By admin on Aug 17, 2011 in ION THE WEB
Ion The Web – Issue 73
THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSAGE
If you’re not familiar with documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, here is an incredibly brief primer: Curtis makes films for the BBC that will melt your brain and shatter your illusions by peeling back the onion of reality to reveal the misguided manias that have turned us all into automatons and lead the world into a state of perpetual doom. That, or he’ll leave you confused and slightly agitated, especially if you don’t like Brian Eno.
In his latest film, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, Curtis examines the connection between Ayn Rand, a gang of Silicone Valley business mavericks and a couple of colonial naturalists. The verdict? Computers have sabotaged reality and Ayn Rand was a desperately lovesick individual.
The Medium and the Message is Curtis’s blog, and it may even be better than his films. Lifting the title from a book by his intellectual godfather, Marshall McLuhan, Curtis pieces together bits of BBC archival footage and pairs them with tireless research to build historical narratives that challenge those of the 24 hour news cycle, with altogether illuminating results. The irony here, is that for such a potent critic of technology, it would seem that Adam Curtis was born to blog.
FUCKYEAHMENSWEAR
The nature of internet success is fleeting; to be washed away when our collective attention span recedes and the next hype wave rolls in. But no matter how long this tumblr commands an audience, its author can take pride in having created an entirely new literary genre – satirical street style poetry.
The ideology of steez promoted by the website’s nameless writer is dogmatically organic. Crispiness is not to be purchased or consumed, but to be developed over time and refined. The game is to be smashed, not to be flashed.
Reading FYMW, one is reminded of the economist Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan theory – which posits that major historical events and scientific discoveries are at first a surprise, and are then rationalized through hindsight bias. It is in this sense that crispiness correlates to the rise of the personal computer or the Arab Spring – historical events are always obvious in the rearview, but only the outliers really know it before it hits the streets.
Rather than patronize its readers with halfhearted tips or faulty intelligence, FYMW tells it like it is. If you’re not already crispy, odds are you wont be any time soon. True steez cannot be communicated; you either live it or live your life chasing the dragon.
