Posts Tagged ‘World War I’
“Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves.”*…
Madeleine Adams on John Scanlan‘s new book The Idea of Waste- On the Limits of Human Life… and on the place of trash in our culture…
… Trash is the hidden foundation of modern civilization. The ancient Trojans waded “ankle deep” in pottery shards and animal bones and whatever else they threw on the floor until they got so fed up with the mess that they paved it over. Rome’s first underground sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, which used the city’s rivers to sweep away waste, was constructed in the third century BC. Writing over two centuries after its construction, Livy praised the Cloaca as a monument without match, and Pliny, writing about a hundred years after him in AD 77, called it the “most noteworthy achievement” of the Roman Empire, beating out the Colosseum and the Parthenon. At the time of its construction the Cloaca was an engineering spectacle, and it also became a symbol of Roman civic virtue. Sturdy infrastructures that served the people endured; flashy monuments to emperors did not. During floods, Pliny noted, “the street above, massive blocks of stone are dragged along, and yet the tunnels do not cave in.” Humbly concealed by walls and by continued elevations of the surface of the city through centuries of accumulated matter, its invisibility ensured its durability.
No Roman subject could have predicted just how enduring an achievement the Cloaca Maxima was: SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus, or the Senate and People of Rome—the emblem of ancient Rome) decorates manhole covers and trash cans throughout Rome. European sewer systems of the nineteenth century drew many comparisons to the Cloaca. “And as would be the case much later with the underground tunnels and drains of Paris and London, its concealment had the effect of making it an object of curiosity,” Scanlan notes, “providing it with the allure of a place that held truth or secrets about the life of the city.” The sewers drew admiration from many quarters—photographer Félix Nadar explored Paris’s extensively in the 1860s, and London’s caused a Manchester Guardian reporter to muse three-quarters of a century later: “These tremendous undertakings may very easily be the most lasting memorials of our cities.” “Out of sight out of mind”—yet also: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” The sense that waste was a thing to be conquered became a transhistorical justification for increasing waste technocracy, but the mysterious underworld of waste has always beckoned to the chthonically inclined.
With the rapid industrialization of the Victorian city came the explicitly progressive urge to submerge its grime. Mudlarks, ragpickers, and sewermen populated London’s new underworld. The sewermen, with their “long greasy velveteen coats, furnished with pockets of vast capacity” for holding money, jewelry, and other cleanable trinkets, were a cut above the mudlarks. Mudlarks, mainly women and children who scavenged on the banks of the Thames, wore “torn garments stiffened up like boards with dirt of every possible description.” But this grime, inspiring contemporary works like Dickens’s Bleak House, covered everything: “Fog everywhere” opens the second paragraph of the novel. For Scanlan, Dickens’s fog is not only the grimy remnant of industrial production; the Lord High Chancellor presiding over the decades-old case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce sits “at the very heart of the fog.” For Scanlan, Dickens’ fog obscured the social apparatus—London’s bureaucracy and class system—thereby keeping the lower stratum from rising out of the perceived muck. Progressive urban projects further ensured class segregation as a matter of aesthetics. Ebenezer Howard’s 1902 Garden Cities of To-Morrow allotted spaces for the healthy and happy middle class, as well as for inebriates and the insane. His “slumless and smokeless” urban plans designed a future city with less (visible) waste.
But interred beneath the gardens of modern progress was mass culture’s growing pile of discarded commodities. Responding to the fragmentation of Europe in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin posited history as an endless accumulation of debris in his Arcades Project, which Scanlan calls a “strange literary waste-book.”…
… All waste goes through cycles of decomposition, buying and selling, or displacement. It was not until the 1970s that the idea of “recycling” appeared in opposition to “disposal.” England’s rag-and-bone collectors formed the economy of recycling before 1970. Rag collectors only appeared after the fourteenth-century popularization of the spinning wheel, which enabled the production of a surplus of rags for the first time in history. Bones were ground into fertilizer, while linen rags were sometimes reused to make linen again, or else they too were returned to the earth (flax makes great fertilizer). But industrialized clothing production in the mid-nineteenth century meant that there were now many different kinds of rags, some with trimmings and linings, some in blended materials. By 1949 these Mr. Krooks had to sort through some seven hundred and fifty grades of rags. “I can tell them in the dark,” Scanlan quotes a collector saying, “but you can still lose out on a deal if you aren’t awake.” By 1970, rag-and-bone collectors had disappeared as recycling became centralized by city haulers and municipal tracking codes. Secondhand stores and eBay keep decentralized recycling—albeit as an economy of trends and “vintage” styles—alive. Despite the “hunter-gatherer impulse” that thrills William Gibson when he clicks eBay’s Seller’s Other Auctions, browsing eBay, antiquing, and thrifting are, for the middle class, a pastime, albeit an eco-friendly one.
The “throwaway society” invented the idea that any commodity could be briefly desired, barely used, and tossed out of sight with impunity. The many tech gadgets you’re supposed to give dad this Father’s Day come with a gift receipt but no reminder that their lithium-ion batteries form centuries of toxic landfill. Dads—well, all people—form a bond with their phones and laptops. Sherry Turkle compares the oneness of tech device and human to “the diabetic [who] feels at one with his glucometer.” “The user who is engaged with their device is probably not given to contemplating the future waste that it creates,” writes Scanlan, “given that they are rather caught up in a permanently unfolding present that arrives on demand, through [our devices’] potentially limitless experiences.” But this constant media stream produces not only dead phones and laptops—it also generates media waste…
Looking for the future in the dustbins of history: “W.A.S.T.E. Not,” from @thebaffler.com. Read on…
* Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash
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As we grapple with garbage, we might send antique birthday greetings to David George Hogarth; he was born on this date in 1862. An archaeologist, he explored and excavated (1887–1907) in Cyprus, Crete, Egypt, Syria, and Melos… uncovering both the ruins of buidlings and the buried detrius of those civilations. From 1908 until his death in 1927, he was Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.
Hogarth employed T.E. Lawrence on some of his digs, and worked with him during WWI to plan the Arab Revolt— when Lawrence bacame “Lawrence of Arabia.”
“Journalism is the first draft of history”*…
… and newsreels were the first available footage. Pathé News was a producer of newsreels and documentaries from 1910 to 1970 in the United Kingdom. Its founder, Charles Pathé, was a pioneer of moving pictures in the silent era.
The Pathé News archive is known today as “British Pathé,” and contains all of Pathé’s work, along with the archives of Reuters, Gaumont, Visnews and others…
Before television, people came to movie theatres to watch the news. British Pathé was at the forefront of cinematic journalism, blending information with entertainment to popular effect. Over the course of a century, it documented everything from major armed conflicts and seismic political crises to the curious hobbies and eccentric lives of ordinary people. If it happened, British Pathé filmed it….
… Spanning the years from 1896-1978, its collections include footage from around the globe of major events, famous faces, fashion trends, travel, science, and culture. It is an invaluable resource for broadcasters, documentary producers, museum curators, and researchers worldwide. The entire archive of 85,000 films is available to view for free on the British Pathé website while licences can be acquired for other uses.
British Pathé also represents content from partner organisations, such as Reuters’ historical collection, which includes more than 130,000 items dating from 1910 to the end of 1984…
The entire Pathé collection has been available on its website since 2002. Now the 85,000 Pathé News items are also available on YouTube.
Explore!
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As we rewind, we might recall that it was on this date in 1910 that the British ocean liner RMS Olympic was launched. The lead ship of the White Star Line‘s trio of Olympic-class liners, Olympic had a career spanning 24 years from 1911 to 1935, in contrast to her short-lived sister ships, Titanic and Britannic. This included service as a troopship during the First World War, which gained her the nickname “Old Reliable”, and during which she rammed and sank the U-boat U-103. She returned to civilian service after the war and served successfully as an ocean liner throughout the 1920s and into the first half of the 1930s, although increased competition, and the slump in trade during the Great Depression after 1930, made her operation increasingly unprofitable. Olympic was withdrawn from service and sold for scrap in 1935.
Olympic was the largest ocean liner in the world for two periods during 1910–13, interrupted only by the brief tenure of the slightly larger Titanic, which had the same dimensions but higher gross register tonnage, before the German SS Imperator went into service in June 1913.
Pathe has the footage…
“The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.”*…
Social media could have been a boon to journalism and the fourth estate; it hasn’t turned out that way. Charlie Warzel‘s thoughts on why that is and where things might go…
Over the past decade, Silicon Valley has learned that news is a messy, expensive, low-margin business—the kind that, if you’re not careful, can turn a milquetoast CEO into an international villain and get you dragged in front of Congress.
No surprise, then, that Big Tech has decided it’s done with the enterprise altogether. After the 2016 election, news became a bug rather than a feature, a burdensome responsibility of truth arbitration that no executive particularly wanted to deal with. Slowly, and then not so slowly, companies divested from news. Facebook reduced its visibility in users’ feeds. Both Meta and Google restricted the distribution of news content in Canada. Meta’s head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, noted that its newest social network, Threads, wouldn’t go out of its way to amplify news content. Elon Musk destroyed Twitter, apparently as part of a reactionary political project against the press, and made a number of decisions that resulted in its replacement, X, being flooded with garbage. As The New York Times declared recently, “The major online platforms are breaking up with news.”
This is correct, but the narrative is missing something. Journalists tend to fixate on how our work is or isn’t distributed. Doing so allows us to believe that algorithms and shortsighted, mercurial tech executives are fully to blame when our work isn’t consumed. Fair enough: Platforms, especially Facebook, have encouraged news organizations to redefine their publishing strategies in the past, including through disastrous pivots to video, only to change directions with an algorithm update or the falsification of key metrics. They’ve also allowed their platforms to be used for dangerous propaganda that crowds out legitimate information. But there is also a less convenient and perhaps more existential side to tech’s divestiture of news. It’s not just the platforms: Readers are breaking up with traditional news, too.
Last week, the Pew Research Center published a new study showing that fewer adults on average said they regularly followed the news in 2021 or 2022 than in any other year surveyed. (Pew started asking the question in 2016.) There’s some shakiness when you break down the demographics, but overall, 38 percent of American adults are following the news closely, versus a high of 52 percent in 2018. This tracks: In 2022, Axios compiled data from different web-traffic-monitoring companies that showed news consumption took a “nosedive” after 2020 and, despite January 6, the war in Ukraine, and other major events, engagement across all news media—news sites, news apps, cable news, and social media—was in decline.
The struggles of legacy news organizations have no simple explanation. Trust in the media has fallen sharply in the past two decades, and especially the past several years, though much more so among Republicans. Some of this is self-inflicted, the result of news organizations getting stories wrong and the fact that these mistakes are more visible, and therefore subject to both legitimate and bad-faith criticism, than ever before. A great deal of the blame also comes from efforts on the right to delegitimize mainstream media. Local-news outlets have died a slow death at the hands of hedge funds. A generational shift is at play as well: Millions of younger people look to influencers and creators on Instagram and especially TikTok, along with podcast hosts, as trusted sources of news. In these contexts, consumer trust is not necessarily based on the quality of reporting or the prestige and history of the brand, but on strong parasocial relationships.
You can see how public opinion has shifted in surveys covering the 2010s. In 2014—squarely in the halcyon days of social news—75 percent of adults surveyed by Pew said that the internet and social media helped them feel more informed about national news. But by 2020, the conventional wisdom had shifted. That year, a Pew survey of more than 10,000 people found that “U.S. adults who mainly get their political news through social media tend to be less engaged with news” and, notably, less knowledgeable about current events and politics…
[Warzel traces the history of news and its relatioship to social media from 2013…]
It would be wrong to suggest that news—and especially commentary about the news— will vanish. But the future might very well look like slivers of the present, where individual influencers command large audiences, and social networking and text-based media take a back seat to video platforms with recommendation-forward algorithms, like TikTok’s. This seems likely to coincide with news organizations’ continued loss of cultural power and influence.
In a recent New York essay, John Herrman suggested that the 2024 presidential campaign might be “the first modern election in the United States without a minimum viable media” to shape broad political narratives. This might not be a bad development, but it’s likely to be, at the very least, disorienting and powered by ever more opaque algorithms. And although it is obviously self-serving of me to suggest that a decline in traditional media might have corrosive effects on journalism, our understanding of the world, and public discourse, it is worth noting that a creator-economy approach to news shifts trust from organizations with standards and practices to individuals with their own sets of incentives and influences.
Should this era of informational free-for-all come about, there will be an element of tragedy—or at the very least irony—to its birth. The frictionless access and prodigious distribution of social media should have been a perfect partner for news, the very type of relationship that might bolster trust in institutions and cultivate a durable shared reality. None of that came to pass. Social media brought out the worst in the news business, and news, in turn, brought out the worst in a lot of social media…
Speaking as a scenario planner (an explorer of plausible futures), your correspondent would suggest that while there are other potential futures, Warzel’s is entirely possible.
One facet of the kind of Warzel’s future that he doesn’t explore is worth mentioning. Stewart Brand is famously remembered for suggesting that “information wants to be free.” What he actually said (to paraphrase slightly) is that “information wants to be free or very expensive.” In a future like the one Warzel describes, journalism of the “what’s actually going on and what might it entail” variety– information that has a very real economic and political value– will surely survive… for those who can afford to pay for it. In a future like this, that kind of “insider info” becomes (yet another) force leading to an oligopolist landscape and the kind of social, economic, and political inequality that entails.
Lest we passively conspire in that future, we should all support the public media institutions that remain dedicated to democratizing “real news.”
Big Tech’s relationship with journalism is much more complicated than it appears: “The Great Social Media–News Collapse,” (gift article) from @cwarzel in @TheAtlantic.
* Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
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As we get informed, we might recall that on this date in 1918 newspapers around the world carried the headline that the armistice signed by Allies and Germany ending World War I had come into effect.
At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918, the First World War came to an end. The armistice… meant total victory for the Allies and the collapse of Germany. The armistice was not a formal surrender – this would come later with the Treaty of Versailles – but it ended all the active fighting. Celebrations occurred across the world after its announcement as the “war to end all wars” had finally come to an end…
source
“If we desire a society of peace, then we cannot achieve such a society through violence”*…
We use data from the Global Peace Index 2018 report, which tries to put a figure on the expenditures and economic effects related to “containing, preventing and dealing with the consequences of violence”.
According to the report, the economic impact of violence to the global economy was $14.76 trillion in 2017 in constant purchasing power parity (PPP) terms. This is roughly 12.4% of world gross domestic product (GDP), or $1,988 per person.
While those figures themselves are quite staggering, how it all breaks down is even more interesting…
More chilling data at “The Economic Impact of Violence.”
* Bayard Rustin
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As we pine for ploughshares, we might recall that it was in this date n 1914 that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie were assassinated in Sarajevo… which precipitated Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia… which triggered a series of interlocking alliances (that’s to say, which led the Central Powers, including Germany and Austria-Hungary, and Serbia’s allies to declare war on each other)… starting World War I.
Franz Ferdinand, ca. 1914
“Regard your good name as the richest jewel you can possibly possess”*…
Argument over a Card Game by Jan Steen
Before people had an image, they had their honour. For much of history, little was more valuable than individual honour. ‘Better to die 10,000 deaths than wound my honour,’ as a character in Joseph Addison’s Cato, A Tragedy (1712) put it. In his bestselling Of Domesticall Duties (1622), William Gouge declared: “a good name is a most pretious thing.”
Despite the persistence of the word and a loosely related idea, the concept of honour, as earlier eras understood it, is so foreign to moderns that it can be hard to grasp. A stereotyped account holds that in early modern England a man’s honour was associated with a willingness to use violence to defend his name, while for women honour was about the maintenance of a proper sexual reputation.
But this is a very thin and misleading idea of honour in early modern England. Personal letters and diaries of elites indeed reveal a preoccupation with honour, a sense of its almost inestimable value. They also reveal that honour wasn’t just about violence among elite men or sexual propriety among elite women. Honour concerned one’s whole person. Likewise, it was less a static, overarching code of behaviour than a loosely defined concept with an array of meanings that could be variously privileged, one over another, with fluidity depending upon the needs and objectives of an individual in a given situation…
On the complicated business of living an honorable life: “The early moderns had their work cut out curating their honour.”
See also: “Ye of ‘Bad Faith’.”
* Socrates
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As we wax nostalgic for a time when honor mattered most, we might send conflicted birthday greetings to a man whose life illustrated the early modern to modern transition from honor to image; Fritz Haber was born on this date in 1868. The recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber–Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas– thus enabling the production of more, more affordable, and more effective fertilizers, which in turn allowed millions to avoid starvation– Haber is equally well known as the Father of Chemical Warfare for his pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I, especially his actions during the Second Battle of Ypres.
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