…the imaginary futures and imaginary pasts of orthogony are imaginary only in the sense that imaginary numbers (which they very much resemble) are imaginary. To a man walking within one, it alone is real, no matter how strange; it is all the others, standing at angles to it which exist only in imagination.
Great Work Of Time, John Crowley
I was asked to write something for Howies‘ Autumn catalogue on the theme of “Positive Energy”.
I was in a particularly punchy mood as I wrote I think, and the backdrop of a summer thunderstorm tipped me in a direction that… Well, let’s just say I wasn’t exactly surprised when it wasn’t printed – it’s not quite ‘on-brand” for them – but it’ll fit in just fine round here. So – remembering that although I’ve added some links, it’s written for print, not the web – here’s what I turned in:
Positive Energy / for Howies / Matt Jones / 871 words. 7.7.09
As I write this there’s a thunderstorm over my head.
It’s a cracking one too, literally. The thunderclaps are ear-splitting and it’s blowing the rubbish around on the dilapidated flat roof our studio windows over look.
The energy released by an average thunderstorm, according to wikipedia amounts to about the equivalent of a 20-kiloton nuclear warhead going off. A large, severe thunderstorm might be 10 to 100 times more energetic.
In a digital window in front of me, I’m reading the twitter posts of a friend (Gavin Starks, @agentgav, founder of carbon calculator http://www.amee.cc) who’s attending the “World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment” with luminaries such as Lord Brown, former head of BP, Sir David King, the government’s former chief scientist and Mr Inconvenient Truth himself, former vice-president Al Gore. It’s an impressive line-up to be sure. But some of the most impressive things he’s recounting are coming from a delegation from China.
For instance, this from Dr Christine Loh (1), of Civic Exchange, China: “China believe they’ve cracked thin-film solar for domestic use” To explain it very simplistically: thin-film solar technology brings the price of renewable energy of the sun into the same ball-park as non-renewable sources such as oil and coal. That China, the factory of the world, is going to start cranking this stuff out could be game-changing, and biosphere-saving.
That China could become the world’s number one economic superpower has been received wisdom for a while now. What’s new is the suspicion they might be able to turn around their rapid ascent to claiming the top polluter crown from the USA. In fact, they might take the lead in clean, green technology from the West.
Gavin also reported this factoid from Al Gore: “China now plants twice the number of trees than the rest of the world put together. Every citizen must plant three”
Not should, not encouraged – MUST. And of course that’s part of the inconvenient truth about China – that their political system and attitudes to individual freedom are very different to those we hold dear in ‘The West’.
But – what if that’s what it takes to survive?
Al Gore again: “We must connect the soil to the energy to the built environment, to our population and to our politics”. We’re in a highly individualistic democratic society. Do we have something positive and captivating enough as a vision to get us there?
We’ve done it before. Over the last month I’ve been watching the commemorative programmes on the telly marking the 40th anniversary of the manned landings on the moon. Not only were they the product of the NASA Apollo space programme – more broadly speaking, they were the product of an ideological battle between the USA and USSR in the cold war.
And it got me thinking strange thoughts: would it have been better for the long term future if McCain and Palin had got in? If America were seized by a new ideological battle – frustrated and bruised from a prolonged, controversial war on an abstract noun, nationalist fervour was directed into a technological crusade to make sure China doesn’t reign supreme in green.
Instead of a space race, an earth race…
Technology isn’t the answer to everything – but hair-shirt green thinking isn’t either. Back-to-the-land doesn’t scale when there’s going to be 10 billion of us on it, and that’s even without the now-almost-inevitable changes in the climate. It’s certainly not the route China’s going to take.
Now, wondering whether GM food or nuclear power might have to gain widespread acceptance, or whether freedom is compatible with survival, or that Obama’s not going to push the US and the West far enough away from legacy thinking is pretty challenging to my personal politics. But, thinking through these kind of ‘counter-factual’ scenarios can throw up interesting possibilities. When we’re ready to think about throwing away the things that we hold most precious, we can see new ways to hold on to them.
Another friend, Sascha Pohflepp, just graduated from the Royal College of Art with a fascinating project illustrating a counter-factual history where Jimmy Carter won against Ronald Reagan, and gave us a 1980s where the arms race was transmuted into an energy race; where a fictional government agency – “The Golden Institute” (2), turns Nevada into a weather lab and Vegas into an array of gaudy lightning catchers that supply the USA with power; where the kiloton energies of thunderstorms are engineered with silver-iodide balloons, and giant gyroscopes near the North Pole harness the world’s rotation to keep the lights on in the West, while slowing down the Earth just enough to make the days longer in the USA than Russia…
Fantastic, crazy, impossible stuff – imagined with the scale and scope and audacity and sacrifice and ruthlessness that got us to the moon. That showed us the Earth. That might keep us here.
That China might be ready for.
Where’s our vision of a bright green future?
There’s the thunder again.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Loh
(2) http://www.pohflepp.com/?q=goldeninstitute
“In the next report I submitted, I suggested that the term ‘logogram’ was a misnomer because it implied that each graph represented a spoken word, when in fact the graphs didn’t correspond to our notion of spoken words at all. I didn’t want to use the term ‘ideogram’ either because of how it had been used in the past; I suggested the term ‘semagram’ instead.
It appeared that a semagram corresponded roughly to a written word in human languages: it was meaningful on its own, and in combination with other semagrams could form endless statements. We couldn’t define it precisely, but then no one had ever satisfactorily defined ‘word’ for human languages either. When it came to sentences in Heptapod B, though, things became much more confusing. The language had no written punctuation: it’s syntax was indicated in the way the semagrams were combined, and there was no need to indicate the cadence of speech. There was certainly no way to slice out subject-predicate pairings neatly to make sentences. A ‘sentence’ seemed to be whatever number of semagrams a heptapod wanted to join together; the only difference between a sentence and a paragraph, or a page, was size.
When a Heptapod B sentence grew fairly sizeable, its visual impact was remarkable. If I wasn’t trying to decipher it, the writing looked like fanciful praying mantids drawn in a cursive style, all clinging to each other to form an Escheresque lattice, each slightly different in its stance. And the biggest sentences had an effect similar to that of psychedelic posters: sometimes eye-watering, sometimes hypnotic.”
– “Story of your life“, Ted Chiang
This week we became BERG.
This is BERG.
“‘Culture!’ Vergil said, peering around the kitchen wall at me. I said good-bye and hung up the phone. ‘They’re always swimming in that bath of information. Contributing to it. It’s a kind of gestalt thing, whatever. The hierarchy is absolute. They send tailored phages after cells that don’t interact properly. Viruses specified to individuals or groups. No escape. One gets pierced by the virus, the cell blebs outward, it explodes and dissolves. But it’s not a dictatorship, I think they effectively have more freedom than in a democracy. I mean, they vary so differently from individual to individual. Does that make sense? They vary in different ways than we do.'”
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Don’t you think?
Passed away recently. Very sad news, and a real shock.
I met Martin a few years ago when I was working at Nokia, and after some initial crossing of swords (who was this marketing dude, and what did he want with design?) we found ourselves getting on famously.
Martin was always ready for an unscheduled adventure. The picture above is from a business trip to New York when we snuck away from day-long meetings to go and face 75mph baseballs from the batting net machines on Chelsea Piers.
Instead of the ‘traditional’ dinner after a long marketing board meeting, he took a bunch of (fairly-traditional) Nokia marketing people to the BFI screening room to watch a documentary (“Dark Days”) about people living in tunnels beneath Manhattan.
Martin was a man in love with human culture – all of it, and he loved being involved in making it – advertising and marketing being the vehicle he used to do so (mostly).
I wish I’d had longer to enjoy watching him do it.
He will be sorely missed.
Russell’s got the right idea…
Get yours (or don’t) from http://moleitau.spreadshirt.net
More blatant commercialism.
As I said previously, I mainly make these t-shirts with spreadshirt so I can have them for myself, but if you’d like one too they’ve available at http://moleitau.spreadshirt.com.
I did this one after watching an awful lot of documentaries about the Apollo missions…
net
From a trip to NYC in 2005. What if they’d listened to these guys?
I’ve had a habit for a long time of putting a throwaway thought onto a t-shirt.
Usually they languish in a flickr set called “Imaginary T-Shirts” but sometimes they become real… Especially if I want to wear them.
This one, that pays tribute to Science Ninja Team Gatchman (or in this incarnation, the Sandy Franks remix) is case in point, and I get them made using Spreadshirt generally, so if you want one too, you can…
Petafloptimism 