bypass or great big convoy

Via the ever-excellent Kottke comes this rather profound study and projection of how self-driving vehicles will alter the economy and particularly the gas-food-lodging infrastructure built to support commercial trucking. While it does not take much boldness to imagine a phalanx of safer, more efficient robot guided convoys taking truckers out of the drivers’ seats as it has already come to pass, but the impact does not of course stop with this last lament of middle-class bread-winners.
The article is written from an American perspective and by analogy compares the seismic changes that could occur to those communities that the interstate freeway system passed by and withered for the sake of expedience, but I think the analysis is completely universal. With manufacturing increasingly retreating into yonder tightfistedness, goods are forever being shuttled back and forth. Consuming merchandise created and delivered by machine, vast swathes of the human workforce (and ultimately, all of it) become redundant and without access to meaningful employment. The untenable situation is accelerating to an important junction, wherein either there is no demand to satisfy the production-capacity because no one has the tender to pay for it or money becomes a rather meaningless trifle and in a utopian society, humans are at last allowed to enjoy the fruit of their labour. I suppose that’s precisely the point of progress but it is hard for me to imagine that the robber-barons might herald this event joyfully—especially if they knowing ushered in their own severance. What do you think? Will those automated cars drive us all off a cliff or make our existence better by abolishing capital?

circe or the call of the wild

Intrepid explorer Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett first became enamoured with South America and the allure of the dense, uncharted jungles when as a surveyor was invited to help resolve a border dispute between Brazil and Bolivia. Some twenty years after the initial encounter (with World War I intervening), Fawcett resolved to return, ostensibly, to seek out a mid-eighteenth-century anecdote he’d learned of: a slave-trader who’d come across a mysterious city deep in the jungles. Braving the elements, predation and potentially hostile tribes, Fawcett assembled a small expedition and embarked to find this place he called the Lost City of Z.

The colonel, who had the imagination of colleagues and contemporaries like Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle and JM Barrie (Peter Pan), was setting out in search of El Dorado, many thought and considered reason enough, but his actual goal may have been far more elusive in reality and far harder to locate. As Fawcett himself reflected, Englishmen have quite the penchant for going native, which is usually a very positive attribute since it tends to cast a humanising light on the lands England has colonised—with some glaring exceptions, and must have felt himself too led onward. The expedition vanished without a trace and despite many rescue parties who themselves suffered not insignificant losses but all those who came after may have all been following a red-herring in the mysterious, lost city. Private correspondence and supposed membership instead suggest that Fawcett’s objective was to establish a utopian commune in the jungle, wiled by the ageless charms of a female spirit guide—a sith, a supernatural harbinger, messenger in the folk-tradition of his native Scotland, the colonel was going to establish a society based on his own religious beliefs, including deification of his own son (who happened to be in that original party) and the neo-theosophy, receiving the wisdom of God through the occult, which was popular, parlour interest at the time. Whatever the objective, no one knows the fate of Fawcett and company.  Reportedly, Fawcett’s family have tried to mask these supposed cult accounts by emphasising the hidden city. It is possible that Fawcett did not care to be found and surely didn’t want pursuers to come to a bad end while on a wild goose-chase, and he himself may have understood the city as metaphorical or at least incidental (like Camelot or the Grail quests) to his real aim and might have discovered Z after all.

dirty-laundry or romeo and oubliette

I wonder what happens—though not exclusively in the sense of data-retention and potential for blackmail and embarrassment, to one’s neglected and moribund dating profiles. Of course, there’s that distracting, distasteful feeling that the internet could be easily induced to vomit up everything—and nosy governments and those capitalising on what we’ve magnanimously shared make this seem like an inevitability—that’s specific to you and you alone, everything shady, exaggerated, secret, plus the occasional stray terror plot.
It’s funny to think of how that fear, which is something coddled like those forgotten avatars and familiars that we’ve no nostalgic feeling for that were once preened and shown for whatever audience, that signals the end of privacy as we understand it was pedigreed in the same fashion. We’ve surrendered, commoditised and compartmentalised every aspect of ourselves little by little, and at first only under our own compulsion and satisfy our own vanities—legitimising the argument that if one does not brand himself or herself, someone else will surely do them the favour. And like those dating or professional matchmaking dossiers, the transitional parts of our characters, habits, predilections are shed and cast away until that picture, even long after we’ve moved away from it, is complete in the enduring sense. What do you think? Do these past identities and identifiers have an unseen, unloved lives of their own (careering onward singlemindedly absent status updates), waiting to be sprung at the worst possible moment?

five-by-five

storyboard: scene-by-scene recreation of Doctor Strangelove using everyday objects

exoplanet: retro, WPA style NASA travel posters

enclava: another aspiring micronation cleaved out of terra nullius

riff-solo: a website that turns one’s typing into drum-beats

century of progress: seven maps that could only be made in the last one hundred years