"The impossible quest for that ersatz authenticity is wearing us down. In the absence of sustaining, reciprocal, non-schematized relations with others, however, the self, as the Invisible Committee asserts, begins to break down: “The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the more tired I get.” Even though consumerism reifies and exalts individuality, it is ultimately self-annihilating. Rather than losing ourselves in the flow of socially meaningful and useful activity, we are congealed in the aspic of our stultifying self-consciousness, replaying strategies of competitive selfhood, disguising ploys for attention as disinterested solicitude. The ceaseless cynicism is corrosive."

(quoted from earlier interview)<br />
<br />
War shapes and designs our society. The landscapes that I look at are created by warfare and conflict. This is particularly true in Europe. I went to the city of Cologne, for instance, and the city of Cologne was built by Charlemagne—but Cologne has the shape that it does today because of the abilities and non-abilities of a Lancaster Bomber. It comes from what a Lancaster can do and what a Lancaster can't do. What it cannot do is fly deep into Germany in the middle of the day and pinpoint-bomb a ball bearing factory. What it can do is fly to places that are quite near to England, that are five miles across, on a bend in the river, under moonlight, and then hit them with large amounts of H.E.. And if you do that, you end up with a city that looks like Cologne—the way the city's shaped.

...3-D printing, and automated manufacturing at a small-distributed scale in other ways. This is a hobbyist phenomenon right now where you have a machine that takes some gloop, that connects to your computer, and then the gloop is printed out into something you might like, like a new Frisbee, or coat hanger, or clarinet mouthpiece, whatever it is. As this gets more and more sophisticated, it becomes possible that more and more things can be manufactured onsite instead of made in China or wherever, and then moved over through a huge transportation network...<br />
<br />
Once again, whenever you improve efficiency, when you save money, it's only the same thing as making money if you're already rich. If there are people who aren't rich enough to benefit from that, it just makes them poorer because they have less to do, and less ways to earn money.

(Geoff had a related post.)

via Pruned

People conceive of the American wilderness, Bill Cronon argued, as "the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are--or ought to be." But this is a problem because "the dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living."<br />
<br />
The only way that cities and wilderness exist as they are is because of all those other things we stick out in the Mojave. Energy, industrial, and commercial facilities are the lifestyle-support system of our country. It is in the infrastructural landscapes we've scratched into far-flung natures where we can see actual human society reflected.

via @bldgblog

cosmonauts, machines, etc.

via bldgblog

The Luddite and the techno-celebrant alike are crippled by the narrowness of their technological equipment.

molasses injection

via pruned

via varnelis

Here’s what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon.

Toward the century's end, Marc Augé noted that under this condition of "supermodernity", place was rapidly giving way to "non-place". Places, that is, spaces, made up of social interactions between people, accumulating in memory to form historical meaning, were disappearing. Instead our lives came to be composed of a relentless procession through spaces of transit. Caught in airport lounges and freeways, but also ATMs, the space in front of the CRT, and supermarkets; we found ourselves increasingly alone, inhabiting non-places