We've yet to come to terms with how musicians are paid, on a per stream basis, by the big streaming platforms. Suddenly news comes from Amazon that they are set to pay self-published authors as little as $0.006 per page read. Longer books may receive a slightly higher payment rate.
If one had the goal of stopping writers from writing for e-book publication, or stopping musicians from creating music for the recorded music format, this would be a good strategy. It's hard to imagine another industry that would tolerate this kind of economic contract. If I only eat half of my meal in a restaurant, I expect to pay half price. If I drive my car less than other drivers, I should pay a lower price. If I buy something from Amazon and grow bored with it after a week, I shouldn't have to pay full freight.
Following in the steps of the band Vulfpeck and their album “Sleepify.” I shall self-publish an Amazon e-book with only twelve blank pages. “Sleepify” consisted of ten 30 second tracks of silence. The band encouraged its fans to play the album on a loop while they slept. Funds raised through this method were used to finance a free concert tour by the band. Spotify owed the band $20,000 in royalty payments and eventually paid up. They then pulled the album citing violations of various policies.
Readers, set your library of self-published e-books to auto-advance and loop. After all I have machines that read all my books for me these days. All I need to know is whether I liked it or not, and a few bon mot for cocktail party conversation.
We do a lot of our thinking through glass and mirrors. We want our words to properly reflect the world. We insist that as we observe the world, our glasses should be free from any rose-colored tint. And when a glass knowingly distorts the world, we ask that it be properly labeled.
Philosopher, Tim Morton, uses the passenger-side wing mirror of the America car to talk about the rift between an object and its aesthetic appearance. This is how he describes it in the introduction to his book, “Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality.”
Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
An ontological insight is engraved onto the passenger side wing mirrors of every American car: Objects in Mirror are Closer than They Appear. What we take to be the object “behind” its appearance is really a kind of perspective trick caused by habitual normalization of the object in question. It is my habitual casual relation with it that makes it seem to sink into the background. This background is nothing other than an aesthetic effect—it’s produced by the interaction of 1+n objects. The aesthetic dimension implies the existence of at least one withdrawn object.
Another way of talking about this “habitual normalization of the object” is to reverse the surface/depth binary. Traditionally, the real is deep underneath and the surface is the accident of a temporary condition. Objects behave normally when they occupy a clear place in one’s performance of habit. Weird distortions of appearance are surface phenomena that will clear out given enough time. Morton reverses these observations. Objects undergo a distorting normalization in our everyday lives. It’s when objects become unfamiliar and weird that their deeper reality clearly begins to show itself not as deeper, but as closer than their appearance.
While traveling for his many speaking engagements, Morton finds himself in unfamiliar cities, displaced time zones and strange hotel rooms. The real intrudes, not as a comforting solidity, but rather as a “hallucinatory clown.”
Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. This is the real trouble. The real trouble is that my familiar light switches and plug sockets—or rather my familiar relations to these objects—is only an ontic prejudice, an illusion. The REALITY is what I see as the illusion-like, hallucinatory clowns that lurch towards me, gesturing and beckoning (but what are they saying?).
The incident that brought me back to glass and mirrors was listening to a song by Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett called “Dead Fox.” It has a chorus with the lyrics,
If you can’t see me, I can’t see you.
The lyric refers to the sign you’ll see on commercial trucks warning other drivers in the proximity that if you can’t see the truck driver’s wing mirror, then he can’t see you. And therefore, he will behave as though you don’t exist, after all, you’ve had fair warning.
We imagine the possibility of a cyborg future and think of some strange grafting of machine to flesh. But perhaps it’s much simpler than that. Our first instantiation as a cyborg was with the broad distribution and ownership of the automobile. We’re never more human than when our access to the world is limited to the view through glass and mirrors. The car gives us all that and the ability to move much faster than an ordinary human.
Courtney Barnett’s “Dead Fox” presents a cartoon of the reality of our cyborg existence. We head down the highway splattering roadkill across the blacktop. Pollen floats into the car causing a sneeze resulting in a dangerous swerve. A truck driver checks his mirrors and then passes on the wrong side without signaling. Because if “you can’t see me, I can’t see you.” Esse est percipi.
Heading down the Highway Hume
Somewhere at the end of June
Taxidermied kangaroos are lifted on the shoulders
A possum Jackson Pollock is painted in the tar
Sometimes I think a single sneeze could be the end of us
My hay-fever is turning up, just swerved into a passing truck
Big business overtaking
Without indicating
He passes on the right, been driving through the night
To bring us the best price
Morton’s passenger wing mirror tells us something about objects outside of our habitual day-to-day life. We normalize objects into a background upon which a weird reality floats. Barnett’s mirror gives us a sense of the absurd tunnel vision we’ve forced upon ourselves—we barely even see the roadkill we’ve “jackson pollocked” across the tar. Big business tells us that unless we can see their mirror, we’re standing in the wrong place. And if we’re standing in the wrong place, we’d better give them a wide berth.
The temptation is to go around breaking glass as though it were to blame for the use we make of it. But Morton and Barnett show us that we only need to let the weirdness of glass come to the surface. Somehow we’ll need to forge a new alliance with glass – perhaps moving beyond perfect transparency and reflection to imperfection and distortion. If we turn this thought and look at it from a slightly different angle, we can talk about developing an appreciation for the beauty of translation.
Fintan O'Toole has a piece in a recent New York Review of Books called, “Beckett in Love.” He starts the piece, not with love, but with failure. Not an uncommon gambit when ruminating about Samuel Beckett. O'Toole begins with the point of contact most familiar to the person least familiar with the author. It's a favorite quote of the entrepreneurial set because it resonates with a strategy of dogged determination.
The quote is from the late work “Worstward Ho.” In an age where we thirst for “context,” except when it doesn't suit our purposes, O'Toole goes on to explain the larger context of the quote.
“Fail better” (which I recently saw on a recruitment advertisement for a financial services company) is followed a few lines later by a reminder that, for Beckett, the phrase is an exhortation, not to keep trying until you succeed but to keep failing until you fail completely: “Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good.”
The popular form of the quote is plucked from Beckett's “Worstward Ho” in an attempt to turn failure into just another strain of pre-natal success. Beckett, on the other hand, only found his own voice by delving deeper and deeper into failure, loss, exile, and poverty. It's fair to say that Beckett found a form of humor in these depths, but it isn't the free and superior laugh of the successful entrepreneur — the master satisfied with a job well done after several setbacks. Nor is it the comedy of bringing the high and mighty to earth, rather it's the laughter of the lowest when the epiphany strikes that there may not be a “bottom” to hit.
One imagines the corporate team building exercise where the high-priced enthusiasm consultant leads the bright-eyed group of employees through a visualization.
You know that dream where you're falling? Take yourself to that place right now. You're falling and falling. You begin to panic. Surely you'll stop soon. Perhaps you'll begin flying. But no, you fall and fall. What happens when the bottom comes? Terror sets in. It will be the end. It doesn't come. The exquisite disorientation of falling continues on and on. Numbness. And then, a moment when the absurdity of your situation emerges. You smile inwardly as you consider the notion that there may be no bottom to hit.
The New Inquiry's publication of an essay by Sam Kriss called the “Manifesto the Committee to Abolish Outer Space” really caused something click into place. I'd been thinking about the way that science uses concepts from romantic poetry to create enthusiasm and “buy-in” for its mission. When scientists use words like “beauty” and “awe” to describe natural phenomena they borrow from the romantic poets. The “love” of science is not at all scientific. There is no scientific theory of beauty; even scientists would acknowledge, it's not a proper subject for scientific inquiry.
Here's Kriss on what it means to abolish outer space.
We said earlier that for us to abolish something does not mean to destroy it. Once the cosmos was thought to be painted on the veil of the firmament, or to be some kind of divine metaphor, a flatness inscribed with thousands of meaningful stories. Since then it’s become outer space, a grotesque emptiness. Space is a site of desecration, an emptiness in which one moves, and moving into space means closing down any chances for Earth. C.A.O.S. is not interested in setting up limits. We want to create a future, not one of tin cans dodging rocks in a void, but a future for human life. To do this we must abolish outer space with all its death and idiocy, and return the cosmos to its proper domain, which is mythology, so that when we look up it will be in fear and wonder, and the knowledge that we live in a world that is not possible.
Sam Kriss makes clear that we've traded one mythology for another, but this new mythology is stamped with the imprimatur of science. Our new mythology equates outer space with adventure, bravery, ultimate knowledge, beautiful images of nebula and galaxies, and a vast new frontier for human exploration (and exploitation). In the back of our minds, we hold the possibility we may need a new planet if things go too off the rails on this one. Outer space is the source of a “reset button” for human-habitable planets.
The reality of direct human contact with outer space is instant death. Despite what you may have been told, outer space doesn't want us. Human bodies evolved on this planet with its atmosphere, rhythms of day and night, its particular gravity, and the many plants, animals and our other co-habitants. To survive in outer space we must replicate a minimum set of earth's qualities that have a necessary relationship to human life. Outside of normal earth gravity, we eventually turn into gelatin. Up and down, heads and feet, opposable thumbs, and the consumption of food, these are concepts that have no purchase in the vast expanses of space.
The beauty of outer space is created in post-production. It's like an using an Instagram filter to make your life look more interesting. For instance, the Hubble Space Telescope doesn't use color film–or any film at all. The distant light is recorded in shades of black and white. The color is a educational and promotional tool, not a direct perception of an object. Here's what hubblesite.org has to say about their use of color and seeing things that can't actually be seen by humans.
The colors in Hubble images which are assigned for various reasons, aren't always what we'd see if we were able to visit the imagined objects in a spacecraft. We often use color as a tool, whether it is to enhance an object's detail or to visualize what ordinarily could never be seen by the human eye.
Our idea of outer space is that it's over there–far away. We imagine ourselves to be Joseph Banks, Mungo Park, Charles Darwin or Dr. Livingstone in search of the undiscovered territory. For the most part, outer space is empty. There's nothing to discover. It's even emptier than “flyover country.” As Kriss notes in his manifesto, we lose nothing when we abolish outer space because “there's nothing there already.” Astronomers recently issued a report saying that based on data from the Kepler spacecraft their could be as many as 8.8 billion earth-sized planets capable of supporting life. What they neglected to say was that no human from planet earth will ever set foot on any of the those planets. While our imagination is infinite, our physical manifestation in space-time is nothing but finitude. Just like producing images of astral objects that can't actually be seen by humans, we create a catalog of planets, obscure unattainable objects of desire.
And while scientism ridicules the cosmology of others, it is still geocentric at the bottom of its thinking. We are already in outer space. Earth itself isn't outside of the universe. We are spinning, orbiting and hurtling through outer space. I already live in outer space.
