#31: The Great Gizmo
"To move the earth Archimedes required a lever long enough and somewhere to rest it—a gizmo and an infrastructure—but the great American gizmo can get by without any infrastructure." Reyner Banham, the British architectural critic who first visited the United States at age 39 (and taught himself to drive in order to "read Los Angeles in the original") belongs to the great tradition of writers, like Alexis de Tocqueville a century prior, who understood American culture better than most people who have spent their lives here. His essay "The Great Gizmo" (quoted above), which frames the history of westward expansion as the triumph of resilient devices like Evinrude outboard motors and Jeeps in settling the disorderly wilderness, belongs to the McLuhanian tradition of writing that arrived decades before the technology it best describes.
The iPhone, of course, finally arrived to epitomize Banham's thesis, or so it seemed. If we were already demonstrating our "belief in a device like a surfboard as the proper way to make sense of an unorganized situation like a wave" in 1965, then by 2007 we were certainly primed for a handheld device that would enable us to surf on the oceanic chaos of information that is everyday reality (and the more we embraced our phones, the more chaotic that reality started to seem without them). At least one blog post made this point back when iPhones still felt sort of new; it's amusing to revisit that perspective now.
The difference between the iPhone and the pioneers' gizmos was also anticipated by Banham, though. He observes that American-made Jeeps became less rugged in response to the country's infrastructural development, increasingly optimized for smoother roads and less fit to traverse unpredictable terrain. Meanwhile, another iconic technology, the Coca-Cola vending machine, was popping up everywhere, in remote desert towns as well as major cities, with an "almost surreal independence of its rough surroundings as it sits snug in its stylists' chrome and enamel." Unable to function without fully modern electric grids and supply chains, the iPhone is no different: equally dependent on the invisible global infrastructure that it urges us to pretend doesn't exist.
Reads:
Perpetual Motion Machines: An incredible essay by Chenoe Hart about driverless car design and how self-driving vehicles will mark the end of transportation (in the "end of history" sense) (thanks again Miz).
Taylor Pearson on how the Blockchain Man is the emergent individual of the digital age (in contrast to William H. Whyte's Organization Man).
Every Noise at Once is a map of thousands of music genres that plays an example soundbite when you click on any genre name. One of the coolest and most useful visualizations I've ever seen - it will come in handy next time you need to feign familiarity with Horrorcore or Deep Spanish Lounge (or Vaporwave!).
Until next time,
Drew