On Efficiency

The government of Alberta (that's a province in Canada) is in the process of trying to take control of that province's Universities. Here's an article about it. This is an almost comically bad idea for a number of reasons, most of them provided by the article. But if you look at the comments there is one part of the article I find extremely disturbing that most people seem to think a good idea:

“We have 26 post-secondary schools in Alberta,” says advanced education minister Thomas Lukaszuk, on the phone from Vietnam, where he’s volunteering to build playgrounds. “Each one is a virtuoso. But those 26 schools don’t play together. They don’t have a conductor.”

[skipped paragraph]

“Twenty-six schools. Why does each one need its own payroll department? Bureaucracy is repeated 26 times over.”

Here my earlier post about Universities and corporations is relevant. But I'd like to expand a little. The assumption Lukaszuk makes is all 26 payroll departments at all 26 schools do the same job and can, therefore, be centralized and amalgamated into a single payroll department. The next step is to take that department out of public hands and turn it over to a private corporation (with the ideologically presumed gain in efficiency). This is how the United States government handles its payroll - more accurately, the United States government pays Lockheed Martin to handle its payroll. But even a little thought about how those 26 different payroll departments actually operate demonstrates the problems with this logic. 26 different payroll departments means 26 groups of real people who you can call when the inevitable mistakes are made, 26 groups of people who have jobs and are putting food on the tables of all those families. The government is employing those people - although Universities are technically separate corporate entities - and the government wants to take those jobs away because it is more efficient.

Also, note each of the 26 schools has dozens of highly paid administrators, going all the way up to the President: here's a list of the highest paid university employees in Canada. Somehow I doubt the payroll officers are getting $500k per year. 

You can't make a strictly economic argument against this kind of move. I'm sure the accountants have no doubts it makes sense economically. But you can make a political argument about it. I don't want my government to be more concerned with efficiency than with the lives of people. The extra expense of 26 different payroll departments is the tiniest fraction of Alberta's budget. Save the money in some way that doesn't mean cutting people's jobs in the name of efficiency.

You can also make a different argument about it, although I'm not sure what you would call it. These days people pursue efficiency as if it was an end in itself. Again, from a purely economic viewpoint, I guess it is. But the relentless pursuit of efficiency costs us all the benefits of inefficiency. In the broadest possible context, being human is extremely inefficient. We spend most of our time doing things that do not advance any particular cause or bring us closer to reaching a particular goal. Music is tremendously inefficient. So are painting, sculpture, poetry, dancing, having friends - all those things which are most important to us as humans. If the things you think are most important to you as a human aren't on that list, think a minute about whether they are efficient. I bet they aren't. I like playing with my nephew - a total waste of time.

There is also a kind of economic argument for inefficiency. Ontario is home to one of the most advanced research institutions in the world - the Perimeter Institute. You may have read in the news Stephen Hawking recently made it his base of operations, maybe Cambridge was too efficient for him. Anyway, one of the architects who designed the building described it as "a place where coffee is translated into theorems". Because of this insight the hallways between the offices are absolutely gorgeous - an attempt to increase the amount of time the various members of the Institute stand around chatting. Some of the most intelligent people in the world have a building specifically designed to help increase their performance, and the key is to keep them from "working".

By most lights, humans are ridiculously inefficient. We sleep one third of every day. We have to eat and excrete. We get very unhappy when we can't talk to other humans. The best possible thing any institution can do, from an economic perspective, is replace humans (either with other humans who get paid less or with automata). Why should you pay a person a living wage when a machine can do the job so much more efficiently? The only reason, and it is sufficient to the point of being self-evident, is we care about other humans. Or we ought to. We don't care about machines, except in the extremely limited way we care about possessions.

Being human means being inefficient.

There is also a classist factor to all arguments about efficiency - no one ever argues the people getting paid the most are inefficient, although I'm never very clear on what, precisely, they do. David Johnson, former President of the University of Waterloo, got paid more than $1 million to campaign for his current job - Governor General of Canada. I don't know what the GG does, but I know there is no efficiency expert breathing down his neck.

There are so many ways the drive for efficiency is having a negative effect on all our lives I can't possible list them all. It limits what we can buy, what we can eat. It changes what we read and what we watch.

There is a famous joke about James Joyce. Someone asked him what he did in the Great War. He replied, "I wrote Ulysses, what did you do?" He wasn't kidding. It took him seven years to write that fucker and he would never have been able to, despite various jobs he held between 1914 and 1921 if a private patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, hadn't given him thousands of pounds over a quarter of a century. Joyce was inefficient as hell. Ulysses is 265 000 words long, divided by 7 years, divided by 365 days - a little over 100 words per day.

On Criticism and Architecture

Here is an interesting piece by Allison Arieff from the NYT: Interesting Piece

I agree we need to think more about architecture and, obviously, more and better writing about architecture can only help that cause. Here example of critical prose is, unfortunately, right on the money. I used to be an avid consumer of architecture periodicals, now I can't stand to look at them. I complained to a Ph.D in architecture, "Architecture articles are bullshit." Her response was, "No. They aren't." Two highly trained critical minds and that was as far as we got on that issue.

Off the top of my head, I can only think of one brilliant designer who is also a brilliant writer - Rem Koolhaas. But it is important to note his best writing (Delirious New York) was based on a complete theoretical framework the book was intended to explain.

Architecture criticism is not going to improve until it is based on a clear and comprehensive theory of architecture - one that explains not only how buildings are to be designed but also why they are to be designed that way. The writings of the early Modernists are crystal clear because they understood what they were doing and why they were doing it. Robert Venturi wrote elegant and lyrical prose about post-Modern architecture because he had an idea what architects should be doing (and why). Too bad no one agreed with him (and the resulting architecture was terrible). But if you read Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture or Learning from Las Vegas you will see how knowing exactly where you stand is crucial to writing well.

We should not expect architecture criticism to improve without a clear and comprehensive theory of architecture. The best a critic can do is assume the critical position of the architect - and that means writing only about buildings whose architects possessed such a position. I could write about the Guggenheim in New York or the Whitney and do a passable job of it because I understand what Wright and Breuer thought architecture was, what it meant. I couldn't do the same for any building post 1975 - with the possible exception of the Guggenheim in Bilbao.

If someone asked me how to write architecture criticism, I would say ignore the theory entirely. Concentrate on the experience of the building. The Whitney, for example, has one of the best (and certainly the most menacing) entrance sequence of any building I know. It pulls itself away from the sidewalk, forcing you to cross a bridge to reach the doors while it looms over you. It's a fantastic sequence, beautifully choreographed. Tell me how you move in the building. Peter Zumthor's Thermal Baths in Vals is one of the most admired buildings in recent history but I didn't know you had to approach the bathing area through an underground tunnel until I looked at the plans myself. No one photographs that part because it's too dark. I don't know why no one wrote about it.

Leave the heavy thinking out of it. People don't think about buildings, they use them. Or pass through them. How does the building touch the street? How do you get in? How do you navigate once you are inside? The "architecture" part of a building is 45% facade and 45% lobby. Tell me about those things and you are 90% of the way there.

As for the really "important" buildings, the ones that are so strange they demand interpretation - huge skyscrapers, buildings with exotic sculptural structures - you could do worse than considering them as, and describing them like, people. Calatrava's buildings, for example, are drama queens everyone is going to get sick of fast.

On Helen Keller

"Life is either a great adventure or nothing."
- Helen Keller

I see this quote on FB frequently and it always makes me feel guilty. My life is certainly not a great adventure. I have not jumped off a cliff lately (either with a parachute or into water). I do not participate in extreme sports. I only leave my apartment when I am forced to by some necessity. Therefore, by HK's logic, my life is nothing. I'm not sure I would disagree with that but I might put it a little less forcefully.

But like all things that hang around in my brain long enough, I eventually got around to thinking about that quote. What kind of adventures did Helen Keller get up to? I doubt she was a para-glider, nor can I see her smuggling a secret code over enemy lines. I am not going to turn this into a cheap HK joke. Her disabilities (am I still allowed to call them that?) require me to reconsider my initial reaction to her eminently meme-ish sentence.

Life is either a great adventure [to you] or nothing [very exciting]. It isn't as punchy, I'll admit. But I think it is closer to what the sentence means. Read this way it is less an injunction to "Do something that scares you everyday" - another popular injunction for either self-improvement or selling running shoes - and more a suggestion about how one should consider one's life.

I generally mistrust famous quotes from famous people because extreme cases make bad laws and famous people are extreme cases by definition.

Here's another one: "Be the change you wish to see in the world." - M. Gandhi

I've always thought this quote was absolute bullshit. It makes no sense. And it is stupid, something Gandhi wasn't. How, precisely, is a single mother making $16k a year with two kids supposed to "be the change"? How are the millions of people living in desperate poverty supposed to "Be the change"?

What Gandhi actually said was:

"If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him... We need not wait to see what others do."

That's a much more nuanced view than Be The Change. It also makes sense. Maybe I should give HK more credit. Maybe the Life is... quote is nothing more than a fabrication deliberately meant to sell cars or shoes or the organic shopping experience.  

On Boats and Swoon

"One can't not be on a boat."
"I've frequently not been on boats."
- Tom Stoppard

This really has nothing to do with boats. I don't own a boat but I do know a lot of people who do. I don't know anything about how to work a boat or make it go - unless it has a motor (that makes it pretty simple).

There is an artist named Swoon (Google her, she's fantastic). Here are a couple images of her work.

One of her projects was to build a boat, which turned into a flotilla. From what I have read about it, the flotilla was a party on the water, making landfall when they wanted to convert the ships into stages and host concerts. A wicked wonderful idea. Then they somehow got the flotilla across the Atlantic and crashed the Venice Biennale - another wonderful idea. Seriously, Swoon is amazing. I have a huge crush on her.

Ever since I read about it I've wanted to try it. Cruising up to Venice in a crazy boat made of garbage and held together with baling wire while having a flotilla wide jam session. Sometimes people do really cool things. Swoon has a book, it's pretty good. The art is really great but the book, as an object, isn't so hot. Still, worth checking out. Here's the link to Amazon: Swoon's Book

Piblokto Madness

The Piblokto Madness bed, Inchmale called it. “Intense hysteria,” she recited now, from memory, “depression, coprophagia, insensitivity to cold, echolalia.”
- William Gibson, Zero History (2010)

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Something. Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You throw your plough aside and, your head completely empty of thought, you begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That’s hysteria siberiana.”

I tried to conjure up the picture of a Siberian farmer lying dead on the ground.

- Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun (1999)

According to Wikipedia, Piblokto Madness and Hysteria siberiana are the same disorder. If you Google hysteria siberiana all you get is references to Murakami and the Wikipedia article identifying it as Piblokto. I'm going to take a guess here and say Gibson did exactly what I did - read about this strange disorder in Murakami's book, Googled it, and then started reading about Piblokto. Then he went on to write a really good book in which includes this strange disorder, something I didn't do. 

Gibson is fascinated by Japan and Japanese culture. He has written some pretty good essays on Japan, collected in 2012's Distrust That Particular Flavor. It includes pieces on Beat Takeshi, Hikaru Dorodango (shiny balls of mud), Japanese culture in the late 20th Century, and his experience of Tokyo. I can't recall Gibson writing specifically about Murakami but I wouldn't be surprised if he was a fan. 

I like Murakami too. I don't know many people who know of Murakami and don't like his work. I think many of them would be hard pressed to say why they liked it. I know I have trouble articulating the reasons. It is easier to articulate what is wrong with Murakami's work - the books are too similar, they have no clear meaning and often lack conclusions, they are sometimes (like 1Q84) about 1000 pages too long. 

I taught A Wild Sheep Chase and was forced to admit I had no idea what anything in the book meant, I just really liked it. The students and I decided to attack the book by making a list of things we didn't understand and then spent three hours trying to connect them. The clearest conclusion anyone managed was the student who offered the opinion the book itself was the wild sheep chase. I thought the class was a disaster but when I asked them at the end of the term, that class was the clear favorite of the majority of students. 

If I was forced (as I am here forcing myself) to explain why I like Murakami so much, I would say it has something to do with Hikaru Dorodango. Here is an example:

 

There are instructions available online if you wish to make your own shiny mud ball but be forewarned, the process is time consuming. These objects are the result of an obsession. And I think Murakami's work is obsessional as well - he is reworking his own life, over and over. His obsession is with those parts of his life that lack a coherent narrative. How, for instance, does a person fall in love? This is an enormously important event in an individual's life! So why do we insist it just happens - as if it was the most mundane occurrence.

Murakami's protagonists face the world in all its complexity. They are frequently amazed how much of their lives just happens. They are sometimes treated to a glimpse of the mechanisms by which things just happen. And the reader is sometimes provided with the characters' incomplete attempts to explain their own lives. Which makes Murakami a bitch to read - how much is really happening (should the reader interpret as actually occurring to the character), how much is the character's imaginings, when are bizarre events real, when are they just (?) the characters imagination, when is Murakami (as author) leading the reader astray? 

 

Despite the odd events in many Murakami books (Sheepman, for example) I take his work to be almost exclusively interested in, and dedicated to, "real" life. That is, life as it occurs not just to Murakami or his characters but to all of us. And I take the inclusion of magical elements as a reminder (or possibly an admonition) that life is magical - not in the fake-guru "listen to your heartbeat" bullshit magic way but in the sense of massive complexity and continuous random events producing a world we can nevertheless navigate, all the while maintaining an internal monologue that is neither real nor unreal. It might not be magic literally (not like making a bird fly out of your sleeve). That something so incomprehensibly bizarre in every detail should produce something marginally comprehensible in toto is magical. That is what I find in Murakami's work and why I only read it when I am relatively certain of the ground under my feet.    

On Technology and Morality 2

I write these fast. I don't take time to really think about them. They are off the top of my head and consequently, I frequently miss fairly obvious stuff. Take the previous post. I stated somewhere in there the key aspect about morality is it pertains to how I relate to the rest of you. I immediately jumped to the largest scale I could think of (another frequent failing) and neglected considering the more common, and more relevant, matter of my daily life.

90% of my personal interactions occur via my computer. Either email, Facebook (I know I am way too old and uncool but since Facebook hasn't been cool for years, I figure I'm alright), occasionally Skype, whatever. The fact of my daily existence is the only people I speak with face to face and in the flesh are people I'm buying something from. Technology intrudes wherever it can.

Everyone will have experienced this or something very similar - you are sitting with some friends, maybe eating dinner and, in the middle of the conversation, a smart phone pops out. Someone wants a photograph or feels the need to post what you are doing on some social website. Worse is when someone decides the smartphone takes precedence over the people sitting right there with them and starts to text under the table.

When I was writing the syllabus for the class I taught last fall, I wrote a whole section clearly explaining 1) no smartphones or computers of any kind in the class, and 2) the reasons for that prohibition. The students seemed to regard this as a harmless eccentricity on my part and brought their computers and smartphones to class anyway. Most people find it incomprehensible someone might want to set aside a portion of their daily life - asylum from the constant interruption or temptation of technology.

I don't go to parties very often - I used to tho, and they were very different. The parties I go to now, everyone is waiting for their picture to be taken, sub-consciously preparing for the unexpected flash to go off. It's weird.  And you better look good when that unexpected flash eventually goes off because the image (with your name and a geo-locator tag) can be online in seconds. I am the least social of people, but my face is online dozens of locations. My efforts to protect my face as my own property have come to nothing so far.

People seem to judge their lives now by a different set of criteria. How will this look on my website? Is this cool enough for the judgmental eyes of my 1200 "friends". This is a grotesque expansion of the super-ego. The damning super-ego injunction ("Have fun!!!") has gone from a strictly internal edict to an externalized function - "Have fun and make sure everyone knows it!!!" So the super-ego has become socialized and, as a result, become a different kind of moral factor.

The super-ego has always had moral relevance. It is that part of you that demands moral action - combating the Id and it's insatiable demands for satisfaction. (Hey this could be a pop song, I just rhymed action and satisfaction!). And the super-ego has always possessed a communal aspect, since it is responsible for generating our ideas of how we ought to behave and what we ought to do. But I can't help but think the new, metastasized super-ego is a very bad thing. Technology has added a giant ticking clock to super-ego injunctions. The fact our interactions with social media occur in real time exponentially increases the urgency of these injunctions.

An aside here - I sometimes think there is a market for surrogate fun. If you really don't feel like going out and doing anything interesting, adventurous and worthy of internet sharing - why not outsource? Hire a surrogate to post a steady stream of fictional updates that perpetuate precisely the image you wish for your various internet avatars? It isn't so different from interns handling celebrity Twitter feeds.

So how is all this super-ego pressure properly moral? It creates an unnecessary narcissism. And narcissistic people are generally bad moral agents. How many tweets have you read from the food bank? Or from people volunteering at retirement homes? There is a reason the bible says charity should be performed with the left hand while the right remains ignorant. Charity is inherently self-less - it is a subordination of personal interest under communal interest. Technology, as it is used in my life and the lives of people I know, isn't very good at that. It's fantastic at self-aggrandizement but shit at whatever the opposite of aggrandizement is. 

If you don't think super-ego injunctions are a big deal, you're flat wrong. How many times have you heard people complain about their life? My life sucks. I don't have a life. I wish I knew what I was doing with my life. This is pure super-ego. The answer to the question, "What am I doing with my life?" is completely obvious to the person who asks. [I offer myself as an example; I'm reading a lot, occasionally applying for jobs, worrying about my teeth, smoking way too much, and eating too much take-out food.] The question, more accurately phrased, would be, "What will it take for my super-ego to leave me alone for a few fucking minutes!?!" That the super-ego is the source of these complaints is equally obvious. You hear these questions / complaints even from people in a state of almost total Id satisfaction - "Yes, I'm having the best sex of my life and the food is also fantastic but what am I doing with my life?" The super-ego is an unyielding and merciless critic. It is never satisfied. So magnifying its power with an omni-present camera and real-time updates re "what you are doing with your life" seems a profoundly bad idea to me.      

On Morality and Technology

If one were to attempt to evaluate the morality of technology it might seem the first task would be to move from the general to the specific. Different technologies have different moral qualities, do they not? A medical imaging device that can save tens of thousands of lives is fundamentally different morally from a weapon system that is designed only to kill effectively. This is an extreme example and, as a long dead Greek gentleman once said, extreme cases make bad laws.

If we consider what technology does generally we might be able to make some general statements about it. Technology, in whatever guise, increases our ability to alter our circumstance, to tailor our environment to suit, to force reality to conform to our wishes. It seems like a certainty that any technology not specifically designed around a basic moral premise (like the Doctor's famous "do no harm") must necessarily be amoral at best and immoral as a general rule. The reasoning behind that judgment is unclear so let me explain.

One of the Great Russian Authors, I forget which one, noted a strange quirk of human nature; those who profess to love the human race as a whole tend to dislike humans as individuals and vice versa. I am one of those people who dislikes the species as a whole but likes individual representatives. I do not think highly of humans. We are venal, cruel, and brutish. It therefore follows that those things which increase our ability to act on our nature will result in an increase in venality, cruelty, and brutishness.

Whatever you think of the preceding argument, you will admit technological advances do not occur by themselves. The greatest engine the human species has ever created for spurring technological advance is capitalism. So the morality of technology can only properly be examined within the context of the capitalist societies that advance it. The first thing that must become apparent to anyone who has any knowledge of either history or anthropology is capitalist societies are spectacularly unkind. The are venal and avaricious by definition and brutish to those who are least capable of defending themselves. The more advanced the economy, the more unkind the society.

That is the downside of capitalism. Even its harshest critics will admit it creates wealth almost as well as it creates technology. But the division of wealth that is the heart of capitalism is, in many ways, its cruelest aspect. In non-capitalist societies (it would be more proper to describe them as pre-economic or pre-capitalist) it is almost universally true that no one starves until everyone starves. This is manifestly untrue about capitalist societies.

In the smaller picture, at the level of the individual wondering whether or not to purchase a new technology, economics is also germane. I am writing this on an old MacBook Pro. While I love this computer (and have since I bought it) I can't quite bring myself to purchase another while Chinese workers in Apple factories are committing suicide to protest working conditions or while minerals necessary to build a replacement are mined by slaves in some of the worst places in the world.

Morality, it is worth remembering, it not something I do to myself, but how I act towards others. And in the world in which we live money is a form of action. I don't bother myself about my money making executives even more ridiculously wealthy but I cannot help but be bothered when the way I use my money makes some of the most miserable people on the planet even more miserable.