Reviews and Comments

I was not a big tumblr user - tinkered here and there. This book is a great account of tumblr's technical affordances as well as its cultural significance. It's written by insiders, which I think brings a lot to the analysis. I read it for research on federated/decentralized networks, and that meant I was most drawn to their concept of "silosociality."

The authors argue that tumblr has a shared sensibility, oriented toward social justice and creating "safe space." They describe that sensibility in terms of silosociality, which involved the maintenance of boundaries that is not always creating cozy, happy places. There's a toxic side to it. Still, even with that toxicity, silosociality need not always be demonized - it's a different way of thinking about how we gather (online or offline).

"Tumblr users experience tumblr in silos that are defined by people's shared interests, but sustained through inward-facing shared vernacular and sensibility, made possible by tumblr's features, functions, and rules." (52)

Navigating, learning, and becoming part of silos - this is hard. That's what drives some people away. But that friction is interesting and sometimes useful. Current discourse is allergic to silos and echo chambers (even as people flee to these kinds of set ups - group chats, private messaging apps) but that discourse is (to my mind) driven by corporate social media companies that want you to post more, and more, and more so they can mine the data. They can, obviously still data mine private messages. But their business model would have to change if people thought more about cultivating their silos and then moving between them (or looking for ways to manage the connections between their silos).

At any rate, this concept of silosociality is really interesting, and the authors suggest in the conclusion that it might be a way of thinking through the futures of social media.

The key thing that comes out of this collection of writings (taken from letters but also excerpts of various texts) is that Marx and Engels thought unions were necessary but no sufficient for revolution. Unions remained, for the most part, too narrowly focused on economic issues and were often hostile to political advocacy or organizing. However, M&E also saw unions as crucial organizing spaces, as "organizing centers" and as places where the working class "trains itself."

I read this as I work on an essay about unions as places where workers can engage in crucial rhetorical practice - learning to talk to other workers, honing arguments for labor, and gaining important experience in organizing. Until recent years, these "organizing centers" or "schools" for honing one's rhetorical skill with regard to questions of labor and militancy have been pretty weak. The recent interest in labor organizing means that we can think about union spaces as crucial places for learning, thinking, and practice.

This is a nice encapsulation of an exhibition that run at the Hammer Museum in 2022. The show was the first to focus on Ulysses Jenkins work, a mural and video artist from Los Angeles. The book has some great essays and a roundtable about Jenkins' work.

The best essay is by Aria Dean, who takes on how Jenkins' work deals with race and representation. She offers a reading that goes beyond the typical understanding of Jenkins work - that he's offering a fairly simple critique of racist representations of Blackness (especially his work "Mass of Images"). Dean offers a much more interesting reading of Jenkins' work suggesting that a close look at Jenkins' work in the 1970s and 1980s reveals "a narrative unfolding, one that originates in Jenkins's massive failure to assert a legible ontology of himself as a black subject, capable of wreaking havoc over the images imposed on him, and ends with an abandonment of this pursuit. By the end of this period, Jenkins – in a semi-linear progression – has moved away from grappling with the slippage between the black subject and its representation and toward a non-ontological blackness, or what he deems a new black universalism." (42)

This autobiography of video artist Ulysses Jenkins is an interesting look both into his career and the LA art scene at a moment when video and telecommunications were coming onto the scene. Jenkins shows how that technology opened up new avenues for expression but did not really change the core dynamics of that art scene.

I read this book as part of my research into Electronic Cafe, a telecommunications art project that extended from the 1980s into the 2000s. Jenkins was part of the first iteration of that project, the first version of Electronic Cafe which served to network neighborhoods around LA during the 1984 Olympic Games. Each neighborhood had a cafe equipped with Slow Scan TV, a Bulletin Board System, an electronic writing pad, and more. Jenkins was an arist-in-residence at one of the sites (Gumbo House) where he helped people in the neighborhood with both technical issues and by prompting ideas for creative projects and communication with other neighborhoods.

His career is really interesting, given his experience both with creating art across media and with organizing art collectives and labs around LA.

I can't believe that a book of essays about architecture is one of my favorite books of all time, but here we are. You don't have to know anything about New York City or architecture to enjoy these essays.

Sorkin was the architectural critic of the Village Voice for years, and this is a collection of his essays published there (and some that were published elsewhere). The main villain in this book is architect Phillip Johnson, who Sorkin absolutely despises. It's hilarious to read each and every take-down of Johnson in this book.

The best essay in the whole collection is "Dwelling Machines," which appeared in Design Quarterly in 1987. It's a discussion of how the design of homes has "diversified since the time the world became rational, sometime during the 18th century when the Enlightenment pulled the cord that turned on modernism's incandescent bulb." (188)

Here's one of my favorite sentences, from an essay that describes the Portman Hotel (aka the Marriott Marquis), which features a large tower of elevators inside. Here's Sorkin's take on that tower:

"What we have here is, in effect, a skyscraper indoors, in captivity, like King Kong!...But Portman blows it, doesn't play up the tower-ness of the tower. By stepping back the section of his atrium as it rises, he obscures his soaring shaft at its culmination, its most seminal point, its moment of entry into the disc of the as-yet-unopened surmounting revolving restaurant. Just goes to prove, though: size isn't everything." (140)

Don't get my wrong. If Vandermeer writes it, I'm going to read it. But I don't know quite what to make of this one. I loved the beginning, the middle was okay, and the last third was a slog. I think @sophist_monster's theory is that Absolution mirrors the Southern Reach Trilogy, which would track nicely since I love Annihilation, like Authority, and can take or leave Acceptance.

I will say that the book's blending of so-called technology with so-called nature (cameras that are seemingly organic, that change and morph as soon as they are examined, and that are eventually "shucked like oysters") is fantastic and vintage Vandermeer.

The book also does interesting things with time - time has always been weird in Area X, but it seems to take center stage in this book:

"Amid all this sea wrack, the excesses and mundanity, the heavy fog of the moment, what none of them - him, the locals at the Village Bar, the biologists - could divine Correctly was Time.

Not so much the passage of time, with which the locals were well familiar, as the way in which past, present, and future collapsed into each other. The mind became confused by the intermingled layers and whether the portents were ill or benign. Because so much on that coast, humid and hot and closed off, decayed spring to life decayed sprang to life. The eye, misled, did not know what was truly and forever dead. The eye did not know where to focus, could not tell what might next be resurrected." (33)

Even in a book that I wasn't gripped by, I can count on Vandermeer to keep me going with passages like that.