Everything is a Remix Part 4: System Failure

A brief history of intellectual property, or why 1790 was more culturally progressive than 2012.

For the past year, Kirby Ferguson has been tracing the history and evolution of remix culture in his fantastic ongoing series Everything Is A Remix, with each episode tackling a different facet of collaborative creation. This week, the fourth and last part of the series, titled System Failure, finally makes its timely debut in the aftermath of SOPA and the peak of the ACTA debates.

From the origin of “intellectual property,” which suddenly transformed shared ideas into owned artifacts, to the psychological paradoxes of how we justify doing the copying but resent being copied, to the dirty business of opportunistic litigation, the film explores the aberrations of copyright and reminds us that the original Copyright Act of 1790 was entitled “An Act for the encouragement of learning” and the Patent Act of the same year was “An Act to promote the progress of the useful Arts,” upholding an ideal of a rich public domain with shared knowledge open to everyone.

Our system of law doesn’t acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas are regarded as property, as unique and original lots with distinct boundaries. But ideas aren’t so tidy. They’re layered, they’re interwoven, they’re tangled. And when the system conflicts with the reality… the system starts to fail.

The closing lines capture the urgency of the issue with remarkable eloquence:

We live in an age with daunting problems. We need the best ideas possible, we need them now, we need them to spread fast.

(As an evangelist of combinatorial creativity, Part 3 remains my favorite — do check it out.)

Kirby’s new project is called This Is Not A Conspiracy Theory and will do for politics what Everything Is A Remix did for remix culture. It’s currently raising funds on Kickstarter — I’m supporting it wholeheartedly, are you?

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How McLuhan, Agel, and Fiore Created a New Visual Vernacular for the Information Age

The rise of the experimental paperback and how ‘typophotography’ paved the information superhighway.

One faithful day in 1965, the most monumental and legendary typo in media history took place: someone switched a letter in the title of what soon became an era-defining book by legendary media theorist Marshall McLuhan*, best known for coining the catchphrase “the medium is the message.” Thus The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects was born, thanks to a unintentional error most McLuhan biographers sweep under the carpet. But, the legend goes, once McLuhan saw the typo, he exclaimed, “Leave it alone! It’s great and right on target!” The title of the book was suddenly open to four possible interpretations — a play on “Message” and “Mess Age,” or “Massage and “Mass Age.” The book soon came to be referred to simply as Massage. But what is most curious — and least known — about it is that it was developed explicitly for young readers, relying on graphic materials to engage younger audiences with big-idea nonfiction. (Sound familiar?)

Massage, however, was part of a bigger and much more significant picture — it was one of eight books developed by Jerome Agel (1930-2007), a kind of transmedia, cross-disciplinary publishing puppeteer, who collaborated with trailblazing graphic designer Quentin Fiore to distill the complex and important ideas of thinkers like Buckminster Fuller, Carl Sagan, Herman Kahn, and Marshall McLuhan into digestible and viscerally absorbing narratives for the general-interest reader. These paperback books had a wholly novel visual vocabulary and a new way of entering the mass market as full-spectrum media events that, long before the days of sleek book trailers, boasted $100,000 publicity budgets.

The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan / Agel / Fiore and the Experimental Paperback tells the fascinating story of these collaborations and how they created a new media form “designed to put into popular form, or into more understandable form, some of the greatest ideas of our time.” Zooming in on the nine-year window of innovation in mass-market publishing in the 1960s and 1970s, Stanford Humanities Lab founder Jeffrey T. Schnapp peels away at the sociocultural and technological factors that gave rise of this bold new graphics-driven storytelling and transformed the paperback into a kind of stage and screen for “typographic pyrotechnics.” The promise of that story is a deeper understanding of contemporary visual culture, the convergence of highbrow and lowbrow, the vernacular of advertising, the dynamics of newspaper and magazine publishing, the creation of avant-garde mass culture, and a wealth in between.

The purpose of this inventory is to draw a circle around a body of objects; to take stock of their common properties; and to tell a story about where they came from, what they were, and where they led. Their variety is such as to sustain a multiplicity of narrative threads: about the rise of a new photo-driven graphic vernacular; about the triumph of a certain cognitive/cultural style; about criss-crossing between high and low, the erudite and the mass cultural; about the shifting boundaries between books, magazines, music, television, and film.”

Together, McLuhan, Agel, and Fiore engendered a sweeping shift in the filed of mass communication, whose impact still reverberates in the present wave of publishing disruption. But among the trio’s greatest feats was the radical reshuffling and remixing of traditional specialized silos, wherein writers write in solitude, editors edit against impossible deadlines, designers design with purely aesthetic concerns, and booksellers sell based on rigid categories engineered around a stale market. In the foreword, Adam Michaels observes the “pedagogical prejudices” that have created a chasm between education in design and education in writing:

Most educational superstructures ensure that the art student and the liberal arts student shall never meet. The alienation between text and image production is learned early on and reinforced by increased professionalization over the course of life.”

(For the ultimate testament to higher education’s failures to foster this cross-pollination of disciplines, look no further than Steve Jobs’ iconic 2005 Stanford commencement address, in which he recounts the serendipitous breach of this chasm that sparked the founding philosophy of Apple.)

McLuhan, Agel, and Fiore embraced “the book’s intrinsic strengths as a site for synthesis and surprise,” as Michaels eloquently puts it, and forged a visionary model in which the unconventional intertwining of form and content engaged audiences with new, almost cinematic modes of delivery.

Fiore also redefined the role of the designer as author** and pioneered a new visual genre that came to be known as “typophotography,” a neologism coined by media theorist László Moholy-Nagy to describe “the visually most exact rendering of communication,” an elastic new form of visceral storytelling. Steven Heller writes in the introduction:

[Fiore] strongly believed in experimentation and was not just attempting to navigate through McLuhan’s disjointed prognostications, sarcastically mocked by [critics]: he was actually attempting to construct what eventually evolved into a primitive iteration of ‘the information superhighway,’ using the paperback book as its bedrock foundation.”

As for Agel, what made him an exceptional visionary were his faceted interests. (Something Jackson Pollock’s dad would approve.)

Jerome Agel […] had a keen appreciation for photography and narrative as fine arts. But he was, first and foremost, a journalist equipped with a mile-a-minute, omnivorous mind and a genius for public relations.”

Agel and Fiore’s most celebrated graphic masterpiece was their 1970 collaboration with Buckminster Fuller, I Seem to Be a Verb: Environment and Man’s Future, which repeated the formula of Massage — a bold and highly visual distillation of big ideas for young people — with even greater precision.

Agel saw the book as part of show business and McLuhan was among the first to recognize the cultural significance of this paradigm shift. In the modern bible Understanding Media, he wrote of “the phenomenon of the paperback”:

[It is] the book in ‘cool’ version … transformation of book culture into something else… The paperback itself has become a vast mosaic world in depth, expressive of the changed sense-life of Americans, for whom depth experience in words, as in physics, has become entirely acceptable, and even sought after.”

A foretaste of the technique in question can be found in the September 1965 issue of Books, the front page of which led with 'The McLuhan Galaxy,' a montage of cartoons and quotations radiating outward from a book-slaying, television-antenna-crowned McLuhan. It was accompanied by a lengthy 'interview' that hails Understanding Media as the 'must read book in the country today' and implements what will later become the method of the McLuhan/Agel/Fiore inventorying of media effects: a sequence of quotations fired one after the other, interrupted only by questions -- 'why is everyone reading field Marshall McLuhan?' 'what the hell is going on?' 'OK, WHAT'S THE MESSAGE?' -- and designed to swarm the reader with information. In the interview's midst, Agel dutifully inserts McLuhan's call for the 'fresh air reeducation of book culture.'

Ultimately, The Electric Information Age Book is about what made this collaborative book innovation — which McLuhan called “the mosaic of instantaneous communication,” “the process rather than the complete product of discovery” — extraordinary at the time, but also about how it paved the way for the tectonic shifts happening in media today, with our customizable iEverything and highly visual neo-magazines a-la-Flipboard. Schnapp observes:

[These inventory books] all communicate some version of the following script to the reader: even if this book is ‘by’ a major thinker, you fill in the blanks, you connect the dots, you navigate the book forward or backward to find the tasty tidbits; look for the patterns, ideas, and story line yourself They tender the promise that, if you follow these instructions, in return, you will discover that not only is this ook about you, your neighborhood, your job, your government, your world, but also about how to make them yours.“

* For more on McLuhan, see Douglas Coupland’s excellent almost-biography, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, as well as this 1984 biographical TV segment on McLuhan by none other than Tom Wolfe.

** For a contemporary meditation on the evolving role of the designer as Internet futurist and entrepreneur, see Cameron Koczon’s necessary article, “An Important Time for Design.”

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Six Vintage-Inspired Animations on Critical Thinking

A field guide to the art and science of the solid argument.

Australian outfit Bridge 8, who have the admirable mission of devising “creative strategies for science and society,” and animator James Hutson have created six fantastic two-minute animations on various aspects of critical thinking, aimed at school ages 8 to 10, or kids between the ages of 13 and 15, but also designed to resonate with grown-ups. Inspired by the animation style of the 1950s, most recognizably Saul Bass, the films are designed to promote a set of educational resources on critical thinking by TechNYou, an emerging technologies public information project funded by the Australian government.

The animations — which are part Minute Physics, part The Dot and the Line, part 60-Second Adventures in Thought — are released under a Creative Commons license and cover the basics of logic and the scientific method, as well as specific psychological pitfalls like confirmation bias and Gambler’s Fallacy.

For more on the art and science of critical thinking, see the excellent primer Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing: A Brief Guide to Argument.

Thanks, Upulie

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All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Adam Curtis on How Technology Limits Us

What Ayn Rand has to do with the Occupy movement.

Documentarian Adam Curtis is among our era’s most influential cultural storytellers, with a penchant for debunking the established order of beliefs and ideologies. In The Century of the Self (2002), he traces the origin of consumerism and how Freud’s theories shaped twentieth-century manipulations of public opinion, from politics to marketing; in The Power of Nightmares (2004), he explores the rise of the politics of fear; in The Trap (2007), he examines the concept and evolution of freedom and the simplistic models of human nature on which it is based. His latest BBC documentary, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, premiered last May, mere months before the global Occupy movement erupted, and paints an infinitely intriguing, though in my view wrong on many counts, portrait of technology as a limiting, rather than liberating, cultural and political force. The title of the series comes from a 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan, in which he envisions a world of cybernetics so advanced that the balance of nature is restored and there is no need for human labor.

Though the film has strong techno-dystopian undertones akin to the Orson-Welles-narrated Future Shock series of the 1970s and neglects how technology enables such powerful phenomena like networked knowledge and crowd-accelerated learning, it offers a dimensional context for many of our present political, economic, and technological givens. Coupled with Curtis’s signature immersive storytelling and exquisite use of historical materials, rare footage, and revealing soundbites, the series is an invaluable primer for much of today’s most pressing sociocultural issues.

The first part, titled Love and Power, deals with how Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism shaped the ethos of Silicon Valley in the 1990s and, eventually, the global economy as Alan Greenspan and Bill Clinton set out to create the New Economy, based on the premise of a dramatic rise in productivity thanks to emerging information technology. Curtis, however, goes on to argue that instead of creating market stability, these Randian ideals constricted people into a rigid system with little hope of escape.

We are now living through a very strange moment. We know that the idea of market stability has failed, but we cannot imagine any alternative. The original promise of the Californian ideology was that the computers would liberate us of all the old forms of political control, and we would become Randian heroes in control of our own destiny. Instead, today, we feel the opposite — that we are helpless components in a global system, a system that is controlled by a rigid logic that we are powerless to challenge or to change.”

Part two, The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts, explores how technology cornerstones like cybernetics and systems theory were, Curtis argues, falsely applied to natural ecosystems and used to develop unrealistic models for human beings and societies. The episode has particularly timely resonance, in light of the recent global Occupy movement, as Curtis argues that such self-organizing network models without central control might be good at organizing change, but are less effective in what comes after.

The failure of the commune movement and the fate of the revolutions showed the limitations of the self-organizing model. It cannot deal with the central dynamic forces of human society: politics and power. The hippies took up the idea of the network society because they were disillusioned with politics. They believed that this alternative way of organizing the world was good because it was based on the underlying order of nature. But this was a fantasy. In reality, what they adopted was an idea taken from the cold and logical world of the machines. Now, in our age, we are all disillusioned with politics, and this machine-organizing principle has risen up to become the ideology of our age. And what we are discovering is that if we see ourselves as components in a system, it is very difficult to change the world. It is a very good way of organizing things, even rebellions, but it offers no ideas as to what comes next. And, just like in the communes, it leaves us helpless in the face of those already in power in the world.”

The final part, The Monkey In The Machine and the Machine in the Monkey, examines the selfish gene theory of evolution, developed by William Hamilton in the 1960s and made famous by Richard Dawkins in 1976. Curtis traces how this applied to everything from the civil war in Congo and the Rwandan genocide to George Price’s quest for the origin of altruism to Dawkins’ atheist reformulation of the religious idea of the “immortal soul” as a computer code in the form of genetic patterns. Curtis concludes by asking whether, in accepting these views of humans as machines, we as a culture have disempowered the human spirit.

Hamilton’s ideas remain powerfully influential in our society — above all, the idea that human beings are helpless chunks of hardware controlled by software programs written in their genetic codes. But, the question is, have we embraced that idea because it is a comfort in a world where everything we do, either good or bad, seems to have terrible unforeseen consequences?… We have embraced a fatalistic philosophy of us as helpless computing machines to both excuse and explain our political failure to change the world.”

Curiously, Brautigan’s original collection of poems, which inspired the film title, was intentionally distributed for free. The Curtis documentary, on the other hand, remains largely (legally) unavailable online and nearly impossible to legally see outside the U.K., as if a stubborn and enforced metaphor for the very thing it argues.

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