I read this out loud, really fast, to a room of people, about three of whom seemed interested, in St. Louis, last March.

Does this make any sense fellas? 

This was the prompt for the panel: "Vacancy is one of the defining residues of deindustrialization. It produces vacant land,vacant homes, and even lives that seem evacuated of purpose. Vacancy, in this sense, registers a nagging loss. It materializes decline. But it also points toward futures that are yet-to-be determined. This panel begins from the premise that vacancy invites a battle over futures and proceeds to ask: What kind? What sorts of futures do differently situated groups seek to create from industrial residues? Do these futures exacerbate longstanding inequalities? Do they enact an otherwise? Can they do both? And how do the historical, material, and affective remnants of what came before assert themselves as people try to imagine something new?
 
The papers in this double session all take up the afterlives of ruination, moving from the abandoned shopping malls of suburban America to tent cities inhabited by refugees. They take up empty homes, repurposed buildings, and vacant land in the US and abroad, clustered primarily in former steel towns and port cities. All of these spaces have been shaped by loss in one form or another—fire, demolition, migration, eviction— but they are not exactly backward-looking. On the contrary: all are spaces where more than one vision of the future is angling to take hold. They are spaces where loss has
created particular kinds of openings. In the process of mapping these openings, this panel invites wide-ranging theory work around the concept of vacancy. Panelists ask how vacancy is classed and raced, rendered visible and invisible, made available for intervention, and experienced temporally. They also consider whether claims of emptiness might be more precisely understood as claims about who has a right to the post-industrial city.

While all participants take up the relationship between emptiness and opportunity, papers in the first panel emphasize the complex forces behind late industrial “displacements,” while panels in the second highlight vacancy’s constitutive “openings.” "



On Corn and Soybean Futures 


While megacities are routinely declared to be not just the fashion globally, but a statistically real future-home for much of the world’s population, throughout the Midwestern U.S., peripheral, rural areas are achieving human population densities many times as diffuse as the global average. In many of these especially rural places, notions that this process is correlated with some broader de-industrialization pattern are difficult to imagine, as this change in the distribution of people in territory is coupled to numerous examples of industrial intensification. In places like this, “the future” maintains a tremendous amount of imagined continuity with the corporate, agribusiness, techno-futurist mask donned by settler colonialism in the immediate post- WWII U.S., but, crucially, articulated from within some imagined rural space and as a rural person. Outside points of industrial intensification, the specifically-human social landscape empties out: closing shops; obsolescing civic organizations, institutions, churches; re-orienting basic social services and civic patterns around streamlined superhighways of asphalt and fiber-optics.

Any vacancy is at once an enclosure. To confront the significance of vacancy in the contemporary U.S. as a scholar means necessarily to begin in the midst of a nested series of incomplete enclosures and not-quite-ever vacancies. The huddled masses yearning to breathe free require the legal, theoretical and military apparatuses of dispossession, not just to officiate the spiritual and territorial evacuation of the “new” land they came to possess, but to themselves be rendered in poor, wretched, tired need of said land in the first instance. This is perhaps why vacancy broadly, but especially as a sign of social decline under a settler-colonial paradigm, has to be proactively, even cheerily, ignored by settlers in its midst.

Given the popularity of explicitly human-rights-oriented, anti-racist, inclusive politics in the institutional landscape of the last several years, with the exception of the state and political landscape itself, the enduring presence and regular reemergence of variably-abstracted, violent, mascot images, each silently indexing the historical trauma of native dispossession, can no longer simply manifest destiny, but instead necessarily create an ambivalence that differentially undercuts and bolsters settler claims to territory. This mobilization of vacancy-images points to a removal that must be racialized, primitivized, and/or otherwise removed from any historical or contemporary continuity with any particular place. The strategies of settler colonialism necessitate the creation and curation of particular public stages, theatrical sets projecting a façade of generalized placelessness or place-blindness.

In what follows, I’ll talk about the relationship of vacancy and industry/deindustrialization in rural northern Iowa. In particular, I’ll try to characterize this rurality and its particularity, then I’ll offer a rather rapid-fire accounting of vacancy’s social and institutional anatomy, after which I’ll focus briefly on a particular tech that certain settler populations have engineered for diving under the social shockwaves emanating from the industrial intensifications that have characterized at least the last 65 years of agricultural development.

Part 1: How Forest Cities Think

In rural settings, given their already low human population density, the magic of the built environment and its various social media, its capacity to affect a proper nature/culture dualism, would seem to be at its most tenuous. In my home and field site of Winnebago County, IA, the county seat is a town of about 4,500 people called Forest City. For a few years in the 2000’s and early 2010’s, the chamber of commerce covered the town in a variety of signage bearing the slogan: “Where Nature’s Close, And Friends Are Closer.” In his book, How Forests Think (2013), Eduardo Kohn, dipping into C.S. Peirce, elaborates a vision of the rainforest and its myriad denizens as differentially empowered participants in a tangle of hierarchically emergent registers of interpretation (49). It’s his contention that the hard divide between human intelligence and that of other life-forms that has accompanied industrial modernity in the West softens under the stoichiometric logic of Peircean semeiotics, wherein thresholds of firstness - iconicity, resemblance or indistinction, sheer quality - spill into secondness - factuality, reaction, indexicality - and then again into thirdness - generality, convention, argument, law, symbol. To be in the forest is to find oneself open to all manner of possibility for non-human lifeforms to inundate one’s body and mind with signs, and, in turn, to tune one’s conscious and unconscious thought to the shapes and colors and movements by which life enlists matter (51-53). According to Kohn, the major part of forest significance conducts via the basic protocols of iconicity and indexicality. Symbolic thought, it seems to Kohn, is the category where human interaction emerges and diverges from the semeiotics of other life (60).

Since my first time reading through Kohn’s book, I’ve maintained an admittedly somewhat cheeky desire to articulate a counterpoint that would get at How Forest Cities Think. For our purposes today, I’d like to point out two things with respect to the mind of a small, rural, “city,” or what passed for a city up until the last century. First, the iconic and indexical presence of modern, built space in the U.S. cleaves toward a continuous, rigid, Euclidean framing at as many registers as it can conceivably influence: time, texture, proportion, shape, color, position, etc. Furthermore, and by contrast to the rainforest image Kohn provides, the symbolic presence of the built environment takes ultimate precedence as the zone in which ties to things and land and people can be officially established. Second, the builtness of the built environment stands out, and its edge discloses a continuous line of weird and unruly overlap, of sprouting and crushed vegetation, of spreading corrosion, of termites and rats, of loose concrete disintegrating into sand. Interpretation of this weird line seems to cut through the population like so much processed American cheese, but not cleanly. The ragged, ongoing, cut leaves people with localized, immanent, boreal tendencies set at idiosyncratic angles to some not-insignificant reverence toward all the flashy propositions and admonitions of urban, human, symbol-games. In the course of a given life, these elements combine gradually and seamlessly, and rural people become highly personalized articulations of often highly dynamic admixtures of these built and boreal (environ)mental tendencies.

Part 2: Industry Loves Vacancy

It’s hard to imagine at this point the effort that would be required to really reach vacancy in the settled parts of the world. In Iowa, the substrate of settlement dates back beyond the Northwest Ordinances, specifically the Land Ordinance of 1785 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Ordinance_of_1785), which laid out the survey patterns that would render the continent into vacant jurisdictions to be divided and sold for settlement. By 1846, Iowa had become a state, and plant and animal relatives of dispossessed Native people faced abrupt ecosystemic vacancies (“Iowa Indian Tribes.”). Intensifying land speculation nested vacancies within vacancies, the Homestead Acts brought a comprehensive occupation of the land by armed, white households who could get in the swing of farming quickly enough to survive and eventually augment the economy of the county through commerce and taxes. According to 2017’s census estimates, the percentage of Iowa’s population that claims Native ancestry is 0.3% (https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src= bkmk).

The ancestor settlers who first occupied these lands have generally left behind little sense of the conditions and ideas that motivated their radical relocations. We descendants have managed to get by feeling sufficiently human a few ghostly photographs, a rotten trunk, maybe a few words. Within a generation or two, the mechanization of agriculture, the Great Depression, the New Deal and WWII would inaugurate the creation of an extremely elaborate food system in which farmers have been financially induced to scale up their operations as much as possible by relying on increasingly elaborate facilities, equipment, fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, genetically modified seeds, computerized control and crop analysis, and artificial insemination. The plat maps of Winnebago County from even 1983, which at the turn of the 20th century show a blanket of names attached to 40, 80 and 160 acre plots (http://www.historicmapworks.com/Map/US/470552/Newton+Township/Winneba go+County+1913/Iowa/), show the consolidation of the rural population as fewer names occupy larger and larger tracts (http://www.historicmapworks.com/Map/US/126761/Code+11+++Newton+Townsh ip/Winnebago+County+1983/Iowa/). In many rural counties affected by the major structural changes in U.S. agriculture, nothing has emerged to soak up the human labor squeezed out of the farm economy and people have left. In the case of Winnebago County, a group of Forest City investors enticed a California-based travel-trailer manufacturer to open a plant in Forest City, before buying them out and changing the name to Winnebago Industries. A collection of interviews released by the Winnebago County Historical Society last summer features interviews with workers from the early days, describing the feverish process by which they cobbled their early motorhomes together, working to transcribe their designs only after the fact. The factory burned to the ground, everything had to be rediscovered, but then the factory took off, spilled new money into the town, and remains a major employer for the region and its brand a ubiquitous presence on the roadways and screens of the U.S..

The shift from farming to a manufacturing/wage-labor economy has maintained population numbers in Forest City since the postwar era, but overall the county grows increasingly vacant, and little old farm houses and groves all over the landscape gradually rot and sink and are reborn as more cropland. In the United States, we have seen an almost inconceivable developmental leap in this time, reducing the human population directly involved with agriculture from the still current global average of roughly 40% to less than half a percent (https://techcrunch.com/video/monsanto- acquires-the-climate-corporation/). It seems highly doubtful, even based on future- projections as dated as those of Earl Butz (https://www.nytimes.com/1976/06/13/archives/why-they-love-earl-butz- prosperous-farmers-see-him-as-the-greatest.html), whether any significant portion of the people presently involved in the day to day operations of commercial farming will remain politically or economically important to agribusiness.

So, factory or not, high-tech agriculture or not, the effect has been a hollowing of the civic landscape. The ramshackle old commercial uptown is generally a ghost town. The theater’s former owner retired without a buyer. It was plucked from vacancy by a non-profit organization. HUD matching funds were offered to businesses who would spend money to bring their facades into alignment with a particular historicized aesthetic devised by the chamber of commerce and an outside expert. A few owners bit, others took the opportunity to do their own unsanctioned renovations, one announced their refusal of outside funding with a printed sign in the window. The hospitals that used to serve the healthcare community have become an assisted living facility and a county jail. The former hospital/county jail was recently closed over asbestos concerns. The local paper, now subsidiary of a corporation which manages some 40,000 such papers throughout the country, covered the city council proceedings regarding the issue, emphasizing the excitement of council members regarding the possibility of creating additional parking (https://globegazette.com/community/forestcitysummit/news/local/supervisors- discuss-what-to-do-with-old-lec-in-forest/article_293eaa94-bb2b-56e5-b1d2- b6e13e209e40.html). Parking on the streets in uptown Forest City between 2 and 6 AM is a ticketable offense. Every night, the city meticulously curates its emptiness. The smaller, outlying county towns rarely fill.

Part 3: Openings?

Opening this landscape to alternative possibilities seems glaringly obvious given all this emptiness, economic malaise and the generally low cost of rural living, but this is not so simple. In practice, the people who would do such opening have been captured by student debt and/or have been educated for export along the well-known trajectories referred to as the rural brain drain. While this seems an opportune place for the fomenting of things like Katherine Stewart’s “Other epistemologies” (Stewart 1996, 29), the agribusiness, economic reductionism of the rural Midwest effectively exports critique, and especially anything that appears to be critique as such. Idiosyncrasies remain largely personal, solitary, hidden in nooks and crannies of the vast landscape. Opening local vacancies and displacements runs counter to the ongoing depopulation and industrial intensification processes, which have consolidated and, whenever possible, outsourced official, actionable, knowledge-making, mediation powers to distant population centers. Biographically speaking, I was educated in this milieu and nurtured for export, to work in a knowledge-making capacity in some population center. The openings and opportunities my work seeks to map/manifest remain aspirational, largely my own ethnographic-historical collage, and a facet of my statistically uncommon return to this particular field. Michael Taussig, in his article “The Corn Wolf: Writing Apotropaic Texts” (2010), characterizes agribusiness as "magical, disguised as anything but", "resolutely rooted in science as anything but ritual" (30). Agribusiness generates a vast network of theaters of public, close-knit, common-sensical, seriousness, while dismissing other scopes and styles of performance.

In the case of Forest City though, we might see the commodity product of all this settlement and development as an opposite, distinct embrace of vacancy, and one that mimics its basic disregard for place. To take off in a recreational vehicle, to adopt a motorhome lifestyle means suspending yourself entirely at the intersection of supply chain and wilderness, embracing placelessness, while at the same time expanding your home, your domestic horizon, the sanctuary of your idiosyncracies, to the ends of the road. Your life becomes one of calculating, controlled vacancy: seeking attention, social, human, symbolic interaction when the mood strikes or you need to stop by Wal-Mart for supplies; camping, exposing yourself to the signs of non-human beings, when you don’t.

Anthropologists Counts and Counts, who wrote about senior RV travelers in the 90’s, and James B. Twitchell, who wrote a book called Winnebago Nation (2014) each focus on concepts and images like nomad, pioneer, freedom, gypsy, and Indian, in characterizing the Winnebago phenomenon, and there is certainly some truth to those aspects. But what I see in an overriding sense is twofold: first, a mascot that presents a shibboleth of scope. Using the name Winnebago with such disregard, imprecision, ignorance and greed, given what it indexes for Native people, should be condemned, but we should also grasp that what it does in practice is to automatically weed out people for whom this disgusting symbolic reverberation takes precedence, and to confine the scope of interpretation to the time and place of encounter. “You must capitulate,” this frame tells us, “for the scope of this interaction, to a bad textbook history of naturalized, primitivized, Native disappearance before the march of American progress. It is a done deal.”

Second, it is an enormous mask, a special pass, a sign aimed in a more earnest and apotropaic direction precisely toward the ascendant technomass of the modern world. Recreation is the correct counterpart, the release valve, to work. If you want to be in perfect symbolic accord with the serious, down-to-earth, image of work ethic you’ve been cultivating, while living a life of complete immersion in the immanence of home, family, forest, and big box store, you must have a machine that can effectively bend space-time to touch those things. Donning such a rolling, gas-sucking, money-pit, mech-suit, which appears so nihilistic and obtuse from any number of critical ecological perspectives, constitutes, from the other side, a supreme act of faith in the never-say-die spirit of technological optimism. This is not a sovereign faith, but a sincere, at times uneasy, belief that must be confronted through the cautious attempt at mimetic, sympathetic magic, at drawing close to danger to try to move along with the movements of its power and work through the unconscious foreboding it stirs in your body. The hum of the engine itself miniaturizes and domesticates the shuddering industrial groan of great cities.

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Digital Glut

• 00. You were missed, Eric, but two out of three legs⁰¹ was at least enough to ambulate, and boy did we ambulate
• 01. I'm sure there's a 'third-leg' dick joke that I could make out of that, of which you would be the butt, but... ooohh, too late⁰²
• 02. Yes, I just called you a 'dick' and a 'butt' in one go
• 03. I initially used the term 'exchange', but the transfer was, in fact, omnidirectional on this particular occasion, which is entirely my fault, as there were things to be exchanged, but they will still be passed along through other means
• 04. A collective term used to refer to the ubiquitous accessibility of massive libraries of commercially curated media
• 05. Notably not 'everything', in fact; a limitation which factors heavily into this discourse

A recent assembly of myself and Triumvir Johnson⁰⁰ that, auspiciously, included enough time, both up and down, for intra-triad flow⁰³ of digital media, which, itself, is only remarkable in that it was a return from such a long hiatus, has caused a minor revelation in my music procurement and listening habits as of late: the Digital Glut⁰⁴ has dimmed my appreciation of music. Everything⁰⁵ is readily available. The dalliances with the new are still there, but rarely lead to the emotional entanglements that they used to; the sea is simply too teeming with fish. Goodbye, organic, self-motivated musical discovery. Hello, auto-generated approximation of taste.

Qwest made this just-around-the-corner future out to be unbelievable, possibly even disturbing:

Qwest Saloon from Toni Hess on Vimeo.

• 00. Choose-your-own Streaming Adventure, though Spotify is my deluge-of-choice, so I'm picking on them, in particular
• 01. What does that do, anyway? Are they fanning themselves?
• 02. A term I often use in reference to software in a similar sense to 'bullshit' as used by the monastic society of academics in Neal Stephenson's Anathem to describe meaningless or pointless innovations created for commercial purposes. i.e. Dynaglide lubri-strip, or Spotify's fragmented, seemingly incomplete social capabilities
• 03. Do you have any idea how much Haydn there is on Spotify? I just scrolled through it for several minutes, never hit bottom, and still have no idea how much there is...
• 04. Or worse, you did seek it out and it wasn't there; in the surprisingly limited alternate reality of hyper-libraries, exclusion too easily becomes nonexistence unless one is willing to straddle multiple realms. Tommy Lee Jones may only need to wait for the White Album's inevitable addition to this new alien format, but Tool is simply never going to be a part of your streaming universe
• 05. This is unfair, perhaps you did discover it; streaming services backed by unimaginably comprehensive collections aren't the death of discovery, your taste being cranked through an algorithm as you listen and seamlessly fed back to you as though you asked for it is the death of discovery

Enter Spotify⁰⁰: Qwest's quaintly anachronistic saloon becomes a certainty. It exists. You walk in, your taste intact, little saloon doors waving like a bridesmaid trying not to cry⁰¹ and it's great. You're getting buzzed on all of the 'neat tricks'⁰² that the software is capable of, which have little to do with the music, or even the service being provided, but, they are neat. By the time you've made it through the concertos, the cantatas, the symphonies, the Hungarian State Orchestra recordings, the Hungarian Chamber Orchestra recordings, the Heidelberg Chamber Orchestra recordings, etc⁰³, the bar is out of peanuts and you stumble home aglow with the listening possibilities. It's all there, you can listen to it whenever you want, and so, you don't. At least, not in the way that you used to; it's not special anymore. Maybe you searched for it, but you didn't seek it out⁰⁴, you didn't discover it⁰⁵, you didn't take the time to listen to it again and again because it felt so fucking good every time. You didn't even feel it.

• 00. Not actually all, but as near to all so as to not matter much⁰¹
• 01. You've probably noticed that I've been apeing the enthusiastic annotating from Peter's master's⁰² thesis⁰⁴
• 02. Not Peter's master's thesis, Peter's master's thesis, the thesis that Peter wrote to become a master, not the thesis that Peter's master wrote⁰³
• 03. Annotation is fun!
• 04. I'm not very far into it yet
• 05. Which was technically no longer an issue because of emulation state saving
• 06. This is a whole other diatribe that is actually more about me secretly hating most video games... so secretly that I haven't even told myself yet

I've experienced a similar phenomenon with video game emulation. The idea of having all⁰⁰ NES games was simply too appealing. I couldn't help myself. But, once I had them... just two clicks and poof, there they were... enjoying them became a chore. NES games were hard. They were mean and unforgiving and, in most cases, saving your progress was impossible⁰⁵. You continued playing because, at some point, you specifically wanted this game, and you only had one other game and you really fucking wanted to play Nintendo. Without that limitation, appreciation takes on the form of some wan, listless creature, chronically unimpressed⁰⁶. Three title screens in and you already don't give a fuck about the remaining thousand. You've successfully vaccinated yourself against this particular strain of Nintendo.

• 00. Thingness in this case referring to the reality of being without any sort of raison d'etre, somewhat in reference to Peter's references to Heidegger, Mitchell, and Ingold, which, in turn, all seem to be references to Plato's thoughts on thingness and being? I never actually read any Plato, but attempting to wrap my head around various ranges, junctions, and bifurcations of thinging like the toddler trying to carry all three stuffed animals at once is amusing; similar to the toddler analogy, probably most amusing from an outside perspective
• 01. As opposed to collections that progress, but never come to completion, a collection in which the impossibility of specific element inclusion is imposed outside of the collectors control is imbued with a vexing sense of futility
• 02. Spotify allows the user to 'save' songs and albums to a their personal library, but the library itself has no distinct advantage over the encompassing hyper-library that backs the service; both are searchable, neither have an explicit 'Play All' functionality⁰³, one is simply a subset of the other with a meaningless border drawn around it giving the user the illusion of collecting
• 03. This is based on my original attempt to find the equivalent of a random-play-all button and turns out to no longer be entirely true; the Android client includes shuffle-play buttons within the song, album, and artist contexts of the user's library, in each case shuffling by context

I've muddled my point, and reading back through, I find myself arguing against the slavering Ty of twenty minutes ago, but I think the thing that I'm getting at is this: curation is its own reward. A collection is just a pile of things exuding little more than their own dingy thingness⁰⁰, each inconspicuous amongst the plenitude until the collection is curated, the things and their thingness individually polished, cut, and set through deliberate, active appreciation, which is possible when applied to any pile of media. However, curating a collection that can never be complete⁰¹ is its own farce, made even more absurd by the pointlessness of the collection mechanism⁰².

Is this the fault of the misguided 'more-is-better' future vision seen above and the services that made it a reality? No, this is my own damn fault, which is easily remedied and not actually a real problem. Did my satirical attack on the paradigm of turn-key access to oceans of media vs accumulated ownership of individual works get more serious than intended? Yeah, fuck, Ty, chill out, man. Is the idea of version controlling our collective audio library so as to simplify change merging and make use of commit diffs to summarize the gulfs of time between triumvirate conclaves as auto-generated playlists just more of the same glut? I don't know, man, maybe we should find out.

Triad X

Compulsory Opening Statements:

I took some comfort in discovering, after first grimacing, then punching minortriad.blogspot.com into the address bar and scrolling all the way down to look at the first post, that it'd taken us  until the day before Eric's twentieth birthday to open this weird and patchy record of the decade now nearly elapsed. I don't know why I felt so excited by the thought I might have missed that auspicious date. I don't even know why I've gone ahead with this thing you're reading now. Something about the ticking by of ten's places makes my head ring, and I'd better not exorcise that feeling anywhere but here.

What have we done?
What eerie treasure have we buried here?
What has become of this decade?
What has become of this project?
What has become of the triad?

When I think about the mutations accruing in my own personality it is tremendously clear to me that they have been myriad, but I am unable to maintain a fixed opinion as to whether I am more or less like the self whose writing I read from this remove. I suppose I'm satisfied with that tension, leaping from a sort of perfect remembered continuity to moments of unidentifiable disgust, usually at the naivety, but sometimes with the style, the voice. Did I really think that? Was I playing? How creepy.


Fuck that bullshit:

I don't want to answer any of those questions. I really don't give a rat fuck about the answers to those questions. Those are questions born of the hyperbolic bloated discourse against which this hallowed blog was explicitly consecrated. Those are questions whose answers at least defy modeling and simulation through singular imagination. I'll not waste our time.

Requisite Commemoration:

What I really want to talk about, now that I've written those other things first, is an experiential shift in our more recent, typically dyadic, brief encounters. It occurs to me that we have, to a certain extent, shed a considerable register of our collective remembrances. What I'm trying to get at is though we maintain our respective abilities to access and recant relatively profound, narrativized scenarios in which we three once participated, we have sloughed nearly all of baroque in-speak. And in the wake of this purge we are faced with a genuinely novel terrain, a time never theorized in our sparse plan to 1. Leave town; 2. Do something with our lives; 3. Remain friends; 4. Sit together on a park bench laughing at one another's jokes as our corpses inevitably wind down.

I look at this list and 1 is done and 2 looks ugly, hairy, scary for me, still. I don't know how gym class is progressing, haven't heard it yet from the horse's mouth, but I'd almost put money on the applicability of those adjectives in describing that emergent plane wherein Rico becomes Rotta. And then I look at 3 and my face cheeses up a little bit, because out of all the ever-churning things I can claim to know or be in this world, whenever we make the time to regard one another I can always feel precisely that spirit which drew us together and know that whenever the right season does arrive the igloo can be re-stacked, the pieces reset, the game played anew; probably better.

Denouement:
Anyway, 29 has been an altogether profoundly lousy year on my end, though not my time spent with either of you fellas. Put glibly for the sake of time: I've been beating myself beyond silly with a mallet I forged from the difference between the world in which I daily find myself and the one I hope to help render from it. In spite of these regular beatings, I have failed to destroy the mallet using my head.
A truly dire predicament?
Perhaps. A few months ago I would have agreed half-heartedly and then concentrated on banishing the topic from my mind and getting my guts back in order. But gentlemen, GENTLEMEN! There is something else emerging from this murky period, something I apparently had to pry from the banks of the Winnebago. It's a sudden glimmer of mad hope, a blossom from some arcane bulb. Here's to the next ten! Here's to that bench!

Doorbells and Sleighbells

Hey!

K1: http://libgen.org/book/index.php?md5=67fcf57555c0c6bf25a1dda9624e4e5d
K2: http://libgen.org/book/index.php?md5=ed894bc9a5cc7545ab2a897e334f194a
Potions and Spells: http://libgen.org/book/index.php?md5=0432d67dde86bb5497aa82eb77123df2
Treasury: http://libgen.org/book/index.php?md5=51680594286dd3c001da278bec457c9f

Ecology

class User; has_many :issues # hehe

It's usually difficult to focus on the tiny passions, but it seems that I have prematurely achieved a life of contentedness and abundant leisure and that I'll be able to hold onto it for some time. I have always been a computer enthusiast and probably should have succumbed to that current earlier in life, but, well, you know, causality and serendipity and all of that other bad spec fic shit; now I have my girls and a happiness that I wasn't even seeking. I also have this job where I sit in front of a pair of computer screens for hours on end and write in a language that I learned last summer (recently, more in a language that I learned last month) and I fucking love it. I get paid to play Lego for a few hours every day, it's just that the blocks are significantly more complex and completely intangible. It provides such an intense level of focus that it is almost meditative at times. I have immersed myself in it so much that it is actually somewhat difficult to type in this text area; I continually find myself wanting to go kk up a couple lines or hhhh back to the previous word to fix something or jj escape to command mode. Above all, however, the most useful tool in my budding career is the environment that I work in. I went a bit hardcore and chose to learn how to use an industrial strength window manager called XMonad, which is configured directly in Haskell source and recompiled (this, in itself is a challenge as Haskell is a somewhat obscure functional programming language, and as such is non-linear in nature and difficult to learn - even now, I don't know it very well). It has become my most cherished tiny passion. My xmonad.hs configuration file has become something like a bonzai tree to me over the last few years. Rare is the day that I don't tweak something. Some days, I will take the day off to wade through it while perusing the API docs, trimming here, refactoring there. In it, there are subtleties of code that I genuinely find beautiful even before the consideration of what functionality they provide.

This single line, for example:

doTrans i = ask >>= \w -> liftX (setOpacity w i) >> idHook

The elegant solution to a long-standing niggling problem that this line of code represents is powerful enough to actually carry emotional weight for me. This one line allows the window manager to set the opacity of a window based on whatever window property flag that I want. It makes windows transparent. Not the most powerful example from a pragmatic standpoint, but to automatically set the opacity of windows as they are created without the need of an external utility is unheard of (XMonad is a tiling window manager, so without transparency, there is no concept of 'wallpaper' because you would never be able to see it and even programmers need pleasing aesthetics). There are many other solutions and I toiled away trying to get them all to work with moderate success, but the issue remained effectively unresolved for quite some time before I worked out this solution.

Another common task in the configuration file of every single XMonad user is window attribute matching. The built-in boolean comparison operators are, logically, equal to (=?) and not equal to (=!). Exact match is inflexible, so I wrote these:

q ~? x = fmap (x `isInfixOf`) q     -- includes?
q !? x = fmap (not . isInfixOf x) q -- excludes?
q ^? x = fmap (x `isPrefixOf`) q    -- has head?
q ?$ x = fmap (x `isSuffixOf`) q    -- has tail?

Native partial matching! It was a small revolution, but a powerful one. There are so many simple little efficiencies that I've worked in over time, and I am quietly proud of every single one of them. The file as a whole is something of a sacred treasure as it defines an environment that I have nurtured and improved for years. There are dated copies of it strewn throughout my various backup drives and file systems. There are obsolete versions of it that I dig through and pore over periodically to regain a bit functionality that I gave up in some underlying system changeover at some point. I don't get many opportunities to express the level of satisfaction that I get from working with code as I still refuse to have interactions with entities that I don't have a meatspace connection to, but I have the feeling that you guys will get it to some degree simply because you know what I was before I became enthralled with programming. Though, now, having written that out, I'm not sure what insights into my current affairs that would really afford you. Whatever. This is what I'm into now. Taye diggs.

I thought this might be helpful to visualize some of what the code does.

The title is an actual line from my client's code. I can't help but giggle every time I see it, though not because of the joke itself, but because of the image of the other guy on the project sitting at his computer giggling at it enough to have added the comment.

What has it got in its pocketses?

My advisor's Question: What do you see your thesis as doing?

I had an idea going into this thesis of providing some kind of ecological epiphany through a study of the labor of 'developed' commercial agriculturalists and their attendant societies/cultures/environments and, if I got lucky, to pull a fast one on old home town and old alma mater at once: lighting matches in the crawlspace where the tails of all the objects lead to things in dusty obscurity I vowed I'd bring back an image of the beast to the village. I lit out with with a determined curiosity, a shield covered in Said's writings on the crucial impact of positionality and my righteous library of ethnoecology texts into the maw of my matrilineal community and almost immediately realized some quantitative mistakes I'd made when estimating the weight of the project. 

While some of the interactions I would eventually have benefitted from my historical familial connectedness to the place, I was unable to secure any kind of sustained (cymbal!) agricultural work. My attempts to gain entry into the exciting field of commercial livestock production were complete failures. The farmers I spoke with were on autopilot, watching their crops roast in one of the driest summers on record, and readying their fleets to reap it. I found the working world and the workspace were more or less secreted, highly regimented spaces for interactions. Cultural anthropology in most cases elicits a group of responses similar to those I receive from New Yorkers when I say I'm from Iowa: "Ohio?"; "Idaho?": "Oh, you like diggin' up bones huh?"; "Wow! Hey, you ever read Jared Diamond? What tribe do you study?". Thus, I found myself more or less afloat. Lots of first dates and brief run-ins with people I knew growing up, but no protracted conversations, no admission. And I couldn't push it without alienating . No study, no researcher that isn't probing to cure some malady, or subtly vivisecting their subject would ever ask to just hang out and shoot the shit, let alone offer to help out with things. Where's the cool design in that? Where's the aloof magic? What is it you're trying to get from me? I could see these questions hanging over many interactions as they fizzled out in a haze of pleasantries and entreaties to greet my family members. 

My historical research of exploring the territory through records, writings, museum collections and genealogical materials proved excessively fruitful, and in the absence of prolonged success with formally sought or arranged meetings, I endeavored toward the second part of Geertz's characterization of fieldwork and just began hanging out, trying to catch my needle in a groove. The bars, the street, the organized festivals of the summer and all the doors opening out from these events became my milieu and suddenly sparks began to fly. In these spaces I met with consumption, the risky, sloppy, dark drunken communions, the slipstream of sacred stories and the not infrequent sovereign guffaw. Through its waste, the place suddenly related to me, identifying me as one of its confused dispossessed, returned somehow but not apparently making or productively rebinding to kin, not sublimating my raw energy into daily responsibility. 

For the thesis I want to give a general economy of Winnebago County that looks at the creation/production of nature (labour) and the destruction of its surpluses. I intend to do this primarily by telling stories that explore the surreal, shocking, humorous moments I encountered talking to people there last summer. I want to work from a point in your transgression piece where you characterize Modernity as the transgression of the sacred, Bataille's zone of radical negation. In this transgressed sacred terrain the old dichotomy of high (conscious? intellectual?) and low (ecstatic? corporeal?) splits the already corporeal sacred, giving an absurd moral hierarchy to the division of labor and the forces it organizes, disorganizes, naturalizes and denatures. The ethnography of 'development' exceeds the etymology of the term as it reveals but also conceals and must contain its opposite. This vibration manifests in the historical record (documents, landscape, stories), which silently guards the fragments of an unabridged, not for TV version of the 20th Century pioneers and Indians story, flattening and straightening it into an origami vector of natural-history, as well as logics of country and city, rural and urban as they bubble and burst from erection to impotence, as well in the slippery practical and theoretical distinctions between animals and machines. 

Beyond these more traditional things, the elephant in the corner of the room with anthropocentric little anthropology and its schizophrenically-culled, socio-culturally conservative frankenstein assembled eclectically from the academic temple of the conscious sacred in the name of humanity is the electronic digital computer and its growing cybergothic world. Ubiquitous computing orchids while we wasp, to recycle a popular natural trope, accelerating, enlivening and enveloping by the moment. For instance, deepening corporeal alienation by compressing social encounters into sequences of electrical impulses shot around the world at light speed for communion via baroque assemblages of oriental mountain ranges and puffed hydrocarbons. 

Sustainable development amounts to the project of converting these machines for animation (energetically and algorithmically) under general economy (fauna?,flora?, only harder, faster, arguably already intelligent - stones that walk like men). An anthropologically derived shot at ecology then would have to be a radical negation of the inter-eating biomass and its reterritorialization, something which no machine is yet able to provide. Cybernetic totalitarianism points to an emergent existence of vestigial immanence in a newly autonomous restricted ecology, not some kind of cushy 'co-evolution' implied in the recurrent romantic robotic leisure society visions of optimistic capitalists. 

Nick Land ends his collection of writings Fanged Noumena with the ominous challenge:

Level l, or world-space, is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-conifgured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to Level 2!?

Several of my experiences speaking with farmers and farm workers made me shudder with the uncanniness of the scope at which this process of cybernetic penetration already seems quotidian in big agriculture, which was already impressively hulking before it became an integrated network.