#67: A Bicycle for the Donkey Mind
In 1924, Le Corbusier wrote, “The Pack Donkey’s Way is responsible for the plan of every continental city.” When the father of modernism made that observation, the winding, patternless streets that we still associate with pre-industrial cities—organic accumulations of expedient, short-sighted decisions by humans and their domesticated animals—had already given way to the grid's rectilinear regularity in many urban areas. He continues, "Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going." OK. After Le Corbusier delivered his own vision for cities, which in many ways defined 20th-century architecture, it turned out he may have overestimated the human race. Now we walk in straight lines because we have to, not because we know where we're going. Far from an expression of certainty, the urban street grid simplifies, removes choices, and reflect's nobody's direct route exactly. The donkey, for all its zigging and zagging, may have actually known better where it was headed, and imprinted its will more directly onto the landscape.
Even if Le Corbusier and the modernist movement failed to realize their vision, their ideas reflect an exhilarating belief in human potential and the desire to build a world that unleashed that potential. Nearly a century later, the current epoch of technology and design (which may be winding down) have this in common with the modernists: Optimistic rhetoric about individual freedom and possibility alongside products that seem informed by the opposite values. We eagerly provide data about ourselves to platforms so they can help us learn what we want; our unique personal desires are mere inputs for systems that channel them into a narrower range of outputs. A street grid offers many paths between point A and point B, but if we weren't only using one of those paths already, Google Maps ensures that we are now. Even Steve Jobs, a noted disciple of modernism, proclaimed that people don't know what they want until you show it to them—a nearly perfect inversion of Le Corbusier's argument for straight lines. For Jobs the straight lines were purely aesthetic.
After modernism, as one might imagine, came postmodernism. The prescriptivism of the former gave way to descriptivism, in which architects stopped imagining ideal forms and started going out and deriving principles from things that were already happening without them, like Vegas Strip signage and suburban lawn ornaments. This approach, for all its merits, conceals an unstated nihilism—whatever happens, happens—but it did, at least, filter and refine what it observed in an effort to produce a better version of it. Maybe this is a more accurate model for the predictive, algorithmic, monetized nature of the present digital milieu, which seems so needy in its effort to figure out what we like and offer empty support for who we are. Like modernist architecture, though, it accidentally conditions us while pretending not to. We're more like the donkeys Le Corbusier described than the humans, wandering aimlessly and leaving data trails that someone else builds into roads.
Reads:
Liz Pelly on Spotify as "self-driving music" and how platforms never merely aggregate content impartially, but also shape it. As one example, she offers "an artist duo that previously considered themselves an indie-pop band, but through the magic of Spotify data has come to realize they are more often classified as an electronic group."
"Music for Car Alarms," a great autobiographical essay by Benjamin Bratton (author of The Stack) about "spending the first two decades of the 21st century trying to escape the 20th." Also this: "Dug up in Bolivia and Chile, (lithium) used to store energy in batteries. Refined differently, it is used in the triggering devices of nuclear warheads, and differently still, given to psychotics who ingest it and stop hearing demonic inner voices. Lithium wins Chemical Element of the Decade."
A retrofitted Boeing 747 at Burning Man got stuck in the desert.