Tag Archives: Quotes

You Can See the Problem

When my soon-to-be brother-in-law first visited our new flat last year, he asked me about the kind of roller shutters we had installed, if they were electrically operated and if I could activate them remotely. I told him that the real estate developer had stuck to manual levers to keep the cost down as much as possible, but we could, if we wanted, easily add a little motor on the side.

But I told him that I preferred this manual system anyway. If one day I can’t open or close the shutters, I will know where the problem comes from: a mechanical issue with the roller.

Nicolas Magand

An upcoming issue of Good Work is focused on “Machines,” and it strikes me that the ability to see the mechanics involved is part of a machine’s appeal. Modern devices—especially “smart” devices—tend to hide the machinery, either by design or because they’re so complex, which makes them impossible to tinker with. And, as Matthew Crawford taught us in Shop Class as Soul Craft, tinkering with stuff is a human instinct. “We want to feel that our world is intelligible,” he says, “so we can be responsible for it.”

In books and movies from the twentieth century, people are always fixing stuff themselves—cars, toasters, space ships. Fifty years later, when tech has crept into even more aspects of our lives, tinkering, let alone fixing, feels almost impossible. You can’t see the problem, so you can’t understand the problem, so you don’t feel responsible for the problem. But lack of responsibility is uncomfortable. We want to feel responsible. Responsibility is good for us.

(In his post, Nicolas also links to a post called “My Coffee Maker Just Makes Coffee” by Bradley Taunt. Also worth a skim.)

Working Together and Alone

I once said to a film director I know that I don’t see how movies ever get made, and he replied that in making a movie he has “so much help” from smart and skilled people — he doesn’t understand how I can just sit in a room and write books. But when I’m sitting in a room writing a book I am not accountable to or answerable to anyone else: I only have to manage Me.

Alan Jacobs

Jacobs goes on to paraphrase Lumet’s description of the director’s job:

In Lumet’s account, to be a director is to be in this mode of sensitively responding to all the people around you, with all their needs and demands, for weeks on end.

I find myself sympathetic to both modes of working. Few things fire me up like tackling a creative project with a group of talented people. I enjoy sensitively responding to them. But once the play’s run is over or the filming has wrapped, I can’t wait to get back to the computer and books. My ideal job would be divided between writing and directing… Hey! that’s an actual job, albeit one few people get paid for.

Moscow [Idaho] has, according to reliable figures, a greater number of church people than any other city of like size in the United States.

Hiram Taylor French, writing in 1914

They Dream of Mars

RAY BRADBURY But as it turns out—and I love to say it because it upsets everyone terribly—[Edgar Rice] Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world.

INTERVIEWER Why do you think that?

BRADBURY By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special. That’s what we have to do for everyone, give the gift of life with our books. Say to a girl or boy at age ten, Hey, life is fun! Grow tall! I’ve talked to more biochemists and more astronomers and technologists in various fields, who, when they were ten years old, fell in love with John Carter and Tarzan and decided to become something romantic. Burroughs put us on the moon. All the technologists read Burroughs. I was once at Caltech with a whole bunch of scientists and they all admitted it. Two leading astronomers—one from Cornell, the other from Caltech—came out and said, Yeah, that’s why we became astronomers. We wanted to see Mars more closely.

via

Bad roads, good people; good roads, bad people.

Mama Espinoza (via)

Rage Against the Machine

The sensitive person’s hostility to the machine is in one sense unrealistic, because of the obvious fact that the machine has come to stay. But as an attitude of mind there is a great deal to be said for it. The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug—that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes. You have only to look about you at this moment to realise with what sinister speed the machine is getting us into its power.

George Orwell

More on Advertising

From The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg:

Advertising, in its ideology and effects, is the enemy of an informal public life. It breeds alienation. It convinces people that the good life can be individually purchased. In the place of the shared camaraderie of people who see themselves as equals, the ideology of advertising substitutes competitive acquisition. It is the difference between loving people for what they are and envying them for what they own. It is no coincidence that cultures with a highly developed informal public life have a disdain for advertising.

Rough Ground

In this post, Alan Jacobs reiterates things he’s said in previous posts that informed my most recent newsletter.

I’m basically repeating here the message of Nick Carr’s book The Glass Cage, and much of Matt Crawford’s work, and more than a few of my earlier essays, but: automation deskills. Art that hasn’t been taken through the long slow process of developmental demonstration — art that has shied from resistance and pursued “the smooth things” — will suffer, will settle for the predictable and palatable, will be boring. And the exercise of hard-won human skills is a good thing in itself, regardless of what “product” it leads to.

The link is worth following if only to see the difference between the architectural sketches of Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry.

Creating Needs

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism:

At first glance, a society based on mass consumption appears to encourage self-indulgence in its most blatant forms. Strictly considered, however, modern advertising seeks to promote not so much self-indulgence as self-doubt. It seeks to create needs, not to fulfill them; to generate new anxieties instead of allaying old ones. By surrounding the consumer with images of the good life, and by associating them with the glamour of celebrity and success, mass culture encourages the ordinary man to cultivate extraordinary tastes, to identify himself with the privileged minority against the rest, and to join them, in his fantasies, in a life of exquisite comfort and sensual refinement. Yet the propaganda of commodities simultaneously makes him acutely unhappy with his lot. By fostering grandiose aspirations, it also fosters self-denigration and self-contempt.

It reminds me of my friend Ryan’s observation that commercials are “trying to make you sad.”