Today, my client Pepsi released The Ultimate Refresh, a remix project allowing anyone in the world to upload their own accompaniment to a track by LMFAO, and to remix other people's submissions with the original song. It's a pretty cool riff on the Through-you.com aesthetic -- four videos play at once, in a 2x2 matrix.
I'd like to take full credit for the idea, but can't; although I worked on the project, I came in on the tail end of it.
Check it out, let me know what you think.
I love, love, love this augmented reality application by the US Postal Service, for its combination of high-tech geekiness and good, old-fashioned functionality. Want to know which package size is appropriate for the item you're shipping? Hold it up to your webcam, and see how virtual boxes fit around it.
(Seen on Adverblog)
As any reader of this blog, or anyone who is familiar with me and my work knows, I am a generally a big cheerleader for the whole D.I.Y. ethic. User-generated content, peer production, craftiness, what have you -- I'm all the way behind it. My wife and I subscribed to both Make and Craft magazines. D knits and crochets like a dynamo, and I am in the process of publishing a book on how mash-ups betoken a new social epoch. We dig hacks, mods, machinima, anything that smacks of good-old-fashioned people power.
However, an unnerving thought has been playing around the corners of my mind for a while: What if the whole D.I.Y. ethic isn't (just) a strategic boon to collective agency, but something more sinister: a wholesale shifting of productive labor onto the backs of consumers, and a sign of the end of the bourgeoisie as we know it?
We generally think of D.I.Y. as (light, encouraging voice) "C'mon, kid! You can do it! Do it yourself!" But what if it's actually something more like (gruff, discouraging voice) "Get out of here, pal, I'm too busy. Do it yourself!"
There are certainly many signs that D.I.Y. production is supplanting traditional economic structures across many industry sectors:
The list could go on ad nauseum; these are simply the first examples I could think of. There are many competing potential explanations for this trend:
Unfortunately, none of these explanations appears to be true:
So if none of the explanations I cited above explain the D.I.Y. trend, what does? Is it just simply an accident of aesthetic and cultural history, a trend as shallow and temporary as pogo sticking or C.B. radio? Maybe. But I don't think so. My suspicion is that we, as a society, are primarily using the D.I.Y. ethic as a screen to hide our increasing poverty from ourselves -- both at the individual and the industrial levels.
One statistic that's stuck with me since i came across it a few years ago is that a double-wage-earner family in the 2000s has a lower standard of living, and less buying power, than a single-income family in the 1970s. Obviously, the continuation of this trend would be devastating: maybe we should expect to see polygamy legalized in coming years to functionally allow families to include three or more full-time wage earners. More likely, we'll see people staying with their parents longer, and the birth rate shrink, especially among higher-SES populations.
To put my premise simply: I think that the D.I.Y. ethic provides industries with a convenient way to hide the declining health and wealth of their sectors by cutting costs (both labor and capital) without cutting prices. And it provides individuals with a socially positive context in which to cut consumption costs, by buying raw or semi-raw materials, rather than finished products. Of course, neither of these trends can continue much longer; to combine metaphors, if D.I.Y. is an economic band-aid and craftiness is a cultural fig-leaf, the open sore of our festering economy and naked poverty of our middle classes cannot be hid much longer.
One final thought, generated by a masters student of mine as I was discussing the above in class last week: The whole green/sustainability movement may have powerful economic and altruistic roots, and may be socially beneficial in problematizing and solving the rampant excess of consumer culture, but it can also be understood as a fig leaf of sorts. When I was growing up, old people who saved string, tin foil, and paper bags seemed like damaged goods, crazy holdovers from the anomalous scarcity of the great depression. Today, it's becoming increasing hip and cool to do exactly these things -- in other words, we've developed a cultural mechanism couching the degradations of poverty in both the attractiveness of hipster culture and the admirability of altruism. Today's string-savers aren't a bunch of crazy old kooks; they're cutting-edge, avant-garde paragons of youth culture, and staunch defenders of our planet's future.
Please, somebody tell me I'm wrong...
I recently saw an old friend of mine, Norm Savage, after about 10 years without contact. He's a writer -- of the post-beat, neo-romantic, soul-searching, confessional variety (although he'd hate being classified this way, I'm sure). He wanted to talk with me about using the Internet to self-publish.
Norm had been a hair's breadth away from landing a big publishing contract with FSG for his powerful memoir of diabetes and heroin addiction, Junk Sick: Confessions of an Uncontrolled Diabetic, which had been about 25 years in the works. Just before the paperwork went through, the economic downturn shook up the market, and his editor got canned. She recommended he wait until she landed somewhere else, and publish with her there, but Norm just couldn't wait any longer. After a quarter of a century of masochistic labor, he wanted his words out in the world.
Despite my frequent championing of participatory culture, I have to admit I was a little skeptical about self-publishing on a site like SmashWords. I've been more successfully brainwashed by the traditional cultural gatekeepers than I like to admit, and for me (an aspiring book author myself), the concept was tainted with the odor of "vanity publishing" -- narcissistic, self-deluded, amateurish, delusional, desperate, etc. After all, FSG is the top of the heap publishingwise, and SmashWords just seemed to be such a tragic fall from grace.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized what a ridiculous point of view that is. I've read drafts of Norm's book, as well as other work of his, and I know that his story is one that needs to be told, and that his style is one that needs to be read. His book is deep, powerful, painful -- in a word, human. If the traditional publishing industry is so dysfunctional they can't serve as a conduit for writers of Norm's caliber to reach potential readers, then maybe we readers and authors should let them die -- and switch our focus to publishers like SmashWords. Don't get me wrong -- I love the stuff that FSG puts out, from their cover designs to their content. It's just that, knowing the specifics of this case, I can imagine all the other innovative and valuable books they and the other publishing houses are failing to put out.
I'd never purchased a book on SmashWords before, but I just bought Junk Sick. It only costs $2.99, and for that price, I can read it in every imaginable digital format, from HTML to PDF to EPUB. And it's DRM-free, so I won't have the amazingly frustrating experience of being locked out of my own library by a stupid robot, which ended my brief sojourn into ebook-purchasing a few years back.
If you're at all interested in the psychological and social dimensions of diabetes, addiction, writing, sex, music, loneliness, pain, friendship, art, introspection, exhibitionism, love and fear, you should seriously consider buying this book. SmashWords will even let you read the first 35% of it for free. Or you could read an interview with Norm at the SmashWords blog, which will give you a pretty good sense of his character, his story, and his relationship to language.
Norm also publishes his own blog, which is basically fragments of his new book-in-progress, posted as he writes them. It's called The Savage Diabetic.
This nifty little plugin replaces all the banners on a web page with "curated art images." Every 2 weeks, its cache of images is updated, to a new bunch of works by a new bunch of artists selected by a new curator. I'm definitely installing it now.
(Spotted on Grand Text Auto)
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