#Kate Wagner

[thepotentialof2007]

I can see how it warps the mind, the perception of the world and our place in it. Power is enticing. Like Lewis Hamilton? You can eat steaks that cost the same as your electricity bill and meet him again. You, too, can bask in the balding aura of Prince Harry and the fake glow of Instagram models. Any wealth and status you lack, you can perform. What I received wasn't a crash course in Formula 1—in fact, Formula 1 only became more mystifying to me—but journalism, as viewed by the other side. The great irony of the other side is that they need journalism. The petrochemical companies, deeply powerful institutions, need journalists to write about all the things they attach themselves to that are not being a petrochemical company. Formula 1, on a rapacious tangent for growth and new markets, needs journalists to spread the good word of the richest sport in the world. Unfortunately for the other side, journalism still remains a double-edged sword.

This article by Kate Wagner, published on 1 Mar 2024, was removed from Road & Track later that same day. Link goes to archived copy.

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McMansion Hell curator Kate Wagner wrote an article for Road & Track that was published then unpublished in the same day because, well, she told some uncomfortable truths.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

[gettothestabbing]

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

Written by Sophia 🌀

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 open forums for games I would never play. But as much as I try to remember the endless dotcom online world, 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.

Kate Wagner effectively captures the fleeting memories of the open internet in a time before apps, and the "thrill of the hunt" that came from this open landscape. Any hyperlink you navigated through could have opened up into a new world; knowledge you could have never imagined, groundbreaking new media that nobody had seen before, or complete communities redefining what it meant to have a personal blog.

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, with my most memorable internet experience happening on April 6th 2016, when the multimedia webcomic Homestuck released the flash video  [S] Collide as the conclusion to Act 6. Since its debut in 2009, Homestuck has become a legend of the early web; 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.

When Adobe Flash went down in 2020, Viz Media (having recently acquired publishing rights) made little effort to preserve this 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 this 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 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. 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.

[thepotentialof2007]

Quick reference for the LH excerpts from Kate Wagner's behind the scenes at COTA article.

All sports are powered by the personalities of their practitioners, and Formula 1 has those in spades—the chipper, effusive Daniel Ricciardo; Mr. Suave, Carlos Sainz; plucky George Russell; the deep-feeling Charles Leclerc; and, perhaps above all, the sport's longtime great champion, a man from some of the humblest beginnings in motorsport, the regal and soft-spoken Lewis Hamilton, who just announced an absolutely shocking move to Ferrari after an illustrious 11 years and six championships behind the wheel of a Mercedes (and six seasons and one championship with Mercedes-powered McLarens).

. . . .

The day's activities commenced with a tour of the garage. In the garage, there are many mysteries one is not allowed to know or see. The use of phones is forbidden lest one incur accusations of espionage. When we got into the garage, Lewis's car was naked, its insides visible for all to see. I think this was the moment where my respect for the sport as it exists really made itself clear. It is hard to describe what I felt looking at that car. The closest phrase I have at my disposal is the technological sublime. I pictured a living, breathing animal of extraterrestrial origin, hooked up to a thousand arcane sensors that delivered messages in little pulses. All the tubes and sculpted carbon-fiber parts and the endless net of wires all working in service to the godhead engine, formed something totally incomprehensible to me, a feat of engineering so vast it breached the realm of magic. Hamilton himself walked through in his helmet, unexpectedly on an errand. After being in the presence of the car, I perceived him differently than before, when he was just a guy driving in circles on TV. The scope of his capabilities became more directly known to me in the face of that which I believed to be unknowable. All of that was built in service of him. He stopped and looked into the open maw of the car. The tour guide led us hurriedly into the back room where the coffee and tire bags were stored so that no one could listen to what Lewis said.

About half an hour later, they brought him up to the paddock to talk to us. It wasn't a press conference, but rather a kind of a TED Talk. The questions were rote and a guy with a microphone asked them as though they were being broadcast on television. Hamilton talked rotely about how much he loved America and the fans here, talked—to the people who needed reassurance—about how the car was "getting there" but made it pointedly certain that they knew it still needed some work, which surprised me, making me realize this was still a private setting. I come from a sport where chivalry never died and no one is allowed to say anything negative because it is "unsportsmanlike" and every cyclist has to play his part in the farcical pageant of being a dull, humble farmer's son. It is a pretty open secret that a lot of cyclists don't like their bike sponsors but they would never, ever, ever say it. It's somewhat contradictory, but the sheer financial calculus of F1 is what makes it possible for Hamilton to be critical. This is a multibillion-dollar industry putting its full heft behind him doing well. It's reminiscent of the patronage system of precapitalist times, when rulers and nobles with endless riches paid musicians and composers to live in the palace with them.

. . . .

Frustrated, I returned to watching the cars as they started up again, knowing that the drivers were pushing them to their limits, engrossed in their personal kaleidoscope of motion and color. Hamilton was in one of them. In the last shootout, he drove differently than before. A great verve frayed the lines he was making, something we can only call effort, push. Watching him, I understood what was so interesting about this sport, even though I was watching it in its most bare-bones form—cars going around in circles. The driver is the apotheosis of quick-moving prowess, total focus and control. The car is both the most studied piece of human engineering, tuned and devised in lab-like environments and at the same time a variable entity, something that must be wrestled with and pushed. The numbers are crunched, the forms wind-tunneled. And yet some spirit escapes their control, and that spirit is known only by the driver. Yes, we watch this perfect blend of man and machine, but we speak of the machine as though it were not of human origin, as though the machine, being born from science could—eventually, through its iterative processes—sublimate human flaws. The driver, being human, knows this is false. His intimacy with the machine is the necessary missing connection, and even if the machine were perfect, it was made for imperfect hands. But it is never perfect. The gaps in its perfection are where disasters transpire, but also miracles. As we waited for the van to take us where we were parked, a part of the track was still visible to us. Hamilton distinguished himself by the lines he cut along the corner and the loudness of his engine, that pushing. We heard over a loudspeaker that he had finished third, a remarkable improvement above the last two sprints, where he lagged behind in the midfield. This made everyone in our camp happy. They always called him by his first name. It reminded me of how I used to talk about cyclists after I started interviewing them, with the swagger of knowing them.

. . . .

When Hamilton came into the room he was wearing a cool pair of pants with shimmery colored mesh sewed in and had an exhausted appearance, having come just from the track. We were allowed to talk to him but were told not to make any recordings or transcriptions. When he spoke, it was notable how often he mentioned his father and how deeply-felt his political convictions were. Some people are totally different off the record, but Lewis was simply a more lively version of himself. I find him a fascinating figure. A lot of fans either love or hate him, see him, paradoxically, as both humble and arrogant. The word quiet is better. Not reserved, not shy, just quiet. He belongs to a special group of people. The ones I've met in life include the violinist Hilary Hahn and Pogačar, the Tour de France winner—human beings who walk the earth differently, with an aura that transcends it. He appeared perpetually relaxed, controlled and refined, both present with us in the room but on a higher plane within. We used to call this magnificence when we believed in kings. I don't know what we call it now. Excellence, maybe. The irony of parading someone incredible like that around in the backrooms of petrochemical executives is not lost on me. I was grateful that I got the opportunity to speak to Lewis Hamilton, someone I am not ashamed to say I admire. I would have preferred it if they let him go home and rest instead.

[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... ;)