……. is it terrible, that *that* is the first line that I think of during the domain-mapping workshop in class? It refers to one of my old psych texts – back when I was still toying with being a psych major (rationale: better pay, cool job-potential and the guys in psych were hotter.) about Piaget’s development growth for children. Aged 3-6, they begin to experience/think outside themselves, and for the first time, realise a world that is out of their control. In effect, they realise that there are domains which they have no mastery over which results in learning (and tears of frustration!) It’s not exactly related, but it’s quite interesting to think about.
Anyway here’s my domain-mapping map:
domain-map
We were supposed to do a venn-diagram, but eh, I’ve done enough of those back in asian-school when everything was a freakin pie chart and venn diagram and I really *really* didn’t want to do another. My original idea was to use the map of Manhattan and the boroughs to draw a kind of map-on-map thing (especially with the grid system, would be nice) and the height of the buildings to reflect the importance as well as creating a thought-class-categorising system.
BUT!!!
Once I started to draw, I realised that I couldn’t work that way, it just didn’t seem ‘right’. So. Anyway. That’s how the face came out. I wasn’t really consciously thinking of drawing a profile in particular, but that’s how it came out. Now I think about it, I quite like the idea of using the face – first it’s because the face presents both interior/exterior (thought/emotion), second is because the face has the most muscles in per capita, and it’s also the most sensoral part of the body. The idea that each area is a muscle, and muscles have to work together to function; metaphorically, works nicely I think. There’s also a bit of colour-coding going on, but not really notable.
Today’s reading was on the Jamer Hunt’s Manifesto and I was kinda; ehhhhh…… over some of the things he said. I think part of my reluctance is also because I’m wary of anyone who throws a lot of newfangled terminology (post industrial?metabolic?sounds like marketing gimmicks)
My biggest complaint is this:
The movement towards mass production of production, cloud computing (esp. in regards to distributed network intelligences) is a return to the original idea of a terminal, where each terminal is a gateway point to a larger producer (or rather, each individual entity producer pushes forth a method of production to a greater mass of production i.e. 1up the chain) and this kind of behaviour, of terminals and very specialised units of production – where each community can crowdsource specialised skills to a greater cause or assemblage is well………..it’s basically Fordism!
Maybe not Fordist in the way that most people understand it – as factory assemblage, but a communal, crowdsourced assemblage that is *still* dictated by a greater entity. Only that this entity is no longer the terrifying Factory, but has been remodeled insidiously as platforms, channels or ‘Clouds’ where everyone happily signs away minutes of their play time for labour.
In turn, this is reflected in the current state of living. (the proof is in the bread-pudding?) It’s true that technology takes away jobs and turns them obsolete, but what we are experiencing is beyond that. If it was simply job obsolescence – well, that happened in the 18th century too, when printing presses took away people’s jobs permanently. I would say that technology exacerbates the current situation, but is not the wholly to blame for all the crap that’s happening.
What I think is that this kind of new Fordism – where play has been labour’fied, and platform control is that you have a kind of plutocracy in the strictest sense. Hunt touches on this as well, he talks about people no longer ‘owning’ items but ‘leasing’ them constantly…… which points back to the idea of a rentier class. The idea of a rentier class comes from David Ricardo . He defines a rentier class owns some kind of property that everyone else needs in order to invent or create or build anything else. The original rentier class of Ricardo’s day owned land. Land was the vice that gripped the rise of industry, today it’s capital. The part of the surplus diverted to an unproductive ruling class isn’t rent any more, it’s interest.
With the OccupyWallStreet movement, it’s easy to see that the modern ruling class are all rentier classes. They don’t produce anything, and the problem isn’t even in production (physical, tangible) anyway – even if you gave everyone a 3-D printer and the ability to mass produce mass production, it’s not going to change because the issue is here is about value. It’s the fact that you don’t have to make, or even do anything that will produce – it’s about beating the system, and your value comes from how well you play the system (think it was John? who mentioned financialisation gaming) so what was previously relational (i.e. the price of food is related to the amount of food produced and demand for food) has now been destroyed by speculation and financial gaming.
So yeah, the future of design is here – it’s all code and games and producing valueless cool shit (re: junk), but do you really want to stay around just to hack the system out? or is there a better way of living?
strawberry.millefuille 