A Unified National Transportation Policy

- An evaluation/evolution of a nation in motion -

Trains

A) the body

Gone are the days of the Super Chief.

The train is in decline, still. Less freight is carried by rail in America. Overtures are made in homage to the train. Trains get speeches, but not new lines, not new passengers.

B) the symbol

It was the symbol of modernism, of the industrial output of Nations, of high speed, of raw power. It was the national might, the national dream. It was America, done up in steel, traveling across its own high-strength flesh grooves carved into the width of a continent.

Now the train is a symbol of socialism. It is the lurching, dying giant of the State. Railroads are subsidized, marking the awkward, geriatric point between lack of State-attention and full privatization. The point between decline, and actual death. Super Chief meant many things, but Amtrak means a joke. A national joke. A Washington joke. It is the failure of socialism, a past age, an idealistic modernism, belonging firmly in the alternate history of Deco zeppelin docking collars on the tops of skyscrapers. Trains have gone the way of World Wars. Of ocean liners, and big red rockets. It was a product of our technological age's teenage exuberance, and youthful idealism. We leave the trains now for the other countries of the world, where idealism is more akin to their stage of development, that is to say, behind the intelligent, older, more mature and advanced-of-ego-age, us. The Chinese might have high speed rail, and perhaps the Euro-rail network is nice for tourists, and the Japanese might love their crowded trains. But Americans will travel by other means.

Cars

A) the body

A car crash used to be a perversely beautiful thing.

Everyone was buying cars. Big metal things, leather seats, lots of gas, even more road, radios installed, rock and roll invented and recorded and broadcast, it sounds good lo-fi, lots of treble, the engine takes care of the bass, drinking and driving was not always illegal.

People still buy cars, but the brands are diminished, safety records are tarnished, the price of gas is up, and hydrocarbons are foreign. The roads are broken, the highway design is as ancient as Eisenhower, the clover-leaf is from the age of the bomber gap.

B) the symbol

The car was the way in which we killed ourselves. We loaded it up with friends, we loaded it up with bullets, its metal was the crisp black steel of a hand-gun, the American gun, the gun that tamed the West, the gun with which we protect our homes. We loaded it up with gas, we got loaded ourselves, we got behind the wheel, we got it out on the road. We pulled the trigger, we pushed the petal, we pulled it back into the lane, we pointed the hood ornament West like the reticle on a gun sight.

But cars don't have hood ornaments anymore. We still die behind the wheel, perhaps more than ever. But it's no longer the subject of our rock and roll. The act of transportation is no longer the goal--now the goal is simply the destination. Our music is about where we are driving to get to, not the act of driving there. We get angry at the costs, and the time involved. The human costs, the environmental costs, the economic costs. What was the back bone of our industrial output is now our liability. The subject of the second, second amendment--the American right to own an automobile--is killing itself off. Handguns are better made than they ever were, but cars are prohibitively expensive to buy, poor in quality, unsafe to drive, and expensive to fill with fuel. If only it was the government, keeping us down with their seat belt laws and recalls, or restricting the places we can drive, or refusing to fix the roads. If only... but more and more, there is just little reason to drive. Where would we go? Into snarls of traffic? How many times can you drive to and from work? It is becoming more macho to drive a compact car than to obtusely keep filling that truck with gas.

We are no longer a country on the edge. We are no longer at the frontier, racing engines against fate and time and space. Our egos are bruised, perhaps, but the car just wasn't taking us to the places it used to take us. We're no longer bigger because of our cars. We may yet brandish that weapon, and clutch it in our cold, dead fingers, but we are starting to realize we are in the dark. No one gets rid of their guns--more likely, they just forget where they kept them.

The neurotic drive to express the fact of death through our machines, through our tools, and enact our ego-preserving force upon our environment is perhaps not the most sustainable of psychological traits, but it is only a neurosis. It is a potentially harmful pathway of mental power, but a pathway back to ourselves. We worked through our aggressions by impacting the asphalt, hard. Life is nothing if not self-destruction, a constant progress towards death.

But now, once again, we are beginning to travel by a different route.

Planes

a) the body

Suicide is a turning of the future against ourselves.

Airplanes, or alternatively, aeroplanes, were the future. Heavier than air flight was the impossible dream--space flight almost seems tantamount to leaving the ground in comparison. It's only faster, higher, and with a thicker skin. More money, that's all. But airplanes globalized the world. They crossed the continent again, after the train. But they also crossed the water, and then the ocean, and then time zones. What way better presents the fact of a round globe to any particular consciousness, other than to mess with the Circadian rhythm? The very internal sense by which we understand light and dark was pulled back and forth across the globe like a curtain, introducing a new insomnia into our modern lives.

Or so it was, in modern times. Now things are... different. We have receded from this magic of space and time. Supersonic flight is now barely a dream, in the same category as walking on the moon. It is a relic of a different future, it is a future of our past, and accordingly, it is the past and future of our present. It is one of many dreams. Our dreams are revealed as only dreams. Air travel is more expensive. Airlines are less profitable. Flight is slow, it is the height of bureaucracy, of customer frustration, of the infringement of personal liberty. There is more freedom now on the bus.

And also, so it seems, flying is more dangerous.

b) the symbol

Once, it was car bombings. A vehicle, something we see every day, packed with explosives and parked next to a target. But like our personal transportation, the symbol has moved on. How does the enemy of society attack in this day and age? From the air. The futuristic airliner passing silently and quickly overhead is now an angel of death, and those who have ill intent seek to cause them to rain down upon us, like clouds of fire, like curses, like biblical plagues. In the promise, now lies danger and potential death.

The airlines and airports are now places of suspicion, where one fears to tread. And yet we still have to go, because there is no other way. We have to get there, and so we have to face our fears. The fear, of our future coming to kill us.

It is not simply callus to refer to acts of terrorism as symbols. Because, as acts of terrorism, they are symbols. If one wanted to kill, one plots a murder, an assassination. There is no need for such spectacle. Even for more supremely violent acts against society and people and places, there are more efficient ways. A car bomb, a train bomb, even a misdirected bus has a greater damage capacity. These targets are wide in the open, and could never be fully secured. And yet, terrorists still lust after plane travel. There is no better spectacle, and no more powerful symbol.

The train represented the industrial muscle of nations, but nationhood is passe. The car was once the weapon of the people, which we turned against ourselves. The plane is an inefficient weapon, but one which we turn against others, one which strikes against the globe. In our modern society, in whatever age that it is, the airplane is a symbol--not of self-destructive ego expression, but of our wish for each other's death. It is a homocidal symbol.

This is no longer a neurosis, but a psychosis. Humans have dreamed for millennia of flight, and finally even a child can learn to pilot a plane. But the skill of flying is now a security risk, because those with the power to fly, also have the power to kill. Our dream is a social liability, a hazard, and a threat. Our willful conquering of the air is now a violent ideation, and so it seems, it can lash out "at any time".

America has undergone a psychotic break with reality. Certainly, it is a fact that violence is one of the most eternal laws of humanity. That is fact. But the break with reality lies in the notion that a single, solitary vision of violence will do anything to sway the course of humanity. Or even a string of violent visions, symbols, and acts. We are surrounded by violence everywhere--in our countless other symbols, and in our physical bodies, themselves images of violence, both the capacity for, and the vulnerability to violence we all encompass as human bodies. Our relationships with space and time are constituted within the physical tolerances of violence. Our transportational infrastructure, as the set regimes of physical motion through space and time for our society, are themselves constituted within the physical tolerances of violence. We normally call these "safety", or "comfort", "keeping to a schedule", or "physical possibility". It is the same thing that has guided the rest of humanity through the journey of history. Physical possibility, and the pursuit of safety and comfort. If we have a destiny to manifest, it is letting our bodies achieve what they can, how they can. It is a lot of hard work, pain, and most of the time, results that fail to meet our expectations.

The break is the deviation from this historical path, to think that we can achieve all that we think. To believe that the future we once saw in trains, cars, or planes was anything more than a future we simply envisioned. To think that a future could ever become a present. There is only the present, and all the dreams, symbols, and acts that could ever occur within it.

Those who have experienced the psychotic break cannot understand why the present is not the future they have already envisioned. Why is America not what it's supposed to be? They do not understand why their dreams are not already reality. Reality is a stratification made from dreams, but in this way it is nothing but absolutely real--it is never wish fulfillment. Those who have experienced the break do not seek to express themselves in repair of their egos, to alter their own egos with actions and with objects, to better deal with the inconsistencies of reality. They seek to effect the same break on reality that reality has broken within them, to widen the gap by breaking the reality of others, and in doing so they seek to pick one particular symbol to represent the violence they feel, and thereby re-constitute the reality they have lost. They throw their entire lives into this symbol, and in return, expect a redemption of their lives in the act of violence.

But in the end, it's just another act of violence. It's just another passage from here to there--another physical spasm in a huge stratification of physical spasms. It is one more symbol in a massive dream-dimension society of symbols, and another confounding truth of human reality. It is not human work, it is human futility. And in this way, it's also our fate.

We haven't seen the last breath of our unified national transportation policy.

Let My Boxcutter Be My Guide

One of the bizarre things that interests me is the symbols printed on boxes. In various jobs I've had, I've spent a good deal of time staring at the underside of boxes. There's a lot more information there than one would think. Such as crush weight parameters. How about that?

There are also some esoteric symbols printed onto various cartons, for the purpose of telling warehouse personnel how to treat the boxes, given the contents. Some of these are obvious, others are not. Some of my favorites are the stacking diagrams--drawings of how to palletize the boxes for maximum strength, product capacity, and all while keeping the product safe.

For those of you interested in "architectural fiction", and such things, we might think of these as visual-commodity-infrastructure-planning-geometries. Or, for those of you interested in "architectural fantasy", these are packgnosis-mobiscriptural-palletamulet-mandalas.

Materials handling to Third Bardo, man!

I believe these is the old packaging of digital printer developer. Most of these are from digital printing supplies of some sort. Even from looking at the box, I have no idea what this is supposed to symbolize, other than not to stack more than ten layers deep.


Toner, I think. The far left means stack no more than 25 high. The far right means the toner's holy halo will be visible when glorified with rays of the one true god.


Boxes of bottles of fuser oil. Also, the blueprints for "the endless staircase of holy knowledge."


This is also from the fuser oil box. To me, it evokes twisted intestines, and the dark voids that lie within us all.


More from the toner cartridge box. The cartridges come two to a box; and somehow, in the way they fit, they easily slide out of the box, but when they are empty and I am ready to take them out to the trash, I can never fit two back in the box. Maybe I don't pay enough attention in the first place. Or maybe, just maybe, this diagram depicts the boxes shrinking once the cartridges are removed.


This is actually from a box of instant Thai soups. Which is a printing supply to me, in an abstract way. Note, first of all, the mystic hand symbol on the left, which I'm sure I saw in one of the seizure-inducing gnosis scenes in Lawnmower Man. You might also notice how they managed to fit "protect from rain and sun" into one symbol, which is more efficient than another example above. Then, although I can easily figure out that the far right symbol means, "this soup is not for peasants who still use archaic and symbolic tools," I am at a complete lost as to what the bottle means. I thought the whole point of these things was to symbolize a message understandable in any language! Does it mean, "do not consume with pure whiskey?" Or, "Made with 100% Not Holy Water?" Maybe, "Only serve in Eylermeyer Flasks?"

Anybody who speaks Thai is more than invited to ellucidate in the comments.

The Poverty of National Calling Plans

The small-scale buzz around Bruce Sterling's SXSWi talk is pretty amusing, mostly because as he put it, "this offhand speech of mine -- truly a rant, delivered from notes -- is provoking a remarkable response specifically BECAUSE there is no crisp digital record of exactly what I was saying."

I love this sort of stuff (even when it doesn't involve shadowy Internet well-knowns). Literature is archaeology, man. And it's like we're digging through a city (well, maybe a hamlet) wiped clean by the sandstorms only a month ago. Is that a toothbrush? Maybe it's a shamanic scepter! Nah, maybe just a toothbrush.

But as our French Philosopher Phriends would remind us, the archaeology of truth is the sandstorm itself. None of this theology of the book! It's the Internet, after all. We all love the fact that it's okay that we make it up as we go along.

I'm pretty good at the making stuff up part. I have a degree in philosophy. The rule of philosophical scholarship is that you can make a dead guy say anything you want--you just have to manipulate the puppet strings. These puppet strings can be quotes taken almost of of context, the abstracts of papers somebody else wrote about someone else, or if you're of Zizek-stature (or first-year undergraduate) the mere name-drop may suffice.

Unfortunately, I also have these interests in stuff. Stuff makes me think. This means I can't quarantine my bullshit into academic papers alone--unfortunately for me, these reinterpretations, quotations, appropriations, and exhaltations are constantly circulating in my head, driving me slowly, but surely, to a state of being entirely boring. Unfortunately for you, I have a blog, which you seem to be reading. Hmm. I wonder what will happen next...

So, let's play the game.

WHAT DID BRUCE STERLING REALLY MEAN WHEN HE SAID THOSE THINGS?

What did he say anyway? Well, no one really knows for sure (this is going to be so easy).

Always start with the text.

"The clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on ‘connections’ like the Internet, Skype and texting. ‘Poor folk love their cellphones!’ (Sterling) said.”

"connectivity will be an indicator of poverty rather than an indicator of wealth," (note taken by Rohde).

The internet is poverty? Cellphones are poverty? What is he saying? These things GO AGAINST EVERYTHING MY INTERNET MARKETER TOLD ME!!!

Here is some actual Sterling text. From his short story (architectural fiction, no less) "White Fungus":

"Cell phones are the emblems of poverty."

Interesting enough. Would probably make some liberal cell phone users nervous.

But look at this--"symbol of poverty", "indicator of poverty", "emblem of poverty". Are we noticing a trend here? Call the semioticians!

Also of note: the quote from "White Fungus" is placed, in its original context, with the phrase "computers are not sources of wealth."

So what do we have here? We have wealth and poverty opposed. We have "source" as a flow of wealth, whatever wealth might be. We have "connectivity" as a given, of some sort. We have poor people with cell phones. And we have symbols, emblems, and indicators.

Wealth and poverty, the meaning of which these statements seem to circulate, have different applications. They are material concepts, but social as well. Generally involving value, the value may flucuate. Are we talking about social value? Are we talking about material value? Or are we talking about material value derived from social value? Or the other way around? What sort of poverty do cell-phones represent, and of what sort of wealth are computers not the source? Who is poor, and who is rich as a result?

The Twitter-phobic Internet folk have interpreted the point as purely social in message, and therefore at root, idealistic. We spend a lot of time on our cell phones, and therefore the precious, bourgeois "free-time" in which we would otherwise pursue such worthwhile, humanistic goals such as good, honest fire-side conversation, staring whistfully at clouds, and playing polo, suffers as result. It is an ironic musing worthy of a minor scenario of the Odyssey: through our frantic attempts at universal communication, a female cell-phone beast eats our ears, eyes, and mouth. Odysseus sails away on a plank, born on the gentle breeze of Athena's brain waves, thankful he never signed up for the cursed free internet-service.

If anybody is losing anything of value, it's happening materially. Material, of course, extends into the consciousnesses and compound consciousnesses of people, in less than solid, i.e. symbolic forms. But just because we assume a loss of something that never existed, like "true, meaningful conversation", does not mean we can declare a robber. Because somebody kicked over your invisible dandelion wine is not a cause for blows. If you're not talking to other human beings in a meaningful way, that's your problem, buddy.

We've written up the Internet to be some grand form of communication. It certainly is a form of communication (by way of good old fashioned reading and writing) but how grand is it? Those singularity morons aside, what exactly do we expect from the Internet, and how has it either surpassed or fallen short of our goals? These sorts of material questions deserve attention. So put down that pen and paper, junior Thoreau. Turn up your headphones, and let's dance.

Communication, as a flow of symbols throughout our conscious perceptions of the world, are not strictly the material facts of life, but they are the way we understand them, as the capacities of our sentience dictates. In addition to providing a smooth flow of sensation in the way we would hope between the ideally closed confines of our mind and the cold, cold world, they also get a bit tangled in the intermedium, the interpretive membrane of flesh. Is what you feel what's really there? Is what's there what you really feel? How sure are you that you feel what you feel? In these tossing seas, in which there is no Ithika, there is as much agonism between every drop of water as there is undifferentiatedness in the silence of drowning. Don't worry, we're pretty good swimmers. And maybe the gods do exist; you never know.

So we can worry about the hubris of the "real world" at the same time as we kick and thrash in the liquid of our minds. But you best not forget strictly material world--or else you will find yourself floating face down. The interfaces between the worlds of consciousness and the hard rock that may in fact be out there is important, but only important when we have a bit of each in both hands. Think about the world, but also world about the think. Right? Right?

In other words, cell phones: what do they do for us, and how do they work? What they do for us only goes so far as we know how they do it. Otherwise we're just plugged into our own sensory feedback loop. There are clear benefits of communication that don't require a list. But how do they work?

Poorly. And I'm not just talking about signal strength. Look at the material models for our high-tech communication networks. It's full of "pay as you go" reverse indentured servitude, credit/fee contract scams, and monopolies. I pay over a hundred dollars in "connection fees" per month to stay networked in the way I find useful. WTF? That's more than my car insurance. I could set up my own telegraph station a hundred years ago for less, probably. What future is this?

Not to speak of the hardware itself. Dropped calls, bad operating systems, bricked phones on their way to the e-waste fields of China. App stores? Fart programs? Are we serious?

Materially, (in the strict sense), we are all slaves. When I build a transistor radio set, perhaps I'm connected. But with a cell phone, I've mortgaged my flow of information.

This is the ongoing rebuilding of the credit economy. Housing collapsed--wait for the information infrastructure. People can't pay their data bills, and drop off the network. The content begins to shrink. There is a rush to "flip" domain names, but nobody is reading anyway. Eventually, land lines shut down, or are taken over by the government because they the tubes are too big to fail. It's not dot-com VC sink holes, its the crash of information itself.

So in a class sense, we are the texting, twittering, blogging poor, the proceeds of ill-gotten AdSense all being eaten by the Company to pay for our web hosting fees. If you advertise, you are basically sharecropping.

And I haven't even mentioned the fact that a cell phone will not make anything edible, does not cure a single disease, or reclaim a single molecule of CO2. All it does is call people! We'd be better off giving every person a good pocket knife than a RAZR.

Is ubiquitous connectivity useless then? A tool of the oppressing class to profit off our work, and nothing else? Should we burn the factories, and shove our clogs into Web 2.0?

Is there no benefit for the poor having cell phones? What about teenagers? I think it is safe to say there is a benefit. When I was trying to find an apartment and a job at the same time, with no mailing address or reliable internet connection, my cheap, free-with-contract cell phone was my only link to the material world. It was my access, and the only one I had--not to community or SMS, but to anything. Access is good--because then you can use it however you want and make it as utile as you wish, even if it is for mostly LOLing. In this world when few material things are concrete these days (think of rural Africa, where a cell phone connection is more likely than a water and sewage line) this shard of access is the only thing many can depend on--and we are rapidly re-organizing our material lives around this anchor. The problem is that we are kept poor by these anchors, because someone else is dolling out the rope.

The material use of a tool or object is a certain sort of value, and the control of that object, via less-material pathways such as "contracts", "property", and "debt" is another sort of value. I believe a bearded man other than myself wrote something about that once. Along with the rise of Access as a new axis in our material lives, other sorts of value appears, connected in different ways. There are various sorts of social value, with different amounts of relative worth.

For example, cell phones are status symbols, by which we judge relative wealth. Just like cars, before people decided they'd rather drive electric flat-screen TVs than new SUVs. The cell-phone is a commodity as well as a tool, and there are certain values of having a certain connectness; being able to say "you can always reach me on my blackberry" has a value in addition to anything that might be said in the email. And this is before you cover the damn thing in pink rhinestones.

But the act of communication, can be a commodity, as much as it is the use of a tool. Lots of people buy into the idea of communication more than they actually communicate. My Loyal Internet Marketers for one. (Yes, I have about twenty or so. They all follow me on Twitter. The best part is, they are just as useful whether I read them or not! And they are free! If one quits, s/he is replaced by two more!)

There is a certain idea of the Internet going around, one which you might be familiar with. It is a familiar story (though not perhaps as familiar as The Odyssey), and one much loved, especially in this country. It is a love story--Demos, our perennial hero, falls in love with Techne, and they decide to start a family. Because they believe their love is so perfect, they decide to adopt a child: Kratia. Kratia, unfortunately, is not a child, but a dark spirit from way back. Because of their love, Demos and Techne were blinded to the spells of Kratia, and did not see it in its true form. They thought, oh, its only a kid, give it a cell phone, and it will be fine. But then when the monthly bill came back...

We think that technology, somehow, is the final proof of democracy. We've merged our belief in the destiny of capitalism and freemarkets with our sleepy trust in democracy to maintain a fair balance of power. These two great tastes actually don't taste like anything together, but in fact continuing doing what they do best--democracy consolidates the power of the people into commodity leaders, away from the economy where it belongs; and technology continues to evolve like a tool, according to the actions of those who wield it.

As our economy gets more technologically rigorous, the powers that control the economy also control more technology. In the interest of maintaining this power, they use the tools they have at hand, lulling Demos to sleep with Techne's sweet songs.

Don't know those lullabys? Ever heard of American Idol? Vote early, vote often--the true democrat's popularity contest. How about the Obama SMS network? Feel connected? Feel like one of the people? Yes we can? How much do you get charged per text message?

The technology of the Internet has given democracy its return to populism, all right. You feel more like Demos when you're with Techne, don't you? You are so in love with her, you can't even remember who you were before. But don't blame Techne. She's under the spell too. It's the product of your love, that demon, bastard spawn that crawled off into the dark woods when you two were busy humming little love songs... Power... what gave birth to evil itself...

Anyway, that's enough with the stories. But wait, one more:

"The Internet — we used to call it a ‘commons’. Yet it was nothing like any earlier commons: in a true commons, people relate directly to one another, convivially, commensally. Whereas when they train themselves, alone, silently, on a screen, manifesting ideas and tools created and stored by others, they do not have to be social beings. They can owe the rest of the human race no bond of allegiance." - Sterling, in "White Fungus"

Did the true commons ever exist outside of the Arendtian notion of the agora, and those other high-minded Greeks and liberal humanists? Sure, we commune all the time. But humanity is not a commune--never was. There were always tools, people, and power. The relations shift around, but the players stay the same.

So what is worth? Where does the true value lie? Not in any particular person or tool, certainly. It's in the relationships between them. The pathways that guide certain people to use certain tools for certain goals. The path of a hammer to hit a nail; the text message to offer a friend a job; the processing of information to sort out a story--a story that might teach someone how to use a tool better. The objects, and even the people are mere symbols, emblems, and indicators of power and potential power. The symbols only have the value we give them, as we use them to mediate between ourselves and the world. Cellphones are emblems of our poverty. Computers don't make value (unless your desktop is at Moody's). And here we are, back in the beginning--people and symbols, symbols of people, people symbolizing tools, and tools symbolizing people.

Poverty--who is poor here? I suppose in the end, everyone with a cell-phone. They are the least common denomenator of Access these days. So we're all poor, in the respect of technology. Only some of us more than others, and and some of us, decidedly more materially than others. But maybe some day, a cheap, open-source free access to the networks will be devised... and then we can all be the salt of the earth. After looking at the bailout packages, I would rather we were all equally poor, frankly.

What does Bruce Sterling think? Hell if I know! Shit, that guy is crazy. Every read any of his stuff about global warming?

From the Ashes Rise...

A fellow named 'Fuzheado' has a good Flickr stream of the destroyed CCTV building, the one burning in my post from yesterday. I would give you a taste, but its Flickr, so I can't copy a picture. Just go take a look.

It intrigued me that in this stream (and most photos currently circulating), the shots are almost entirely of the smaller structure, because of course, it is the one that burned, and the one which people want to look at. However, yesterday when I was searching for the "before" pictures of the CCTV complex in my post, the one I used was the only one I could find showing the smaller structure even a little bit, and its barely in the shot! That's because the giant loop is much more interesting and stunning in a photo--at least, until yesterday.

So isn't that interesting? In destruction, the lesser tower suddenly becomes the bigger building, at least in the networked image-verse. And since it was never used, its informational content is all that it is!--its functionality is in its ideational consumption!

BLDGBLOG would probably say something like: "The super-structural, conflagurative destruction in architectural space serves as a foundational, symbolic reconstruction in architectural time!" Except he would probably say something correct, rather than just being a jerk like me :)