Reading Notes and Questions
This week with our focus on time, we read three pieces. Below are some notes, questions and quotes I liked from each.
The Times and the Seasons by John Durham
The article says that clocks raise the question “what is to be done” more than calendars. Is that really true?
I like the idea that a calendar can suspend time - I had never thought of it that way before. I sometimes feel like this in the very early morning - 4am feels like a suspension of time too.
“Why do resources run out on the microscopy and not in its macroscopy?”
Water clocks remind me of the fountains that the Incas built at Machu Picchu that still flow today. It makes me wonder - were they designing for this time scale?
I had never really considered a time before a second hand and this is making me wonder what my life would be like in that setting
Some concepts that stuck with me:
“Sunlight as yet one more commodity subject to the socialist redistribution”
“Cruel distortion of human existence”
“Mortgage of ourselves to do things we did not actively choose but will not give up”
“The challenge with climate change is to make chronos as urgent as kairos”
“Clouds transcend geometric and atmospheric logics”
I don’t agree that our air is now silent. I hear my the neighborhood church bell often on my way to school or while I’m running. In New York the air is full of the sound of the subway moving according to a daily schedule and birds in the morning during different times of year for example.
The tower section reminded me of the towers of Sacsayhuaman, the Inca’s greatest fort that was also one of the main sites of their defeat by the Spanish.
I agree that the tower mediates between heaven and earth and a fundamental medium of surveillance but I am still unclear on how it signals between the living and dead and the secular and the sacred.
I hadn’t thought before as the weather being constructed by talk, instruments, journalism, but like this framing.
Phenological Mismatch by James Bridle
“The greatest trick our utility directed technologies have performed is to constantly pull us out of time” -- I think about this a lot with phone notifications. I have all of mine turned off except for texts and even then usually keep my phone on silent. I am always surprised when people get push notifications from all of their apps - it is so completely overwhelming and jarring to me.
“We thought technology was about means, but it has been subverted for ends.”
The ends cannot justify the means because “the means employed determine the ends produced” - I have never quite heard this argument phrased this way and I find it helpful and compelling.
I love the Tamagotchi reference and vividly remember seeing behavior of my friends in 2nd grade change when they got one - suddenly they were controlled by/attending to this other thing I didn’t understand but it made me want one.
I often think about the energy consumption of my computer when I am developing VR projects - my computer heats up, it makes noise and pretty much can’t run without being plugged in. I haven’t yet dug into the ethics of working on projects like these, but it is something I think we need to address at a place like ITP or IDM because we don’t often make the connection to a bigger system.
Pervasive technology terms:
“Computers can be proactively persistent”
“Novelty of technology can mask its pervasive intent”
I am currently doing research on the history of the development of the internet and I can’t help but thinking that some of these problems could be addressed by going back to some of the earlier ways of thinking about this particular technology and approaches that have since been lost. The question I have been asking myself over and over again in this research is: What would a feminist internet look like?
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
I like and think that it is significant that everything in this story is mechanical - it allows a level of abstraction and removal from our current technologies that gives us a step back when thinking about the analogy.
Is this story explicit in response to CO2 levels rising and causing a decline in cognitive ability or more generally?
Do these creatures feel pain?
Quotes that stuck with me:
“Air is the medium of our thoughts”
“The price of speed”
“Then time itself will cease”
“With every movement contributes to fatal equilibrium”
Coming from a background of economics, this story had a satisfying ending because equilibrium is the state the whole field is trying to achieve. It makes me think again of a quote from the first reading about weather: “the privilege of being ordinary” (to me, this is the definition of privilege). This has never seemed to me like a natural state, which was also learned in the reaction to cybernetics.
Going back to the last quote - “then time itself will cease” - I wonder if this something economists overlook in their models, that what marks time is the movement back, in and out of equilibrium and trying to get back to equilibrium.