Sometimes I have a dream where I'm desperately imploring someone to listen to me and stop and change their ways. I'm not sure who my interlocutor is; I usually see myself in the third-person with my antagonist off-screen. In my dream I'm utterly convinced that they are so incorrect and so misled that if they continue what they are doing it will irreparably damage us both. I start persuading them calmly but they refuse to listen, or ignore me, or continue doing the thing I'm trying to get them to stop and it escalates into shouting, screaming for them to stop but they continue to ignore me, or simply can't hear me. In the end my throat is raw from screaming, my head throbs with rage, my back is bent over and I'm exhausted and crying but they carry on.
I hate that dream. It hurts. Maybe you have it too? I'm sorry if you do. It probably has some symbolic meaning about insurmountable adversity but like a lot of my dreams I tend to ignore it and pocket it until it later bears a semblance upon life when I can draw on it for learning.
But that dream came to mind on Friday evening while watching the symbols of Brexit happen. I'm always wary of blaming or singling out individuals for things that I personally find to be wrong because people are usually the victims of calamitous events rather than causes. And unless you are a murderer, sexual predator or other nefarious being the chances are that circumstance has as much a part in the situation as free will. But it was hard watching some of the vox-pops with folks celebrating this historic catastrophe and not want to blame them for their choices in our particular calamity: You must have seen the interview; (I generalise from despair, but you get the gist):
'We'll be in control again.'And on and on and on it goes like the greatest Monty Python sketch writ large on the rhetorical path to nowhere. You can't blame folks for deploying words like 'sovereignty' and 'laws' without (as I don't) even really knowing what they mean. They're parroting the Eurosceptic words they've heard since the early-2000s.
'Of what?'
'You know, our country.'
'Ok, but what specifically?'
'Our sovereignty.'
'What does that mean for you?'
'Oh, well, control of our own laws.'
'Which laws?'
'All the laws that Europe took away.'
'Ok, which ones?'
'Like...fishing laws. We'll have our own fishing laws.'
'So how will that affect your daily life?'
'Oh, well, it won't but we'll have our own laws.'
So then if we don't blame the folks gathered in Parliament Square to celebrate the ritual sacrifice of fifty years of mutual cooperation, do we blame and scream at the politicians? (you know specifically the ones I mean) I mean, it's good catharsis if you like your throat cut to ribbons but they're just doing politics. Let's imagine a pleasant fiction:
As with our world, the end of the Cold War leads to an end of a clear 'us and them' narrative simultaneous to enormous growth in the economic prosperity of the most wealthy leaving the once exhorted working and lower middle classes behind. Instead of blaming non-white people (War on Terror) or 'the elites' some right-wing think tank (supported by the tabloids, fintech and green tech investment) puts together a cohesive, straight-forward and digestible narrative that lands the blame for social inequality squarely at the feet of exploitative extraction and fossil fuel industries. New politicians like Noris Fohnson and Bigel Jarage campaign and harry – out of political expediency rather than conviction – for an anti-fossil fuel platform in the right wing, swinging MPs – out of political expediency rather than conviction – to call a referendum in 2016 on a carbon neutral economy by 2020. They promise jobs, new industries, growth, wealth for the 'forgotten' and a nationalistic vision of Britain leading the way.
Sure, it seems unfeasible but you know, the mechanics are broadly the same. And you can't blame politicians for being political. You CAN blame them for shirking any sense of courage or integrity in the face of a opportunism and of knowingly committing the country to a policy path which they fully understand (and most have admitted before this debacle) will lead to a worse outcome for most people. You can go to fucking town on that one.
So anyway I posted a Political Opinion on Instagram on Friday night and braced for the inevitable backlash but instead received some sympathy, kind words and two interesting debates in which I learned something. This continues to support my conviction that Instagram is my favourite (great articles to the contrary aside). Had I done the same on Twitter dot com I would have received the inevitable 'eat rocks and die you fascist' response. This is a symptom I think of how much Twitter's panopticon structure (you can see what everyone else says) rewards collective outrage. On Instagram, where it's direct messages or you have to go out of your way to read what other people have written about another's thing, there's no need to play to the crowd.
Reading
To be totally honest, I don't understand half of it (the cultural theory half specifically); but in a good way. Sometimes I read things where I struggle with the ideas and terms and give up. There's so many things to read that I refuse to engage with things where the author doesn't at least try to engage an audience beyond their immediate peer group. In this case, Escobar really is trying to engage people exactly like me – a western-educated designer – in shifting my conception of my subject. His writing makes me want to re-read sections to understand where he's going at. I'm apprehensive of getting to several areas of the book – the ontological turn and transition design specifically – both of which I've taken several runs at each and come up only slightly more comprehending but I'm kind of excited to tackle those things through his writing.
However, in a book referencing designers, inevitably to be read by designers (even if he is clear that is not his sole audience), it could use some pictures! Escobar refers to a lot of practices throughout the book and rarely illustrates them through description and never through images. The thread of a thought can easily be lost when he drops the name of, for instance, a co-design practitioner I was unaware of and then doesn't expand on what they do and how or use an image of their work making it hard to interpret them as an example of his theory. I also actually like his tendency to string out lists of adjectives which I know some folk find poor style. I do that. So that makes it feel ok. More conceptually, I also feel that sometimes his ideas border on nostalgia such as at one point lamenting the replacing of the fireplace in the home (a site of community) with the television, or enthusing the value of blood relations and physically-local communities over dispersed technological social networks. Maybe there's more to go into here later in the book but I have a niggling concern that (at least early in the book) he off-handedly discounts the role of media technologies in building new kinds of families and communities that for many folks (perhaps western, yes) are more fulfilling – even safer – than the physically proximate ones. Anyway, I'll write more once I wrap it up. It's intense but I'm enjoying the challenge.
Sorry, no learning or channel recommendations this week. This is long enough for you. I've got them in my notes for next week.
Night, x