Blog archive October 2024
<< August 2024 / November 2024 >>
29.10.24 / 01 / workplace curators
Implicit in notes on sustainability is the idea that workplaces need curators, as part of their sustainability framework.
The task of the curator (among other things) is to blend new and retained items in a way that supports the narrative of how the organisation is evolving. There is a sustainability narrative, how we reuse, repair and remodel old things, but there is also a cultural narrative, how a workplace and organisation evolve continually, balancing the old and the new, rather than freezing for ten years and then needing radical change to catch up.
Facilities management has tended to focus on maintenance and functional change, within what currently exists - the new copier or task chairs, the workgroup moves and changes. Curator is a cultural job, beyond the utilitarian.
It asks:
- Who are we and where are we going?
- How do we move that way with what we’ve got?
- When we replace, do we do like-for-like or something different?
- What new things do we need, and how will they evolve in turn beyond answering one need?
- What makes a workplace culture readable and ownable?
- How do we evolve ‘tradition’ so that people feel grounded during the process of change?
- How do we reduce the need for disorientating 'great leaps forward', or at least bring everyone to that point together and prepared?
28.10.24 / 02 / great disasters
The great disasters happen when every point of failure in the system fails. If only one point had held it wouldn’t have happened, or the loss of life would have been far less.
In that sense every great disaster is actually unique. It will never happen that way again, that precise combination of incompetence, misfortune and circumstance. That is why the great disasters fascinate us, because we have a sense of horrified wonderment at their unfolding, stranger than fiction. They often end up as plays and movies after a (barely) decent period for grieving, because they have compelling plots and action (just insert young lovers in peril).
Disasters bring in their wake huge rafts of legislation and practice, driven by politicians who must be seen to do something. To "make sure that such a terrible thing can never happen again". But it probably won’t anyway. Something else unforeseen will happen. The iceberg never strikes twice. And if it does, the ship won’t sink. Or the rescue ship will arrive in time. And so on.
In a way, the real value of the post-disaster legislation is to prevent the lesser disasters which happen repeatedly. The systemic changes catch a lot of things that in themselves are too small and uninteresting to break political inertia, the ‘shit happens’ kind of things.
28.10.24 / 01 / SI AW
A couple of Situationist quotes with obvious relevance to alt worship:
As soon as the leader of the game turns into a Leader, the principle of hierarchy is saved, and the Revolution sits down to preside over the execution of the revolutionaries. We must never forget that the revolutionary project belongs to the masses alone; leaders help it, Leaders betray it.
Raoul Vaneigem, 'The Revolution of Everyday Life' ch. 6
The most pertinent revolutionary experiments in culture have sought to break the spectators’ psychological identification with heroes, so as to draw them into activity by provoking their capacities to revolutionize their own lives. The situation is thus designed to be lived by its constructors. The role played by a passive or merely bit-part playing 'public' must constantly diminish, while that played by those who cannot be called actors, but rather, in a new sense of the term, 'livers', must steadily increase.
Guy Debord ‘Report on the construction of situations’ 1957
19.10.24 / 02 / packing
I’m always bemused by those speeded-up luggage-packing movies on luggage-selling websites where a load of nice things wriggle around and all pack nicely into a nice messenger bag/suitcase/wallet.
Finisterre Freitag Freitag (note the packs of eggs)
How come it isn’t like that for me? My things don’t fit, they make unsightly bulges. Where in the movies are the large and awkwardly shaped British plugs and chargers? The cables associated with all the gadgets? The Apple USB dongle? The bottle of handcream or disinfectant gel? The large headphones in their case? The shopping bags? The cutlery set? (You have a stainless steel cutlery set so no more disposable cutlery, right?) The movie stylist must have spent days finding all the right things for that exact fit.
Packing cubes - somehow I’ve managed to get through life without them. But the thing the packing movies almost never show is the empty bag that you will put dirty clothes in.
19.10.24 / 01 / simulacrum
I was in a record shop in Greenwich a few weeks back. What I found was that a lot of the vinyl that looked ‘original’ was a reissue, but you would only find out by examining very carefully. The ‘reissues’ that weren't quite like the original album (dodgy dance remix track, compromised graphics) were actually from the 80s/90s so were older than the ‘originals’. And then there were originals that really were original, which tended to be too worn to be tempting, and worth least of all.
So I thought, what happens when everything in the record shop, and the shop itself (and maybe the staff), is a simulacrum? And since we’re dealing with mass-produced objects does it matter? Especially when the new ‘original’ is remastered from the original studio recordings and on better vinyl?
Still I'm haunted by the possibility that the future will be exactly like the past, only more so.
