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heechulhamster · 6 years ago

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Remnants - Kim Jongdae

KIM JONGDAE x Reader

Genre: Angst, College!AU, Mature!AU

Warnings: Implied sex

4,068 words.

Synopsis: He was the one you tried to forget. His memories were the one you tried to bury, burn, and leave. Just exactly as he did to you. But seven years after, the ghost of your past was now standing in front of you. Breathing the same air, and existing in the same space as you do.

He wasn't supposed to be here. He was supposed to live in the fragments of your memory you tried so hard to discard, burn, disintegrate. Yet he was here, existing in the same space as you, breathing the same air as you do, and unabashedly staring at you as if all other things are invisible. The set of eyes that were set on you stirred an overwhelming mix of emotions in your body.

"I am certain that you two would work well together on this project." Your client expressed with a wide smile, evident of hope and enthusiasm.

You tried hard to reciprocate the positivity he exuded. "We'll work hard to achieve your desired outcome, Sir." Your hand reached to the client in an assuring handshake. He then turned to him, and did the same. That's when your eyes met again, a surge of memories came back in your mind. You tried hard to shrugged it off, the bliss of immaturity, the wonderful firsts, the pain when he all too suddenly left.

The client left and you were quick to re-organize your portfolio that laid on the table. Not wanting to spend more time with the man in front of you.

"It's been so long. When did I last see you, seven years ago?" You looked up to him, seeing a sly smile on his face.

"Yep." You simply answered.

"You've changed a lot, really. I almost didn't recognize you."

"Yeah, five years is a lot of time Mr. Kim." A smile crept up in your face, but not one of comfort nor happiness. One that's a mere show of professionalism, or just a facade to hide how affected you really were.

"Mr. Kim? Aren't we far from formalities now?" His eyebrow raised, his features sure did improve a lot. His far more chiseled, structures more defined, his shoulders even broadened - almost the same as before but noticeably better.

"We have a lot of time for catching up while this project runs, Jongdae. I really need to go." You smiled with pursed lips and you were quick on your heels.

You hated how affected you still were. It's five years, it's been a half of a decade. Yet the pain he left was still there, among the butterflies that crept in your stomach when he smiled. It's still in your head like a video that can be played back over and over.

You were in second year of college, a handful of excitement still present in your system. It was your dream university and program after all. It wasn't hard for you to adjust in the new environment, knowing you prepared for it your whole life. You just felt that it was right, you in the city, studying Architecture, and that was it - all that you could ask for.

Then there was this one particular day, the weather seemed overcast and it was a good time to hang by the front of one of the best buildings in the university. The right amount of sunshine mixed with the green shade of spring made a wonderful sight to your eyes. You admired its neoclassical style, grabbed the drawing pad in your bag, and started sketching. Art was your passion, but there's always the insatiable room for improvement. Half an hour passed unnoticeably and you were awakened to your senses by a voice coming from beside you.

"A 2B would really work better on that shading. Would give it more dimension." You looked beside you, a man was suddenly seated on the free space and was looking (or judging) your work.

"I don't have one. It's just a random sketch anyways." You sighed.

He scuffled through his bag from where he retrieved a pencil of the exact shade he told you. "Lucky for you I have one here."

A smile full of subtle charm emerged on his lips, and you were sure you felt a sudden flush on your cheeks. You took the pencil with a smile and used it on the shading.

"Fine arts?" He asked you.

You shaked your head, not looking away from your work. "Architecture."

"Oh, our majors are closer than I have thought." You looked at him. He reached out a hand, "Jongdae, Civil Engineering." You took it with a smile and a steady babble of talk and laughter followed soon after.

It took off from there, from casual coffee dates, to just hanging out around the university, to being of constant prescence in each other's daily routines. He was a batch ahead of you so he showed you around the life of a typical student of the University. And it was such a shift from your cyclical life. Jongdae introduced you to his group of friends, which soon became yours too. Baekhyun and Minseok were such a delight to be with for you, one for the laughs, and the other seemed to always watch over you.

It seemed as if everything was in the right place, at the right time. When he held your hand, when you touch, when you whisper sweet nothings in the afterglow, it all seemed too perfect. But it was undefined. As much of a couple you two seemed to be, no one really confirmed what you guys were. It seemed to work that way, no one questioned it- not even you. No one really asked if you guys were official because it just seemed like it. And the two of you? Well you were pretty sure that the mutual exchange of affections and i love you's were assurance enough. But it was still pretty bleak. You didn't know if you had the right to be jealous, or demand time, or even ask anything from Jongdae. So when the time came that it all suddenly faded, you were left to wonder what happened. What went wrong? Was it all a work of fiction in your mind?

It was vague to you how after a summer break, you and Jongdae lost contact. You were inseperable for one and a half year and it was all gone with the wind. Messages went dry over the break, he was suddenly either too busy or somewhere else. And when school came back, you didn't even know how to approach him anymore. He was suddenly a stranger that you longed for. You came across each other and only a nod was shared, even if you want to ask him why. Why did he cut you out all too sudden? Was there ever gonna be an explanation?

Turns out, you never got the explanation you wanted. You never heard the reason why he acted as if nothing ever happened. His graduation came, and not a single word was heard from Jongdae. As if the months you shared was all but a work of your silly mind.

But you couldn't complain. What were you two anyway? You slept together, shared endearments, worked together, but was there even any confirmation? None. You didn't have any label. And somehow you figured, maybe it was nothing. Maybe it wasn't important to him, he had his fun, and now he's done. But it certainly wasn't just that to you.

That same night after meeting the ghost of your past, you found yourself indulging in a bottle of wine, or whiskey, whatever your hand reached in your pantry. It felt fucked up, how you still remember every damn detail he forgot with ease. How Jongdae's dumb smile still stirs a juvenile feeling within you. How you still want to cry, and cry you did.

You started to convince yourself that it was all just a product of being shocked in the situation. Who wouldn't be? That person who just left you seven years ago just appeared in your latest work project. What do you expect to feel? But it wasn't easy, Jongdae didn't make it easy for you too.

"These columns would really look good in terms of aesthetic but I'm more concerned regarding the structural integrity. It's a risk." He said, pointing to a certain part in your blueprint.

"Mr. Seo specified that he wanted that, and when was a column ever a concern for structural integrity?" You replied, still focusing on the blueprint laid in front of you.

He looked at you in curiosity. "Yeah, I figured that out. I forgot that I used to study Building Design with you." Jongdae let out a small chuckle.

"I made all your reviewers then, Jongdae how could I forget the concepts." You unexpectedly reminisced. He stared at you in silence, as if really looking back or pondering on what you just said.

"And besides, you tend to forget a lot of things." You rolled the blueprint and walked towards the coffee machine. You are in his office, his firm, as you were the architect that was sourced out of the company Jongdae worked from. No one from them focuses on modern architecture, one that you've been mastering on the past few years. So Mr. Seo wanted you for the job.

"Well, I most certainly did not forget about how we used to do this." He said withh a smile on his face, leaning back against his office chair. Your face scrunched in confusion.

"This is the first time we worked together, Jongdae." You chuckled a little, giving him a hint of how delusional he sounded.

"Our kitchen should have one large island on the middle so it wouldn't be hard to cook. It should be granite, I like that better than marble." He mimicked the way you speak as he walked towards you. "And ofcourse I agreed. As I said, you'll be in charge of the aesthetics. Your dream italianate house, then I'll be the one to sign as an engineer." You rolled your eyes on how he had his teasing face on.

You laid your head on his chest while your hands played with his. Jongdae and his habit of humming random songs in your hair as you traced random musings on his chest. Beads of sweat just starting to fade, breathing slowly returning to normal state, and you just let your ears take in his voice and the sound of his heart.

"This is something I could totally get used to." He said while brushing your hair with his fingers.

"Really?" You lazily answered.

"Think about what our future home could be like." Jongdae's strong hands landed firmly on your cheeks.

"Italianate, just right with a cozy feeling. Something that feels like a lazy sunday with its warmth. Not just a house, but a home." You said as you warp your hands over his body, bare skin to skin.

"Sounds just like us." He said smilingly as he slowly inched his lips towards your forehead. "Sounds perfectly like us."

"Looks like you're the one who easily forgets." Jongdae laughed, obviously teasing you a lot more. "I hope you remember what I said about what I like about having kitchen countertops--"

"Which are not what they're used for." You cut him off before he says things that are not meant to be talked about in a workplace. Turning your back against him, you put creamer and sugar in your freshly poured drink.

"I'm really surprised you remember those. I thought you just forget everything and leave." You decided to give a snark remark, not that you planned it. It just came out. So you decided to let out a little laugh in attempt to not make the conversation too serious, or one that you're not to engage in as of the moment.

"Is this about..." He started, his mocking demeanor that was once there earlier now changed into a serious, somber one.

"Nope. We're not talking about that, Engr. Kim." You said as you sipped through your hot coffee.

It was a lie, you wanted to talk about it. Know everything, the reasons, his excuses, made up or not. You just wanted to know what made him turn away completely and never look back. But this wasn't the time, and you wonder if it will ever be. Because to you, his name still carves a silent cut in your heart. One that will never heal, no matter how long it passes by.

But despite the emotional chaos it caused within you, Jongdae still felt like home. How you two worked well together as if your styles and work ethics just blended. Because it was how it supposed to be, as you formed your identities and dreams together. You found yourself still warming up to his laugh, his random touches wasn't an alien feeling. As if it was right, because that's how things used to be.

"You got it just right. But shouldn't be the interior beams placed a little bit lower and on a different degree?" You pointed out to the foreman beside you on the blueprint.

You've been working on Mr. Seo's house, or villa, or more appropriately mansion for over three months now.

"Engr. Kim told us that it could be a concern when we started laying the third floor. The beam will also need another support column, the one we're doing right now." And as if his intuition called him, Jongdae appeared beside you. His hands instinctively snaking behind your back as he explained the changes. You sighed in defeat, it has been started anyway.

"Looks like you and Engr. Kim are comfortable around each other." The foreman stated in a teasing tone, to which Jongdae smirked to.

"We came from the same college. We were friends back then." You defensively explained.

"Thought you might have been more than friends." He teased once more and Jongdae laughed awkwardly, "Actually.."

"Actually not." You said with a fake attempt of a smile. "I'll be at the tent if anyone needs me." And with that you walked off.

Weeks passed and you could feel a dynamic shift with you and Jongdae. From being friendly and familiar, it came back to being strictly professional. His hands were now nowhere near you, he would only talk to you when it concerns the project and nothing more.

But somehow now, you found yourself in his car. Because you came along with Mr. Seo in the site but left you there and now you're left with Jongdae to come back in the city.

"So, we were friends huh?" He broke off the silence. You peered over him, looking at his bland reaction illuminated by the soft cascade of sunset.

"Why, weren't we?" You retaliated.

"I mean, I just thought we were more than that." You avoided eye contact with him, and looked out of the window.

"I thought so too." You sighed. "But then again, I thought that maybe we weren't even friends at all."

"What?"

"Friends don't just leave without explanation." You tried to mask the pain in your voice. "Friends don't just leave you hanging, just avoid you when they don't feel like talking to you anymore. So if we're not friends, we certainly can't be more than that."

You heard him scoff.

"I'll just call myself your past time back then." You let out a laugh hinted with bitterness.

Jongdae called out your name. "It's not like that. It wasn't like that."

"Then tell me what it was, Jongdae. Tell me why you just fucking left me without any explanation and made me feel like shit and unworthy." Your voice cracking on the verge of tears. "Because I'm tired, of all these years thinking it was my fault."

"It wasn't your fault. At all." He said lowly.

"Then why? Was I too boring for you? Did you find someone prettier? Or you just realized I'm not worthy of neither your time nor a proper closure because all of that was how I felt." You broke down, tears started flowing from your eyes and you couldn't help it. These were the questions you were dying to ask for years on end. And now he was here, and the word was out of your mouth.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." That was all he mustered to say as he parked in front of the office building.

"I asked for an explanation, not your apology." With that, you left the car and walked towards yours.

The good thing was that your part of the project was close to finished. The interior architecture has been finalized, and no other revisions on the plan will be made. So all you needed to do was pay a few visits to the site to see the progress and you're good. It just diminishes the need to interact with Jongdae.

Then this night, as you were relaxing at your sofa and watching a movie you heard a knock on your door. You're not expecting anyone to drop by and it's just flat out weird to have someone by your door at 10 in the evening, specially on this age.

But it was weirder to see Jongdae holding a box of donuts, in his hoodie, when you opened the door. It almost seemed like deja vu. Your forhead knotted in confusion. You're sure that constant avoidance and an awkward atmosphere don't lead to that person knocking on your door on late night.

"What are you-" You trailed off when you realized you were only wearing a thin tank top and shorts that barely reach your thighs.

"Just like the old times?" He raised the box and gave a smile.

"We're not 19 anymore, 10 in the evening is considered late at this point Jongdae what do you want?" It came off as tired warning, almost a tone of indifference.

"To give you your well deserve reason and explanation." Jongdae pursed his lips after, seemingly waiting for your approval.

You just opened your door a bit more and let him in. He put down the box your table and removed his hoodie, just like he always did almost a decade ago.

"I don't know if strawberry sprinkles are still your favorite so I just got two of it and a little bit of everything." He said as he opened the box.

"You know how much of a sucker I am for strawberry sprinkles." You let a curve form on your lips as you reached out for a piece. You walked to your fridge and got a bottle of water which you also rested on the table. When you're both sat down, you looked at Jongdae as if you waited for him to speak.

"First of all, I was stupid." His elbows sat on the table and he clasped his hands together in front of his face.

"That's not an explanation, its a fact."

"No. You don't understand."

"Yeah that's why we're in this situation." You said dryingly.

"I was stupid, and didn't make the best decisions. I was graduating that term, and I got scared to leave you there. To have a hard time leaving the university because a piece of me was there." His knuckles rested on his lips.

"That still doesn't make sense to me." You said taking a sip of water.

"I know."

"You got scared to leave me, but you technically didn't stay either. You just cut me off."

"I can't say goodbye to you. I can't bring myself to say goodbye. To leave you. I got an early job offer a term before graduation. Which was extremely far away from you. Knowing myself, how much of a possesive, and jealous prick I was that time, I know it wouldn't work. I would just be paranoid of you going around the university without my arm around you making everyone know you were mine." You searched Jongdae's face of any signs that he was lying, because you knew when he did. But his face was painted with a mix of regret, of guilt, of pain.

"I know the more I stick with you, the harder it would be for me to leave. But you know I had to leave. And you, I couldn't see you cry when I say goodbye. It would break me. So I figured if I just slowly let you go, just go out of your life completely undetected, maybe it wouldn't be a problem. Maybe it was better to leave the last days of us happy then see us going down and crashing and burning. I wanted to leave a good memory, not something of pain."

"You're so fucking stupid." You said in disbelief. But it made perfect sense as the Jongdae you knew wasn't really the most rational with decisions.

"You think you didn't hurt me by doing that?" Your hand slammed against the table.

"I just... I really didn't know what I was thinking back then." A shimmer in his eyes was evident at this point.

"You never even reached out to me! Not a single call after, never." Tears started flowing out of your eyes. "I felt as if I was never important to you because you left me just like that."

"I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry. I'm so stupid. I know." Jongdae walked over and hugged you. Your face on his chest, which you didn't even notice that you were hitting already.

"I was there on your graduation, I didn't want to ruin the day so I didn't approach you. You remember? Minseok and Baek was there. I asked them to give the flowers, and the necklace. That was the least I could do." You remembered the said pieces, and that definite day. How you searched for Jongdae when Minseok and Baekhyun approached but it turns out to be just the two of them.

You just started crying on his chest as he cradled you like a child. You were both on the floor by now, and you just let it out. All the pent up emotions you sickeningly tried to get rid off the past seven years.

"It would be selfish of me to ask for forgiveness. But please, give me another chance." He said as he lifted your chin to meet your eyes with his.

"You're so stupid." You remarked but you couldn't help but latch your lips onto his. Your bodies melting together, as if puzzle pieces that were meant to fit.

One thing lead to another, the next thing you knew you're both in your bed. Jongdae's touch was careful but he still knew the way around your body. The places that just flick like a button and make you writhe in pleasure. Every nook in your body that you liked attention in. Everything felt familiar, like every movement was engrained in your head and a muscle memory. He knew you too much for the seven years to even matter. Because right now, right on the afterglow, you're blisfully lying in his chest again. Jongdae humming a song that used to be your favorite back in college. And it just felt like home.

"I'm so sorry for causing you that much pain." He said as he brushed your hair again with his fingers.

"We're both naked in my bed now which kinda means you're forgiven." You laughed. It doesn't make any sense how the person you tried to forget in the past 7 years was now holding you again, bare skin to skin. And laughing as your breathing and heartbeats synced as one.

"7 years was a long time. I missed you. I missed you a lot. I missed you as if those 7 years were hell." You just smiled at his sweet nothings, it was habitual for him to be like this right after.

"Stop acting as if you didn't date others on those 7 years Jongdae." You joked. "They don't matter now. I'm back to you, I always belonged to you." You looked up at him and saw sincerity in his eyes. "Maybe you're the one who dated a lot, missy." You rolled your eyes.

"You're really one hell of a jealous prick."

"I'm pretty sure none of them was better than me." Jongdae remarked defensively.

"In closures? Oh God they were far better at that than you. But in bed..." You smirked teasingly.

"Well, we won't need any closure now. I'm sure as hell that I'm not ever letting you go." Jongdae whispered on your lips as he kissed you once more. And you sure won't either, as he was your home, one who you belonged to, no matter how far you go.

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katherinemacbride · 6 years ago

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solidarity in sites of temporary hospitality, you do what you can with what you’ve got

Text written August 2018. For Hagen Verleger (ed.), Margaret van Eyck—Renaming an Institution, a Case Study (Volume Two: Comments, Contexts, and Connections), Peradam Press, NY, 2018.

https://hagenverleger.com/portfolio/margaret-van-eyck-volume-two/

Prelude/Postscript

He was talking about the library as a site of radical hospitality: because the person holding the space cannot know the content of all that is being held, in fact it is better if they don’t, because then their focus is on the hospitality, rather than making their own voice among the tangles of sentences in some of the books. [1]

She was critiquing the Western European perspective of not articulating a voice as a way of dealing with colonial guilt. Her critique was that this was both an attempt at empathy but also extremely privileged. [2] What do you do when you’ve wasted your own epistemologies by using them so violently, when you’ve taken up all the space already, how is it possible to make work that listens, can you speak, how do you learn to speak more quietly when you’ve been trained to be at the centre, should you shut up and fuck off? What are all the men doing?

We were swimming in the studio, lesbian empathy. Notes everywhere, to self, to unknown, to a different self, from a different self.

“Capacity Based Exchange,” he was saying; each according to what they can do. All share. [3]

“We share values,” someone says [4], but the values didn’t get a name so how do “we” know? And even if they had a name, there is that big gap between the word and its meaning, that space for editing and remaking and erasing, as Christina Sharpe says. [5]

While you’re reading this, think about friction. Dirty fingers rubbing paper, skin on skin, bodies that don’t fit. Rubbing up the wrong way. “Remember: deviation is hard. Deviation is made hard.” [6]

I was supposed to be writing about dust, and dirt, and sweat. And books. The books that you taught me tell you things even if you think that as books they’re boring, the books I was learning to read as a context not as content. The catalogue shelf for example, filled with female editors care-taking the writing of male essay writers, the exhibitions in regional institutions, the work of the institution we are in represented as books, all this labour and how do I read it now. Not carefully enough, I feel.

Making change is dirty, tiring, boring, upsetting, enraging, finding your allies. Unending.

It was dark, to protect the books, and cool, but not cold, and certainly not damp. The room was sound-proofed, from the mixed musical fragments thrown out the windows of the conservatory, by the trees standing in the garden, the blanket of carefully selected ground-covering perennials, a village of bicycles chained to the fence, and the partial jutting out of the opposite wing of the building. A place to go and write. A place to go and hide in plain sight. A place to go and observe from your quiet seat the comings and goings of the management (collective noun) and the management (verbal noun). The caretaker, writer, poet. The librarian, writer, novelist. Two of the beautiful possibilities of provincial life where people are allowed to slide into roles for which they are not officially trained but are precisely skilled, temperamentally matched, committed, and able to bring some flow and energy.

Dust/Dirt made from particles of paper residue left over from cutting the pages, microfibres from cleaning cloths, dead human skin cells detached from their organ, sugar granules, dust mites, desiccating coffee molecules, food particles, broken-down hair follicles, tobacco threads, traces of drugs in pre- and post-ingestion forms, clay particulate from the soil outside, DNA, fragments of art materials, faeces, sand, sweat. It is sticky from the proteins; the human matter. The type of paper in each book must alter the dust composition through its attractant or repellent qualities. And what is that smell, the book smell that indicates its age roughly, is it accumulated dust and sweat?

A room with a dry smell. Most of the books too well-kept, or not so old as, to have foxed pages and those moist smells familiar in memories of rummaging in boxes at sales and in garages. Archival quality papers, hot pressed smoothness, the chemical grassy smell of freshly printed large distribution. The occasional papers [7]—A4 printed essays, stapled and set into plastic folders, flopping awkwardly among the books, their matt surfaces supporting tough content asking questions of the ranks of catalogues memorialising indistinct exhibitions of regional and international artists; remnants of the theory department persisting in participants that came after holding fast to writing as a critical tool. Radical, beautiful thought unfolding in 11pt fonts. Their format whispering, refusing, sticking to academic norms; their words shouting “find me you fucker.” Documents of group processes made public in pages—the process evading the printing press—presented fragments and transcripts, quotations and diagrams, occasional bit-mapped photographs; everything is Riso-printed, upstairs, on creamy absorbent paper stock.

She was angry. Sunday morning. Dressed prettily, playing music, angry. She was tired, sitting among the aisles working quickly, but making slow movement along. He was bored, writing lists of new curricula. They were sad. The energy was held unevenly, fed by stolen-or-shared cigarettes and sweet coffees, chatting outside on the wooden platform, red wine, moments of recognition and pleasure, durations of pointlessness, biscuits and trail mix. How many days? Rushes of energy—who bought all this African philosophy in the early 1990s! Quick shelves: bleak. Fiction for instance, clang each spine on the metal shelf quickly. Quick shelves: like friends. Feminism for example, this, this, this, oh not that one, wonder why, not much to turn here because women wrote this shelf mostly. Put the single book about masculinities on the collective pile. Finding things like jewels on the beach, books you’d forgotten about, books you’d heard of but never encountered, books you’d never met, books not very present on the internet. Fantasies of who was ordering these, stories of books being trashed and rescued resistantly from the piles of waste. Epistemological wastage [8] comes in overlapping layers: firstly, and undoably always continuingly, violent; later or simultaneously through violence’s secondary forms of stupid, penny-pinching, “progressive” [9] bureaucracy.

They were fighting a bit, one likes big gestures, one likes small details, so it is difficult. Strategically, politically, and ontologically different ways of dealing with the question and its answer: “And who does the labour benefit? The institution really.” These positions are fighting around and within me. The details liker is directed, like an animal following a scent, there is a sensitivity to something in the air that I can’t perceive, they’re sure of the path they’re moving along, but not so sure that they’re not open to taking another one if something comes up. The big gestures seeker worries more—I can relate to this—maybe because the pressure of that expectation is a bit crushing. What kind of self-confidence and stamina do you need to continue with a task that is so temporary, that many would regard as futile?

Learning

Learning the knowledge that your body is remembering anew, again—

does it forget in order to survive, like some bodies somehow forget the physicality of cumulative not sleeping in baby feeding periods and desire to fuck reproductively again,

does it forget because it takes too much energy to remember the way it stiffens when it is threatened, in between all the times when someone chooses to assert their existence in a mode of power and threat against yours,

does it sometimes ignore what it actually is knowing all the time, because life would be too sad and raging if it did acknowledge this without the caring company of the others in this room, or other others in other rooms

—of how hard it is to make change, just how repetitive and boring and physically hard it is to do even this one tiny thing. When this one tiny thing is complete the how hard is suddenly so visible and makes that systemic oppression clear. This is what it means. It means billions fewer words in space. Galaxies of thought that have no space in here. Making stories to remember important information. Making gatherings to learn how to do things. Getting out of bed to go take care of the thing you were doing yesterday and see how it is now it’s tomorrow. Making peace. Making reparations.

Learning the contingencies of making decisions as you go along, the system can never be perfect and consistent. This time I felt generous, this time not, this one was a balance of problems, this one breaks the rules entirely but it is an important book that should be visible so I put it on the table.

Books are carbon, captured, stable, running without a data centre. A wasted epistemology is also often wasted land-water-air. My wasting epistemology is made of your natural resources, and your body, because mine weren’t and isn’t enough. But I feel my greed and overuse as not having enough, being underfed, dysmorphia of the body, the culture, the interconnectedness of it and us all.

Prelude/Postscript

The difficulty of doing things differently, the slowing down or changing of methods. Inductive reading, reading across time, lingering in the period between two publication dates to see what changes between one text and the other. Time, hearing and time, time is material, time is everything, time is not straight, time was, time is, time will, now and not now, two kinds of time, or three, past present future, or more, entanglement of all the possible and actualised times, waiting for time to pass until something heals, but what if it doesn’t ever heal, or it can’t, it’s eaten into the DNA that’s being passed around, it's so embedded in the structural oppressions that it can’t yet heal into something else, because it never stopped happening, it’s not past, it’s now.

Everywhere the time is being stolen that’s needed to do this work. Stolen from and stolen by, stolen in order to do, and stolen from that possibility.

In the car you said something like, “maybe we should all refuse to speak in the moderated and mediated rational language we’re taught to think it’s better to fight in so we don’t look emotional.” [10]

[door of the public speaking/shaming room slams, shaking the seats]

[walls of the broken-into-on-the-weekend library ring with thought and study and laughter]

[1] Nick Thurston, “Speculative Libraries” (talk, PrintRoom, Rotterdam, June 18, 2018).

[2] Cristina Bogdon, “Fuck off Transmediale (provisional title),” Revista-Arta, (February 8, 2018): http://revistaarta.ro/en/column/fuck-off-transmediale-provisional-title/

[3] Michel Bauwens, comment made during “FAQs on the Commons and Art” roundtable (launch event, Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, June 9, 2018).

[4] A comment I have encountered, unspecified like this, on too many occasions recently.

[5] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

[6] Sarah Ahmed, “Refusal, Resignation and Complaint,” feministkilljoys, (June 28, 2018): https://feministkilljoys.com/2018/06/28/refusal-resignation-and-complaint/

[7] E.g. E.C. Feiss, A Critique of Rights in “We Are Here” (Maastricht: Charles Nypels Lab, 2015).

[8] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).

[9] Conversations with various friends and acquaintances who work in libraries indicate that numerical quantities of loans, stripped of any other information, are being used as the marker of success and value, at the level of the whole library, the performance of the individual librarian, and the worth and necessity to the collection of each individual book.

[10] I’m paraphrasing a private conversation here.

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markjsousa · 7 years ago

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Why Venture Capitalists Dominate New Markets

The success of the Venture Capital (VC) industry is staggering. Despite financing just 1/6 of 1% of the new businesses in the United States, VCs back a full 60% of the companies that grow to the point of an Initial Public Offering (IPO). Year after year, VC returns exceed public market comparables – one study found that the average VC fund has outperformed publicly-traded stocks by 25%. Especially for new markets, the VC model is tremendous.

Why? We can boil the distinctness of the VC approach down to four major elements:

1. Blank Slate Strategy

Most large companies devote substantial resources to strategic planning, so it may seem odd to say that VCs succeed in part due to strategic clarity. The distinction is that corporate planning is typically focused on maximizing the potential of an existing business, and so it sees the world from the perspective of a company seeking to push more units of whatever the firm sells. The plan revolves around variables such as how much to invest in marketing and R&D and how aggressively to price. Frequently, the strategic plan is really a financial plan with a thin veneer of competitive analysis on top. There is little fresh thinking about industry change, nor about how an entrepreneur would approach the industry if he had a blank slate. As Clayton Christensen has chronicled very well, this is how companies end up in strategic dead-ends – Digital Equipment kept on making better and better mini-computers, but owners of PCs simply did not care.

A VC uses a totally different lens. He is constantly scanning the world for new markets that seem on the cusp of taking off. He develops a clear point of view about how these markets might evolve and what sort of bets might work out. Then, sometimes, he waits. As explained by David Aronoff of the leading early-stage investor Flybridge Ventures,

“We take the crocodile approach. We identify trends that we have a passion for, we find out enough about them, and then we lie in the relevant pools waiting for interesting things to float by, from entrepreneurs, academia or companies that have been bootstrapped.”

Other VCs will seek to run a strategic play again and again. Versant Ventures, a major healthcare VC firm, invests across a wide array of medical specialties and technologies. However it looks for some common features in its portfolio companies. As explained by Versant’s Charles Warden,

“We like to move the site of care, from an expensive and centralized setting to one that is more cost-effective and accessible. We also like to support less invasive technologies. These might sell at higher prices than more invasive alternatives, but the faster patient recovery time reduces the total cost of care. We also try to be first to market with a strong intellectual property position and an ability to generate more data about medical outcomes than any competitor. Sometimes we will follow if a technology is clearly superior to current options. We avoid the middle ground, where there are multiple players in a nascent market and we are trying to pick which technology will win.”

VCs succeed because they are strategic opportunists. They follow a strategy suited to the moment, not to yesteryear when an established company first entered a market. They focus resources on what has high growth potential today, not on sustaining businesses that may have already passed their peak. Because the canvas for VCs is so broad and open, they have to be very clear about what they are seeking. When the opportunity presents itself, the crocodile can then move lightening fast.

2. Portfolio Planning

Consider your retirement plan. It likely has a mix of assets – stocks and bonds, domestic and foreign holdings, and perhaps precious metals and real estate. In some years, conservative investments will do well. Other times are more favorable to riskier assets. While any particular holding might have a great or terrible year, over time total performance balances out.

Now consider the typical company’s portfolio of investments in new markets, when these investments exist. There may be a very small handful of ventures – not nearly enough to provide year-to-year stability. Because sallying into new markets is so distinct from most companies’ norms, approval for these investments may come all the way from Mount Olympus. The Gods in their plush offices decreed that they liked an idea. The C-suite does not deal in small figures, so plenty of money supports the few ventures approved. Failure would therefore be crushingly expensive – financially and for a few peoples’ careers – so the venture may play “small ball” – going for easy wins that may not be market-shaping moves. Or, if the going gets really bleak, the venture may try to double-down on its wagers by investing in a massive push to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Either way, many of the investments fail to meet expectations. They sputter forward, or they flame out.

In other words, the corporate portfolio lacks asset diversity. It owns a few Treasury bills and a cement factory in Uzbekistan. This is not really what the Gods wanted, but their lack of a portfolio plan allowed the peculiar calculus of company politics to create a mix of holdings that no right-minded investment advisor would dream of recommending.

A VC looks at the world in a completely different way. He knows that 6 out of 10 VC investments will be a total loss. Another 2 or 3 will pay back the investment but make little positive return. Hopefully, the remaining 1 or 2 will be huge wins. He can make this formula work by rigorously limiting amounts invested until companies prove their potential, spreading his wagers over several investment theses and ensuring that the inevitable failures are quick and inexpensive. He looks askance at portfolios where every investment works out. As the autoracing great Mario Andretti once said, “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”

A portfolio plan provides courage to kill new ventures. For a large company, this can be terribly hard. Ending a venture sometimes means effectively terminating a career, so the natural tendency in most big firms is to struggle forward. With a portfolio plan, it is easier to kill 2 out of 5 investments if the plan allows for only 3 to move forward. The plan provides cover for people associated with the losing ventures, allowing them to save face by blaming the strictness of the process; it can make the career stakes less life-and-death.

Additionally, the plan allows for better budgeting of resources. Many new market programs start with backing multiple ideas. As the concepts grow to become real businesses, the needs increase for money and skilled staff. New projects also keep coming in; there is often no shortage of interesting ideas or their champions, and it is hard to deny support to potential internal allies of the new market program. So the firm tries to stretch its resources, leading to longer timelines for building the ventures. Ultimately the situation reaches a breaking point and many projects are cut all at once. Critical decisions get made very quickly about what stays and goes. A VC avoids this trap by knowing at the outset how many financial and human resources will likely be required at what time. He does not spread his resources too thinly, and he can provide appropriate support to ventures as they grow.

Few companies are more rigorous than Royal Dutch Shell. In a business where billions of dollars are invested on the basis of geological probabilities, Shell puts great emphasis on detailed analysis and minimizing its number of failed explorations. Yet in its Gamechanger program, which emulates VC practices, the company has a totally different approach. Gamechanger aims for 3-5 big wins per year. To get there, the program estimates it needs at least 200 ideas, with 50 active projects at any one time, of which 15% get to proof of concept. In some years just 35% of those are deployed. By expecting such a high rate of failure, Shell can pay appropriate attention to sourcing the requisite number of ideas while preserving resources for its most promising ventures.

3. Expectation Of Variabiity

For a well-established business, spreadsheets rule. The potential profitability of investments determines where the money flows. Because the company understands its business deeply, it can require managers to submit detailed budgets for coming years and hold them to their word.

New markets should be treated differently, but oftentimes they are not. When I was building a mobile commerce business in Africa, a very senior executive at our corporate parent – one of the continent’s largest cellphone networks – closely examined the two-year budget I had just passed to him. He leaned over his desk, looked me keenly in the eye, and said, “This is a contract. Do you understand?” Unfortunately I did, and I was terrified. We had just set up our systems, had no customers, and did not even have regulatory approval to operate. The revenue figures were a total guess. I had a rough idea of the total market size, but huge uncertainty about how quickly customers would sign on. One might think that a totally new industry in a place like Zambia would be given some leeway to find its path, but no. The company’s budgeting process needed my figures to create an overall revenue estimate for non-core businesses. The consequence was that my wild speculations were placed on an equal footing with rock-solid estimates from well-known holdings that the company had owned for years.

Now listen to how a VC approaches this task. David Aronoff at Flybridge Ventures explains,

“The VC approach to financials for new start-ups has nothing to do with what I learned in business school. I want to ensure that expected expenses are reasonable, and we do some sensitivity analysis around that. This tells us how much money we need to raise. We look at the business plan’s revenue picture, and then we throw it out the window. This is at best a dream.”

The VC method reflects how an asset manager would evaluate high-risk holdings. He has a plan for how much will be allocated to these assets every year, and a targeted rate of return on those investments. However he knows that any one investment will likely deviate significantly from that target. The secret is to have enough investments so that the variability is neutralized.

Because a VC does not budget based on fictional revenues but instead focuses on real costs, he does not over-fund ventures. He asks how much is needed to finance the company until its next funding round, which is typically associated with a major milestone in the firm’s development such as its first customer. This approach concentrates the company on that milestone, avoiding distraction from the countless other things that the company will eventually need to do but matter little in terms of reaching that immediate goal. The VC thereby keeps his investments manageably small, which enables him to spread his bets.

4. Sequencing Risks

The VC not only sets focused goals for reaching the next milestone but also ties those criteria to the most important risks facing the venture. He is not looking to build an institution for the ages – there will be time later for that. At the moment, he wants to know that the institution is worth building.

For instance, if a company is trying to sell something online the VC may not look for the firm to build a sophisticated IT and order fulfillment system. In the near-term that can be borrowed from another company, or some manual processing can handle the few sales the venture will chalk up in its early days. While the company will eventually need such a system, there is little doubt that it can be created. A much bigger risk is whether customers actually want to buy whatever the company is selling.

For all their sometimes cumbersome bureaucracy, established firms can lack patience. Even if a company’s senior leadership expects its new market ventures to iterate their way toward success, the managers of those businesses may feel differently. They are frequently high-potential staff in the company on a brief stop-over in the venture to build their credentials. They do not have years to show results. Because they are A-list players seeking an unbroken string of successes in their careers, they push to build the business fast. Oftentimes they will be in another position before the potential flaws in this strategy become apparent, and it will be easy to escape blame. By contrast, a venture fund typically has a ten-year duration, and VCs receive much of their compensation on the back-end of that timeframe as investment returns become clear. They have few political incentives to game the system by tackling too much too soon.

The Blake Project Can Help You Expand To New Markets. Take The First Step With Us.

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joejstrickl · 7 years ago

Text

Why Venture Capitalists Dominate New Markets

Why? We can boil the distinctness of the VC approach down to four major elements:

1. Blank Slate Strategy

2. Portfolio Planning

3. Expectation Of Variabiity

Now listen to how a VC approaches this task. David Aronoff at Flybridge Ventures explains,

4. Sequencing Risks

The Blake Project Can Help You Expand To New Markets. Take The First Step With Us.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

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telusmobility · 8 years ago

Text

The seven traits of effective digital enterprises

To stay competitive, companies must stop experimenting with digital and commit to transforming themselves into full digital businesses. Here are seven traits that successful digital enterprises share.

The age of experimentation with digital is over. In an often bleak landscape of slow economic recovery, digital continues to show healthy growth. E-commerce is growing at double-digit rates in the United States and most European countries, and it is booming across Asia. To take advantage of this momentum, companies need to move beyond experiments with digital and transform themselves into digital businesses. Yet many companies are stumbling as they try to turn their digital agendas into new business and operating models. The reason, we believe, is that digital transformation is uniquely challenging, touching every function and business unit while also demanding the rapid development of new skills and investments that are very different from business as usual. To succeed, management teams need to move beyond vague statements of intent and focus on “hard wiring” digital into their organization’s structures, processes, systems, and incentives.

There is no blueprint for success, but there are plenty of examples that offer insights into the approaches and actions of a successful digital transformation. By studying dozens of these successes—looking beyond the usual suspects—we discovered that effective digital enterprises share these seven traits. 1. Be unreasonably aspirational

Leadership teams must be prepared to think quite differently about how a digital business operates. Digital leaders set aspirations that, on the surface, seem unreasonable. Being “unreasonable” is a way to jar an organization into seeing digital as a business that creates value, not as a channel that drives activities. Some companies frame their targets by measures such as growth or market share through digital channels. Others set targets for cost reduction based on the cost structures of new digital competitors. Either way, if your targets aren’t making the majority of your company feel nervous, you probably aren’t aiming high enough.

When Angela Ahrendts became CEO of Burberry, in 2006, she took over a stalling business whose brand had become tarnished. But she saw what no one else could: that a high-end fashion retailer could remake itself as a digital brand. Taking personal control of the digital agenda, she oversaw a series of groundbreaking initiatives, including a website (ArtoftheTrench.com) that featured customers as models, a more robust e-commerce catalog that matched the company’s in-store inventory, and the digitization of retail stores through features such as radio-frequency identification tags. During Ahrendts’s tenure, revenues tripled. (Apple hired Ahrendts last October to head its retail business.)

Netflix was another brand with an unreasonably aspirational vision. It had built a successful online DVD rental business, but leadership saw that the future of the industry would be in video streaming, not physical media. The management team saw how quickly broadband technology was evolving and made a strategic bet that placed it at the forefront of a surge in real-time entertainment. As the video-streaming market took off, Netflix quickly captured nearly a third of downstream video traffic. By the end of 2013, Netflix had more than 40 million streaming subscribers.

2. Acquire capabilities

The skills required for digital transformation probably can’t be groomed entirely from within. Leadership teams must be realistic about the collective ability of their existing workforce. Leading companies frequently look to other industries to attract digital talent, because they understand that emphasizing skills over experience when hiring new talent is vital to success, at least in the early stages of transformation. The best people in digital product management or user-experience design may not work in your industry. Hire them anyway.

Tesco, the UK grocery retailer, made three significant digital acquisitions over a two-year span: blinkbox, a video-streaming service; We7, a digital music store; and Mobcast, an e-book platform. The acquisitions enabled Tesco to quickly build up the skills it needed to move into digital media. In the United States, Verizon followed a similar path with strategic acquisitions that immediately bolstered its expertise in telematics (Hughes Telematics in 2012) and cloud services (CloudSwitch in 2011), two markets that are growing at a rapid pace.

This “acqui-hire” approach is not the only option. But we have observed that significant lateral hiring is required in the early stages of a transformation to create a pool of talent deep enough to execute against an ambitious digital agenda and plant the seeds for a new culture.

3. ‘Ring fence’ and cultivate talent

A bank or retailer that acquires a five-person mobile-development firm and places it in the middle of its existing web operations is more likely to lose the team than to assimilate it. Digital talent must be nurtured differently, with its own working patterns, sandbox, and tools. After a few false starts, Wal-Mart Stores learned that “ring fencing” its digital talent was the only way to ensure rapid improvements. Four years ago, the retail giant’s online business was lagging. It was late to the e-commerce market as executives protected their booming physical-retail business. When it did step into the digital space, talent was disbursed throughout the business. Its $5 billion in online sales in 2011 paled next to Amazon’s $48 billion.

In 2011, however, Wal-Mart established @WalmartLabs, an “idea incubator,” as part of its growing e-commerce division in Silicon Valley—far removed from the company’s Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters. The group’s innovations, including a unified company-wide e-commerce platform, helped Wal-Mart increase online revenues by 30 percent in 2013, outpacing Amazon’s rate of growth.

Wal-Mart took ring fencing to the extreme, turning its e-commerce business into a separate vertical with its own profit and loss. This approach won’t work for every incumbent, and even when it does, it is not necessarily a long-term solution. Thus Telefónica this year recombined with the core business Telefónica Digital, a separate business unit created in 2011 to nurture and strengthen its portfolio of digital initiatives. To deliver in an omnichannel world, where customers expect seamless integration of digital and analog channels, seamless internal integration should be the end goal.

4. Challenge everything

The leaders of incumbent companies must aggressively challenge the status quo rather than accepting historical norms. Look at how everything is done, including the products and services you offer and the market segments you address, and ask “Why?” Assume there is an unknown start-up asking the exact same question as it plots to disrupt your business. It is no coincidence that many textbook cases of companies redefining themselves come from Silicon Valley, the epicenter of digital disruption. Think of Apple’s transformation from struggling computer maker into (among other things) the world’s largest music retailer, or eBay’s transition from online bazaar to global e-commerce platform.

Digital leaders examine all aspects of their business—both customer-facing and back-office systems and processes, up and down the supply chain—for digitally driven innovation. In 2007, car-rental company Hertz started to deploy self-service kiosks similar to those used by airlines for flight check-in. In 2011, it leapfrogged airlines by moving to dual-screen kiosks—one screen to select rental options via touch screen, a second screen at eye level to communicate with a customer agent using real-time video.

We see digital leaders thinking expansively about partnerships to deliver new value-added experiences and services. This can mean alliances that span industry sectors, such as the Energy@home partnership among Electrolux, Enel, Indesit, and Telecom Italia to create a communications platform for smart devices and domestic appliances.

5. Be quick and data driven

Rapid decision making is critical in a dynamic digital environment. Twelve-month product-release cycles are a relic. Organizations need to move to a cycle of continuous delivery and improvement, adopting methods such as agile development and “live beta,” supported by big data analytics, to increase the pace of innovation. Continuous improvement requires continuous experimentation, along with a process for quickly responding to bits of information.

Integrating data sources into a single system that is accessible to everyone in the organization will improve the “clock speed” for innovation. P&G, for example, created a single analytics portal, called the Decision Cockpit, which provides up-to-date sales data across brands, products, and regions to more than 50,000 employees globally. The portal, which emphasizes projections over historical data, lets teams quickly identify issues, such as declining market share, and take steps to address the problems.

U.S. Xpress, a US transportation company, collects data in real time from tens of thousands of sources, including in-vehicle sensors and geospatial systems. Using Apache Hadoop, an open-source tool set for data analysis, and real-time business-intelligence tools, U.S. Xpress has been able to extract game-changing insights about its fleet operations. For example, looking at the fuel consumption of idling vehicles led to changes that saved the company more than $20 million in fuel consumption in the first year alone.

6. Follow the money

Many organizations focus their digital investments on customer-facing solutions. But they can extract just as much value, if not more, from investing in back-office functions that drive operational efficiencies. A digital transformation is more than just finding new revenue streams; it’s also about creating value by reducing the costs of doing business.

Investments in digital should not be spread haphazardly across the organization under the halo of experimentation. A variety of frequent testing is critical, but teams must quickly zero in on the digital investments that create the most value—and then double down.

Often, great value is found in optimizing back-office functions. At Starbucks, one of the leaders in customer-experience innovation, just 35 of 100 active IT projects in 2013 were focused on customer- or partner-facing initiatives. One-third of these projects were devoted to improving efficiency and productivity away from the retail stores, and one-third focused on improving resilience and security. In manufacturing, P&G collaborated with the Los Alamos National Laboratory to create statistical methods to streamline processes and increase uptime at its factories, saving more than $1 billion a year.

7. Be obsessed with the customer

Rising customer expectations continue to push businesses to improve the customer experience across all channels. Excellence in one channel is no longer sufficient; customers expect the same frictionless experience in a retail store as they do when shopping online, and vice versa. Moreover, they are less accepting of bad experiences; one survey found that 89 percent of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience. On the flip side, 86 percent said they were willing to pay more for a better customer experience.1 A healthy obsession with improving the customer experience is the foundation of any digital transformation. No enterprise is perfect, but leadership teams should aspire to fix every error or bad experience. Processes that enable companies to capture and learn from every customer interaction—positive or negative—help them to regularly test assumptions about how customers are using digital and constantly fine-tune the experience.

This mind-set is what enables companies to go beyond what’s normal and into the extraordinary. If online retailer Zappos is out of stock on a product, it will help you find the item from a competitor. Little wonder that 75 percent of its orders come from repeat customers.

Leaders of successful digital businesses know that it’s not enough to develop just one or two of these traits. The real innovators will learn to excel at all seven of them. Doing so requires a radically different mind-set and operating approach.

Shared from: mckinsey.com

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telusmobility · 8 years ago

Text

The seven traits of effective digital enterprises

2. Acquire capabilities

3. ‘Ring fence’ and cultivate talent

4. Challenge everything

5. Be quick and data driven

6. Follow the money

7. Be obsessed with the customer

Shared from: mckinsey.com

Jim Senko SVP, Small Business Solutions and Emerging Market

For more information on this solution, please contact us by email at [email protected], call us now at 1-800-432-9556 or request more information online here

The post The seven traits of effective digital enterprises appeared first on Wireless City.

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#Wireless City

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