#Kate Wagner

[st-just]

The extinction of clip art as a concept is a looking glass reflecting what makes the modern computer experience so unpleasant. It’s not even that nothing is free anymore; it’s that nothing is its own product anymore—everything has been reduced to the piecemeal, from individual images to creative labor itself. It is actually cheaper for me to hire a graphic designer on Fiverr than it is to buy a single image on Shutterstock. Hell, I don’t even own the means of creative production anymore—I rent them from Microsoft and Adobe. Meanwhile, copyright trolls and social media crawlers have locked down and watermarked so much of what’s online that searching for images is almost a pointless endeavor in and of itself. No wonder there’s so much demand for AI products like Dall-E and Midjourney. They, also now monetized, fill a niche that clip art once filled, which is to say, they take up a blank space on a page.

-Kate Wagner

[bsportif]

Excerpts from Kate Wagner’s Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain

[ralfmaximus]

McMansion Hell curator Kate Wagner wrote an article for Road & Track that was published then unpublished in the same day because, well, she told some uncomfortable truths.

You can read it here, courtesy of the Internet Archive.

[disarmluna]

[gettothedancing]

The subtext [Let People Enjoy Things] image is a fourfold confession: 1) “I do not want to feel judged for my consumption choices”; 2) “I want to silence people who disagree with me about this particular piece of media by making them feel like they are cheerless or judgmental”; 3) “I recognize an aspect of this piece of media that is worthy of criticism, and I am defensive of this;” and (4) “I do not want to think critically about the things I consume, and if I absorb any criticism about the things I consume it will magically ruin my enjoyment of them.”

Kate Wagner, Don't Let People Enjoy Things

[deathbyautopilot]

We Control the Narrative - On Website Eugenics, Homestuck, and Your Problematic Favs

I entered the digital realm at about 10 years old, just barely witnessing the shift from the web to apps. I played Runescape on a dusty old desktop fitted with Windows XP and would browse through the open forums for games I would never play. But as much as I try to remember the endless dotcom online world and its endless whimsy, works like Kate Wagner’s 404 Page Not Found expose just how far gone that era truly is. For two decades now, the internet has been gradually appropriated by a powerful few, corralling an expansive and free userbase into an easily controlled market.

The shift from the open web to centralized apps has gradually stripped the individual user of the “thrill of the hunt” that characterized the Web 2.0 era. Kate Wagner reflected on the fleeting memories of the open internet, and that nostalgic experience of stumbling upon a single customized site that silently broke down the boundaries of the digital realm. Any website on any page of your search results could yield a treasure trove of groundbreaking new knowledge, media, and community. Sometimes this was finding a new online game, like how it felt to log in to Club Penguin for the first time. But more often than that, it was entire networks of individuals and media that would defy all expectations for what art, and the internet, can be.

This quote pulled from internet historian Olia Lialina summarizes the landscape best:

“It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer.”

But in a post-iPhone world, the shift towards streamlined and prescribed apps neglected the web into obsolescence. Maximalism gave way to minimalism, UIs gradually deteriorated, urging you to download their new app or subtly manipulating the content that browsers would expose users to. As a 90s kid, Wagner watched this happen in the fall of MySpace, where personal archives were purged simply because it was not profitable to keep them around. For me, it was the fall of Adobe Flash, and the creative media that it took away.

Adobe Flash and I go way back, spanning from Elementary school lunches in the computer lap playing Cool Math Games with all my classmates to late-night exploration on the family laptop. One of my most memorable internet experiences came in the months after I discovered Homestuck, a multi-media webcomic that dominated niche digital communities since its debut in 2009.

Having started only 2 years after the iPhone came out, Homestuck is a legend of early Web 2.0, with a rich and expansive digital narrative that the Atlantic dubbed “a story that could only be told online”. By blending IM chatlogs as dialogue, GIFs as panels, flash media, fully animated videos with complete soundtracks, and a one-of-a-kind narrative, this interactive site would draw in millions of users with each update and bridge the divide between forums, personal blogs, and social networks like Twitter and Tumblr.

I will always remember the day that Act 6 of the series came to a climax with the flash video [S] Collide (April 6th 2016, the best day of my 13 year-old, internet-dwelling life), and of course, July of the next year when it was announced that Adobe Flash would die by the end of 2020.

When Flash went down all those years later — while Homestuck was still being updated on this same site — the new owner of the series’ publishing and printing rights Viz Media made little effort to preserve the 8000+ page time capsule. This prompted fans of the series to come together to compile the Unofficial Homestuck Collection, an optimized, offline version of the original site, even offering language filters to correct its less tasteful writing choices. This was an invaluable act, but it also represents a process of corporate neglect, and the ongoing cleansing of any media online that is deemed unworthy of preservation. Wagner compared this to a series of minor Libraries of Alexandria being burned to the ground, and rich personal narratives being buried beneath a controlled legacy of human history.

“The artifacts of internet life are personal—that is, not professionally or historically notable—and therefore worthless.”

Homestuck fans are split between those who recognize it as a postmodern masterpiece comparable to Ulysses, and those who would be happy to see it left in the rubble of the old web. I understand the desire to leave the unfavourable behind us, but accepting the latter narrative gives in to what Wagner called “Website Eugenics”; A process of devaluing the maximalist, often personalized and gaudy, or in some way flawed in favour of the minimalist, rigid professional class standards being set for the contemporary web. In the case of “dated” media, either cringey personal blogs from middle school or crass lowbrow humour, they will be posited as a damper on material history, when in fact it is deeply human.

The more that we accept a narrative of some digital remnants being of value, and others being a poor reflection of our popular culture, the more that we allow an oppressive power dynamic to play out. Everything, even your cringey middle school Myspace or Tumblr blog, or a webcomic that was drawn in MS paint, deserves to be preserved. If the select few get to control the narrative of the majority, we slowly lose these beautiful connections between ourselves, our media, and our ongoing futures. Internet historians, archivists, and cultural commentators like Kate Wagner are doing what they know combats this agenda; revel in the legacy of the early web, retain all that you can, and do it authentically.

[dekaydk]

Laws of Architraction

Sorry, Nawin, you're smokin' hot, but your taste in architecture is as erratic as your temperament. This belongs on @mcmansionhell and deserves a special.

"Special" as in

"You bring this network's ratings down, Flavius, and we'll do a 'special' on you."

[dekaydk]

KATE IS BACK and as delightfully snarky as ever. If you aren't familiar with her work, you are in for a treat.

mojo dojo casa house

Howdy folks! Sorry for the delay, I was, uhhhh covering the Tour de France. Anyway, I'm back in Chicago which means this blog has returned to the Chicago suburbs. I'm sure you've all seen Barbie at this point so this 2019 not-so-dream house will come as a pleasant (?) surprise.

Yeah. So this $2.4 million, 7 bed, 8.5+ bath house is over 15,000 square feet and let me be frank: that square footage is not allocated in any kind of efficient or rational manner. It's just kind of there, like a suburban Ramada Inn banquet hall. You think that by reading this you are prepared for this, but no, you are not.

Scale (especially the human one) is unfathomable to the people who built this house. They must have some kind of rare spatial reasoning problem where they perceive themselves to be the size of at least a sedan, maybe a small aircraft. Also as you can see they only know of the existence of a single color.

Ok, but if you were eating a single bowl of cereal alone where would you sit? Personally I am a head of the table type person but I understand that others might be more discreet.

It is undeniable that they put the "great" in great room. You could race bicycles in here. Do roller derby. If you gave this space to three anarchists you would have a functioning bookshop and small press in about a week.

The island bit is so funny. It's literally so far away it's hard to get them in the same image. It is the most functionally useless space ever. You need to walk half a mile to get from the island to the sink or stove.

Of course, every McMansion has a room just for television (if not more than one room) and yet this house fails even to execute that in a way that matters. Honestly impressive.

The rug placement here is physical comedy. Like, they know they messed up.

Bling had a weird second incarnation in the 2010s HomeGoods scene. Few talk about this.

Honestly I think they should have scrapped all of this and built a bowling alley or maybe a hockey rink. Basketball court. A space this grand is wasted on sports of the table variety.

You would also think that seeing the rear exterior of this house would help to rationalize how it's planned but:

Not really.

Anyways, thanks for coming along for another edition of McMansion Hell. I'll be back to regular posting schedule now that the summer is over so keep your eyes peeled for more of the greatest houses to ever exist. Be sure to check the Patreon for today's bonus posts.

Also P.S. - I'm the architecture critic for The Nation now, so check that out, too!

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar, because media work is especially recession-vulnerable.

[jamielatendresse]

You cannot outsmart capitalist firms that have the power and the intent to buy control from you.

[mindrat]

In addition to running McMansion Hell, Kate Wagner apparently writes super insightful stuff about cycling and now F1 (until her piece got removed after a few hours—kinda obvious why if you read the article).

"Send me on an experience and I'll have an experience. Sadly, I suffer from an unprofitable disease that makes me only ever capable of writing about the experience I'm having. The doctors say it's terminal."

[resolutedoubt]

“To make things more complicated, the field’s exclusion of minorities—coupled with its predilection for patronizing tokenism toward them—has also given Adjaye, a Black man, an extra layer of protection and insulation from criticism. He is not just a famous architect; he is a trailblazer. No one wants to be the employee who ruins the career of one of the few famous architects of color. It’s reasonable to anticipate that their allegations will be weaponized by bigots to reinforce their stereotypes and prejudices. The fact that all three women were Black should remind us that the role race plays in architecture is more nuanced and intersectional than Adjaye’s photo ops with Barack Obama would have us believe. His fall should put to bed the idea that one man’s success in a world that views him as an other is in any way tantamount to a real reckoning with race in architecture.

It bears repeating: Adjaye is an employer. His abuse is workplace abuse—it cannot take place without the infrastructure of the workplace to provide him power and access to victims. While his case is particularly spectacular in its violence, it is of a kind with abuse that happens in architecture firms around the world. All workplace abuse is irrevocably linked with worker precarity. The environment of architectural workers is particularly conducive to exploitation, since it encourages self-abuse: long hours, unpaid internships, unnatural devotion to “the project,” and identification of the self with the workplace.

…

These allegations should not be viewed as the ignoble and unfortunate end of what was once a fairy-tale story. They should not be viewed as an isolated instance of brutality. They should be viewed as a wake-up call. All of the elements that allowed Adjaye’s harm to go unpunished for so long are present in one way or another in all firms. They are inherent in the very culture of the discipline, which has become increasingly stratified, with entry-level workers seen as especially disposable and exploitable. Young architects, after being told all through school that they will be embarking on a journey to change the world and shape the built environment, instead find themselves working 10-hour days using mind-numbing software to catalog how much insulation is needed in a given wall. Receiving any scrap of acknowledgement from the great masters who run their firms more like despots than artists feels especially rewarding in such an uninspiring environment. Combine this dynamic with a culture of virulent racism and misogyny, lack of financial security or upward mobility, and precarious employment visas, and you have an environment that is primed for exploitation. The fact that this exploitation takes on a sexual dimension is no surprise when domination—over the workplace, perhaps over the built environment itself—is the order of the day.

A solution to these problems requires a world in which architectural workers see themselves as workers and where starchitects like Adjaye are no longer seen as gods. It also requires labor organization in the workplace; as in all corporate settings, institutions like HR (if firms even have it) are designed to protect the company, not its workers. Whether through activist organizations such as the Architecture Lobby or through unionization, architectural workers need accountability and support from outside their firms. Unionism in architecture is in its infancy, but solidarity among the field’s workers is rising year by year.”

[phoenix]

Watching a crappy movie, as I do, and one of the main character's names caught my eye... ;)

[infinitemonkeytheory]

One day we will look at five-thousand-square-foot McMansions and Hummers and desert golf courses the same way we look now at thalidomide: a ginormous fuck up. That’s assuming we manage to plan for the future and come through a political fight antithetical to the mortal coil of capitalism: late, fossil, or otherwise.

We need, quite literally, a revolution. And every revolution, lest we forget, is an architectural revolution. The Industrial Revolution brought about the dawn of modernism; the Russian Revolution initially saw the demise of bourgeois opulence in favor of Constructivism. The French revolutionaries looked upon the palace of Versailles with disgust, for it represented everything loathsome about monarchist French society: inequality, waste, and excessive filigree. So, too, under increasingly dire material conditions spurred by climate change and intersecting political catastrophes, will we look upon the McMansion. Maybe sooner than we think.

[m-a-salter]

"Single-stair is not going to fix the housing crisis, because the housing crisis stems from an economic system in which housing is a commodity and a money-making scheme instead of a human right to shelter."