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Charles C. Mann Seminar Media

The Long Now Foundation 03/05/2012 19:35

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Living in the Homogenocene: The First 500 Years

Monday April 23, 02012 – San Francisco

Audio is up on the Mann Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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Bio-blender Earth - a summary by Stewart Brand

Tumultuous effects resulted and continue to result from the massive mixing of the worlds biota when European ships reconnected the American continent to the rest of the world. Mann traced several of the cascading consequences of “the biggest ecological convulsion since the death of the dinosaurs.”

The first momentous change came from microbial exchange—20 lethal diseases came from Europe to the Americas while only one (syphilis) went the other way. North America, which had been largely cleared by natives with fire and agriculture, reforested when two-thirds to 95% of the native inhabitants died from European diseases—”the greatest demographic catastrophe in human history.” That huge reforesting drew down atmospheric carbon dioxide and Europes “Little Ice Age” (1550-1800) apparently resulted.

Meanwhile the mountain of silver at Potosí, Bolivia, vastly enriched Europe, which “went shopping” worldwide. Trading ships coursed the worlds oceans. One artifact picked up from Peru was the potato—a single variety of the 6,000 available. When potatoes in Europe turned out to provide four times the amount of food per acre as wheat, the previously routine famines came to an end, population soared, governments became more stable, and they began building global empires. After 1843 guano shipped by the ton from coastal Peru for fertilizer introduced high-input agriculture. In Ireland 40% of the exploding population ate only potatoes. Around 1844 a potato blight arrived from Mexico, and a million Irish died in the Great Famine and a million more emigrated.

In China, which has no large lakes and only two major rivers, agriculture had been limited to two wet regions where rice could be grown. Two imports from America—maize and sweet potato—could be farmed in dry lands. As in Europe, population went up. Vast areas were terraced as Han farmers pushed westward as far as the Mongolian desert. In heavy rains the terraces melted into the streams, and silt built up in the lowlands, elevating the rivers as much as 40 feet above the surrounding terrain, so when they flooded, millions died. “A Katrina per month for 100 years,” as one Chinese meteorologist described it. The constant calamities weakened the government, and China became ripe for foreign colonial takeover.

In America two imported diseases—malaria and yellow fever—were selective in who they killed. Europeans died in huge numbers, but Africans were one-tenth as susceptible, and so slavery replaced traditional indentured servitude in all the warm regions that favored mosquito-borne diseases. As one result, four times as many Africans as Europeans crossed the Atlantic and began mixing with the remaining native Americans, giving rise to an endless variety of racial blends and accompanying vitality throughout the Americas.

During the Q & A, Mann described a potential fresh eco-convulsion-in-waiting. “There is an area in southeast Asia roughly the size of Great Britain that is a single giant rubber plantation.” Where rubber trees originally came from in the Amazon there is now a rubber tree leaf-blight that is starting to spread in Asia. “You could lose all the rubber trees in three to six months. It would be the biggest deforestation in a long time.” The entire auto industry, he added, depends on just-in-time delivery of rubber.

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VVORK

VVORK 02/05/2012 17:58

»Squirrel«, 1969 by Meret Oppenheim.

VVORK

VVORK 02/05/2012 10:39

»Shadow Weave (Interlock, image)«, 2011, woven canvas by Tauba Auerbach.

WHITE NEGRO FOR MAYOR

Adam Curtis 01/05/2012 15:11

This Thursday Londoners will vote to elect a new city mayor, and I thought it would be a good moment to put up a great documentary about how Norman Mailer stood for Mayor of New York in 1969.

It is a lovely film - directed by a brilliant documentary maker called Dick Fontaine, and beautifully shot in the fluid way of cine-verite back then. But more than that it captures the rise of a phenomenon that has come to dominate (and possibly strangle) western metropolitan society today. It is the rise of the hipster. By this I don't mean the present cliche of the ironic moustaches that live in Hoxton and Hoboken - but a new cultural elite that was beginning to emerge at that time, the rebellious, stroppy bohemians who looked to culture rather than politics to define their identity - and above all their difference from others.

In the film you can see them peeking through in the backdrop of many of the scenes, for Mailer attracts them. In his perverse individualism and rebelliousness - one of his slogans is "We're no good, and we can prove it" - Mailer captured a new sensibility.  This was because he combined a revulsion against a tired old culture together with a distrust of the political system, and the hipsters loved it.

But Mailer was a complicated man - and as well as embodying many of the hipster values he was also a perceptive and vocal critic of the new sensibility. Back in 1957 he had written an essay for Dissent magazine called The White Negro. In it he had described how fears of nuclear annihilation had begun to produce a new kind of young alienated being in America. These hyper-individualists trusted only their own feelings and desires and refused to be part of any group or organisation. And in black culture, Mailer said, they found their identity - the culture of the dangerous outsider.

This outsider culture had originally been created, Mailer wrote, by blacks in response to racial oppression and violence. But for the "white negroes" that culture was then co-opted in order to give a meaning and grandeur to their psychopathic narcissism:

"In such places as Greenwich Village a menage-a-trois was completed - the bohemian and the 'juvenile delinquent' came face to face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child was the language of Hip for its argot gave expression to abstract states of feeling which all could share, at least all who were Hip. And in the wedding of the white and the black it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry.

So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro."

Mailer also pointed out that this new breed of "psychic outlaw" could be equally a candidate for the most reactionary or the most radical of political movements. And in the film there is a fascinating scene where Mailer takes on the trades unions on one of the avenues in New York. He tells them that in the past they were a heroic movement - but that now they have become a repressive, stultifying force in society - in particular in the way they are refusing to allow blacks and hispanics to move up society. It is an odd moment because as you watch you realise that it was elements of this rebellious individualism that both Thatcher and Reagan would later harness. And that possibly, if the left had got hold of it earlier, then the history of the West might have been very different.

In the 1970s the phenomenon that Mailer had identified grew massively. And as it did the new cultural bohemians co-opted another outsider culture to give themselves further identity - the gay culture that had risen up in response to homosexual discrimination. Then in the 1980s that bohemian individualism became the driving force that permitted consumer capitalism to reinvent itself - because it offered the ever-multiplying hipsters the objects through which to express their rebellious difference.

Today it is possible to argue that we have all become gay white negroes. We all listen to "edgy urban" music, spend our time in the gym, go shopping and groom ourselves, take lots of drugs, have sex and then spend the rest of the time talking to our friends about the impossibility of finding real love and connection in the world.

Far from an expression of rebellion it has become the conformity of our age. And if Mailer was right - that it was a sensibility originally born out of the existential fears of nuclear holocaust - then it lost its real radical purpose when the cold war ended.

Instead the white negro hipster has actually become one of the central conservative pillars of our time - because their real function is now simply to prop up an increasingly shaky system of credit and rolling consumption.

And one wonders where are the real outsiders of out time? Who are the new "white negroes" of our age?

VVORK

VVORK 30/04/2012 23:14

»Pico della Mirandola«, 2012,

»Mano-sillas«, 2012,

»Los Mutantes«, 2012 by Pedro Reyes.

VVORK

VVORK 30/04/2012 23:01

»Untitled«, 2010,

»Untitled«, 2011,

»Mudflap Girls 360° (hot pink)«, 2011 by Virginia Overton.

Slow Motion Car Crash

The Long Now Foundation 30/04/2012 18:52

Its somewhere between performance and installation art: last month, artist Jonathan Schipper slowly and deliberately crashed a car into a wall. Moving at microscopic speeds, the crash took place over the course of a full month, each day inching a bit closer to its inevitable fate.

Schippers piece captures the destruction of speed, precisely by taking speed out of the equation. He explains that

We stop and look at a car wreck to reacquaint ourselves with the lost velocity, to reconnect with cause and effect. For we live increasingly in a world without effect, without impact. Speed changes meaning, changes the effects of catharsis.

By isolating effect and putting it on display, Schipper reminds us that life, and the things we do, make an impact on the world around us. He has created a piece of art that takes the long term not only as its medium, but as its message as well.

VVORK

VVORK 29/04/2012 21:36

“The Shell Home”, 2011 by Mandla Reuter. Video, flat screen monitor.

VVORK

VVORK 28/04/2012 15:35

»Natürliche Grazie (Equilibre)«, 1984,

»Hostessen«, 1989,

»Untitled (Tokio), 1990/92 by Peter Fischli / David Weiss.

Breaking Out and Breaking In Finale

BLDGBLOG 27/04/2012 07:49

[Image: Poster design by Atley Kasky of Outpost].

Although I hope to post again about the specific topics to be discussed at this event, I didn't want to lose any more time in announcing the Breaking Out and Breaking In final public event to be hosted at Columbia University's Studio-X NYC on Monday, April 30, featuring a unique and exciting panel of discussants drawn from the worlds of film, design, history, architecture, and the FBI.

Stop by to hear Special Agent Brenda Cotton, Bank Robbery Coordinator for the FBI's Bank Robbery/Kidnapping/Extortion Squad; Thomas McShane, Retired FBI Special Agent from the Bureau's Art Crime Team and co-author of Stolen Masterpiece Tracker; Scott Macaulay, editor-in-chief of Filmmaker Magazine, co-sponsors of the Breaking Out and Breaking In film festival; Matt Jones, designer and principal at BERG; and Jimmy Stamp, writer and editor at the Yale University School of Architecture and co-organizer of last year's symposium on the architecture of the getaway, the hideout, and the coverup.

The event is free, open to the public, and kicks off on April 30 at 7pm sharp. We'll be at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, on the 16th floor; here's a map. Stop by for a panel discussion and open Q&A about the spatial scenarios of real and cinematic crimes, from armored car heists to panic rooms, from Boston art thefts to Los Angeles bank tunnels, and from the internal layouts of financial institutions to the unanticipated criminal side-effects of urban design, exploring the built environment from the perspective of the crimes that can be planned and foiled there.