"Humans Generally Respond Well to Domination": Why Tuna Fishing, Child Obesity and Apple's Integrated Designs Are All Related

This is a quote from Tim Wu, law professor at Columbia, discussing information empires. He argues that these empires start off excited about the technology they are developing - Apple was started by hackers - till they progressively become slaves to the technology itself - now Steve Jobs claims fragmented technology (vs. integrated design) to be the enemy of progress. Wu ends by saying that the next few years in the evolution of internet (and facebook) will determine the course of human culture. Wu is currently working on policy making for web neutrality, implying that the law plays a major role in steering our collective future one way or another.

Parallel to this ongoing technology and policy making debate, this morning the New York Times posted a new video on school kids' food habits. Set in a lower school in Philadelphia, the short film's overall conclusive idea is that regulation is the only really impactful way to change the next generation's weight and heart disease problem. Food empires with their marketing geniuses and food developers as well as our brain's structure are demonstrated to be so powerful that state intervention is the main and only trustworthy solution.

While I agree that regulations play a huge role in how culture and disease develop, isn't there something less authoritative we can come up with? Possibly designing more attractive solutions that don't rely on governmental impositions? Not waiting for tuna to go on the going-extinct list for us to treat it like a leopard coat or for San Francisco to ban toys on kid menus to create kid menus with less salt? 

Or are we really too controlled by our own brain (as determined by 'science'), Kellogg's and Apple that we are unable to give consciousness to our ways and change them? On that note these are pretty amazing:

Syria

What Was the Hipster?

I recently finished a book published by n+1 entitled "What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation." In three parts, the first transcribes the New School's spring 2009 symposium on the subject matter, the second is three written responses to this panel and the final third (and by far best) part is composed of four essays discussing hipsterdom with expressions like "Williamsburg Year Zero," "the polaroid palette," and "behind and above them, Animal Collective."

I didn't find the symposium and its responses particulalry interesting (although the Jace Clayton aka DJ Rapture's Peruvian observations on neo-colonialism in the music biz was great), but the last four essays are really hilarious and informative. Robert Moor refers to his dictionary and thinks about the differnce between the douchbag and the hipster. Dayna Tortorici looks at the role cameras and blogs have in creating the female hipster aesthetic (a thin palette of muted ambers and blues and lo-fi rawness rooted in basement porn and crime scene photography to reveal a bored-looking deer-in-head-lights pouting female's sexy authenticity). Mark Grief does a great job using a whole bunch of humor and insight to question the viceness of Vice, the irony of the ironic t-shirts, the significance of turning 30 and gentrification. While Christopher Glazek compares Hasidim to Hipsters and uses Williamsburg's bike lane controversy as it's main point.

Really great stuff! And on that note here's a pretty good add on the subject matter:

Information is Beautiful

(via information is beautiful)

Life-Changing Design: Before the String, Came the Tea Bag

The Anti-Modern Twist Take II with Citroën

New technologies enable new behaviors, relations and expectations by dissolving old ones. Yet as I have mentioned in the past the relation between high-tech products with outdated technologies, in particular their vintage aesthetic, design and materiality, is ambiguous. For example the iphone has a successful camera producing endless quantities of high pixelised images, yet the iphone's hipstamatic application - that creates unfocused, variable, blurry photographs with vintage polaroid boarders - is a true success story. Why would anyone want blurry versus high-def?

The potential reasons are multiple. Maybe newness is too overwhelming, too ever-changing, and there is a certain desire to use more tamed and defunct technologies. Like the hipstamatic's recent reappearance, over the past decade the sales of vinyls that were in decrease since the 1970s, have been increasing. A desire for materiality? A desire for material looking?

But this doesn't mean that vinyls are replacing music downloads or that hipstamatic pictures are replacing the classic high-def iphone ones. Rather this nostalgia for rudimentary objects from the past is ironically more an addition to novelty - the hipstamatic necessitates the iphone and the vinyl necessitates the downloads to convince it is worth buying.

This Irish ad for Citroën banks on something similar the coolness of the past to sell the new:

Thoughts needn't struggle over mechanical hurdles

Speaking of Inventors...

This is a beautiful stop-motion film made of paper cut-outs about the trials and tribulations of inventors, their inventions and avant-gardist ideas. It's touching and absolutely stunning - especially the end:

The First Computer Programmer was named Right Honourable the Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron

First Computer Geek

Charles Baggage was a 19th c. London scientist, mathematician and inventor, who sought to create a method to calculate mathematical tables mechanically so as to remove the high rate of human error of calculators. He is the father of computer we now know (it is programmable) and his brain is on display in the London Science Museum.

Ada Lovelace, born in 1815, was the daughter of the Lord Byron during his short-lived marriage with Baroness Wentworth. Early on her parents separated and, fearful that Ada would inherit what her mother considered her father's "insanity," the baroness pushed for the rational of mathematics on her only child. Like her mother (who was a patron for Baggage) Ada was an admirable mathematician and, in 1842 started working on Baggage's Analytical Machine - a machine programmed with coded punched cards. For it, from 1842 to 1843 over a 9 months period, she translated mathematician Luigi Menabrea's sequence of Bernoilli numbers into punchcard code. If the machine had functioned at the time this would have been the first functioning computer process, with the computer solving the mathematical sequence. Ada's work was the first algorithm specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, in other words the first program.

That is all to say that the first computer programmer was a woman with half of her genes rooted in romanticism.

Prisoner Stripes, Marine Stripes, Referee Stripes, Fashionable Stripes: Nike Soccer Stripes for the French Team

Les marins portent des marinières pour être repérés si ils tombent à l'eau, Coco Chanel l'anticonformiste en avait fait son uniforme, les prisonniers les ont en noir pour être reconnaissables si ils tentent de s'échapper, et les arbitres se soumettent au même modèle pour se différencier des joueurs. Récemment le renouveau des râyures dans la mode de tous les jours a vaguement changé la donne, mais il reste vrai que les râyures sont une manière élégante de se mettre en avant. 

Picasso l'avait compris, maintenant Nike le reprend pour l'équipe française de football.

Rien de mieux pour redorer un blason sportif que d'avoir de beaux joueurs à la mode qui courent.

JR's TED wish

JR in London during the 2008 exhibit at the Tate

Hard not to love JR and admire the artist's aspirations and process. Since his 2005 takeover of the 16ème arrondissement in Paris with portraits of banlieues inhabitants during their riots, JR has gone around the world to make his large glued-in-publicscapes portraits more than just street art but agents of social change.

All of his art excursions tackle topics animating our contemporary culture by way of personal narrations. In Israel he placed side by side portraits of Palestinians and Israelis in 8 cities; and in Brazil he invaded one of the most dangerous favellas of Rio to question the gap between the media's portrayal of the area and its inhabitants' stories.

Probably his most powerful project as of yet, is his 2009 travels with Médecins Sans Frontières through Sierra Leone, Kenya, Soudan and Liberia to meet women, many of them rape victims and most of all discriminated against throughout their life because of their gender. Speaking to them and then snapping their portraits JR and his team plastered their black and white images on rooftops, trains, and other public platforms as if to give their life a place in the public realm. It isn't only faces, it is about making material objects that give meaning and bring respect to their subjects as well as a means to discuss the everyday to change it.

There is a lot of idealism involved in his work - and at times the rhetoric of changing things with little images relative to the poverty and violence of its subject seem to make it the quintessential western 'feel good' project - but then again there isn't much to loose and certainly so much to make better. I've wanted to send him an email for years along the lines of "I love you" but now that TED has made him the winner of their 2011 TEDprize (in 2005 a certain singer and NGO owner with a Louis Vuitton contract had won) I fear my declaration would be discarded as insincere. He revealed his TED art project last week. Called the Inside Out Project, it is about getting anyone who wants to upload and plaster a photograph in their public space to do so.

That's great, but in my opinion it excludes a lot of people without the internet or a camera (means of communicating about oneself) and as such, not nearly as great as this:

The Most Median Person on the Planet

Well presented data, yellow and good music makes me feel good to be alive: