People want to be part of experiences that make them feel connected to other people, want to make them feel greater than the strength of their own individual efforts. Sometimes those expressions happen in the most unlikely places.
Read MoreOUTSIDE, INSIDE -- A Report from Japan
The rugged landscape all over Tanegashima Island in Japan camouflages the vigorous, motivated culture all around.
Steering wheel on the right side of the car, my windshield wiper slaps back and forth every time I try to signal a turn at an intersection. The controls are opposite their placement in The States, and deeply wired muscle memory is a tough thing to reprogram. I regard each and every moment at an intersection like brain surgery, with one false move potentially causing irreparable damage.
Driving on Tanegashima Island to the eponymously named Space Center presents a visitor with powerful reminders that Japan is an intentional, motivated nation. With a land area smaller than California, the country boasts a world-class space center, carved into a rugged stretch of Pacific beach. Tectonic activity through the ages aggressively defined the formation of the terrain, with huge cliffs towering over deeply folded valleys. Ancient upheavals of Earth's suboceanic crust sent sandstone spires rising, the sedimentary stone establishing rugged rules for hearty inhabitants while occasional outcroppings of harder, volcanic matter remind visitors that they're squarely in the Ring of Fire. The intensely sculpted geography forced road builders to draw inspiration from bowls of udon noodles; wild twists and turns test drivers concentration every single kilometer. It's over these roads that NASA must gingerly truck the GPM satellite from the Shimama Port, a few kilometers distant as the crow flies, but a substantially longer drive across tangled, winding roads.
Tanegashima Island is broken into three sections. Most of the NASA crowd lives in a warren of small hotels in the southern section called Minamitane. It's an unassuming town, clearly a bedroom community for the nearby space center and its support services. School kids in brown uniforms and smart black backpacks scamper on the narrow sidewalks each morning, running to school. Far from the blazing neon and sodium glare of downtown Tokyo, Minamitane flickers while the great capitol city to the north blazes. But like small towns everywhere around the world, the affairs of distant places matters little compared to day-to-day realities of making a living. Hotel and restaurant workers realize an unusually large crowd of jet-lagged and hungry Americans are in town, and it's clear that beyond a short term business opportunity, there's a genuine local enthusiasm to be part of this extraordinary multinational effort.
Minamitane shows signs of the hardscrabble existence that must attend its remote location. Few lights glow after the sun goes down and restaurants are best found with a good plan before setting out and a map in hand. Many buildings need paint. Outdoor commercial signs--fewer than a visitor might initially expect to see--have clearly weathered many seasons. But despite its apparently weary presentation, Minamitane has clearly tried to show it's best face. Yellow banners welcoming NASA flutter along streets and not a scrap of trash appears anywhere.
It cannot be overstated: this is a profoundly intentional nation. To support the army of American staff who have descended like starlings, a flock of matching silver Toyotas have been shipped from the larger island Kyushu. Each morning that flock flits at forty KPH across circuitous roads until it punctures the Space Center's security perimeter, alighting outside a building humbly called STA-2.
If the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, is the soul of Tanegashima Space Center, it's clear that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is the brains. Mitsubishi manufacturers the HII-A rocket on which the satellite will fly to space, and Mitsubishi runs the operations on site. But the cosmetic polish of the austere, white building where we work has long since faded. There are no markings, insignia, logos, or even lights on its outside, and signs of long use without any frills suggest the decades of Japan's storied economic power continue to recede into the past. Rust mottles the metal front door, while discolored institutional tiles line the dreary, featureless hallways.
NASA staff occupies emotionally vacant third floor offices, with metal desks of 20th century vintage pushed together to make rows of work tables. On the first floor, teams of engineers have comandeered air conditioned rooms and installed racks of computers and electronics and other vital equipment. A small room for donning "bunny" suits leads through an airlock into the cavernous brightly lit clean room. Through this portal visitors who make the transition realize in a heartbeat that the tumbledown trappings outside have nothing to do with the most fundamental characteristic of the place and the culture. Like the town's support that makes this possible, like the exceedingly polite nation that graciously hosts a horde of loud, blue shirted foreigners, this is a profoundly intentional room, maintained by a focused, intentional company, working for a deeply focused agency. Inside the cleanroom a twenty-first century space program hums vigorously. The gleaming GPM satellite reflects lights from around the room like a great jewel hewn from the surrounding mountains. Inside this aging relic of an industrial giant, there is still majesty and promise of great things to come.
--MS
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GETTING THERE -- En Route to Japan
Having travelled halfway around the globe, an advanced satellite makes it's way to a special port, ready for shipment to the Japanese launch facility at Tanegashima.
Getting up before the sun on a November morning in Alaska may not be an honest way to represent a person's effort. The sun doesn't make much of an appearance at this latitude. The GPM team traveling to Japan takes that as a charge: we're not planning to hang around too long, either.
Back on the icy tarmac, we leave our steamy bus for the gelid confines of our twilight passenger cabin, up, up, up the precarious metal ladder to the top of the C5. Then we wait.
And wait.
And wait.
Turns out that the plane is fine. It's the runway that's too slick with ice.
Engines idling, bellies rumble. Breakfast never happens. The catering we'd expected in the second half of the trip didn't survive the days of our unexpected Alaskan idyll. People crack a few jokes--how could the overnight quartet of engineers assigned to babysit the satellite have eaten everyone's pancakes!-- but nobody complains. As soon as the Air Force clears us for take off, we're heading west at full throttle.
Nine hours above the Pacific, the team settles into zenlike repose. Conversations are minimal due to the ferocious airplane noise and requisite earplugs. Movement slows. Time expands.
Then, after an eternity, we're on approach. Human dynamos spin up. People run through mental checklists and stretch for action.
Minutes after the wheels stop beneath the gray airplane, people move like springs released. The advance team meets us on the ground with no greater ceremony than high fives and back slaps. In minutes the Japanese and NASA ground teams are rolling at full speed. The C5 nose and tail pops open, and it isn't long before our truck trailer gets pulled out the plane. Not far behind, the great white box holding the satellite rolls out smoothly, only to be bolted down to the waiting truck bed.
From a distance the scene looks like the epitome of an ant colony. Dozens of people with well- coordinated roles clamber and labor over objects many times their individual size, yet collectively manage to make short work of huge jobs. The American team coordinates care and feeding of their spacecraft; the Japanese ground team coordinates movement of heavy objects and extensive runway logistics. A handful of US Air Force crew provide essential assistance working in and around the airplane.
In a little less than three hours, the plane is unloaded, sealed up, and gone. With the satellite now loaded onto the truck, a motley foot parade walks alongside, heading a mile distant for a freshly paved section of sea port, retrofitted specially for this enterprise.
The Japanese ground crew performs like Cirque du Soleil; onlookers can only marvel at the display of technical acumen. They make it look easy. The truck pulls up like a demonstration of precision driving. A massive crane, already waiting, hoists a special I-beam into place. Working side by side, NASA mechanics and Japanese ground teams unbolt the satellite, hook lifting chains to the sides, and prepare. As the shades of night stretch shadows long, crews wheel in small, powerful outdoor lamps, turning the scene into an outtake from Close Encounters.
Then: it rises. The great white box containing the largest Earth science research satellite ever floats above the scene. Gracefully it swings over the edge of a great cargo ship, waiting at port. Then slowly it descends into the hold, disappearing beneath the railing. Another quartet of NASA engineers boards the ship, where together with a Japanese crew they'll sail for Tanegashima Island. First by air, now by sea, the satellite inches it's way to space.
Paper map
FOLLOWING THE BLUE DOT
I do it. I bet you do it, too.
Maps! I'm talking about digital maps! Getting from "here" to "there"! (You never know what people really think when they read a blog.)
Not too very long ago it used to be that we all found our way around the flat earth with crinkled paper maps. When we couldn't get good ground truth from our multi-colored route finders, we'd stop for directions at a local store or gas station and ask for directions. We'd scribble notes about where to turn and how far to travel. We'd try to figure if the received guidance jived with clues we could glean from our printed maps, and we'd try to estimate which compass direction we thought we were headed.
Now we follow blue dots, or let disembodied voices in our telephones tell us where to turn.
Those cloud-based, scalable maps are marvels, to be sure. Millions ditched paper maps faster than bowls of cold oatmeal and instantly found where they needed to go. Major new market segments exploded, supply-chain management and package delivery systems accelerated, and traffic information finally offered the potential that things might get better where it counted. Where could there possibly be a downside?
I'm not crying "downside", but I am raising a philosophical point. You're gonna roll your eyes (I know you are!), but try to open your mind to this. I miss the moments of unexpected discovery that came from finding less predictable ways through space. I miss the moments of achievement, the brain work necessary to figure out complex routes, the discoveries of how cities and towns were arranged. And, like endless examples in a million different forums, I miss the casual brush with unexpected people whom I might have to ask for directions.
Yes, I have to admit it: even as I miss certain aspects of what used to be, route finding is better now. It's faster, more efficient, surprisingly accurate, and with crowd sourced inputs getting better all the time. But the nuanced moments of invention and discovery are largely gone from the process. Creative solutions to ordinary dilemmas are the sparks of ignition that often provoke greater flights of invention downstream. Sure, modernity has replaced old problems with new ones, and individuals--and cultures--constantly encounter new challenges to lash to the creative wheel.
But for a creative person, I suppose the thing that most captures my attention is that we are gradually ceding our personal responsibility to inhuman systems. I'm concerned about algorithms seeping into every aspect of our lives under the guise of "making life a little easier".
First it was speed dialing that made us forget phone numbers. Then auto-correction software killed our collective ability to spell. Kids no longer learn to write cursive handwriting--whither the personal signature? Now it's maps, and all that goes with it.
It's better now, yes. But when the software police come to bolt algorithmically pre-digested dialogue into one of my screenplays, I think we'll know that things have gone past the point of no return.
--MS (Hey, you can follow me on Twitter @michaelstarobin if you're so motivated.)
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The Consciousness of Money
With cyberspace populated by semi-autonomous “bots”, and smart phones sending wireless messages onto the web to look for last minute plane tickets, and software agents in refrigerators circuits ordering more orange juice from a wired supermarket before we even notice we're out, one begins to wonder if we're giving up our freedoms one convenience at a time. But incremental developments aside, one human invention that’s been around for centuries remains in such demand as to be perhaps the first artificial consciousness.
Money.
A cursory glance simply casts an eye of desire on it. But it is really the cash that’s got a hold of us. Consider:
It’s really worth nothing, but it convinces us of its value; it talks us into protecting it. It has value because we collectively believe it has value. A bottle of water can quench a thirst. A fertile field can produce sustenance for years. A whole box of money can do nothing, but it’s desire to exist, to grow, to spread, whispers Faustian bargains in our ears and we listen. We take it in, protect it under our mattresses, pay others to project it in steel rooms at banks, obfuscate to friends and relatives about how much we may or may not have. Consider this:
If you squint while stopped at a red light, the cars all around look like blood cells rushing through veins and arteries. Traffic lights act like heart valves, buildings and businesses act like organs, apartment complexes and housing developments act like bone marrow.
Money rushes around the human organism.
Just like in nature, if there’s a niche to be filled, life rushes in and adapts to fill that niche. If an organ needs assistance, blood and nutrients rush to fix it. If money discovers a need--it's own need, mind you-- it pulls people and energy—lives—towards it like a biological magnet. Cars leave their parking spaces at the crack of dawn, their drivers pulled inexorably to office jobs and fork lift operation and days in front of a fourth grade class. We tell ourselves these are our jobs, but the compulsion to these labors are often just the relentless tectonic pressures of money.
Further evidence of money's consciousness is the endless creative energy among financial entities to forge connections where superficial horse-sense seems to fail. Take the French automobile company Renault and the Japanese car company Nissan. Separated by more than 10,000 miles, the two behemoths share an unusual alliance, and the two together market a wide range of cars in the United States, a foreign country to each of the partners. The soul of the alliance is an effort to broaden the power of manufacturing scale without demanding that each partner bow beneath the sword of the other. This union of competitors is predicated on money talking; corporate cultures in France and Japan could not be more different, but there they are, locked together at the brain stem. To the thousands of workers at each company actually assembling the cars, clicking keyboards, and ordering parts, theirs is not even the illusion of autonomy. Their lives are directly governed by the wages parceled out like pollen among worker bees. They can no more go their own financial ways than they can decide to build a new type of engine on their own. The money in the system is the deciding factor. It is money which reached across culture and space to create a partnership of expedience, and it is money which unifies the executive ganglia making rudimentary decisions regarding aesthetics and strategy. But lest any observer of the system, internally or externally, consider that the executive class has significantly more say than the employees on the factory floors, consider: significant corporate missteps might only end the current incarnation of the financial arrangement built by the Renault/Nissan partnership. Just as the wooly mammoth shed its coat for the summer of the post ice age, so to will the money be transmogrified should those companies pass into the historical record.
Supply side economists will rush to say that corporate bankruptcy is proof that money is not conscious, that it's in the realm of humans and the decisions they make. Rising stocks are based on good decisions and a smidgen of good timing, and by the way, also add money to the economic ocean.
But money is not a population issue. More currency does not equal a bigger, biologically more successful population. Money is more akin to biological potential. It's the promise that it's capable of enormous growth if the conditions are right, and the guarantee that it will endure in a slower, even dormant state when conditions are bad. It is the sleeping code of the global genetic germ, activated like an allele, and deactivated by a drug.
Money can never be inherently creative, but the shadows it casts onto the world around it warp and bend like our own mortal umbras as we walk in the world. The challenge for creative people of widely divergent stripe is to recognize that money is not fundamentally what's important, even as the pursuit of money may be a necessity. Moreover, a creative class (potentially everyone alive, by the way) must get smart about what's going on. Money is an android with a mind of it's own. We created it; it required humanity to get up and walk. But once it set out into the world, it began to pursue it's own routes, pushing and pulling and influencing the world in ways that sometimes cause people of great intellect and purported integrity to disagree vehemently. If we're smart-- if we're paying attention and don't want money's limited, artificial intelligence to push us around-- we have a fighting chance to build a culture that values the subjective rather than the objective. I am moved much more deeply before the motley altar of beauty than at the sparkling altar of money. One radiates energy out into the universe, the other sits and gathers mass.
I would rather light up the night.
--MS
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Money's Value is a Matter of Perception
What does it cost?
The question practically exists outside of time, outside the world. It's built into almost every transaction, and cost is not always a matter of money.
The old saying goes that you can have only two of the following: faster, better, or cheaper. Notice that the arrangement doesn't even require you to determine what kind of goods or service you're asking for.
Money is a measurement of condensed time. Money makes up for what sweat might possibly yield, or for what sweat simply cannot produce alone. A toaster is cheap, but no amount of independent labor from even a smart, motivated person will yield one.
But money is unlike most other human inventions. More than most other things, you want it. Don't pretend otherwise. Sure, you love your family and your freedom, but what do you spend literally two thousand hours a year pursuing doggedly? Like the slogan from the early days of MTV, "Too much is never enough." Pursuit of money sends us all to grinding labor, to endless stress, to acrimony and sacrifice, often with limited promise of lasting rewards. The madness is that it usually takes money to make money, or to make money in any substantive amount that tips the balance of future in a measurable way. That's why most of us are beholden to others who control deeper reservoirs of the stuff than we have.
But does it genuinely, authentically, deeply matter?
If you were to ask most people if they'd willingly abide the great works of art being cast onto a bonfire in return for ten bucks, I'd like to believe that most would say no, even if they knew nothing about art. But ask the same thing for ten million dollars, and I fear for our cultural legacy.
Money matters because it's a proxy for time, and time is the ultimate measure of value. Time means life. Money means you can buy the services that free you from labor, and the goods that facilitate--or promise, at least--comfort, pleasure, or confidence, and all of that means you have more time for life.
The problem is that money has become a misdirected proxy for meaning. We conflate the purchase power of money as a means to an end, as the reason to be alive. But see: we're artists here at 1AU. We already have reasons to live. There are photographs to make, poems to write, movies to produce, dances to choreograph. There are books to read and soups to taste and hands to hold. The size of bank accounts do not make those soups any more savory, those hands any warmer, those books any more compelling. As Pete Seeger said, "How can I keep from singing?"
The money isn't important.
Okay, I see it: you're cringing. Your face is tight, you've already glanced away, thinking you may not finish this naive prayer, this tale of misplaced, juvenile innocence. Just read a few more lines.
I'm fully aware of money's great power, just as I rightfully fear the power of the gun wielded by the undisciplined guerrilla fighter. Only fools pretend there's no potential for profound influence. The fantasy is always that we can James Bond that gun out of the fighter's hand, or, more on topic, suddenly find ourselves flush with cash. Do we want the gun? Nope. Neither do we want the cash. We want the freedom that each affords us. We want the autonomy, the security, the clarity about how to manage our next few precious minutes of this fleeting life. But consider that gun: what would you possibly do with it? Grabbing it gives you nothing but instantaneous sovereignty over circumstance. It neither feeds you, nor shelters your allies, nor brings you love.
Therefore my thesis solidifies. The pursuit of money may be a necessity of the modern world, just as more visceral pursuits are the immediate necessities of pre-industrialized cultures. But as a means to an end, it's worthless. It is it's own end: money pursues more of itself. The moment it gets any greater cultural value beyond being simply a tool, it becomes a false god.
Ironic, isn't it? As a media production team, we're in a very expensive industry, always scrabbling in a relentless pursuit for resources to achieve artistic visions. Artistic visions do not feed you nor shelter your allies either. But they are REAL. They are actual moments of meaning created out of chaos. They are subjective, and thus debatable, whereas money is always objective and outside the realm of debate. Without the ability to discuss or debate something's merits, value's proof evaporates like morning's bold promise yielding to daytime. We need money to do what we do, but it's not the money that matters in the end.
* * *
Next week we continue the bling-thing, with thoughts about money's easily misunderstood consciousness. It's true: it walks, it talks; we listen closely and have a few things to say...next week right here on the 1AU Blog "Faster than Light".
--MS
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Darkness in the Photo Department
The Chicago Sun-Times recently announced that it was laying off its entire photographic staff. Not long ago this would have been regarded as an almost incomprehensible decision for a credible journalistic enterprise, especially at one of the nation's larger newspapers. Now it seems like only a short-lived, below-the-fold feature. For people of a certain age who regard it as confirmation that an era has faded into the mists (and don't mind a little ink on their hands as they try organize pages through the jump), the mass photo firings are a temporal touchstone, even as it may mean little to the nation's youth. But the newspaper's actions reinforce just how much we have no idea what our culture is going to look like ten minutes from now.
Stepping back from the Sun-Times decision it's not particularly shocking to anybody who's followed trends in digital media. Sad, but not shocking. Everybody has a camera and everybody is snapping pictures. It therefore stands to reason that the value of all photographs must fall. It's simple supply and demand, right?
Yes and no.
Photographs as a commodity, regardless of their value, are no longer magical demonstrations of humanity's ability to freeze time. Yawwwn: these days everyone freezes time with a digital "click". The thrill is gone, baby.
But photographs as a means of capturing a moment, a feeling, an image of a place or idea so that it can be shared and pondered far and wide is still as powerful as cave paintings in primitive cultures. Photography as a collective activity is a talismanic wellspring about our beliefs and our fears, our pleasures and our sorrows. Photography is not about individual images anymore, for better or worse. It's a medium that's consumed in huge gulps, dozens of images in a sitting. It's our mode for distributing memory so that it fades less fast, our highway to insight about places and circumstances we might otherwise struggle to fully appreciate. But perhaps most relevant in the context of the Sun-Times's decision, photography is easy to do in a technical sense, suddenly a fully democratic expression, and it never used to be this way. There's one problem, though. The newspaper's staff weren't ordinary representatives of the democracy. They were comparative craft masters, and thus available for potential insights and acumen through an endlessly compelling art.
Has the ubiquity of photographic images completely reduced their value so that anybody with a camera is therefore equal of a professional photographer? Is professional photography, save for the most elite fashion and commercial photographers completely depreciated?
If the answer to any of that is "yes", then we must ask ourselves if all of the electronic arts -- there are many these days -- are therefore on a exponentially eroding value slope. Everybody now has the tools to do the impossible, at least compared to what you could do if you were alive in 1975.
Here's the circle I cannot square: if there's more to taking photos than just a point 'n click, but NOBODY CARES very much, do the merits of "philosophical quality" matter that much either?
Here's what I believe: even if in the hands of a joyful democratic majority, the potentials of photography to capture more than just random electronic signals is vast. Without pretension, photography pledges artistic, journalistic aspirations, fleeting moments of passion, a tension of muscles and breath and light as a photographer engages directly with the world.
I struggle with this intellectually, emotionally, personally, deeply. I cannot answer it in a way that I feel certain will win my case. I feel low. The Chicago Sun-Times has reduced its decision about staff photographers to a purely economic case, to money.
BUT OF COURSE THEY HAVE, you shout at the screen. (It's okay: let it all out.) As a business, that's their obligation. They're in it for the money in the first place.
Well, it may be their obligation, but it still causes me distress. This is serious business that goes way beyond business.
The blog this week began about photography, a discipline intent on finding inner truths, and it ended in a place decidedly in a different galaxy: money. That's why next week, we're going into battle. Next Monday, it's a grudge match: money versus everything else. Bring your camera. You're going to want to post a picture on your Facebook page.
--MS
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