July, 2009 - Jon Lebkowsky

Happiness Is Mobile Loaves and Fishes

Mark Horvath (aka @hardlynormal), who is an advocate for the diverse and generally invisible homeless population, is in Austin hanging out with our friends at Mobile Loaves and Fishes, just in time for this week’s social-mediated screenings of Andrew Shapter’s film “Happiness Is” on Thursday, preceded by a Tweetup (info blogged here by the MLF crew). A “tweetup” is a meetup coordinated via Twitter, but you don’t have to be a twitizen to go there and have a great time.

Mobile Loves and Fishes is featured in the film, a documentary that asks how we can create more happiness (however defined) in our lives. Here’s a clip…

Barker’s aliens

Schwa instigator Bill Barker has turned up, having responded to Mark Frauenfelder’s “where are you, Bill?” post at bOING bOING. Gareth Branwyn spoke with him – Bill’s doing well, and planning a new project.

What was Schwa? From the Wikipedia article:

Schwa is the underground conceptual artwork of Bill Barker (born 1957). Barker draws deceptively simple black and white stick figures and oblong alien ships. However the artwork is not about the aliens: it is about how people react to the presence of the aliens and Barker uses them as a metaphor for foreign and unknown ideas. Schwa became an underground hit in the 1990s.

I suppose that’s correct from someone’s perspective, and it gives you an idea. How accurate can you be about the “meaning” of art? I have a Schwa sticker on my laptop that says “Every picture tells a lie,” and another on my car (see above) that says “You are what you see!” Are those about “foreign and unknown ideas?” I think they’re remarkable koans, still puzzling after 15 years.

One recurrent Schwa theme was about alien presences and detection. I have a glow-in-the-dark Schwa t-shirt that says “ALIEN DETECTOR: the Xenon^TM coated figure above [the archetypal alien image, shaped like a guitar pick with almond-shaped eyes and no mouth] will flash red in the presence of any alien.” Schwa scwhag often counseled you to “STAY AWAKE,” aliens are in your midst. I related this to the Buddhist and Gurjieffian notions of being awake, being mindful, and invited Bill to create the cover for FringeWare Review #5, the “Stay Awake” issue, which was generally about consciousness vs that other, ordinary somnambulist state. I always thought Schwa art was meant to shake us awake and aware.

Welcome back, Bill! We could use a good shake about now.

Politics and Climate Change

I like to think climate change is settled – we have scientific consensus, we know it’s happening, we generally understand the human actions that have accelerated climate change since the dawn of the industrial era. Many of us are feeling energy about reducing our carbon footprint and our overall planetary impact and concern that it’s too late for mitigation, time for adaptation. I personally have been involved with projects like Austin350, Worldchanging, and Powersmack, and I’ve blogged about global warming at Change.org. I’ve been thinking and writing about global warming since Bruce Sterling made me aware of it in the late 1990s. I worked with him on the Viridian Design Movement and wrote an article on climate change for the issue of Whole Earth Magazine he edited. In researching the article, “Being Green in 2001,” I learned that scientists were concerned that their commitment to scientific method – to hypotheses rather than certainties – was misinterpreted as uncertainty about the anthropogenic drivers of climate change. Since then broad scientific consensus has developed, especially via the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC.

I was surprised, then, to have a conversation recently with an intelligent, articulate local businessman who told me that this scientific consensus doesn’t exist, and while he could acknowledge that the climate is changing, it’s a natural cycle associated with solar activity. He’s sent me various charts and links. He’s just forwarded an email that mentions Ian Plimer and his book Heaven and Earth, Bjorn Lomborg, and Kimberley Strassel’s Wall Street Journal op ed piece, “The Climate Change Climate Change,” which says that “the number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.” Among other things, she mentions a list that Senator Jim Inhofe has assembled of scientists who supposedly deny that human action is associated with global warming, and says that the earth’s temperature “has flatlined since 2001.” (Has it?) If you read the comments on the op-ed piece, you see that the question of human action and climate change has been politicized – challenged by the right as a left-wing scam. This is really unfortunate – the science is lost in a fog of political wrangling.

The Hurt Locker

When “The Hurt Locker” screened at SXSW, I thought it was one of the better films I’d seen in years, and Jeremy Renner established himself as a world-class – not just actior but presence. While Katherine Bigelow has always been a sklled action director, she’s never quite had story and actors equal to her ability. In “The Hurt Locker” she shows the other side of post-traumatic stress. Renner plays a detonation pro who embraces, is almost addicted to, the stresses of modern war experienced through his job, one of the most dangerous in today’s field of battle, defusing bombs planted in and around the streets of the city. Even inside the citizens, as we see in one literally gut-wrenching scene. Put this film at the top of your list – one of the year’s best.

Free as in beer

In the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell runs a sanity test on Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money). The only problem is that in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed to make any money for Google.”

Why is that? Because of the very principles of Free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological Free and psychological Free work against each other.

Note that Gladwell’s review is available free online, and Anderson’s book costs $17.19 via Amazon.