#and i think that frankly the panic about attention span gets too general

[aeide-thea]

like, okay, to walk my own talk and do a little fact-checking—here’s a review of hari’s book stolen focus by uk psychologist and academic stuart ritchie, with whom i strongly suspect i've got some political bones to pick, published on unherd, a platform with which i know i’ve got some political bones to pick (tl;dr transphobia ahoy!), but ritchie’s approach and analysis here seem pretty reasonable:

[T]he phenomenon Hari addresses — the feeling that, with so many distractions around in the modern, online-centric world, it’s harder than ever to focus — is one many of us experience. Hari says that he and almost everyone around him feels this way, and describes a several-months-long “digital detox”, where he went to live in a small town on Cape Cod with no smartphone and no internet.

But that’s all anecdotal: does Hari actually present any evidence that shortening attention spans is a society-wide problem? […] It’s not until more than halfway through the book, page 176, that Hari drops what should be a bombshell: “We don’t have any long-term studies tracking changes in people’s ability to focus over time.” In other words, he quietly admits that there isn’t really any strong scientific evidence for the main thesis of the book.

more specifics are under the cut, for anyone who doesn’t feel like giving unherd more traffic (i’m right there with you!), but i do want to highlight the conclusion of the article, which is cutting but seems essentially correct to me:

[T]his is a writer who’s shown himself again and again to be either untrustworthy, unoriginal, or uninformed. If he’s right to say that our moments of focus are becoming ever-more precious, isn’t it time we started paying attention to someone — anyone — else?

and the further pullquotes i promised above:

Most of the book is dedicated to the causes of our collective attentional problems. The first is, unoriginally, social media. Isn’t it very revealing, Hari writes, that there’s no button on Facebook that you can press to help you meet up with your friends in person? Facebook won’t, he says, “alert you to the physical proximity of somebody you might want to see in the real world”. Hari explains that the whole business model of social media precludes the encouragement of joys like looking your friends in the eye or giving them a hug, and instead is based on keeping you fixated on your screen, scrolling endlessly, never leaving the house.

Except Facebook does have exactly the feature that Hari claims doesn’t (and couldn’t) exist. It’s called “Nearby Friends”. It gives you a little map of where your friends are physically at that moment (if they have opted in). It’s been available since 2014. A two-second Google search would have enlightened Hari. Maybe he wrote that part of the book while he was in internet-free isolation.

[…]

[M]any of the other causes Hari identifies are rehashings of previous pop-science and pop-psychology books: we aren’t sleeping enough (Why We Sleep); kids don’t play outdoors any more (Free Range Kids and The Coddling of the American Mind); we don’t eat the right foods (a million diet books). Of course, it’s not a crime to write a book that doesn’t provide any new information. But Hari’s irritating, breathless style turns every single fact he “discovers” into a startling revelation, every single expert he speaks to into the absolute best in the world. Hari’s research — a series of interviews for a pop-psychology book — becomes an intense, globetrotting journey of personal discovery. His mind is so often blown that it’s little wonder it has such difficulty in paying attention.

It’s not just that Hari thinks he’s discovered earth-shaking new information. (As Dean Burnett wrote of Lost Connections, Hari “repeatedly presents well-known concepts and ideas … as fringe concepts that he’s discovered through his own efforts”.) He also thinks he’s a hard-nosed scientific truth-seeker. At the start of the book, he solemnly assures us that: “I studied social and political sciences at Cambridge University, where I got a rigorous training in how to read the studies these scientists publish [and] how to assess the evidence they put forward”.

What makes this risible isn’t just that he’s touting his undergraduate degree as if it makes him an expert (a fairly substantial proportion of the population also have one). It’s that Stolen Focus exhibits no talent for assessing evidence. A few times there’s a small concession to a flaw in a study, or to the fact that scientists disagree on a point — but Hari fails to add any of the necessary uncertainty to his argument. After a cursory mention of the “other side,” he usually just blunders on regardless, assuming his argument is right.

ALT

Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen by Johann Hari

[aeide-thea]

[as long as i’m feeling late-night chatty, i figure i may as well give my tag spiral from earlier its own post, bc i’m realizing it got cut off, and in any case was lengthy enough that it’s probably easier to engage with this way—]

#anyway as i said before i get that we all *feel* more distractible #and i'm inclined to think that's true to some extent—certainly the more i read short-form tumblr posts #instead of longer-form articles or books #the less practice i'm getting at engaging with longer-form narratives #in much the same way that a great deal of close reading has made my eyes physically worse at focusing farther away

#but like—i've always wanted constant stimulus. #when i was growing up i had my nose constantly in a book‚ even when i was walking down the street. #these days i scroll through my phone. it's the same impulse. #if i didn't have internet access i expect i'd shift back to the patterns i grew up with. #maybe those were better; maybe it's value-neutral. #i'm not convinced the golden age of extended attention span was as real as people make out—some of us had adhd before we had internet! #and people have always sought diversion—it used to be that you'd see people on the subway with their noses in newspapers‚ before smartphones were a thing.

#and i think that frankly the panic about attention span gets too general #in the sense that like—if something compelling is in front of me‚ i remain capable of engaging with it. #i can spend hours talking to a friend on the phone‚ or out riding my bike. #so really i think it's a question of like—in what specific areas do we find ourselves dissatisfied with our capacity for attention? #and then what are we doing to address that?

#i do think that specifically my readiness to engage with new long-form writing is less than it was when i was a child #but i think that's a product of (a) having other things to read that take less activation energy #and (b) not being enrolled in e.g. english classes that are asking me to read non-genre fiction #which was‚ if i'm being honest‚ the impetus for a great deal of my more ~literary~ reading growing up. #so like. i could join a book club. i could take a book to a coffee shop and leave my phone at home. #there are specific actions i could take to address this specific issue instead of just engaging in generalized overblown despair. #but like. that isn't a Sexy Unified Theory. that won't sell or go viral.

#but like. clearly i continue to be capable of focusing in on projects—just look at the many words i've assembled in this post and its tags! #so i just think like. we need to define the nature and scope of the issue better—once we get specific‚ solutions start to present themselves. #but we have to believe that we're capable of implementing them. which we're less likely to believe‚ if we're nodding along at disquisitions on How Big Tech Fucked Us Up!

a modest assertion: Big Tech has its agenda; we have our own. we are capable of structuring our lives around our own interests and values‚ rather than the interests and values of corporations. like—not to be constantly le guin-posting, but: any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. but the more we marinate in our own feelings of damagedness—which includes ‘reading thinkpieces that seem to confirm those feelings’—the less alive we become to our own capability, and our own capacity for change. in other words: maybe the real thief of our attention was the johann hari we uncritically lapped up along the way.

[zauniteenforcer]

TW: Anxiety, Depression and Medical Mentions

TL;DR: I’m going crazy, and just needed to put my thoughts on paper.

PS:  If you aimlessly flame in norms in League of Legends, delete the game.

// Honestly, I’m just trying to get better at things, and have a little fun in my free time. I’m tired, and have quite frankly been really depressed recently. Every other game someone’s flaming something over something fucking stupid, and half the time it’s me -- no matter how good or bad I’m doing. You don’t need to tell me I did poor -- I already know. People like that, I really wonder if it makes them feel any better about themselves. I hope it does so maybe SOMETHING productive can happen with it at the very least if it has to happen at all. People like that are the reason so many of my friends quit the game, and I don’t want to think like that. I love this game with all my heart; I’ve gained many friends playing it and it’s something we can share. But like... IT’S JUST A FUCKING GAME. Like holy shit. I’ve been called so many names over the years I’ve lost count and been screamed at... hell, how many times have I been told or seen someone who got told things like ‘Kill yourself.’ -- You should NEVER say something like that. To anyone. You don’t know them. You don’t know what they’re going through... and you certainly don’t know where they’re at mentally. You could just say that to the wrong person.

-----------------------------

That rant aside, I’m just gonna put my thoughts into words. I’ve been so stressed out of my mind for WEEKS. I had to file taxes pretty last minute, and I hadn’t had a haircut in almost a year and a half. These are the little things that were just icing on the cake. That being said:

I just got laid off with work, and nothing available around here would remotely pay my bills (here’s to hoping unemployment pulls through for me. My boyfriend did manage to get a job, but it’s honestly not gonna cover even his half of the bills unless he gets a quick pay raise. Everyone has been pressing me about getting a job too. Sending me stuff at all weird hours, shoving down my throat things I’ve already told them I’m not interested in. Just -- Generally making me feel like I’m completely just a useless waste of space because I no longer have a job... and yeah, that’s really helpful to me getting one.

My last job was as a customer service rep. I took calls assisting with account support and tech support.... So what I really mean is for the past 3 years, I’ve worked 40 hours a week to get fucking screamed at. I’ve been told 8 hours a day for 7 days a week that everything is my fault. I think my favorite quote I heard from a customer was this:

“I bet you feel so proud of yourself. You just love taking money from little boys.”

I have two points that I would like to make to this person who said this to me, but they would never believe me. 

1. I absolutely do not. I do not like what I have to say to you. I am required to do things how I am presenting them to you because I have to have income.

2. If you can’t afford $15.00... you probably shouldn’t have a Netflix account.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. Every other call towards the end of my time there was exactly like that. I would be almost in tears if not outright nearly having a panic attack several times in a work night. When I sleep, I’m not resting.

For another thing... my grandmother has been in the hospital since Wednesday of last week. So it’s almost a week now. She had open heart surgery that day, and I don’t think she’s been conscious since. They’ve had her on oxygen, and at this point she has pneumonia and is possibly getting a Tracheotomy tomorrow from the sound of things.... It’s not inherently looking worse, but honestly, it feels like there’s been virtually no improvement. She’s the last direct grandparent I have at this point, and it scares me. It scares me so much, and I just don’t know what’s happening. 

I need to get out of this mindset... but I don’t get a lot of time to myself right now. There’s always someone to please, and it’s never myself. Where do you go when you’ve been at your wit’s end for several weeks... always saying “Just a few more days and then I can rest.” How do you tell family to get off your backs before you lose your goddamn mind? Especially when they don’t believe there could ever be anything wrong with you because “you handle things differently.” Isn’t... that... the point... of a mental illness??? 

I’ve struggled with anxiety my whole life. That much I know for sure... but at this point, I’m not sure that’s all it is. I know my anxiety is bad but... every day I lie in bed not wanting to get up. Like taking a shower is such a chore. I stare at the ceiling, stuck in my own head because anything I could start just doesn’t sound like fun anymore. It always feels like a lot of people are just out to make fun of me. I lay in bed unable to sleep because all I want to do is cry... and looking back on my life, this isn’t the first time I’ve been like this. It just hit me like a ton of bricks this time around. 

I also have the attention span of a squirrel sometimes. I was told by my teachers back in elementary that they thought I had ADHD because I would act out and practically couldn’t focus on the lesson. My parents told them that I was just bored because I would finish the work early. Now I wonder as an adult if there was any merit to this, or if they were right. Someone can get my attention, say something directly to me, and I just won’t hear it. Like my brain hears sound, but it doesn’t process it sometimes. If more than one person is talking, or more than like 1-2 different things are playing (games, shows, etc.) the conflicting sounds legitimately make me crazy. It just sounds like jumbled static and my brain tries to pick apart what’s different and focus on anything, but I can’t. It gives me a headache. It makes my whole body feel like the static I hear, and I want to throw up when it happens. It basically feels like what I’d imagine could be called sensory overload at that point. 

To be honest, I haven’t spoke with a professional about these things, and maybe one day I will. I’ve mostly been functional enough that I don’t really feel like I need to. I just need a day or two to breathe. I just want the world to slow down for 5 goddamn minutes.

If you’ve read this far, just know that I’ll be okay. I just needed to put it somewhere and my IRL friends and family follow a lot of my other media. -- And honestly, some of my interactions here are some of the happiest things I have to cling to recently. You all are amazing. 

[metamodel]

Death and Revival Revisited

The End is the Beginning is the End, as Billy Corgan suggests on the soundtrack to (what I feel is the unjustly maligned) Batman Forever. I had way too much “decline and rebirth” material to fit in the last issue, so I'll continue to follow that seam for a while. (You'll find that downturn and revival is a recurring, uh, theme here at Recurring Thing.)

After returning to design after a year away, I find that Everything Now Looks Very Strange Indeed™. This is another one of my updates on restarting a creative practice (which I’m calling Studio Thing), plus a dose of cultural and design commentary. 

(If someone’s forwarded this thing to you in the hope you’ll find it interesting, you can subscribe here to secure my everlasting love. And please, pass it on if you think it might be of interest to anyone.)

🔂🧟‍♀️ The eternal return of zombie-centred design

Some follow-up on that evergreen topic of what comes after human-centred design: at TEDxSydney I delightedly crossed paths with fellow innovation veteran Carli Leimbach, who’s been thinking about “earth-centred design” as a corrective to anthropocentrism. I’m intrigued. She’s run an initial workshop with some like-minded people, and I’ll keep tabs on her progress.

In other more-than-human news, Anne Galloway recently posted her talk at IndiaHCI 2018, “Designing with, and for, the more-than human”. I’ve been following Anne’s work for a long time, from when the Internet of Things was called “pervasive computing”, to her more recent work in Aotearoa about sheep. For Anne, more-than-human-centred design means:

“Acknowledging that human beings are not the be-all and end-all.”

“Accepting our vulnerability, acting with humility and valuing our interdependency.”

“Living with the world, not against it.” 

Recommended. Also interesting is the “more-than-human design research roll-call” she recently initiated on Twitter. Follow this link if you want to get in touch with people who are active on the topic, at least in academic circles — some familiar names pop up.

🥪🤮 The alternative to curiosity is… hard to swallow

I’ve just wrapped up my NEIS coursework, and to celebrate I want to recount a story about my teacher Jason that also demonstrates why I’m so glad I decided to sign up for this microbusiness training and mentoring program.

A few years ago, Jason was the director of training at a large catering company which had a significant focus on healthcare facilities such as nursing homes. To get a feel for the training needs of his workforce, he decided to tour their workplaces, immersing himself in their day-to-day work. (His CEO was frankly a little surprised by this — as is the case with many sectors, it was uncommon for management to visit the frontlines. In fact, when he urged the Head of Care at one aged care facility to tour the frontlines of her own operation with him, the staff didn't recognise her, and assumed she was a visitor. Yikes.)

While working with kitchen staff in one nursing home, Jason noticed that one resident, a lone old woman, always ordered the same dish: a single salmon sandwich. Intrigued, he asked the staff about this, and they shrugged. “She must like it,” was the reply. 

The next day, Jason decided to have lunch with her. After a pleasant meal together, he couldn't contain himself. 

“Betty, I've noticed that you always order a salmon sandwich,” he said. (I love that he still remembers her name.) “I don't mean to pry, but, uh, why is that?”

She looked at him for a second. 

“It's because I'm afraid,” Betty whispered. 

It turned out that Betty had dysphagia — a problem with her pharynx or oesophagus that made swallowing difficult — and was terrified that if she admitted this, she would be placed on the puréed diet of an invalid. Over time, she'd gotten used to salmon sandwiches as the one meal she knew could swallow without issue. And because of her fears, that's all she ate. 

“Betty, how long have you been eating salmon sandwiches as your only meal?” Jason asked. 

“Two years.” So basically, a resident had been potentially malnourishing herself for years because the systems around providing and talking about choices under this regime of care were broken. 

After setting her up with a more appropriate (and still chewable) set of diet choices, Jason decided to consult with dysphagia experts and patients like Betty to create a unit of training about these kinds of patient needs, aimed at preventing such system breakdowns. Everyone at their client nursing homes could attend. The aged-care nurses who came were flummoxed, telling their Head of Care, “Why are we only hearing about these kinds of problems and solutions from the catering guy? No offence, Jason, but seriously, WTF?”

In the midst of such regimented systems, where industrial efficiency often erases the possibility of supple action or even humane behaviour, I’m grateful that compassionate minds like Jason’s exist. When curiosity seems like it's at death’s door, people like him arrive to revive it.

The reveal: I was initially pretty skeptical about doing the course under Jason because before classes started, I'd gleaned that he’d spent most of his career managing McDonald’s restaurants. It turns out that my fears were misplaced, because I got a lot out of his teaching. While I really don't share his interest in large food systems, either in experiencing them as a customer nor in their general industrial impact on the world, I'm glad there are people like him enmeshed in such forbidding places, trying to make them more sensitive, responsive and just.

👹👽 First and Last Men

When’s the right time to write a requiem for the human species? 

The other night I had the pleasure of experiencing the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s First and Last Men, a live symphonic and film adaptation of Olaf Stapledon’s seminal 1930 sf novel of future history, narrated by that alien god who lives among us, Tilda Swinton.

(I only knew the Stapledon novel by reputation, and Jóhannsson from his film scores, but was recently prodded to see this production when I watched Philip Kaufmann’s excellent 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In a passing exchange that you’d easily miss, two characters chat about their reading habits, and Stapledon’s work is mentioned. More on this later. Intrigued, I pounced on the Jóhannsson version when it arrived in Sydney as part of the Vivid Festival.)

Jóhannsson only uses the last part of Stapledon’s immense story, which starts in the 20th Century and spans the next two billion years. This focus on the last of eighteen successive human species summons a particularly elegiac mood. Responding to the eventual extinction of life on Earth, humans have genetically re-engineered themselves for life on Neptune, and it is these highly advanced Neptunian humans, astonishing in their animalistic diversity, 20-year pregnancies and 2000-year childhoods, for whom Swinton speaks with such characteristically icy dignity. (My god: that voice.)

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As the camera slowly pans across a series of Yugoslavian Stalinist monuments (you probably know the ones — they recently came into vogue online in the last wave of ruin porn), we cycle through glassy sheets of what anticipatory mourning sounds like: slow arpeggios, and vocals that alternate between the wonderful anonymity of wind instruments and the mewling of cats. (I want to celebrate the two vocalists precisely because they didn’t call attention to themselves: they were exemplary orchestral players.) 

The mood is well-earned: despite all the ingenuity and adaptability of these far-future humans, we discover that a cascade of supernovas has triggered our final extinction. Manned interstellar spaceflight — that mainstay of most sf — is revealed as madness, reducing humans at their technological, technological and ethical peak to nihilistic despair. And as the ever-warming climate of Neptune slowly wreaks havoc on their awesome civilisation, the only thing these “Last Men” can do is make telepathic contact with the past — the conceit that enables Tilda Swinton to narrate the tale for us — as they wait for the end. 

It’s uncanny how much this story from 1930 resonates with our slowly unfolding climate change disaster. And now that the worst seems inevitable, the intense melancholy of Jóhannsson’s First and Last Men feels fitting — a necessary alternative to either denial or relentless panic. But beyond this, I’m impressed by the supreme ambivalence of Jóhannsson’s take. He makes the Last Men as dignified and magisterial as they are aloof, and their vaunted supremacy is a mixture of authentic maturity and our own sneaking suspicion that in their immortal, genetically-designed perfection, these final humans have lost the capacity to take unexpected action. It’s profoundly sympathetic. 

This suggests to me that having a post-human-centred design orientation is very far from being misanthropic. Perhaps we just need to stop pretending that empathy is ever completely possible — who can truly pretend to empathise with a post-human species two billion years in the future, let alone our strange and often unknowable fellow lifeforms, be they vertebrate, invertebrate or botanical? — and instead extend a generalised (and non-paternalistic) sympathy to our neighbours and ourselves. Sympathy is okay. Yes, our situation can be pegged to a combination of pathetic ignorance, shortsighted greed and genuine moustache-twirling villainy. And we are not the centre of the universe. But like others, we are still a species that deserves a dignified mourning.

🦸🏼‍♂️☄️ Can only a God save us now?

Stapledon’s 1930s future-superhumans continue to haunt me.

When I was teaching art to six-year-olds last year, I did a unit on comics, tracing the emergence of costumed superheroes to the ’30s.

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No comment.[/caption]

“Why do you think superheroes appeared then?” I asked the class. “What was going on?”

“IT WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WORLD WARS!” said one student. “MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WERE DYING!” called out another. “My great-grandmother met my great-grandfather in a Spanish flu hospital during World War I!” came another, very-relevant non-sequitur. (It’s easily forgotten that the 1918 influenza outbreak killed at least 50 million people. And yes, these kids are amazing, and publicly funded education is the fucking best.)

Out of the despair of modernity — mechanised mass slaughter and earth shattering pandemics enabled by the globalisation of capitalist industry — we cried out for salvation. Yes, there are many reactionary underpinnings to our superheroic imaginaries (the above image is just the most obvious), but their basis in real trauma behooves us to at least be sympathetic their emergence. We need to take fantasies of supermen seriously (and critically), rather than simply dismissing them as misguided or ridiculous because they’re rather obviously dodgy as fuck. And similarly, we need to take populism seriously.

Make no mistake: while I’m fascinated by downturn and revival narratives, they’re more often than not pretty terrifying: “Make America Great Again” is the clearest contemporary example. And when famed philosopher Martin Heidegger looked forward to “a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety,” he was talking about Adolf Hitler. Don’t look away. Stay and fight in the mud.

🚀🌎 Refuge

Besides talking to the past, the final act of desperation of the Last Men was to transmit proto-organic matter into space, designing it to reassemble on favourable ground in a direction towards intelligent life. (Listening to Tilda Swinton intone gravely about “the Great Dissemination” was just too deliciously weird.) Of course, this is the plot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the story that prompted me to explore First and Last Men in the first place: we are being invaded by relentless pod-people, growing out of seeds assembled from “living threads that float on the stellar winds.”

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Not just taking our jobs — they're stealing Jeff Goldblum's life![/caption]

Too delicious.

Yours in ambivalence,

Ben

[adrabbleofkpopcoffee]

Hi, can I please get a create my day ship with BTS? Something along the lines of how he would realize his feelings/confess? Or if you’ve written a lot of things similar to those kind of ideas before, you could write something else if you have another idea that you’d like to write?

I’m 155 cm tall, have long straight dark hair and brown eyes. I’m usually dressed pretty casually in something like black skinny jeans and knitted shirts. I’m openminded, polite ,creative,softspoken,kind,friendly,introverted,calm & quiet(I can be pretty quiet even when I’m close to someone, but I also have days when I’m very talktaktive). At first I can seem cold/awkward because I’m shy/quiet/in my own world. I’ve been told that I seem like someone who has a responsible, calm, sweet and gentle personality. I’m pretty independent and value authenticity and dislike burdening people with my problems. I always try to be friendly but sometimes get slightly anxious in some social situations as I find it difficult to make conversation with new people (I try to hide that, though).Also, I’m kind of easily distracted and don’t always notice things in my surroundings. I like to paint (actually just art in general, like photography, etc),play piano (I’ve mostly played classical, though),travel,read,be w/friends,sleep,watch movies,listen to music & dance. I’m a major homebody but I do like going outside on adventures and I love travelling. I’m a huge procrastinator but I’m also pretty ambitious and perfectionistic so I’m often feeling like I’m not working hard enough whilst like… procrastinating, haha. I dislike inconsiderate and judgmental people who cannot/don’t care to put themselves in other people’s shoes. I really like skinship and cuddling but only when I’m close to someone. Thank you!

Namjoon from BTS would realize his feelings for you. I think Namjoon is someone who would really appreciate the shelter you would offer from all of his stresses and thoughts. It wouldn’t matter to him if you were reserved at first; he’d get to know you at an intellectual level, and then, as you both grew more comfortable, at an emotional level. As someone who values open mindedness, Joonie would constantly seek you out as a person he can discuss ideas and thoughts with whenever he needs to, even ones that don’t contain much weight. These conversations might even span hours, as you and he lapsed in and out of silence, simply content in each others’ presence. Sometimes your tendency to hold your problems to yourself would stress him out - he’d always want to be the Superman in your life - but Namjoon is also mature enough that I think he’d step back and let you come to him after making sure you knew he was always willing to listen. He’d be constantly amazed by your artistic abilities, and also be cheering you on whenever your procrastination got in the way. Namjoon would be pretty happy to do anything with you, be it staying at home and watching a movie or going on a hike or taking a few days off work to travel. 

This is how the realization and confession would occur: The blast of AC is a breath of fresh air as you and Namjoon stumble into his apartment, retreating from the heat of the day. As much as you’d enjoyed driving to and from the mountains (or, more specifically, driving to the mountains and then protesting as Namjoon insisted on driving back) your car’s air conditioning had quit an hour outside the city on the way home. Given your already sweaty condition - hiking through a forest couldn’t exactly be called a relaxing activity - the sweltering car ride would have been unbearable if not for your travel companion. A soft smile curling across your lips, you glance at the man in question, just in time to see him go to unzip the backpack he’d brought on the trip - and jerk off the zipper in the process. The dismay on his face makes you laugh, and he sighs before setting the bag to the side. “I might be cursed,” he states matter-of-factly, and though you shake your head, Namjoon continues. “First my shoe this morning, then your car, and now this bag. And that on top of everything else I’ve broken.” A pause as he contemplates the zipper in his hand before he asks seriously, “Do you think curses could be real? Or are they just a product of peoples’ need for a higher power to be involved in their luck and misfortunes?” You snort softly, but it isn’t long before Namjoon drags you into a mild argument that must be happening for the sake of happening - you know Namjoon isn’t a firm believer in luck or anything like that. The plan had originally been to head home right after dropping Joonie off, but you find yourself curled up next to him on the couch, not quite touching. You’ve changed out of your hiking clothes into something a little more comfortable, jeans and a slightly oversize shirt, and you’re honestly not sure how much time’s passed. He’s put a movie on but neither of you are paying much attention, your words moving easily over the low volume of the TV. As you look at him, arching an eyebrow at the most recent speculation he’s throwing out, you try to ignore the gentle ache in your chest. It’s been growing for several months now, and it seems to get worse when you’re alone with him, almost to the point where it’s easier to just look away. So you do, drawing your legs to your chest and hugging your arms around them for comfort. You’ve already admitted to yourself that you like Namjoon, like him in a way that’s more than simple friendship, but you also know you’re not going to say anything. He’s incredibly busy with university; bringing another complication into his life wouldn’t be fair, to say the least. At least you do get to hang out with him quite a lot, you remind yourself with a sigh.

His eyes are fixed on your face, and Namjoon can only be relieved that you don’t notice his staring. He’s had many occasions to appreciate the fact that small details tend to pass you by - mainly when he’s dropped or fumbled with something and you’ve made no comment - but today he’s especially grateful. This is the first time you’ve spent so long together alone - getting close to the whole day now - and each passing hour has just made him feel more and more… well, more. He has thousands of words in his vocabulary, and yet as the conversation trails to the most recent book you’ve read, your face morphing into a quietly excited smile, he can’t find one that quite fits the feeling in his chest. It’s fondness, definitely, but how can fondness walk hand-in-hand with panic and a strange, thrumming sort of tension? The sensation has only grown since the first time you met in the university’s music room, and frankly Namjoon is a little reluctant to put a name to it. You’re so composed, so self-reliant, it’s a little intimidating to put that feeling into a thought that involves you and, well - him. After a moment he shifts, barely holding back a sigh, and runs his finger over his lip in one nervous motion. Which is a mistake, because it makes him think about your lips, and everything involved with that, and abruptly, like a surge of electricity that’s short-circuited his brain, Namjoon realizes what he’s doing. Overthinking. He’s overthinking this so damn much. You’re sweet and kind and he doesn’t want to put you on the spot, and he doesn’t want to put himself on the spot, and God knows he doesn’t want to make you uncomfortable, but - But you’re sweet, and smart, and so, so comfortable to be with, and he really doesn’t want to keep pushing that fact away. His sudden throat clearing has you pausing, eyes drifting uncertainly towards him, and Namjoon flushes in embarrassment with the realization that he’s interrupted you. Well. Too late now. His hand finds his head, fingers running in quick, calming strokes through his hair, and as you ask him if something’s wrong, Namjoon takes a deep breath. And he let’s it out, and he let’s out his feelings, too. “I’m - today’s been awesome, Y/N. I mean, that’s no surprise, since it’s been a whole day with you.” He laughs, awkward and sheepish with the complement, and the ache in your chest becomes sharper. Sharper, that is, until he hurries on. “Seriously though, Y/N, right now, just, I really don’t want today to end. Because, you know, I’ve read a lot of stuff about - about liking someone, about love, but I don’t think anyone’s really done it justice, just - just based on how I feel right now. And even if they have, I kind of want to experience it for myself, because that’s the truest way to understand something, and… well, I think I already understand, a little, but I want to understand more. If that makes sense at all,” he finishes in a great rush, and laughs again, self-deprecating. For a long moment that stretches thin and soft, like beams of sunlight across the floor, you stare at him and find no words to say. Because you do understand, the flood of words made perfect sense to you, and you’re a little scared to say anything at all, anything that might be selfish or hurtful or just wrong. And when you realize you’re smiling, and Namjoon is smiling despite your silence, you can’t help but love how much he understands, too. Gently Namjoon reaches out, takes your hand shyly in his own. “What I’m saying, Y/N, is that I like you. A lot. And I hope you like me, too.” And suddenly those simple words crash against you, exactly enough, and with a soft, slightly awkward, slightly bewildered - but entirely thrilled laugh - you shift so that you’re leaning into his warm side, and that’s all you need to say.

**Ahh, this request was so cute! I’ve actually never written a confession create my day, so I was really happy to do it. I hope you enjoyed it, that you liked the ship and the scenario itself, too! I was caught between a few ideas, but I’m hoping the softness of this one was okay. Thanks so much for requesting!**

~Admin Day

[saltymetaphysics]

Changes on T

Recently a friend of mine was asking about my experiences on T, changes, and so on. I thought that writing it down would make sure I could say everything I want to say and why not put it here to for other people to reference. 

The decision: I saw a therapist for a while before going on T. My deepest struggle was once I knew I was a trans man, I couldn’t tell if I wanted to pursue hrt or that I had just been conditioned by the trans narrative and was imposing a path that might not be mine on some internalized idea I wasn’t trans enough. Was I ready to take the leap and deal with the challenges unique to physical transition? And finally, I was terrified of going bald which I felt was vapid and vain so I wouldn’t bring it up, but it was something I needed to say outload so if it is something your struggling with honestly just say it.  I didn’t want the same things a lot of trans men I saw online or knew wanted. Frankly, I could still take or leave facial hair. Sometimes I think I might go back to shaving my legs too. There’s was always the question of money.  On the flip side, would I have such resources as easily accessible outside the university system? Ultimately though, I was always daydreaming about being on T one day and having t-shape, muscles, and a deeper voice. I would avoid full length mirrors at all costs so as not to see my hips. Exercise could not cut it with the change I wanted to my body overall.  The process: Once my therapist signed the letter it was sent to an endocrinologist which for me was all through my university which was a very lucky position to be in and then it all just happened so fast. I went to see her and I had a prescription physically in my hands for the first time. Early on: It was so too good to be true I started to have massive worries that it would be taken away. Once I dropped my bottle and the pharmacy was curious as to why I was back so early implying that they couldn’t give me my perscription and I went into a panic. It took me a while to not worry about that everytime I brought in my perscription. Physical changes: The first changes I experienced were my voice and my eyebrows. My voice would drop slightly then crack like crazy then drop again. Honestly I loved the cracking it made me feel like I was finally having a puberty experience that would yield the results I wanted. My eyebrows felt almost immediately darker and thicker. It actually looked much better on my face and was a much more masculizing feature than I expected. I think all my hair has gotten darker since starting T.  Next I started to see some slight side burns and the peach-fuzzist of a mustache. This continued with my chin, but seemed to hit an absolute threshold at 4 months with very minimal change afterwards.  An increase in appetite was also pretty quick and ended pretty quick. I think I eat a bit more in general, but not by much. (talking 3 pizza slices as opposed to two)

Mental changes: I’m less likely to cry. It’s not that I don’t feel sad, it just physically. I started to notice this around 3 months. My fuse to get angry is defiantly shorter. Frustration is much more of a go to for me. I don’t feel like transition has changed my emotions by any means though. If anything I am more in tune with my emotions and more confident in trusting my feelings and gut.   Almost immediately I started to notice that sensory things effected me more. Sight and hearing just felt more impactful to me. I just ended up getting use to it, but overall I feel like my attention span is just shorter. This could be totally just me being more aware of these things without worrying about how people perceive me and so on all the time, but I totally feel like it’s a thing.

6 months: My body started to redistribute the fat on my body more severely. My hips are so much thinner and I’ve lost the hour glass shape almost completely. My chest and shoulders widened just a bit. Currently at 10 months: I’ve started to notice my muscles forming in a more masculine trait which has honestly been so goddamn incredible. Paired with fat redistribution I just feel like my body is finally mine. My period still hasn’t stop though. They’ve just been gaining bigger and bigger gaps in between and less blood. My endo and I have been taking some measures to try and correct that, but I guess that’s just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.   I started of tracking my transition constantly and now it’s just become such a part of my life that I tend not to and forget a lot. That I’d ever be at this point or that’d it’d feel so natural is such a privilege in my life.  Pronouns and discussing my trans status with my parents and family has also been so much easier. I think my new appearance makes it more real for them, but also just time and my sister’s awesome allyship. This is not a reason to go on T. You deserve to be recognized and affirmed without it!!! 

New problems: I find myself facing is the feminine habits I faced, in the ways I speak and react when I am feeling anxious or caught of guard. When I am comfortable I am incredibly masculine and it comes very naturally, but it’s just fighting this training of female socialization for so long. I pass 50/50. So, bathrooms are even harder to navigate. I use the men’s room more and more, but mainly if I have to go I hold it until there’s a gender neutral bathroom and avoid liquids when I’m out. The anxiety around my chest has become so taxing. Going to the gym is almost impossible for me without a constant fear people are starting at my chest. It’s something I love so that’s really hard for me. In the end however, the confidence in myself I have and the level of comfort in my body is so much greater and makes everything worth it and more.   Romantic and Sexual Orientation: I for some reason had the internalized acephobia that I would eventually be an allosexual person after enough time on T. The moment I accepted myself as an ace person and recognized I use to feel this way I was free. Coming to terms with my sexuality just brought a weight off my shoulders and allowed myself to truly explore my romantic orientation and come to realize I was aromantic as well. That has allowed me to approach the concept of companionship in a totally different way- something that actually fits my feelings rather than the expectations of others. I did gain a libido though (around month 3). It’s not as big an increase as some people seem to have after T, but that was a monkey wrench for a bit. Reconciling libido and attraction was a very interesting experience, but one I’m glad I’ve had. 

I wouldn’t have traded going on T for anything. It’s incredible to see your body transform in to something new and yet 10x more familiar. I feel so much more deeply connected to myself and other people, but it is not a necessary path and take all the time you need. Questioning is natural and a step you must go through for your own well-being. In reality, I’m still questioning my identity. Gender is fluid and complex so I feel like everyone is. Something I used to do to get through it was to say to myself “Questioning is a move forward. Whatever direction you’re going, you’re moving forward.” I know it’s cheesy, but whatever you gotta do-self care is endlessly important.  Internalizing things is also to natural. Remember that’s not you and these thoughts happen. Masculinity and the trans experience is what you make it and yours to experiment with to your comfort level. 

[metamodel]

Death and Revival Revisited

The End is the Beginning is the End, as Billy Corgan suggests on the soundtrack to (what I feel is the unjustly maligned) Batman Forever. I had way too much “decline and rebirth” material to fit in the last issue, so I'll continue to follow that seam for a while. (You'll find that downturn and revival is a recurring, uh, theme here at Recurring Thing.)

After returning to design after a year away, I find that Everything Now Looks Very Strange Indeed™. This is another one of my updates on restarting a creative practice (which I’m calling Studio Thing), plus a dose of cultural and design commentary. 

(If someone’s forwarded this thing to you in the hope you’ll find it interesting, you can subscribe here to secure my everlasting love. And please, pass it on if you think it might be of interest to anyone.)

🔂🧟‍♀️ The eternal return of zombie-centred design

Some follow-up on that evergreen topic of what comes after human-centred design: at TEDxSydney I delightedly crossed paths with fellow innovation veteran Carli Leimbach, who’s been thinking about “earth-centred design” as a corrective to anthropocentrism. I’m intrigued. She’s run an initial workshop with some like-minded people, and I’ll keep tabs on her progress.

In other more-than-human news, Anne Galloway recently posted her talk at IndiaHCI 2018, “Designing with, and for, the more-than human”. I’ve been following Anne’s work for a long time, from when the Internet of Things was called “pervasive computing”, to her more recent work in Aotearoa about sheep. For Anne, more-than-human-centred design means:

“Acknowledging that human beings are not the be-all and end-all.”

“Accepting our vulnerability, acting with humility and valuing our interdependency.”

“Living with the world, not against it.” 

Recommended. Also interesting is the “more-than-human design research roll-call” she recently initiated on Twitter. Follow this link if you want to get in touch with people who are active on the topic, at least in academic circles — some familiar names pop up.

🥪🤮 The alternative to curiosity is… hard to swallow

I’ve just wrapped up my NEIS coursework, and to celebrate I want to recount a story about my teacher Jason that also demonstrates why I’m so glad I decided to sign up for this microbusiness training and mentoring program.

A few years ago, Jason was the director of training at a large catering company which had a significant focus on healthcare facilities such as nursing homes. To get a feel for the training needs of his workforce, he decided to tour their workplaces, immersing himself in their day-to-day work. (His CEO was frankly a little surprised by this — as is the case with many sectors, it was uncommon for management to visit the frontlines. In fact, when he urged the Head of Care at one aged care facility to tour the frontlines of her own operation with him, the staff didn't recognise her, and assumed she was a visitor. Yikes.)

While working with kitchen staff in one nursing home, Jason noticed that one resident, a lone old woman, always ordered the same dish: a single salmon sandwich. Intrigued, he asked the staff about this, and they shrugged. “She must like it,” was the reply. 

The next day, Jason decided to have lunch with her. After a pleasant meal together, he couldn't contain himself. 

“Betty, I've noticed that you always order a salmon sandwich,” he said. (I love that he still remembers her name.) “I don't mean to pry, but, uh, why is that?”

She looked at him for a second. 

“It's because I'm afraid,” Betty whispered. 

It turned out that Betty had dysphagia — a problem with her pharynx or oesophagus that made swallowing difficult — and was terrified that if she admitted this, she would be placed on the puréed diet of an invalid. Over time, she'd gotten used to salmon sandwiches as the one meal she knew could swallow without issue. And because of her fears, that's all she ate. 

“Betty, how long have you been eating salmon sandwiches as your only meal?” Jason asked. 

“Two years.” So basically, a resident had been potentially malnourishing herself for years because the systems around providing and talking about choices under this regime of care were broken. 

After setting her up with a more appropriate (and still chewable) set of diet choices, Jason decided to consult with dysphagia experts and patients like Betty to create a unit of training about these kinds of patient needs, aimed at preventing such system breakdowns. Everyone at their client nursing homes could attend. The aged-care nurses who came were flummoxed, telling their Head of Care, “Why are we only hearing about these kinds of problems and solutions from the catering guy? No offence, Jason, but seriously, WTF?”

In the midst of such regimented systems, where industrial efficiency often erases the possibility of supple action or even humane behaviour, I’m grateful that compassionate minds like Jason’s exist. When curiosity seems like it's at death’s door, people like him arrive to revive it.

The reveal: I was initially pretty skeptical about doing the course under Jason because before classes started, I'd gleaned that he’d spent most of his career managing McDonald’s restaurants. It turns out that my fears were misplaced, because I got a lot out of his teaching. While I really don't share his interest in large food systems, either in experiencing them as a customer nor in their general industrial impact on the world, I'm glad there are people like him enmeshed in such forbidding places, trying to make them more sensitive, responsive and just.

👹👽 First and Last Men

When’s the right time to write a requiem for the human species? 

The other night I had the pleasure of experiencing the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s First and Last Men, a live symphonic and film adaptation of Olaf Stapledon’s seminal 1930 sf novel of future history, narrated by that alien god who lives among us, Tilda Swinton.

(I only knew the Stapledon novel by reputation, and Jóhannsson from his film scores, but was recently prodded to see this production when I watched Philip Kaufmann’s excellent 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In a passing exchange that you’d easily miss, two characters chat about their reading habits, and Stapledon’s work is mentioned. More on this later. Intrigued, I pounced on the Jóhannsson version when it arrived in Sydney as part of the Vivid Festival.)

Jóhannsson only uses the last part of Stapledon’s immense story, which starts in the 20th Century and spans the next two billion years. This focus on the last of eighteen successive human species summons a particularly elegiac mood. Responding to the eventual extinction of life on Earth, humans have genetically re-engineered themselves for life on Neptune, and it is these highly advanced Neptunian humans, astonishing in their animalistic diversity, 20-year pregnancies and 2000-year childhoods, for whom Swinton speaks with such characteristically icy dignity. (My god: that voice.)

[caption align="alignnone" width="980"]

[/caption]

As the camera slowly pans across a series of Yugoslavian Stalinist monuments (you probably know the ones — they recently came into vogue online in the last wave of ruin porn), we cycle through glassy sheets of what anticipatory mourning sounds like: slow arpeggios, and vocals that alternate between the wonderful anonymity of wind instruments and the mewling of cats. (I want to celebrate the two vocalists precisely because they didn’t call attention to themselves: they were exemplary orchestral players.) 

The mood is well-earned: despite all the ingenuity and adaptability of these far-future humans, we discover that a cascade of supernovas has triggered our final extinction. Manned interstellar spaceflight — that mainstay of most sf — is revealed as madness, reducing humans at their technological, technological and ethical peak to nihilistic despair. And as the ever-warming climate of Neptune slowly wreaks havoc on their awesome civilisation, the only thing these “Last Men” can do is make telepathic contact with the past — the conceit that enables Tilda Swinton to narrate the tale for us — as they wait for the end. 

It’s uncanny how much this story from 1930 resonates with our slowly unfolding climate change disaster. And now that the worst seems inevitable, the intense melancholy of Jóhannsson’s First and Last Men feels fitting — a necessary alternative to either denial or relentless panic. But beyond this, I’m impressed by the supreme ambivalence of Jóhannsson’s take. He makes the Last Men as dignified and magisterial as they are aloof, and their vaunted supremacy is a mixture of authentic maturity and our own sneaking suspicion that in their immortal, genetically-designed perfection, these final humans have lost the capacity to take unexpected action. It’s profoundly sympathetic. 

This suggests to me that having a post-human-centred design orientation is very far from being misanthropic. Perhaps we just need to stop pretending that empathy is ever completely possible — who can truly pretend to empathise with a post-human species two billion years in the future, let alone our strange and often unknowable fellow lifeforms, be they vertebrate, invertebrate or botanical? — and instead extend a generalised (and non-paternalistic) sympathy to our neighbours and ourselves. Sympathy is okay. Yes, our situation can be pegged to a combination of pathetic ignorance, shortsighted greed and genuine moustache-twirling villainy. And we are not the centre of the universe. But like others, we are still a species that deserves a dignified mourning.

🦸🏼‍♂️☄️ Can only a God save us now?

Stapledon’s 1930s future-superhumans continue to haunt me.

When I was teaching art to six-year-olds last year, I did a unit on comics, tracing the emergence of costumed superheroes to the ’30s.

[caption align="alignnone" width="980"]

No comment.[/caption]

“Why do you think superheroes appeared then?” I asked the class. “What was going on?”

“IT WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WORLD WARS!” said one student. “MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WERE DYING!” called out another. “My great-grandmother met my great-grandfather in a Spanish flu hospital during World War I!” came another, very-relevant non-sequitur. (It’s easily forgotten that the 1918 influenza outbreak killed at least 50 million people. And yes, these kids are amazing, and publicly funded education is the fucking best.)

Out of the despair of modernity — mechanised mass slaughter and earth shattering pandemics enabled by the globalisation of capitalist industry — we cried out for salvation. Yes, there are many reactionary underpinnings to our superheroic imaginaries (the above image is just the most obvious), but their basis in real trauma behooves us to at least be sympathetic their emergence. We need to take fantasies of supermen seriously (and critically), rather than simply dismissing them as misguided or ridiculous because they’re rather obviously dodgy as fuck. And similarly, we need to take populism seriously.

Make no mistake: while I’m fascinated by downturn and revival narratives, they’re more often than not pretty terrifying: “Make America Great Again” is the clearest contemporary example. And when famed philosopher Martin Heidegger looked forward to “a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety,” he was talking about Adolf Hitler. Don’t look away. Stay and fight in the mud.

🚀🌎 Refuge

Besides talking to the past, the final act of desperation of the Last Men was to transmit proto-organic matter into space, designing it to reassemble on favourable ground in a direction towards intelligent life. (Listening to Tilda Swinton intone gravely about “the Great Dissemination” was just too deliciously weird.) Of course, this is the plot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the story that prompted me to explore First and Last Men in the first place: we are being invaded by relentless pod-people, growing out of seeds assembled from “living threads that float on the stellar winds.”

[caption align="alignnone" width="980"]

Not just taking our jobs — they're stealing Jeff Goldblum's life![/caption]

Too delicious.

Yours in ambivalence,

Ben

[metamodel]

Death and Revival Revisited

The End is the Beginning is the End, as Billy Corgan suggests on the soundtrack to (what I feel is the unjustly maligned) Batman Forever. I had way too much “decline and rebirth” material to fit in the last issue, so I'll continue to follow that seam for a while. (You'll find that downturn and revival is a recurring, uh, theme here at Recurring Thing.)

After returning to design after a year away, I find that Everything Now Looks Very Strange Indeed™. This is another one of my updates on restarting a creative practice (which I’m calling Studio Thing), plus a dose of cultural and design commentary. 

(If someone’s forwarded this thing to you in the hope you’ll find it interesting, you can subscribe here to secure my everlasting love. And please, pass it on if you think it might be of interest to anyone.)

🔂🧟‍♀️ The eternal return of zombie-centred design

Some follow-up on that evergreen topic of what comes after human-centred design: at TEDxSydney I delightedly crossed paths with fellow innovation veteran Carli Leimbach, who’s been thinking about “earth-centred design” as a corrective to anthropocentrism. I’m intrigued. She’s run an initial workshop with some like-minded people, and I’ll keep tabs on her progress.

In other more-than-human news, Anne Galloway recently posted her talk at IndiaHCI 2018, “Designing with, and for, the more-than human”. I’ve been following Anne’s work for a long time, from when the Internet of Things was called pervasive computing, to her more recent work in Aotearoa about sheep. For Anne, more-than-human-centred design means:

“Acknowledging that human beings are not the be-all and end-all.”

“Accepting our vulnerability, acting with humility and valuing our interdependency.”

“Living with the world, not against it.” 

Recommended. Also interesting is the “more-than-human design research roll-call” she recently initiated on Twitter. Follow this link if you want to get in touch with people who are active on the topic, at least in academic circles — some familiar names pop up.

🥪🤮 The alternative to curiosity is… hard to swallow

I’ve just wrapped up my NEIS coursework, and to celebrate I want to recount a story about my teacher Jason that also demonstrates why I’m so glad I decided to sign up for this microbusiness training and mentoring program.

A few years ago, Jason was the director of training at a large catering company which had a significant focus on healthcare facilities such as nursing homes. To get a feel for the training needs of his workforce, he decided to tour their workplaces, immersing himself in their day-to-day work. (His CEO was frankly a little surprised by this — as is the case with many sectors, it was uncommon for management to visit the frontlines. In fact, when he urged the Head of Care at one aged care facility to tour the frontlines of her own operation with him, the staff didn't recognise her, and assumed she was a visitor. Yikes.)

While working with kitchen staff in one nursing home, Jason noticed that one resident, a lone old woman, always ordered the same dish: a single salmon sandwich. Intrigued, he asked the staff about this, and they shrugged. “She must like it,” was the reply. 

The next day, Jason decided to have lunch with her. After a pleasant meal together, he couldn't contain himself. 

“Betty, I've noticed that you always order a salmon sandwich,” he said. (I love that he still remembers her name.) “I don't mean to pry, but, uh, why is that?”

She looked at him for a second. 

“It's because I'm afraid,” Betty whispered. 

It turned out that Betty had dysphagia — a problem with her pharynx or oesophagus that made swallowing difficult — and was terrified that if she admitted this, she would be placed on the puréed diet of an invalid. Over time, she'd gotten used to salmon sandwiches as the one meal she knew could swallow without issue. And because of her fears, that's all she ate. 

“Betty, how long have you been eating salmon sandwiches as your only meal?” Jason asked. 

“Two years.” So basically, a resident had been potentially malnourishing herself for years because the systems around providing and talking about choices in this system of care were broken. 

After setting her up with a more appropriate (and still chewable) set of diet choices, Jason decided to consult with dysphagia experts and patients like Betty to create a unit of training about these kinds of patient needs, and aimed at preventing such system breakdowns. Everyone at the their client nursing homes could attend. The aged-care nurses who came were flummoxed, telling their Head of Care, “Why are we only hearing about these kinds of problems and solutions from the catering guy? No offence, Jason, but seriously, WTF?”

In the midst of such regimented systems, where industrial efficiency often erases the possibility of supple action or even humane behaviour, I’m grateful that compassionate minds like Jason’s exist. When curiosity seems like it's at death’s door, people like him arrive to revive it.

The reveal: I was initially pretty skeptical about doing the course under Jason because before classes started, I'd gleaned that he’d spent most of his career managing McDonald’s restaurants. It turns out that my fears were misplaced, because I got a lot out of his teaching. While I really don't share his interest in large food systems, either in their experience as a customer nor in their general industrial impact on the world, I'm glad there are people like him enmeshed in such forbidding places, trying to make them more sensitive, responsive and just.

👹👽 First and Last Men

When’s the right time to write a requiem for the human species? 

The other night I had the pleasure of experiencing the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s First and Last Men, a live symphonic and film adaptation of Olaf Stapledon’s seminal 1930 sf novel of future history, narrated by that alien god who lives among us, Tilda Swinton.

(I only knew the Stapledon novel by reputation, and Jóhannsson from his film scores, but was recently prodded to see this production when I watched Philip Kaufmann’s excellent 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In a passing exchange that you’d easily miss, two characters chat about their reading habits, and Stapledon’s work is mentioned. More on this later. Intrigued, I pounced on the Jóhannsson version when it arrived in Sydney as part of the Vivid Festival.)

Jóhannsson only uses the last part of Stapledon’s immense story, which starts in the 20th Century and spans the next two billion years. This focus on the last of eighteen successive human species summons a particularly elegiac mood. Responding to the eventual extinction of life on Earth, humans have genetically re-engineered themselves for life on Neptune, and it is these highly advanced Neptunian humans, astonishing in their animalistic diversity, 20-year pregnancies and 2000-year childhoods, for whom Swinton speaks with such characteristically icy dignity. (My god: that voice.)

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As the camera slowly pans across a series of Yugoslavian Stalinist monuments (you probably know the ones — they recently came into vogue online in the last wave of ruin porn), we cycle through glassy sheets of what anticipatory mourning sounds like: slow arpeggios, and vocals that alternate between the wonderful anonymity of wind instruments and the mewling of cats. (I want to celebrate the two vocalists precisely because they didn’t call attention to themselves: they were exemplary orchestral players.) 

The mood is well-earned: despite all the ingenuity and adaptability of these far-future humans, we discover that a cascade of supernovas has triggered our final extinction. Manned interstellar spaceflight — that mainstay of most sf — is revealed as madness, reducing humans at their technological, technological and ethical peak to nihilistic despair. And as the ever-warming climate of Neptune slowly wreaks havoc on their awesome civilisation, the only thing these “Last Men” can do is make telepathic contact with the past — the conceit that enables Tilda Swinton to narrate the tale for us — as they wait for the end. 

It’s uncanny how much this story from 1930 resonates with our slowly unfolding climate change disaster. And now that the worst seems inevitable, the intense melancholy of Jóhannsson’s First and Last Men feels fitting — a necessary alternative to either denial or relentless panic. But beyond this, I’m impressed by the supreme ambivalence of Jóhannsson’s take. He makes the Last Men as dignified and magisterial as they are aloof, and their vaunted supremacy is a mixture of authentic maturity and our own sneaking suspicion that in their immortal, genetically-designed perfection, these final humans have lost the capacity to take unexpected action. It’s profoundly sympathetic. 

This suggests to me that having a post-human-centred design orientation is very far from being misanthropic. Perhaps we just need to stop pretending that empathy is ever completely possible — who can truly pretend to empathise with a post-human species two billion years in the future, let alone our strange and often unknowable fellow lifeforms, be they vertebrate, invertebrate or botanical? — and instead extend a generalised (and non-paternalistic) sympathy to our neighbours and ourselves. Sympathy is okay. Yes, our situation can be pegged to a combination of pathetic ignorance, shortsighted greed and genuine moustache-twirling villainy. And we are not the centre of the universe. But like others, we are still a species that deserves a dignified mourning.

🦸🏼‍♂️☄️ Can only a God save us now?

Stapledon’s 1930s future-superhumans continue to haunt me.

When I was teaching art to six-year-olds last year, I did a unit on comics, tracing the emergence of costumed superheroes to the ‘30s.

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“Why do you think superheroes appeared then?” I asked the class. “What was going on?”

“IT WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WORLD WARS!” said one student. “MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WERE DYING!” called out another. “My great-grandmother met my great-grandfather in a Spanish flu hospital during World War I!” came another, very-relevant non-sequitur. (It’s easily forgotten that the 1918 influenza outbreak killed at least 50 million people. And yes, these kids are amazing, and publicly funded education is the fucking best.)

Out of the despair of modernity — mechanised mass slaughter and earth shattering pandemics enabled by the globalisation of capitalist industry — we cried out for salvation. Yes, there are many reactionary underpinnings to our superheroic imaginaries (the above image is just the most obvious), but their basis in real trauma behooves us to at least be sympathetic their emergence. We need to take fantasies of supermen seriously (and critically), rather than simply dismissing them as misguided or ridiculous because they’re rather obviously dodgy as fuck. And similarly, we need to take populism seriously.

Make no mistake: while I’m fascinated by downturn and revival narratives, they’re more often than not pretty terrifying: “Make America Great Again” is the clearest contemporary example. And when famed philosopher Martin Heidegger looked forward to “a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety,” he was talking about Adolf Hitler. Don’t look away. Stay and fight in the mud.

🚀🌎 Refuge

Besides talking to the past, the final act of desperation of the Last Men was to transmit proto-organic matter into space, designing it to reassemble on favourable ground in a direction towards intelligent life. (Listening to Tilda Swinton intone gravely about “the Great Dissemination” was just too deliciously weird.) Of course, this is the plot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the story that prompted me to explore First and Last Men in the first place: we are being invaded by relentless pod-people, growing out of seeds assembled from “living threads that float on the stellar winds.”

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Not just taking our jobs — they're stealing Jeff Goldblum's life![/caption]

Too delicious.

Yours in ambivalence,

Ben