Brief reflection on the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Fair

"Sure, understanding today's complex world of the future is a little like having bees live in your head. But, there they are." Firesign, Bozos

Yesterday I was quoting Firesign Theatre riffs with my brother Ramon. There is a cult or secret brother and sisterhood of Firesign, and you know each other not by a secret handshake but by a coded sequence of words that magically elicits a next sequence:

"A power so great...

it can only be used for good! or evil!"

I could go on. However, as we were trading some of the more surreal and awe-inspiring bits (The Golden Hind, The Army Training Film, Boom Dot Bust) I remembered that their classic 1971 "I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus" (with its Wall of Science and its Future Fair: "a fair for all/And no fair to anybody") was based on the World Fairs of the 30s.

Bozos begins with vegetable holograms enticing people to get on board the bus to the Future Fair, and ends with one of the first pop culture representations of a hacker doing combat with a computer (in this case a computer that is the animatronic voice of President Nixon). The Fair rhetoric of Progress mocks past fairs like the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Fair, with its heroic and unquestioning paens to industrial development and corporate power. It also has that fun-but-creepy atmosphere I always get at Disneyland, the happiest place on earth but with video cameras and security everywhere, even on good old Main Street.

So it was with interest that I found the following "life mirrors art" moment on Slashdot:

Dan Howland writes"Big Ruxpin is Watching You: Once again, The Firesign Theatre's I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus proves itself to be the science-fiction story where the most stuff came true. If you recall, a hacker named Clem traveled through the Future Fair, followed by computer generated Holy-Grams who popped up and said things like, 'Why not try [WALL OF SCIENCE], 'cause it's my favorite!' Leave it to Disney to perfect that spooky technology with My Pal Mickey, an interactive talking plush doll that knows where it is inside Walt Disney World, and tells you trivia as you move through the park. Ah ha, but even better (at least from Disney's standpoint) is that, just like the Holy-Grams, My Pal Mickey feeds the info back into the central computer system, so Doctor Memory can track people's movements through the park in realtime. (Of course, these data will be skewed because they only track people who buy the dolls...) Here is another link, with the interesting, Asimov-like sentence: 'He has a strong sense of self-preservation, and reminds you to put him some place safe when you get near water play areas, or on wet rides.'"

The future is fun. The future is fair. You may already have won. You may already be there.

2

The reason the Firesign reference came to mind is that I had just begun a chapter in Carroll Pursell's excellent 1995 book The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology. I've been reading some histories of technology in order to get a running start and some context for what I want to argue about the postwar world that created cybernetics, and the cyborg. Pursell traces the "coming of science and system" in the late 19th Century and through the first two decades of the 20th, the increasing centralization and rationalization of all areas of life, Taylorism as it is applied not only to industrial workplaces but to all organizations and to the home itself (remember domestic engineers? the wife of the main apostles of Taylorism became herself a key apostle of Progress and Efficiency applied to the homemaker).

The motto of the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Fair was "Science Finds - Industry Applies - Man Conforms." This motto apparently didn't creep people out the way it is likely to do with current readers. In fact, the motto hides an important fact: that increasingly, the Federal Government was funding science research, establishing panels to look at the effect of the new technologies (and the flood of new consumer goods and machines) on social institutions, and creating governmental bureaus and committees. Of course these committees were often almost adjuncts of industry (the Bureau of Mines, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, myriad advisory committees). And the government monies often went hand in hand with a corresponding increase in commercial uses and corporate benefits. (Radio for example is a key precursor of television, so the way it mixed "fictional lives and consumer products" ends up as a giant advertisement for consumer-friendly "attitudes, aspirations, and styles of living.")

My favorite part of this Future Imperfect Fair is the heroic sculpture in the Hall of Science. Surrounded by a circular wal adorned by art deco panels in organic/Nature motifs (a stylized man holds his hand out to a sort-of deer), and observed by a gallery thirty feet or so above, the sculpture honestly looks like something Matt Groenig would draw in a Simpson's parody. A huge - seriously huge - robot with a huge square head and square shoulders and giant rectangular fingers looks above much smaller figures of a man and a woman. The robot's giant silver head and shoulders are bent almost 90 degrees, and its two giant arms are ushering the humans into a future that seems to terrify them. Honestly. Their arms are up as if to ward something off; they look a lot like Adam and Eve getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden in all those old paintings.

What's eerie is that the whole thing rings true of the assumptions of this and other Fairs of Progress and Science. Technology and Science will not be stopped or really controlled; the future seems out of control and terrible (think of what is about to happen in 1933); governmental and corporate organizations, often revolving doors for one another, will recreate the world for you, like it or not.

As Firesign put it,

"in government inflicted simulation!

the future can't wait no place to hide

so climb aboard

we're going inside

we're going

back to the shadows again!"

The Future Fair bus doors open, and the protagonist says, "Pluck a duck. Who have I got to lose?"

Who indeed?

Mother's Day 2012

Today was Mother's Day, and it was also May Day, at least around here. We postponed the usual Maypole celebration from last weekend to this, and so it was a double header.

The day dawned gray and overcast and cold; Bailey skateboarded home, and we hauled butt over to Liz and Jet's place for a brunch that couldn't be beat. Fresh strawberries, bananas, apples, blueberries; eggs with oyster mushrooms and asparagus; killer Arabian mocha java coffee, orange juice, excellent toastage, homemade strawberry jam.

Liz is pregnant and glowing; Margann is the proud grandma-to-be; Jet is utterly in his daddy groove, easy going and happy; Bailey is in his skater jacket (yet another article of clothing that somehow finds its way to his wardrobe) and reasonably engaged in things; Kate is the great grandmother in all but the law's eyes. And I was, well, was happy to watch Margann and Kate dancing in front of the Wii, with Liz coaching and Jet talking to Kate's son in the kitchen, and the view...did I mention the view? 180 view of the Pacific, white caps and the sun trying, against all odds, to break through.

It broke through, later, and the afternoon was a constant boxing match between the contender, massive gunmetal gray cloud front and the champeen, Big Sol.

By then we'd gotten home, and it was time to make a ridiculous number of blinis for the ultimate second game of the doubleheader: May Day, postponed from May 1 to May 8.

Details to follow.

Community and vulnerability

I think it was Thoreau who spoke of the word community as co-immunity, the ability of a community to protect its members. The word itself is from the late 14c., from O.Fr. comunité "community, commonness, everybody" (Mod.Fr. communauté), from L. communitatem (nom. communitas) "community, fellowship," from communis "common, public, general, shared by all or many," (see common). (courtesy of the Online Etymological Dictionary, a true resource of the commons.)

Last night we had Janis night at our cohousing community. When we first moved in together (about 70 of us, and back then loaded with young kids and hence new parents) we decided to try something new: to have Janice Keyser, the early childhood expert and author, come facilitate a parenting group for our community. And we've been doing this now for many years, and have even reworked the term WWJD: what would Janis do?

The Janis evenings have proved to be invaluable for many things. We go around, and parents talk about their children, what is happening in their homes and lives. We see each other both loving, and often at a loss over some problem or other. We see each other vulnerable, occasionally uncertain, needing help. Somehow, this is fantastically powerful for knowing one's neighbors, for creating empathy for each other's lives.

I know this will sound uber Californian, but...often I am sitting and listening to the group, as people lay out a specific problem (we have lots of teens now, so the problems have themselves grown from when they were toddler problems), and I can feel the group as an organism. Often people are rapt, listening, taking it in, feeling, thinking. The parent will be funny, or wry, or sad, or straightforward, or all in a series; Janice will invariably reframe the problem in a way that is useful and also insightful. Occasionally other cohousers will chime in, give advice, reframe, ask questions. Typically there are tears and there is a lot of laughter, as what were once seemingly intractable problems wrestled with in one's home become the property of all, externalized, capable of not simply solution but also a wider perspective. Laughter is the relief that one's problems are, after all, a size that admits, if not of solution, then of opportunity.

We wind down after 13 minutes times 9 or 10 families, write checks, follow up things that were said earlier. We walk out of the Common House, onto the porch that looks out over the green and the houses, our houses, our community, and for a moment, before everyone descends the stairs and disperses to their domiciles, we are a community in every way that word has significance. We carry the communal parenting, in all its confusion and complexity and grief and hope, each of us.

We are parents in common.

Common circa 1300, "belonging to all, general," from O.Fr. comun "common, general, free, open, public" (9c., Mod.Fr. commun), from L. communis "in common, public, general, not pretentious, shared by all or many," from PIE (Proto-Indo-European) *ko-moin-i- "held in common." This compound adjective is formed from *ko- "together" + *moi-n-, suffixed form of base *mei- "change, exchange" (see mutable), hence lit. "shared by all." Second element of the compound also is the source of L. munia "duties, public duties, functions," those related to munia "office."

So: duties in common, and also change, exchange, in common, together. Community is based, in part, on what is mutable, not what remains the same. And when we meet as vulnerable parents, we give each other permission to show, not our coherent adult competent public face and impression, but our more mutable, changing, uncertain face. Or, to use another metaphor, we show the shadow side of parenting to each other, that which is usually kept in the dark, hidden from most people's eyes.

That we share these shadows is an act of trust that is pretty wild; it is also a highly practical ritual. For we all end up parenting, in various ways, each other's children, and this has the potential of producing a highly flammable kind of conflict. For when are we lions and lionesses more than when we are protecting our children? And when are we as blind and plugged in as when we are trying to figure out our children?

So what looks from the outside perhaps like an idealistic practice (living collectively, discussing problems with children and with issues arising from different kinds of parenting philosophies and practices) ends up having been, for my community, one of the most practical things we've done.

Perhaps we are as strong as our weakest link, our most vulnerable part, but we get stronger when those parts are admitted, shared in common, strengthened. Turns out we are each the weakest link on occasion. And then we have the experience of having Janice and others walk us through a process of getting stronger, of seeing things differently.

Borges, in the Prologue to "El otro, el mismo," writes, "It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature." A day after our Janice meeting, after hearing story after story of complicated family situations and conflicts and confusions and wits' ends, I feel as if the word co-mmunity,common, ko-moin-i, is itself a magical word, that calls up for me a circle of faces, a sometimes thick, sometimes electric atmosphere and taste of the air, a ritual of vulnerability that, irrationally, makes us less vulnerable.

So I am saying the word out loud, hearing it as a set of ancient sounds, an invocation.

Pirates

I was at the farmer's market today and saw this on a shirt:

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world pirates."

It had two pirate faces, both eye-patched.

I told my friends of this awesomeness, and they said to say it like this:

"An ayyyyyeeee for an ayyyyeeeeee...."

Which I think makes it more awesome.

I spent the rest of the day thinking of International Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19) and also my two favorite "new pirate" items:

1. The fantastic pirate store of Dave Eggers and friends on 826 Valencia Street in San Francisco, with lots of cool pirate posters. My favorite is Guidelines for New Shipmates. Number Ten is "When in doubt, swab."

2. The correlation between pirates and global warming cited in literature passed out by Pastafarians who belong to The Church of the Great Spaghetti Monster. I don't have the book so I've lifted this from Wikipedia:

The inclusion of pirates in Pastafarianism was part of Henderson's original letter to the Kansas State Board of Education, in an effort to illustrate that correlation does not imply causation. Henderson presented the argument that "global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and othernatural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of pirates since the 1800s." A chart accompanying the letter (with numbers humorously disordered on the x-axis) shows that as the number of pirates decreased, global temperatures increased. This parodies the suggestion from some religious groups that the high numbers of disasters, famines and wars in the world is due to the lack of respect and worship towards their deity. In 2008, Henderson interpreted the growing pirate activities at the Gulf of Aden as additional support, pointing out that Somalia has "the highest number of pirates and the lowest carbon emissions of any country."

Osama bin Laden is dead. Geronimo-E. KIA.

According to an ABC report, the name of the Navy SEAL operation that ended in Osama bin Laden’s death was Geronimo. Washington knew that bin Laden was dead when they received the coded message "Geronimo-E KIA."

I imagine the meaning of Geronimo was the exclamation “Geronimo!” One dictionary defines it as “used to express exhilaration when leaping or moving quickly. – origin Second World War: adopted as a slogan by US paratroopers, by assoc. with the Apache chief Geronimo.

Two sites repeat the story of the exclamation, tracing it to Army soldiers learning to become the first paratroopers in 1940. At that time the idea of troop deployment by parachute was new, and the men that were learning to do it were also, in some ways, inventing it. Purportedly after watching the 1939 film Geronimo, Private Aubrey Eberhardt decided to use the famous Indian fighter’s name as a shout, to show he had courage and was not afraid of the jump. And so he picked the name of the Apache chief, played in the film by Victor Daniels (well known to ‘30s audiences as the Chief Thunder Cloud who played the role of Tonto in the 1938 Lone Ranger serial). Geronimo became the motto of the first parachute battalion, the 501st Parachute Infantry Battalion (PIB), and Geronimo was on the 501^st PIB insignia.

And so Navy SEALS, America’s other shock troops, perhaps whispered the old war cry as they entered the expensive compound where bin Laden had been living, near Islamabad, 100 yards from a premier Pakistani military academy, less than half a day's drive from the Afghani border, for years.

The Howard article refers to the 501^st’s popularity as reason for the general acceptance of the exclamation outside the Army; it was due to “the intense media coverage of America's shock troops - the paratroopers” (Howard).

Before Victor Daniels played Geronimo for Americans on the eve of World War 2, he was played in real life by Goyahkla, the original name of the Apache military leader. After Mexican soldiers attacked an Apache camp in 1858 and killed his wife, children, and mother, Goyahkla (“he who yawns”) ruthlessly exacted revenge on the Mexican army. As he attacked (in some stories braving bullets to kill only with a knife), the Mexican soldiers called to Saint Jerome, or “Jeronimo.”

So is there any irony in calling the operation to kill bin Laden “Geronimo”? In his time, Geronimo – the Native American military leader – was certainly regarded as a terrorist, by both Mexico and the United States. He had numerous wives, a small loyal band of fighters who harassed Mexican and US villages and their military. And he was famous for both his dramatic raids, and his ability to evade capture. Mexico and the United States were said to have cooperated in his eventual capture, though like Pakistan, Mexico allowed Geronimo to operate on the Mexican side of the border for many years.

Bush the Second used to talk about bin Laden and explain that these people “hate our freedom.” This explains al Qaeda and bin Laden about as well as Geronimo’s motivations for fighting two national armies for 28 years were understood by the average US newspaper circa 1886:

The Apache Chief Geronimo and the surviving members of his band, who recently killed by torture and inhuman butchery 170 persons, many of whom were women, are now in custody. The people of Arizona and New Mexico are very indignant, and will oppose the usual course of the military authorities in allowing them to return to their reservations unpunished.

(the Indiana Progress, Thursday, February 11, 1886)

When Hon. Carl Schurz was secretary of the interior, in one of his reports he characterizes the Apaches as "bad Indians." That was several years ago. They have not improved in behavior since. For a year and a half Chief Geronimo and his band of Apaches have been terrorizing the southwest.

(Mitchell Daily Republican, Friday, February 12, 1886)

I’m not mourning the death of bin Laden, particularly. His name will live on and circulate through any number of mythic and factual accounts, as a terrorist who planned the deaths of 2752 human beings, mostly civilians, and as someone who fought back against the imperial forces, against the terror of an occupying force. It is unlikely, though, that any time soon he’ll be the hero of an American Hollywood action film that turns his legacy from a terrorist into a freedom fighter, never mind becoming the word our shock troops use as they leap out of planes, or kids use as they jump from the couch to the floor, repeating in play the geopolitical games played for real, far away, long ago and today.

Geronimo-E. KIA.

Sources:

Howard, Ed. “Paramount's 1939 western GERONIMO... a forgotten movie with a giant legacy.” http://www.b-westerns.com/geronimo.htm

“Osama Bin Laden Operation Ended With Coded Message 'Geronimo-E KIA'”

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/osama-bin-laden-operation-code-geronimo/story?id=13507836&page=3

“Submission of the Apache - The Capture of the Apache Chief Geronimo.” http://www.logoi.com/notes/capture_apache_chief_geronimo.html

Continuous Partial Attention not Certified Public Accountant

1

Where am I?

I am sitting in a chair in front of my computer which is on (to be honest) the nicest table I have ever owned or pretty much seen.

I am also looking out the window at the trees moving in the breeze, the California April afternoon of my dreams which is also where I was a few minutes ago. And where, to be honest, I more or less "am" now.

I am thinking of the table of friends across the green, Kevin Claire Lia Cat Nicole, and of the conversation we were having fifteen minutes ago when I was with them. And thinking of what they are talking about now, and how nice it might be to still be there drinking an espresso and listening as people use their mouths to make sounds that others understand. So, I'm sort of there now, too.

Next to me is a book. Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It is about a world not unlike and yet not like Earth. It parallels Earth's history in many ways, yet just differently enough to be fascinating. It sits next to me, all 935 pages of it. I was reading it on my porch, in the California April afternoon of my dreams, when I was called over to sit at the table of friends across the green. It exerts a pull on me, or several pulls: the pull of a book I am in the middle of and want to be reading, on the porch; the pull of a narrative that wends its way into my thoughts no matter how much I am focusing on writing this blog; the pull of a book that I've read before, and know I should recall, and yet do not, so that this curious thing (why did I remember the part about the clock, and the discussion of what comes down to Platonism vs Aristotelianism, and yet not remember the fable of the fly, the bat, and the worm?) calls to me and makes me focus on it and not on the task at hand.

So where I am is partially, continuously, in Stephenson's fictional world, which is like and unlike our world.

And I haven't even talked about my cell phone, which is sitting quietly next to me, because I've selected All Sounds Off, but which nonetheless exerts a kind of constant pull to its potential delights, terrors, information, conversation. How many times do I look over at it? Pick it up and look for texts? See if anyone has called? I'm pretty focused right now, and so the current answer is not too much; I've managed to go a half hour at least without even thinking about picking it up. Ok, I just picked it up to check. But that's only because I started to write about it. Scout's honor.

So. Where am I, now? Where are you?

2

Continuous partial attention or CPA is something I've found my way to, like Hansel and Gretel, and the bread crumbs I've scattered on my way to CPA are not all still there, if you follow my fairy tale analogy. But I've been thinking about how cell phones distract us, and also allow us to be in constant potential communication with a whole range of people and places (Facebook, ESPN, Kirkwood Mountain and its weather). If there is something called focus, then there can be kinds of focus; if there is something called attention, then there can be loss of attention, or lack, or deficit. One of my latest tag lines has been "Everyone in the United States has ADD" because most of us are surrounded by devices and habits that make attending to one specific task almost impossible.

The quick and dirt way to understand Linda Stone's concept of CPA, or anything really, is to paste shit in from Wikipedia, right? I said right? Ok. So here goes:

The term Continuous Partial Attention (CPA) was coined by Linda Stone in 1998. Author Steven Berlin Johnson describes this as a kind of multitasking: "It usually involves skimming the surface of the incoming data, picking out the relevant details, and moving on to the next stream. You're paying attention, but only partially. That lets you cast a wider net, but it also runs the risk of keeping you from really studying the fish." Continuous partial attention has been understood as multi-tasking, but it is somewhat different, as full attention is not used (hence the partial) and the process is ongoing rather than episodic (hence the continuous).

Stone herself wants to draw a distinction between CPA and multitasking. She says in an article from Lifehacker.com:

Continuous partial attention and multi-tasking are two different attention strategies, motivated by different impulses. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient... In the case of continuous partial attention, we're motivated by a desire not to miss anything. There's a kind of vigilance that is not characteristic of multi-tasking. With cpa, we feel most alive when we're connected, plugged in and in the know. We constantly SCAN for opportunities—activities or people—in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, "What can I gain here?"

http://lifehacker.com/#!343882/multitasking-versus-continuous-partial-attention

We might well ask the question, is this a distinction without a difference? I've been looking at some of the recent research on multitasking, and most of it seems to say, there isn't much that is good about multitasking. In a few instances it makes sense to scan information constantly and intermittently because we know that some of it won't be that useful or even relevant later, while some of it will turn out to be valuable in some way. And we can't know this beforehand. But of course most of us can feel the downside to this behavior, whether we call it CPA or multitasking or mundane cyborg activity.

In another short piece in The Huffington Post, Stone addresses this:

More and more, many of us feel the "shadow side" of cpa -- over-stimulation and lack of fulfillment. The latest, greatest powerful technologies are now contributing to our feeling increasingly powerless. Researchers are beginning to tell us that we may actually be doing tasks more slowly and poorly.

And that's not all. We have more attention-related and stress-related diseases than ever before. Continuous continuous partial attention and the fight or flight response associated with it, sets off a cascade of stess hormones, starting with norepinephrin and its companion, cortisol. As a hormone, cortisol is a universal donor. It can attach to any receptor site. As a result, dopamine and seratonin -the hormones that help us feel calm and happy - have nowhere to go because cortisol has taken up the available spaces. The abundance of cortisol in our systems has contributed to our turning to pharmaceuticals to calm us down and help us sleep.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-stone/fine-dining-with-mobile-d_b_80819.html

3

So what do these two pieces of blog have in common? I'll keep it short. As I hope I've shown, already we are multiply-located, as humans. We are here, and we are also there, in memory, in desire, in readiness for fight or flight or a new input for the sensorium. Now we have added devices that have a multiplier effect on this multiplicity. Few would dispute that the cell phone, which is actually a number of things besides a cell phone, and the net-connected computer (and its nomadic sister the laptop/tablet and its midget cousin the smart phone), do not add mightily to this several places at once phenomenon.

And the final irony may be that the cell phone/computer prosthetic may also change the way we are when we are not even in their presence, or "packing" as people used to say of guns.

4

Here I"m tempted to tell you how to 'fix' this "problem.' Nope. Partly i think you can imagine fixes already. And partly that is the wrong way to pose the question of how these cyborg prosthetics extend and augment human responses that are already "there" in the organism. More, I want to suggest that the language we are using to imagine these effects - addiction to cell phones, information overload, multitasking vs CPA, ADD vs focusing techniques - are part of a larger and less visible change in basic human behavior and our experience of time and space. And this is what I want to call the mundane cyborg.

Enough for now. Time to walk the dog out in that lovely Californian afternoon.