May 2010 Archives
Cell phones, China's commodities purchases or misleading new metrics? An interesting question raised by Paul Kedrosky using data from Wolfram Alpha. One commenter suggests Kiva, but no one really seems to buy that explanation.
Check out Alwyn Young's 2009 study, The African Growth Miracle for more data suggesting that we may need to move past the stock images of Western charitable colonialism.
A rather nasty whomp on the head has of necessity kept things low key for me the past couple of weeks, but in my ongoing effort to get back to normal I did make it down to Tribeca for a few hours tonight to watch Lost at the showing sponsored by Slate. A most interesting event on several levels, not least of all for the way it exemplified the social theme pervasive in the show itself.
(spoilers ahoy)
As for the already notorious last episode of Lost, I could not help but compare it with the recently aired series finale of Ashes to Ashes, the sequel to the classic UK sci-fi drama Life on Mars. Both Lost and its UK cousins use mysteries connected to time travel to explore notions of purgatory, redemption, fate, freedom, self-awareness and personal meaning.
Lost appears to differ from the UK series in that it seems to make the physical world--real time before death--the realm of time travel and mysticism, but even that could be a swerve. It's equally arguable that the silent wreckage montage at the end of Lost is a not so subtle hint that even the main timeline was a collective fiction--everyone died, then came to self-realization through a shared mythic adventure as well as a more mundane form of purgatory. Think of it as Dante Wii with ascending levels and a side of suburbia.
Either way, what particulalry stands out for me is the subtle yet significant shift that both Lost and the UK series make in regard to personal meaning. Theirs is a distinctly social vision of salvation--we not only find meaning in overcoming our faults, believing in God, etc. etc., but in creating a communal reality with others.
Holographic realities and the social soul are themes that resound throughout human religion, philosophy and art--sure, Egyptians did this through pyramids and Christians, cathedrals, but even though we're pouring our millions into TV and movies at the core it's all the same thing. The individualistic turn of the past few centuries was a bit of swerve; shows such as Lost and Ashes to Ashes indicate that, as McLuhan predicted, the age of hyper-connectivity is retrieving a more tribal vision of the self.
Jeremiah's Vanishing New York has the story of the recent relocation of venerable Greenwich Village institution Ansonia Pharmacy, whose store window featured "a revolving display of mostly local art known as the Ansonia Pharmacy Windows."
The reason for the move was explained by this not-so-cryptic quote from Aristotle: "Everything that moves is moved by another." The reason, no doubt, is the substantial escalation of rent at the original location, a market phenomenon that many believe is causing Manhattan to lose its core identity. One proposal to stop things like this from happening is the adoption of commercial rent control for small businesses. Although Aristotle notes that politics is inherently an ethical enterprise, whether rent control is the ethical solution has been the subject of considerable debate.
The Gap is sponsoring American Woman: Fashioning an American Identity, the latest exhibit at the Met's Costume Institute. The fact that the Gap did not insist on putting its own clothes on display was actually pretty savvy--while physically inserting Gap clothes into a fashion retrospective could call attention to the sponsorship and the gap between The Gap and high fashion, the sponsorship itself reinforces the sense of The Gap as the fashion identity of today, democratic, accessible and at the same time validated by an elite institution warehousing the style of the past.
Sit through one of my social enterprise classes & you'll hear me chat about co-ops, which in the U.S. seem to have been erased from the collective memory of folks who claim that blending social benefit and business is a revolutionary innovation. As I'm wont to say, folks outside the U.S. have made the connection--indeed, for some in Europe the term "social enterprise" is synonymous with co-ops--and this week The Guardian has a nifty article on the historical significance of the co-op/social enterprise link in light of the upcoming British elections:
Regardless of who wins on Thursday, it seems certain that Britain faces a revolutionary change in the way local services are run and delivered. The Conservative party has made mutualisation a central pillar of its election strategy, promising to "unleash a new culture of public-sector enterprise". Its manifesto, entitled An invitation to join the government of Britain, contains proposals for millions of public-sector workers to set up co-operatives and sell their services back to the state. Employee-owned co-operatives would be able to decide on management structures, innovate to cut costs and share out any financial surpluses among staff.
Labour is similarly enthusiastic about co-operatives. Its "mutual manifesto" puts the emphasis on people running many of their own services, from health and social care to council estates and Sure Start centres. The Liberal Democrats would go even further, introducing a new mutuals, co-operatives and social enterprises bill to bring the law up to date and give responsibility for mutuals to a specific minister.
But why the sudden enthusiasm for a mutual model – and will the plans work?