I just saw Objectified at Yerba Buena, last week. I enjoyed getting a peek into the minds of the most respected industrial designers of the last few decades, but it disappointed me as commentary on the profession’s attempts to fill a larger societal role.

Good parts: the visuals were great. If you’re easily distracted by beautiful, manufactured objects (me == guilty), then you’ll enjoy all the nicely-shot closeups of everything from toothpicks to cars. There’s also a good amount of factory porn (CNC machines, injection molding, extrusions) which I particularly enjoy, since I love to see how things are made.

The interviews with the designers are also good. As with many documentaries I like, the filmmaker is silent, letting his subjects do all the talking. We get alternately profound and amusing glimpses into these designer’s minds, understanding how varied their design processes are (and how strange their obsessions.)

Where the documentary began to disappoint me was after an interview with Paola Antonelli (a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.) She provided an interesting voice for design, looking to a future where designer’s role has significantly expanded. Moving past the formal aspects of an object, it’s symbolic meaning, and even its immediate consumer context, she described a role for designers at the highest level of policy (politics, regulation, etc.) She believes that designers should be involved in any place where society’s behaviors are considered, where a system interacts with people.

As an aspirational voice, Antonelli’s point was well made. But that’s not where the profession is, right now, and the documentary doesn’t really provide a strong critique of that lofty aim. There is a well-justified angst these days in the design community over the role that designers have in fueling the endless and accelerating cycle of resource use that we have no hope of sustaining for more than a few generations. True, design is a valuable way to understand how people inhabit the world and to shape their experiences. But the vast majority of design occurring these days is simply a method of creating fashionable things that drive sales. Rob Walker (New York Times Magazine) takes aim at this, briefly, but then to address the point, the film shifts focus to IDEO headquarters where they are hard at work at minimizing the waste in… toothbrushes. The solution? A permanent handle with disposable heads. This Core77 review resonated with me:

At around the three-quarter mark in the film I started to squirm in my seat. The movie’s exploration of the relationship between human and object was all very interesting, but I started to wonder, Is this film going to be critical at all? And wouldn’t you know it, the very next scene cut to footage of e-waste processing centers, with CRT housings being disassembled, parts crashing, tumbling into massive steel bins, and (finally) some mention of what the impacts of all these objects that these venerated designers dream up might be. (Funny that I was relieved to see the dark side rearing its head! Like in all good narratives, no conflict no story.) Again, some good commentary by Rawsthorn, and then some follow up at IDEO, but I couldn’t help feeling that this essential part of the story of stuff was getting severely, almost negligently, shortchanged. I’ve been banging the “designers aren’t in the artifact business, they’re in the consequence business” drum for a long time now, so I wanted Gary to hold this foot closer to the fire.

This is a failing of the entire capitalist system as we’ve structured it so far, so you may say that it’s unfair to put too much blame at the feet of the lowly designer. But if designers are attempting to elevate their profession to the level of policy, I think it’s fair to point out how often they have failed to take the larger effects of their work into consideration.

I’ve finally started educating myself on the current economic crisis. However we move past this current credit crunch (soft landing vs. hard landing), the fact is that Americans will likely face a lower standard of living within our lifetimes. You might not have believed that the decline of the American Empire had begun up until 2008, but it’s clearly in motion now.

Unfortunately, the imperial decline could have dire effects, worldwide. Whatever your opinion on the fairness of an empire, one thing it can promote is stability. If our capacity to service our national debt diminishes to the point where we have to remove our military presence from the hundred or so nations where we have bases, we may see scores of regional wars in the power vacuum.

Additionally, an empire in decline has few resources to devote to stewardship of the enviroment (or, put more simply, long-term planning.) We can elect as progressive a government, come November. The US may simply be unable to withstand the political and economic costs of raising energy prices in order to combat global warming.

Perhaps another nation will take up the role of “global policeman.” Perhaps dramatic new technologies will save our GHG-saturated climate. The future is unknown, but the dire scenarios are looking worse and more likely than ever.

Facebook has long lost its luster, so it’s just sad to be reminded that Friendster still exists at all. Recently, I’ve even been getting spam messages from my friends’ hacked accounts. Here’s an example:

Date: 07/7/2008 3:08 pm
Subject: Hey
Message:
Hi,
it’s been a while since we talked,
I hope you are doing good.
I got a new page for the cam app, take a look!
[link to spam site]

Smart, those spammers. They know I’ll open a message from a friend. That is, of course, until I start ignoring all Friendster messages altogether. Which begins now.

With all the Obama/Clinton poll-watching, armchair campaign strategizing, and hand-wringing over which democratic candidate is “electable,” it’s been easy for me to forget that there are people who really stand for what I believe. Dennis Kucinich articulates those beliefs with such passion and clarity that it breaks my heart, knowing that he has not one chance in hell of becoming President for the foreseeable future. But I can at least watch him go and hope for our collective future.

More Kucinich on YouTube

The Poor Man Institute » How can I put this?

Call it a triple-layer cake of dead-on brilliance. Poor Man serves up a humorous intro to Olbermann’s lucid celebration of Clinton’s righteous, pointed fury.

PS: You should all be reading “The Poor Man Institute.” And watching Keith Olbermann. And working to get Bill Clinton back in the White House. Constitution Shmonstitution. The dude abides.

Those of you who know me know that I Hate Tom Friedman. My disgust with him and his approach to reality is so thorough that when asked why I Hate Tom Friedman, I usually make something of a game out of it – let me pick a random op-ed and see how many sentences get my blood pressure up.

But I can’t imagine playing that game any more, because if I ever read this article again, my head is going to explode. Seriously – I Fucking Hate Tom Friedman:

The “real reason” for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. … The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world. And don’t believe the nonsense that this had no effect. Every neighboring government — and 98 percent of terrorism is about what governments let happen — got the message. If you talk to U.S. soldiers in Iraq they will tell you this is what the war was about.

You should, too.

A poster to a political discussion group I take part in sent one of the recent STRATFOR reports on the escalation situation in Israel and Lebanon, the gist of which was that Israel had no choice but to seize this unique political/strategic opportunity to eradicate Hezbollah’s weaponry, and that a ground invasion is necessary to achieve that goal and therefore likely imminent. Parsing the report and its context gave me my first opportunity to scrawl some semi-cogent thoughts on the war that has been occupying a large part of my attention for several days now. Here goes, with links, after the jump:

Read the rest of this entry »

• Lousiana congressman William Jefferson (D-New Orleans) is the subject of a recently released FBI affadavit detailing evidence of extensive corruption, allegedly receiving millions of dollars in bribes to help promote or accelerate the regulatory approval of a variety of business dealings. He is said to have stored nearly $100,000 in cash in his freezer. [Link]

• Finnish cartoon death metal band, a parody of itself that has become an extremely divisive issue in their native country, won the European music competition known as ‘Eurovision Song Contest,’ beating out competitors from dozens of genres representing countries across Europe. When they entered, a Finnish member of the European Parliament was quoted as saying that “Lordi could embarass Finland when it takes the EU presidency in July 2006.” About their win, the lead singer says: “It just goes to show that Europe is not such a bad place.” [Link]

• The New York Stock Exchange, itself a recent entry into the realm of the publicly traded, has made what is now the frontrunning offer for the European exchange ‘EuroNext.’ In doing so it has leapfrogged several suitors, including the German Deutsche Börse, and looks poised to take control of the largest platform for exchange of European corporate equities. [Link]

• Financial speaker Larry Williams, who claims to be “the only futures trader in the world to repeatedly trade $1 million of his own money live at seminars around the globe” was arrested in Australia on charges of evading the taxes due on proceeds from his ten books – “nine on futures and stock trading and one on the true whereabouts of Mount Sinai.” [Link]

From a recent, lefty petition:

“Seriously, this war and war budget are beyond crazy. Newspapers are saying another $72 billion is a shoe-in. How have we let this happen? How can we stop it? One clear way is forcing any half-responsible Reps to stop funding what most Americans and most Congresspeople know is a losing mistake.”

It seems to me that the war is over. At this point, we’re deciding whether or not to fund the reconstruction of iraq. I may not like that fact that we’re in this situation, but nor do I see much of a choice. The power vacuum that we would leave in our wake at this point could be catastrophic in the middle east, with effects rippling globally.

I’ve had little time to read up, recently. What justfication is there to simply pull out?

So, my email over at Fastmail.FM just went down for three days. Note that I pay these people $100 a year to give me essentially the same service as Gmail. I have continued with them simply because I still haven’t yet grokked Google’s don’t-sort-it-we’ll-search-it-for-you way of dealing with email.

Their explanation?

The drives we use have a guaranteed lifetime of 3 years and were only 15 months old. Given that RAID 6 can support up to 2 drives in an array failing, the chance of any 2 drives failing at the same time is an extremely rare occurrence. However in this particular case, 3 drives all failed within a remarkably short period of time! At that moment, we had effectively lost access to all data on the unit, and had to resort to our disaster recovery scenario, our daily incremental backups.

“Extremely rare,” indeed. Given their ratings, the chances that three of these drives would fail within the same six-hour period is 1 in 84,000,000,000. That’s assuming an even distribution in failure probabilities. If failure is more likely at the end of a duty cycle (as expected), their explanation is even less plausible. As soon as a Google offers IMAP support and assurances that their nascent AI isn’t feeding on my email, my hundred dollars is going there.

I know my probability calculations are wonky, btw (i.e. 3 drives failing together vs. 3 drives out of X drives failing together.) Suffice it to say that it was unlikely thing.