TPO#12: A Shrinking World
This is Issue 12 of The Purposeful Object, a newsletter by Navneet Alang that’s about… trying to live the good life when you’re a mess? Uh, that’s my new tagline. This round: a minimalism of consciousness, not stuff; a new article in Eater from me; and the wide world of video game music.
An attempt to fill up time
It’s no surprise when a beautiful book stays with you. It’s a bit of an odd thing, though, to have a mediocre one linger. And yet somehow, I often find myself thinking of Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway. The sci-fi novel, set in near future Southern Ontario (!!!), puts forth a world in which people, well, walk away from a mainstream society called Default. The existence of the walkaways outside the centre is maintained mostly by tech: by the ability to move into new bodies (and genders), cyborg interfaces connected to a global network, 3-D printers to create housing, food and pretty much anything else. In a sense, it’s the idea of a 60s commune with the difficult problem of its material predication neatly solved.
The book is full of fascinating ideas but unfortunately is also marred by clunky dialogue and poor plotting (my review of it is here, but please forgive my writing: I don’t know what I was thinking). But for all the grand concepts and big picture thinking, the actual lives of the characters are rather limited in scope: they are huddled together in small groups, occasionally fearful of others, and mostly keep to themselves.
It’s been on my mind lately, partly because the book is about the only one I’ve read that puts forth a plausible(ish) view of the thing that comes after capitalism, but also because of the way in which the pandemic has caused life to shrink. We have all retreated from the world in some way, whether simple socializing or the broader interactions that comprise ordinary day-to-day life.
Yet, a surprising reaction among some people to this pulling-back has bee, well, relief. As this Daily Beast article notes, some people are feeling less anxious and less depressed. I know I have also felt this way — a strange sense that when you should be stressed by the emergence of a global calamity, you are instead much calmer than usual.
It makes a strange sort of sense, though. There is less going on and so there is less to manage, both practically and psychologically. There are no social engagements to arrange and pencil into a calendar; no meetings to go to or dress for; no FOMO from missing out on everything from readings to concerts to festivals. Yes life can be a bit boring at times but sometimes the emptiness feels both welcome and also full of possibility. All those things you had been putting off, not because you didn’t have the time, but because your brain didn’t have the space now seem a bit more possible.
We are told to expand our lives: to grow, to see more, to be more. But I suppose what the pandemic has left me thinking is what is one were to apply the notion of degrowth — a concept at odds with the basic premises of capitalism — not just to the economy or the environment but the idea of human consciousness itself? Not so much so as to retreat into a cocoon of privilege, but instead, to think: well, what if I had a life of less — less people, less activity, less stuff — so that I be more focused on what actually matters to me, not what has come to matter to me through circumstance? What if, as Ian Bogost likes to say about Twitter, we just weren’t really ever meant to speak to each other this much?
Work
Like most writers, I keep a little collection of of fragments of ideas. Mostly, I expect they’ll either get forgotten, or occasionally slotted in as part of some larger piece. Sometimes though, they turn into their own thing. Case in point: I had an idea for a long time was really nothing more than “some people treat recipes like scripture, some like intertexts.” Anyway, that became this piece for Eater that instead argued that, if you’re able, it’s often more fun to think of recipes as less like scripture and more like little units of technique or flavour that you can easily mix and match.
Ephemera
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This Wired feature on the evolution of video game music is bananas fascinating. I love, say, the work of Jesper Kyd in the Assassin’s Creed series (example here), but this gets into how dynamic game music has to be: “What this means is that much game music is in constant flux. It is combinatorial – imagine a constantly reshuffling Rubik’s cubes, forming into different patterns.... Each verse or chorus will be cut together into its own loop section. A three minute cue might have 6-10 different sections that all need to be able loop and connect with each other randomly.” What!
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Why procrastinating is about managing emotion, not time. One of those ideas that sounds very simple when you hear it but is helpful nonetheless to see stated plainly. As an absolutely awful procrastinator, the key seems to be in: a) just starting, even the smallest thing; b) breaking things down into manageable tasks. This is why I sometimes tell myself just to read a single page of a book — usually I end up reading quite a bit more.
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Yeah, it’s on the TED website but this — on the idea that there’s a right and a wrong way to be introspective — is interesting, especially for those of us who spend too long wallowing in our own thoughts. The idea seems to be that asking why (i.e. why am I feeling this) is actually less helpful than asking what: what am I feeling, what are my options, what can I do? Again, a little woo-woo, but as a general idea, potentially helpful.