not barely 100 years old, and it’s of one of his lowest moments, stricken with poverty, asking for help. His request was denied. I am filled with fear that my own memories will be lost to time. That nobody will remind any one of what I remember. That my great grandpa told me about being a prisoner of war to the Germans in Austria when his plane was shot down. That my grandma told me about her memories of her father insisting on driving his team of mules and wagon until he died. That my great uncle remembers my great grandpa showing him the wolf spring trickling up out of the rocks in the mountains and a rattlesnake that guarded it. My memories live in me, memories of my family live in me. My dreams, my thoughts, my worries, my passions live in me.
I just got back from UMOCA where I've been working for the past several weeks with Milad Mozari to develop his
exhibit as part of the "In Memory" show. As I was leaving at 3pm in the afternoon, I spent some time looking
around at the exhibits. There is a large amount of work from Do Ho Suh of his fabric sculptures of various
objects from places where he's lived in Berlin, Seoul, and NYC. This placard explained how he would sculpt these
objections with obsessive detail as if the over information might contain memory. For me, something about seeing
the meticulously hand embroidered warning text hidden in the back of the fabric sculpted light fixture, and the
names on the doorbell directory, made me feel emotional. Such a beautiful amount of attention given to
recreating the most mundane details of a moment in time really encapsulated memories for me. The feeling of
nostalgia towards the smallest building blocks that construct a moment in time.
Another piece I loved was of a sculpture made of an FBI report about Martin Luther King Jr's "communist"
activities, and the entirety of the report was redacted. The artist made the redacted portion a mirror, raising
the question of whose memories persist, and whose memory becomes history. It's such a poignant question that
feels strongly relevant. Seeing myself in the reflection delivered the artists message and left me questioning
how my memory might persist and how my words might be received and controlled.
The last piece that resonated with me that i want to write about was this artist who takes found photographs and
writes fake obituaries for the people in the photographs, often satirical, in a way to address their own fears
and obsessions with memory lost. This unexpectedly made quite the impact on me. I have many photos from my
childhood but almost no video. There's nothing left behind of my great-grandpa and beyond. I come from
generations of farmers and ranchers. The land settled by my great x1 x2 and x3 grandparents is a ghost town.
Only a handful of photos exist. As I scour antique stores and find discarded photographs, faces of those who
nobody remembers, I fear of my own memory being lost.
I'm left with so many thoughts and feelings surrounding memory, mostly fears around my own memory, both how I
remember things and how I will be remembered. I left the gallery looking up at the buildings taking a mental
snapshot of my surroundings. I left thinking how I will always remember the first gallery exhibition I worked on
being about memory. I'm left thinking about how I have so much on my mind and how I need to write it down to
remember it all. How I want to write a book so I will always have my memory preserved, so people remember me and
what I remembered. I'm left thinking about the videos of civil war veterans talking about their grandparents
memories of their grandparents. How memory is preserved through storytelling. When I read Faulkner, I am
absorbing his memories of the post-civil war American South. It reminds me of my own grandparents, the way they
talk as rural Utahns. There is so much to remember, to remind, to record. I want to explore these thoughts more,
maybe with my own art on memory.
I hardly know how to title this let alone write about it, but I have this contradiction inside me creatively where I make art and designs using code and have an innate interest in the technical, and yet I find that the art I am more consistently drawn back to and more uplifted by are works that are as far from coded algorithms as one could get. Piano from romantics and impressionists like Chopin, Debussy, Schubert, etc. and paintings from impressionists and post-impressionists like Monet, Van Gogh, etc. Maybe this is a normal thing for artists, to settle into a balance with their creative interests. Recently I performed concert visuals at the Salt Lake City Masonic Temple and the opening act was an intense, brutal post-metal band called Black Shape, and one of the band members I immediately recognized as Scott Shepard from the sweet long-time Provo folk guitar and cello duo, Book on Tapeworm. His music from that project has always been a symbol of storybook fantastical whimsy – so seeing him blast us away with post-metal distorted guitars was surprising to me. Maybe that's what we need as creatives, the courage and flexibility to express ourselves however we feel drawn to. I love opportunities to mix my interests when they arise. Today a friend of mine shared work and thoughts on the internet as a "garden" and how he explored arranging snippets from his browsing as "flower arrangements". I've discovered similar concepts from old-web enthusiasts called "digital gardens", and sometimes "screenshot gardens". This resonates with me and my interests in generative art and web design, and the natural world, of gardens flowers, and the beauty of the Earth. I think a lot of what humans find beautiful is that which is natural and reminds us instinctively, maybe even programmatically in our DNA, of what is safe and a sanctuary. The romantics felt this when they painted scenes of serenity. So for me, treating a webpage and the framework of hypertext it was built on as a garden and allowing its forms and limitations grow and dictate the flow of its navigation is inspiring to me. Bringing together these seemingly conflicting ideas into a connection unexpectedly leads to new avenues of thinking, allowing new things to grow.
I have been deep in thought about the internet lately. Undoubtedly, it is the most important development of our
time, and has completely changed the fabric of our world. Some might say that it has made life easier, and in
some ways I believe that to be true. But as we have streamlined our lives, we have also made them busier, more
demanding, less quiet, more rapid. In the early days of the web, it was an esoteric realm for those that had the
will and the desire to decode it. Websites like GeoCities allowed users to carve out their own spaces and form
their own communities around them. Chat rooms and forums were town halls, plazas, community centers. The world
wide web seemed limitless, anyone could do or learn anything.
Today, the web is a different place. Because of big tech companies cornering interaction through social media
sites, it has mutated into a tool for essentially brainwashing the general public to engage, click, scroll,
scroll, scroll, until inevitably they a. get irritated enough by the ads to PAY the company to hide them, b. see
the same ads frequently enough that they BUY the product, or c. never heed the ads but, no matter, their data
down to the most minute lingering on a web element gets analyzed and archived next to that users name and is
used to construct a data-clone of that person which is then sold off to data brokers and used to get them to buy
their products elsewhere. On top of this every-thing-is-for-sale capitalistic hellscape, algorithms perfectly
curate feeds for interaction and outrage. If it gets the user to engage, the algorithm hones in and intensifies.
The effects on us are severe – death of subcultures as we know them, a young population incapable of
face-to-face interaction, an older population incapable of distinguishing truth from reality.
Now with AI progressing faster than any other technology in our lifetimes, all of these challenges will be
exaggerated to the nth degree. The internet was the most important development of our time, and in only a few
decades it is being challenged and threatened to destruction. "[Dead internet
theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory) that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly
of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing
organic human activity." Every day this conspiracy is proven to be reality. Google images is dying with search
results turning up AI generated images. Bots on social media platforms bait users into clicking their links
sporting pornographic profile pictures generated by AI. Foolish silicon valley developers are building so-called
"growth tools" to generate comments on LinkedIn using AI to farm engagement. With so little human touch left in
the internet, how will we survive? What will happen to our beloved world wide web?
I dream of the ways of the old web. Recently I discovered a website built in 2023 by a biologist through
NeoCities, a GeoCities offshoot designed to bring the old web back from the dead. As I filtered through their
pages – one dedicated to bugs, one a scientific chart of every plant they've ever eaten, one a gallery of sticky
note drawings made for their boyfriend, one a contact page with a guestbook where any visitor could leave a note
– I became strangely emotional and hopeful of what we could reclaim. I dream that as more people become
disgusted with the dead internet that a movement might take place where we carve out our own spaces and make the
web ours again. I dream of a web revolution (a webolution? lol).
We as a species advanced how we did because of our abilities to form communities, collaborate, work together, &
maintain large scale communal relationships. This communal nature has been dulled in modern society through
capitalism & individualism & has been the impetus for a lot of the inequality in our society. If we were to
change our culture & ideologies to be more communal like our ancestors, perhaps we could eliminate it.Imagine a
world where the hard work is automated as much as possible & the remaining work is divided up equitably among
the able so that it only needs to be done for a few hours a day. The remaining more pleasurable work could be
done by all. We need a balance of work for the body & work for the mind.
We have machines that manufacture thousands of articles of clothing. We are then meant to buy these & wear them
to express our personal feelings. Thousands of people wear the same clothing & we try to afford more expensive
clothing than others to create a sense of luxury & glamour which we can then leverage to make ourselves
enviable. However, if we decided to focus our machines to benefit society instead of benefiting the
manufacturers, things might be different. Items such as furniture, art, clothing, etc. should not be mass
produced -- at least not on a global scale. These things should be kept local & should retain a hand-crafted
element to them. That's part of my issue with AI, that it is being used to automate art & culture, an aspect of
our lives that should remain untouched by automation.
Bruno writes this book to argue that today's designer is yesterdays artists — that artists have been in large
part replaced & made irrelevant, & that designers are artists using their skills & creativity to be planners.
I struggle with this sentiment because to me, the difference is more in that design is art which is marketed. It
feels like, while a chunk of what makes good design *good* lies in how well it solves the problem at hand, that
design relies more on marketing — whether or not it makes money. The capitalistic marketing side of being a
designer is increasingly hard for me to reckon with. If a design does well, it can be mass produced & populate
the world until it becomes “out of style” in a few years & ends up in a landfill. Designers love to think of
themselves as artists, but at the end of the day, we’re often sacrificing our vision to appease the client, who
often doesn’t care or have the same aesthetic eye as you, & we’re ultimately forced to create work that feels
disembodied & without a soul.
The reality for me is that at heart I’m an artist, but our world no longer values artists as much as designers.
If I am to survive in this day & age, design is the closest way I can make a career while still holding onto the
artist in me. But it will always be under the umbrella of capitalism. How can I read about publicity preying on
people’s sense of powerlessness & dissatisfaction with life to offer them empty “solutions” that can help
provide a false sense of glamour in their monotonous lives, then work for those very predatory companies helping
create those very publications being used to trick them?
Perhaps the answer lies in the type of design I settle into as my career. What I do & who I work for. Will I
make educational exhibits & art installations for a museum? Or will I make ads & branding for a a financial
firm?
It is important here not to confuse publicity with the pleasure or benefits
to be enjoyed from the things it advertises. Publicity is effective precisely
because it feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths,
sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Publicity begins by
working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real
object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in
that pleasure's own terms. The more convincingly publicity conveys the
pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will
become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more
remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why publicity
can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is
proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it.
Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always
about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by
the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him
envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be
enviable? The envy of other. Publicity is about social relations, not
objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as
judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.
Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not
sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with
interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become
less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more
impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others)
of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed
happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority. It is this
which explains the absent, unfocused look of so many glamour images. The look
out over the looks of envy which sustain them.
The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys
the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into
an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving
herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love
of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the
product.
This excerpt is talking about the role of envy in advertising, but it is making me think about the role of envy
in myself, & how I make decisions for want of being envied. I think the art & produce, the way I dress, & even
the way I decorate my home are partially affected by wanting to be envied. To be envied is to be desired, which
of course is something I want.
I think envy is, in a certain sense, a necessary feeling to possess -- to be envied is to be in demand, &
especially when operating in a career where reputation leads to work & especially work that is desirable, envy
is a mechanism for success; for obtaining & fulfilling my goals.
How then can we avoid envy that, like John Berger writes about, is "impersonal", "absent", & "unfocused"? Is
there a balance between being envied & respected but also being humble & grounded? Perhaps envy is the wrong
approach? Is it rooted too much in narcissism & egocentricity? Is there a way to be desired & respected while
also not caring about what others think?