The Madding Crowd

Many different ways of looking at the Swarming.

New Paul Graham essay on Cities and Ambition is interesting. Predictably a little depressing for those of us stuck in cities that don’t really send a coherent message to their inhabitants, except perhaps the suggestion of a muttered “fuck you”.

Really, is Colombo even a city in this sense? Sure, a lot of people live here, but it seems to lack a certain urban cohesiveness or identity, just lots of little groups of people, generally divided on class lines or ethnic lines or both, who don’t really inhabit the same city at all. This could be my jaundiced view of the matter, but I think this is why it’s hard to say that Colombo has any kind of message or unifying metaculture at all. There are of course a lot of people who think it does, but they don’t seem to agree amongst themselves on what that metaculture or fundamental organizing principle is.

Till We Have Faces

Most of the plaintive introverts-are-people-too articles on the net will tell you that our world and our languages are extrovert-oriented. This can be demonstrated with a common-or-garden thesaurus: take the list of synonyms for “extrovert” and “introvert” and sort the synonyms by whether they are positive or negative.

Extrovert (22 total):

18 positive synonyms: approachable, civil, communicative, cordial, easy, expansive, friendly, genial, gregarious, informal, kind, open, sociable, sympathetic, unconstrained, unreserved, unrestrained, warm.

4 arguably negative synonyms: character, exhibitionist, show-off, showboat.

Introvert (62 total):

6 positive or arguably positive synonyms: modest, conscious, cautious, self-observer, solitary, humble.

56 arguably negative or outright negative synonyms: lone wolf, loner, nerd, autist, hermit, outsider, circumspect, coy, demure, diffident, disinclined, reserved, reticent, retiring, self-conscious, brooder, creep, drip, egotist, narcissist, oddball, weirdo, wet blanket, wimp, anomic, afraid, apprehensive, averse, backward, bashful, chary, distrustful, fearful, hesitant, indisposed, loath, mousy, nervous, rabbity, recessive, reluctant, self-effacing, shamefaced, sheepish, shrinking, skittish, suspicious, timid, unassertive, unassured, uneager, uneffusive, unresponsive, unsocial, unwilling, wallflower, wary.

I got started on this subject because I was going to talk about the NOSO project -the No Social Networking project, yet another antisocial networking site. Like Isolatr, Snubster, Nemester, Introvertster, and so forth.

NOSO’s website seems to have died sometime in the last few months (but there’s a good interview with RU Sirius) and the gimmick is probably dead too, but in a nutshell, the gimmick was that NOSO members would create NO events -which are precisely not social gatherings. The idea was to go to a selected public place and disconnect -to switch everything off, cell phones, laptops, neural implants- presumably in the vicinity (but not the company) of other people who were also disconnecting. To be alone in the middle of a crowd.

So: is the NOSO project dead because it never took off, or because it was redundant?

Wake Up, You Stupid City

The goddamn New Year is over, already.

As most of my regular readers know perfectly well, New Year (April 13/14) is a big deal hereabouts. Old harvest festival, pointless rituals followed earnestly by urban folk out of the vast inertia that history brings to bear. In my entire life, I’ve only missed the ritualized New Year twice. One year I spent it waiting in a hospital room -it’s a long story- and completely missed the whole thing without really noticing. That was some years ago.

This year was the second time, and the first time that I skipped New Year because I could, and because I wanted to: I ignored the auspicious times and festivities, I didn’t wear the colours, exchange gifts, visit my relatives or go to temple. (Actually, I haven’t been in years, so that last wasn’t very novel.)  I’m sure this isn’t a big deal to some of you, and it’s not really a big deal to me, either. Except that it seems to somehow mark the end of something. It was an enormous relief, is what it was. I don’t know how I stood it all these years.

Essentially, I spent New Year on the Internets -or at least, I would have if a friend hadn’t shown up with alcohol and marijuana. But it’s the thought that counts.

Destructor

The humpbacked old hags of fairytales had real-life incarnations who roamed London – as strange pub names and signs testify. Now these are disappearing along with their stories.
Guardian: Taming of the Shrews

There must be similar stories about every city. It’s particularly entertaining to trace the history of Colombo’s street names. Everybody still knows what you mean if you say Green Path (instead of Ananda Coomaraswamy Mawatha) or Duplication Road (instead of R.A. De Mel Mawatha), but did you know there used to be a road called Destructor Road? That’s where all the giant robots lived.

Living By Architecture Alone

Cities make an ideal laboratory for evolutionary biologists to watch adaptation happening before their eyes
Evolution gets busy in the urban lab – life – 26 April 2006 – New Scientist

Yeah, no shit. Oh, wait… you didn’t mean people, did you?

Naturally, most of the rapid adaptation that happens among humans is cultural/psychological rather than biological. I assume there are keen-eyed memeticists and anthropologists watching the urban evolution-o-rama and taking notes. on this somewhat more immediate (and therefore more interesting in an instant-gratification sort of way) level of variation and selection.

[I]t often becomes noticeable the extent to which rural towns and villages are constructed against the nearest city. Rural inhabitants’ own understandings of themselves continually exist in relation to nearby cities, with their potential to symbolise modernity, allow alternate social spaces, create different possibilities for personhood and social life and range of diverse phenomenological backgrounds and neighbourhoods.

Moreover [...] the very existence of cities is dependent upon the differences between the persons who inhabit them. It is a foundational diversity that is responsible for bringing the many different types of city into being; the discursive city, the mythical city, the physical city, the poetic city, the underground city, the late-night city, the working city, the women’s city and the men’s city. To this list we might also add [...] the ethnic city, divided city, gendered city, contested city, de-industrialised city, modernist city, postmodern city, fortress city, sacred city and traditional city [...]

Thus the city does not exist in an individual’s mind or ‘out there’ as an objective physical landscape but as a collective entity that gathers people’s emotions and memories, mixes them with architecture and elicits distinctive practices and ways of being being. Or put another way the city is not simply architecture alone, but a curious melding of ‘flesh and stone’.
Cities: an Anthropological Perspective

And to this profligate proliferation of cities we might add at least one more: the mundane city, the everyday city, the one that faded slowly when you stopped seeing it and just isn’t there any more.

Jack Hawksmoor in The Authority by Warren Ellis is a subspecies of human hyper-adapted to living in cities. Ellis interprets this in a delightfully cartoonish way, but that’s an interesting notion anyway. In a way it begs the question. Cities themselves evolve, I suppose, at least in a metaphorical sense. There’s variation and selection of a sort. But maybe we’re mistaken and they’re not all beasts of the same stripe. Could be cities are more different than they are alike, and to adapt to one is to lose another. Would I call myself a human adapted to living in cities? Maybe not. The city bothers me. It’s messy and noisy and dangerous and full of strangers. The city gives me adrenaline poisoning. I’m sure it’s killing me, sure and deadly as the cancer sticks. But I couldn’t leave it, either -I mean, maybe I could leave this city, though I don’t want to, but I can’t really entertain the idea of living outside cities altogether. I can’t take bucolic romanticism seriously. I may not be very well adapted to the city, but I’m addicted to it.

Or take Tom O’Bedlam in Morrison’s Invisibles, who declares that cities are a viral parasitic superspecies from outer space whose sole purpose is to drive their host -us- to create more cities, until we choke the earth with urbanity and take the virus away with us in spaceships to infect other places. (Of course, he was mad as a hatter. Poor Tom.) Not cities that we live in, but cities that live through us. Pirsig says something like this, in New York at the end of Lila -the city as super-organism, overtaking, overriding. Maybe it was just NY getting to him, eh? It seemed to contradict his own thesis, his Metaphysics of Quality, what with him placing the Intellectual so clearly as a product or output of the Social.

Writing about cities is hard. Small towns, world-spanning uber-megalopolises, it’s all been done to death. And when you’ve lived in a single city all of your life, in a way the city is writing you. Your perceptions of cities in general, no matter how coloured by what you’ve seen pictures of or what you’ve read about, fall back on the defining reality of your own blood and brick, flesh and stone. That’s where all the real building blocks come from. The smells and textures. The feeling of walking down the street, paranoid or pronoid by turns.