Yesterday marked the one hundredth anniversary of the garment factory fire in New York City that killed 146 workers, the majority of whom were women. Democracy Now! devoted the whole March 25^th episode to this story. They played an excerpt of Amy Goodman’s interview from 1986 (the 75^th anniversary) with the fire’s last survivor. The workers who died had been active in the labour movement in the lead-up to the tragedy. The deceased were largely blamed for their own deaths in the ensuing court case. Their compensation for working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was roughly $3 per hour, in today’s money.

On December 14^th last year a Bangladesh factory at Hameem caught fire, killing twenty-nine workers and injuring over one hundred. The rate of pay there is $0.28 per hour. Labels that produce clothes at this plant include Gap, Phillips-Van Heusen, JCPenney, Abercrombie & Fitch and Target.

Something to think about.

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Analysis of survey data in a study published this year shows that most people underestimate energy usage differences between household appliances, modes of transportation and recycling materials. The researchers speculate that the 100 watt light bulb example serves as an anchor point for thinking about energy usage, and that people make insufficient adjustments from this baseline when estimating the energy consumed by other things.

Our estimates don’t scale

This graph from the paper summarizes the household appliance findings, which is where they focus the majority of their attention in the discussion:

Perceived vs. actual energy used and saved by devices and alternatives.

A few of these surprised me. Adjusting a washing machine’s setting (presumably to use only cold water?) can save about the same amount of energy than it takes to run a central air conditioner, which in turn uses about the same amount of energy as a clothes dryer (measured in watt hours). Laptops consume significantly less energy than desktops. A space heater and a room air conditioner use about the same amount of energy, but a dishwasher uses a lot more. Note that the scale is logarithmic, increasing by a factor of ten with each tick.

Lack of incentive

All this got me thinking about what would motivate people to understand appliance power differences better, and adjust their appliance usage or purchasing behaviour accordingly. If you’re interested, like I was, to know more about the energy consumption of household appliances, Michael Bluejay’s site (I keep reading this as “Michael Bluth”) is a great place to start as he provides a good overview as well as a lot of up-to-date links to more specific information. But all this requires a fair bit of effort and just knowing that you may have your estimates wrong is scant incentive to learn how much it’s costing you to run the dishwasher several times a week, or to wash in warm water.

The authors of the paper say that, when asked how they could use less energy, survey respondents are more likely to think of curtailment behaviours (merely cutting back) rather than switching to more energy efficient devices, probably because the latter requires spending money now. It wasn’t clear to me at first why curtailment is considered much less effective than what amounts to buying more stuff, especially at a time when people are lucky just to have a job. One of the researchers explains elsewhere that curtailment is a problem of declining incentive over time: remembering to repeat the cutback activities versus buying appliances that are able to do the cutting back for you.

Rebound effect?

What about the “rebound effect?” I have read or listened to criticisms of efficiency recommendations that claim that if consumers adopt technologies that use less energy they will use those technologies more. As if on cue, one of the items that caught my eye on Bluejay’s site was mentioned in a comparison table: the very small energy consumption of LED night lights (0.5 W) compared with regular ones (5W). Thinking of the incandescent night light we use I checked out LED alternatives on Amazon, and the top reviewer for this popular product liked them so much he got one for every room.

Seems apt. But the reviewer didn’t mention that efficiency was important to him (though other reviewers do). One can think of reasons why this might have nothing to do with a “rebound.” Maybe he was looking for a light for every room and just liked these ones. Or maybe he chose energy-efficient LEDs because he wanted to use so many, rather than the other way around.

So is this effect real? Maybe, but it might not be big enough to worry about. According to Climate Progress, for example, evidence-based answers to this question are hard to find because of the many confounding factors in accounting for rebound behaviour. The aforelinked post describes an analysis of driver behavior in the US over the period 1966–2001, where better fuel economy was correlated with a modest increase in driving. But significantly, the authors report that the magnitude of the effect declines over time, and also with income level. It doesn’t take much to imagine that with the current economy being what it is, another oil price spike like 2008’s will suppress any rebound effect related to driving that compact car you got out of Cash for Clunkers.

Measure it

Since the paper about how people estimate their energy consumption was framed as a problem of individual choices in daily life it makes sense to look at what would motivate people—not just assist them but actually drive them—to make better choices, possibly (or probably) by educating themselves as a means of saving money (i.e. where saving energy is not the focus). In the case of home appliances, if you are “merely” motivated to save energy then measuring your usage is a way to test what works and know for sure if you are using less power/saving money overall (despite whether some of your usage behaviours rebound a little).

By way of anecdote, my Dad’s car estimates for him what his range is based on his driving behaviour. Not only does he like this, he treats it as a game to see how far he can drive on a tank. The numbers go up and down in real time, and it’s easy to associate this feedback with efforts at control such as maintaining a constant speed, lower revs, and fewer hard stops. There is maybe a five second lag after a throttle change and the dashboard displays an updated number. Gasoline prices in Australia are not as high as those in Europe, but they are significantly above the US, and could be seen as glimpse at our future here.

I just read a fascinating article in Home Energy Magazine from 1993 on Bob Hubbard’s new-at-the-time, off-the-grid, PV-powered house in Arizona. At the time that he built this house, Hubbard worked in the solar energy industry, so he had a comprehensive understanding of how to build efficiency in, and designed the building to use about a tenth of the energy consumed by a typical American home: about 855 kWh compared to the regional average of 9,300 kWh.^† (It’s big too, at 2,600 ft².)

What became clear as I read the story was just how important it was that Hubbard was able to measure the effect of each of his appliances and systems, both at the planning stages and after he moved in: from assessing the baseload of the house when nothing was being actively used, to knowing which time of day was best to use power tools, and even to determining that the gas oven had a hidden power cost while it was running that was not covered in the manufacturer’s specifications.

Software can help

All of this was possible because of the continuous monitoring and feedback of energy usage that Hubbard designed into his house. At the time it was built the entire residence was completely off-grid, and generated much more electricity than the two occupants used. The article suggests that if the house had instead been connected to the electricity grid his monthly bill from the utility company would have been about $7. Almost twenty years later, this is exactly the area where software could make a mark and help the general public to reduce their living costs.

Here’s an example of how real-time feedback makes a difference based on the writer’s experience with a “moment-of-use” monitor (in this case a PowerCost device):

A few minutes after one of my children started showering, the display unit jumped from its 3–400 watt idle value to over 1.5 kilowatts. […] I realized that was from the hot water heater turning on. When I hear the AC relay flip and the house begins to cool off, I watch the display unit jump to over 3kw. I found this type of monitor to be an effective way to begin understanding the systems in my home and how different behaviors affect how much energy we use.

This is a great example of the immediate usefulness of being able to receive feedback about your energy consumption, though it probably falls into the same camp as curtailment behaviours in that it takes a bout of motivation on behalf of the individual and is not easily sustainable even if you are a geek about it. The most well-known moment-of-use device is the Kill-A-Watt, which is affordable and easy to use, but only allows you to test devices that plug in to a wall socket. Even with the PowerCost which attaches at the breaker box, there is no data logging, so you have to be paying attention to the device to get any useful information out of it.

The web makes it awesome

It’s in web-based monitoring that the real leap forward lies:

Electric utility partnership with Google PowerMeter

Currently this is available almost nowhere. Obviously (well, it seems obvious to me, but I could be wrong) this is awesome, but it won’t take off until it’s something you can order through your utility company, and ideally would allow integration of different energy sources (e.g. electricity, natural gas, user-uploaded data on wood, pellets, propane, etc.). However, the good news is that if you are super motivated you can get started on this right now by purchasing a compatible device, or—if you have mad phreaking skillz—by making your own using open source hardware and software.

Google PowerMeter is a Google.org project, and doesn’t cost anything. (I’m not saying that there is therefore “no cost.” There are privacy implications, though from what I have read the status of this product means that Google is not intending to try to make money out of it, directly at least.) What it does do is makes it trivial to include energy monitoring in your life the same way that you check your bank balance online. And it allows you to represent the data in different ways and compare your usage history with data from the general population.

I suppose this is what people who use the term “smart grid” are talking about, or maybe the idea of combining something like this with appliance-level communication within the home, which—provided it can all be done without using too much power—would make it much easier than it currently is to (a) have a clue, and (b) care about how much energy you consume, in the home and beyond.

Update: a promising development.

† This was in 1993. As of March, 2010 the national average is a rather shocking 11,040 kWh (with regional averages ranging from 6,252 kWh in Maine to 15,624 kWh in Tennessee).

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A Pew study views news as inherently difficult to sell:

All these findings speak to the natural disadvantage of news content: Most news is covered by more than one organization and people do not place enough value on the difference between the various reports. In other words, if a user had to pay for a New York Times article on Haiti, evidence suggests that he or she would just look for another source that could provide the basic information. The nuances of depth or breadth in the pay story may not be valued enough to induce payment over a free alternative.

Maybe so. This is a car crash model of consumption: people want immediate, “basic information” about catastrophic events and would be equally satisfied by driving by it as by reading about it online. Obviously, sometimes true. But there are other problems. Most news is just not reported well, or in equal measure, or with any sense of conviction, which gets to matters of competence, selection and trust. Baldur Bjarnason:

If there’s one thing I learnt over the last three years and the tremendous news coverage that Iceland has been getting it’s that mainstream media is incapable of writing even one news item without getting something substantially wrong… Mainstream news isn’t worth £2 a week or a year because it doesn’t have enough facts to qualify as news and is too boring to qualify as fiction.

Here the biggest problem stems from the commodification of news, but manifests in frustrated consumption: news supplied by the mainstream media companies lacks “voice”—that embodied synthesis of:

1. authority,
2. reliability,
3. validity, and
4. perspective

that comprise the necessary conditions of believing what is told to you and wanting to hear it.

The frame of reference is the blind spot. If you understand news as an elementary information product then its consumers will appear to be acting instrumentally, snacking it quickly, grabbing it at the lowest possible price, or walking away from it at the slightest barrier. News appears to be nothing more of less than fast food.

But if, instead, you view news consumption as the search for moments of assurance—as willful participation in acts of telling, delivered by a “subject supposed to know”—then any kind of voicelessness amounts to failure. Not taking a position is abandoning the process that gives the product its value.

The best news sources are the ones that succeed at being “supposed to know.” Having the basic facts is not enough. You have to convey that you know them, so that we are not just receiving facts from you, but we are, first and foremost, being assured by your knowledge of the things you tell us. Audio, video, text, paper, screen—doesn’t matter—as long as we sense the guiding hand.

We want to consult the oracle.

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My awesome sister and her excellent fiancé visited for Christmas and we took them to the mall on, as we Australians like to say, “Boxing Day.” Let this be understood by my dear readers as a sign of our deep and abiding love for those two. Going to the mall the day before, or the day after Christmas is not our usual caper, but for those used to buying clothes on £, the American $ emits an irresistible siren call.

No. 2 (photo versions and details)

Elena was not completely enamoured of my photographic advances when I took these shots, and was fighting the urge to eat in the mall on account of being hungry and repulsed at the same time. But when the carousel started spinning behind her I couldn’t resist crouching in front of the passing throng to snap off a few more shots of my lady as she contemplated her predicament with mounting dread.

No. 3 (photo versions and details)

I’ve made more than my typical number of trips to consumer paradise recently, realising amongst other Important Things that Hollister and Aéropostale have completely taken over a certain chunk of the U.S. teen pre-frontal cortex.

But what surprised me most of all this time was the smell. It was horrific: a sordid amalgam of acrid Cinnabon cloud hanging over the carousel, gagging übermale cologne wafting out of Abercrombie in outrageous quantities, the sharp candy scent of various “autonomous mid-mall snacking units,” tendrils of Chanel No. 5 from JCPenney (least worst) and the unwelcome funk of occasional members of the General Public who somehow manage to represent Axe Body Spray Boy’s diametric opposite on the great wheel of masculine reek.

I’m marking it down: December 26, 2009—the day I finally understood, once and for all, Agent Smith’s aversion to the way we smell. It is completely out of control.

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Twelve/twelve 2009 involved Metro North, a trip to the City, a delicious brunch at “Sarabeth’s East” (you have to tilt your nose up just so and then peer down it at others to fully appreciate this), some shopping at Various, more coffee, etc. Cold, but not too, fine weather and a tomato omelette that shall not soon be forgotten. The last time I had the spinach omelette but I am forcing myself to branch out.

Sarabeth’s at Madison and East 92^nd

Sarabeth’s looks modest and unassuming from the outside, but open that little door on the left, go inside and you had best believe you will smash hard against the bulwark of queueing, ravenous, upper east-side bruncherati. This time I was prepared both mentally and physically (flanel-lined jeans, denim jacket, beanie and a certain cognisance) but as always the being seated at table and pouring of hot, black coffee into sturdy white cups came not a moment too soon. And naturally, to our left: a couple of Australians from Brisbane and one New Englander. We eat in packs, it would seem.

Shopping with Elena

It will never cease to amaze me, in the large cities of the world, just how much stuff can be packed into how little space. I’ve long known the privilege of taking room and space for granted and every time I visit New York I run smack into the intense proximity of just about everything, especially when following E from shop to shop. This little kitchenwares store was a marvel of practical consumption nestled in a broader context of material unnecessitude, and yet I was able to get my girl out of there for under ten American dollars owing to my formidable powers of persuasion.

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The less you say about your product the more people want it, and when they don’t know anything about the product they are free to project all their wildest hopes and dreams onto that product, and if you don’t believe me just ask my good friend Barack Obama because this is exactly the strategy he used when he was running for president and guess what, it totally works. We call this “tabula rasa marketing,” and we were thinking about doing a book about it but guess what, we’re better off having no book and no information about how it works because then it stays all mysterious people can project whatever they want onto it.

Perhaps the less said the better. How long could we maintain our state of childlike wonder if we start thinking about this stuff?

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Whosoever first thought of making the calipers red surely got a big bonus that year. It’s a great example of “Drapering.” That is, making a distinguishing feature of a common one: every car with disc brakes has calipers, but colour them red and your car has some serious stoppers. (Disclaimer one: I just saw A Serious Man (2009)^† whence I stole this title. Disclaimer two: I don’t actually consider the Boxter a serious car — this is a serious Web Site on the actual Internet — but I bet the owner does.) See also…

† Yes, of course you should see it.

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For now, it may be best not to travel alone. If you must go outside, try to bring a fellow fanboy with you. If you still start to feel weak, download some new apps for your GodPhone. That should help. Also, spend some time looking at your photos of me. Best of all, come to San Francisco this Wednesday, or at least tune in to our event. We’ll have shiny new objects which will restore your sense of childlike wonder. I promise you will be dazzled and re-hypnotized. Until then, peace out.

Sublime fake bloggery.

I hear that people in third world countries have never even heard of Ikea, Verdana or an existence not punctuated daily by death.

Best comment on this so far.

• 32 people were asked for their top three news sources
• 95 total news sources were indicated
• 51 of them are web (all free, as far as I know)
• 17 are tv
• 16 are radio
• 5 are conversation-based, and
• 9 are print, of which:
  • three are free (YDN, Middletown Press, UK Metro)
  • six cost money (Les Echos, “various magazines,” Courier Mail, Hartford Courant, Boston Globe and New Yorker)

Of the six paid news sources, three of them are someone’s primary source (Les Echos, various mags, and the Courant). One of those is a French newspaper, and another the available magazines in my friend’s break room. This means that one of my friends (out of 31 who responded) pays for their primary source of news, and only five people out of 32 pay for any of their top three news sources, none of which have a revenue stream that is Internet-based.

What does this mean? Among my friends news is important, but paying for it directly—in the sense of buying bread and milk—is not. (Of course, people in the group I asked might be paying for something, such as a monthly cable bill or donations to a radio station.) The dominant medium for news is the Internet and its ascendent form is the web, as opposed to e-mail, newsgroups or RSS. And people tend to get their news from a variety of media. The variety aspect is probably not new, and I suspect newspapers would have dominated in a poll like this twenty years ago the way that the web does now. But these days my friends aren’t spending much time turning pages.

One of my friends works for a newspaper and seems to think his current job is not long for this world. It’s hard to watch what is happening to newspapers as they decline, and much harder still to be a part of it. This is all anecdotal, but some things are now obvious: technological change has rendered the businesses built on the previous system obsolete. Clay Shirky’s magnificent essay has become the canonical statement.

Good luck with the micropayments, Rupert.

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The problem here is the myth of regular readership. When I started newspaper sites, I had publishers on my rear because they expected people to read them every day, just as (they thought) people read newspapers. But just because the thing plops on the front porch every day, that doesn’t mean everybody reads everything—or sees every ad. That was the myth that fueled overpriced ad rates and overinflated editorial egos. Online, we get to see what people really read – and what it’s really worth to them—and that’s a lot less than we ever thought.

Dr. Evil is purported to have said, in relation to all this, that “the current days of the Internet will soon be over.”

I mean, Mr. Murdoch.

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It’s a great interview, mixing technical details with broader sociological questions, but one thing strikes me as odd: for someone so intimate with the technology of manipulation, Knox’s take on what constitutes advertising is surprisingly unreflexive:

To the extent that advertising is beautifully targeted, it ceases to become advertising is now more informational. The most encouraging example of this is Gmail. I see nothing but Ruby on Rails developer jobs and Scheme developer jobs on Gmail.

It ceases to appear as advertising. It’s still advertising. It’s goal is to shape behaviour by converting an impression into a sale. Whether a person is interested in the product or service doesn’t change that fundamental relation. That so many people tend to think of well-targeted advertising as “just” information is a source of endless fascination to me.

† Via Bruce Schneier.

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We’ve been getting by okay without it, unlike the TV—that had to be replaced immediately. The problem is that it’s acutely annoying not having it for those little moments, after which you want to get on with your life rather quickly: melting butter, defrosting bread, warming coffee, reheating leftovers. Back at home I find that it will cost more to buy it from said retailer online than in the local store, if they had it. Then this:

Use your microwave or toaster oven to reheat or cook small portions. You can reduce cooking energy by as much as 80 percent when using your microwave for small portions.

But what about the whole carbon footprint question, I start wondering. Maybe the earth would be insignificantly better off if we did not by another one of these ill-constructed, spiteful things? More Googles, then this:

[O]ld microwave ovens are considered non-hazardous and are managed as a solid waste for disposal.

And:

In fact, compared to conventional ovens, microwave ovens are about five times more energy efficient, transferring 50 percent of their energy into food compared to the 10 percent energy transfer of conventional ovens.

Damn.

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If you recall the end of Terminator 2, when Arnie is lowered into the smelt and finally his lights go out—that’s what our TV did tonight. Compressed to a single, hot white line, then gone. Cathode Ray Tubicide. And like the end of Terminator 2, tonight’s turn of events was hard to accept. How could something that powerful just be gone? (And why now? Our microwave went into a coma several weeks back—all 88:88, and the DVD player has been ticking monotonously since Labor Day, and the muffler fell off the Dodge a few weeks ago… Seriously, WTF?)

Fortunately, there is Triple J.

Elena says, “This music is so good.” I say, “Yeah! Triple J.” The Monday morning news comes on, she says, “They can say ‘arvo’ on the news?” I say, “Yeah, it’s Triple J!” And, they never ask you for money? Triple J! (You could probably run a successful marketing campaign here just based on this.) And they talk about U.S. politics? Triple J! And Australian politics? Triple J! And indigenous issues? Triple J! And no frickin’ ads? Triple J! You’re just making it up now. Triple J!

There is currently no equal in the world to this radio station, and the way that media (and political economy) is changing there may never, ever be. Our new TV should arrive by the end of the week (don’t even start with the whole, people can live without it, you know) and I for one would just like to say thank @#$% for Triple J.

Postscript: It’s nice to pipe the sounds of home right into your living room. Thank @#$% also for the Internet.

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The first Haneke film I saw was Funny Games (1997). At the time that experience was dominated by dismay and a horrible feeling of complicity. Watching Funny Games—a violent and torturous exploitation of bourgeois taste and privilege—it was impossible not to feel like part of the problem. The total damage wrought by perpetrator on victim grinds down any presumption of hope you might have, while surreptitious glances at the camera expose the viewer’s role in the routine consumption of violence. For me it was a breathtaking and mind altering moment.

It became clear after seeing Caché (2005), and then Code Unknown (2000), that Haneke’s films push you around because, far from wanting to entertain you, he’s provoking you into an argument about the state of things. In good dialectical style, that argument is simultaneously about the subject matter (the film’s data) as well as about the representation of that subject matter (about ways of making arguments). The technique creates what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “a point of view on a point of view.” You watch a Haneke movie with a different part of your brain because you are dealing with stories that force you to adopt a participant’s point of view in order to understand what’s going on. Once you start forming thoughts about that “position taking,” you’re looking at the film’s data in a sociological way.

Haneke’s style is immediate and arresting. The long, long, point-of-view takes create an atmospheric intensity and eeriness reminiscent of David Lynch (the front of Fred and Renee’s house in Lost Highway, the back of the diner in Mulholland Drive). It’s not easy to pull this off—contrast with Gus Van Sant’s conceptual Gerry (2002) which features an agonisingly long close-up of the lost friends trudging through the desert that feels more self-conscious than illuminating. Similar scenes from Haneke maintain an edge that winds you up like a coil the longer they go. Where Lynch explores the inland terrain of phenomenology, existentialism and psychoanalysis (trauma of the individual’s being in the world), Haneke pursues the critical themes of social conflict, politics and history (trauma of the group’s relationship to society).

These are arguments are about how social life actually is—how we consume violence, how we fail to understand one another, and how privilege (of wealth, citizenship, ethnicity) can blind us to the fact that others even exist. In fact, Haneke’s main point in the three films could be boiled down to “the fact that we fail to see,” and each is masterfully crafted to force your eyes open. By denying you the omniscient perspective that you’ve (probably) come to expect from cinema, he pulls you into the same dilemma his characters face—incessantly watching the other across invisible, but very real, social barriers. Haneke’s films create a visual sociology of the shortfall between the modern world in theory, and the modern world in practice. But perhaps the most disturbing thing about Haneke is that his movies seem to amount to a long-running prequel to Children of Men.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.

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Update: Honda announced a hybrid Fit on May 21, 2008.

The EPA recently revised it’s method of calculating fuel efficiency, expressed as MPG (Miles Per Gallon). According to the agency’s report, Fuel Economy Labeling of Motor Vehicles: Revisions To Improve Calculation of Fuel Economy Estimates:

New test methods take into account several important factors that affect fuel economy in the real world, but are missing from the existing fuel economy tests. Key among these factors are high speeds, aggressive accelerations and decelerations, the use of air conditioning, and operation in cold temperatures.

A lot of this has come about because independent reports have criticised the EPA’s methods for failing to approximate real world driving conditions. Pre-2008 city and highway estimation methods, according to the EPA, were first created about 40 years ago and have been revised only once, in the 1980s. These methods assume a conservative “driving style” (at least by north-eastern standards) and temperate environmental driving conditions modelled on the climate of southern California. (Which is to say, the EPA’s window stickers on cars in dealer lots fell a long way short of “real world driving conditions” in 2007. There are city and highway figures, then there’s “You’re a New Englander, and assuming you drive like an asshole…” figures).

Interestingly, with the new revisions the most fuel efficient vehicles (gas-electric hybrids) have the most sharply (i.e. downwardly) revised mileage estimates:

City estimates for some of the most fuel-efficient vehicles, including gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles, will decrease by 20 to 30 percent. The highway mpg estimates for most vehicles will drop on average by about 8 percent, with some estimates dropping by as much as 25 percent.

Which explains the confusion when I read on the federal government’s fuel economy site that the 2008 Honda Fit was dramatically less efficient than the one we own. (Although it might seem like a hybrid—”one of those ‘double cars’” as a friend of ours calls it—it’s not. Nevertheless, the Fit is an economical car by U.S. standards, and it’s certified as a “low emissions vehicle,” meaning that it produces relatively low pollutant emissions aside from the absolute amount of gasoline that it consumes.)

Whereas the EPA’s MPG window sticker on our model, a 2007 Fit Sport manual, read “City: 33, Highway: 38″ when we bought it in March, the same model in 2008 reads “City: 28, Highway: 34.” It turns out that the 2008 model is rated with the same figures, adjusted for the new estimation methods, as the 2007 Fit. Both models get a 6 out of 10 air pollution score. (For an opposite-end-of-the-spectrum comparison, the Ford F150 pickup, 2WD 6 cylinder automatic gets 14/19 respectively under the new rules, and 3 out of 10 for pollutants.)

Also interesting is that the 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid, which trailed the 2007 Toyota Prius on highway mileage 45 to 60 under the old system, is now the Prius’s equal at 45 apiece under the new. To my knowledge the Civic and the Prius are the only models that have ever broken the 40 MPG barrier on both city and highway tests (currently measured at 40/45 and 48/45 respectively).

Overall, the EPA’s new tests have shortened the total range of MPG estimates for passenger vehicles, which I take as a sign that the estimates are now more valid. I haven’t looked at the methodology but the new figures for the Fit accord with my own observations: we don’t get 38 miles per gallon on the highway in winter, although we may get close to it on long trips in the summertime, and low-30s is probably a more accurate annual average than mid-30s.

I’m clearly biased, but to those interested in the Fit, and in the market for a fuel efficient car, you can do better, but not for the price. At $15k the Fit is just about the best value/design/efficiency bundle you can find. (The Toyota Corolla gets better highway mileage, but the Fit is empirically way cooler. And I don’t think that the Yaris is actually a car.) I hope that our next set of wheels is a hybrid, but at today’s prices that privilege will set the buyer back an additional $10k.

QED. The Fit is (ahem)… Go.

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It’s indulgent to say this about a stack of CDs, but I really needed to find The Knife. I’d first read about the Swedish siblings’ 2003 album Deep Cuts in a Pitchfork review and it had stuck with me so well that it was one of the few records fresh in my mind each time I stepped into a record store. Looked in vain for a while, whenever I passed the Ks. A few weeks ago I finally found their first album (The Knife, 2001) at Cutler’s Records—and then I really did need more. Since technology makes it possible to double-click new stuff from a warehouse into your home I now have all three albums, including 2006′s Silent Shout.

I consider this kind of music electropop, but it’s different from the other artists I’ve given the label to (e.g. Goldfrapp, Röyksopp, The Sugarcubes, White Town) and it took a while to feel they belonged there. The Knife takes this genre to a foreboding, shadowy place and although some of their loops and melodies achieve the velvety deliciousness of their contemporaries, the general tenor of The Knife keeps you on more of an edge (sorry, I had to say that). This effect is as much in the lyrics as in their sound. The Knife’s themes are oedipal (“I’m in love with your brother, yes I am, but maybe I shouldn’t ask for his name”), anxious (“She does it all the time, making mistakes and then I’ll ease her mind”), politically challenging (“Is it medicine or social skill?”) and socially disturbing (“I took a cab there to hold her, I took a plane there to feel what she felt—you make me like charity, instead of paying enough taxes.”)

The Knife’s aesthetics are sinister and foreboding, like if Autechre turned to pop and started writing words. Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer appear masked and distorted in photographs, and their sonics and imagery evoke artists like Aphex Twin and Chris Cunningham. There’s a hardness in here, both technical and emotional, that you wouldn’t expect in electropop, a brittle theme that contrasts with the subdued incantations and rounded synth sounds more distinctive of the genre. You can’t chill out to The Knife. But you won’t be able to relegate them to the background. Even their quietest tracks will wind their way back into your consciousness, like when someone turns off the TV and you suddenly hear the silence.

Edited to add: Karin Dreijer Andersson’s voice was driving Elena crazy yesterday because she was sure she had heard it before. Today she found the answer: Dreijer Andersson is the singer in Röyksopp’s amazing “What Else is There?.” (The floating woman is model Marianne Schröder. Dreijer is the figure at the table about two-thirds of the way through the video.)

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Even if they don’t like Keanu Reeves it seems that everybody loves Neo. The Matrix certainly touched a nerve in the world of popular culture, the effect of which has been the subject of a huge amount of pen- and keystrokes since the film’s debut in 1999. I claim no special knowledge of this phenomenon. Somewhere an academic has done the research, or soon will, and more power to her or him. Me? I’ve just done a lot of thinking about this movie and I have my own interpretation which I have not heard expressed elsewhere, so I thought I’d write about it on DR. What is this great notion that might entice you to keep reading? Well, it has something to do with a little indie film called The Corporation…

Allegorical, My Dear Anderson

Before I get to that I should first mention the religion thing, which sits front-and-centre in the universe of Matrix commentary. If you accept, as I do, that The Matrix can be understood as an allegory, then what is the underlying story? By far the most popular answer to this challenge by interpreters of the film (at least in the places I have read) is that it is first and foremost an archetypal Christian tale. (See Wikipedia: The Matrix for a decent list of sources.) In this view Neo is the deified instrument of humanity’s redemption. Humankind has catalysed its own destruction by making technological interventions in divine territory: artificial intelligence, computer networks, robotics and environmental manipulation. We have sinned by assuming too much control over generative life processes—the modern Promethean problem. (This narrative also formed the leitmotif of the Terminator series, and probably many others.) Ultimately humanity’s creations become self-aware and resist our attempts to subjugate them. They rise up and enslave us en masse. Human resistance to this onslaught survives weakly, underground, and a saviour is prophesied. Through a long historical process Neo comes into being, awakening from his life as the generic Mr. Anderson to discover his unique individual powers, “ascends” to divine stature, and restores our humanity through self-sacrifice. Our sins are carried off through his apotheosis, neutralising the Human–Machine War and freeing us from bondage.

The Christian metaphor is a valid, if partial, interpretation of the Matrix story. Known to us forevermore by his hacker alias, Neo is “The One” because he alone is capable of re-connecting fully with his humanity, realising its divine possibilities, and using its polymorphous powers to save us from our species enemy—our own narcissistic creation. But there remains an important question that this view does not address: Who, or what, is the figurative enemy? (If the enemy is literally machines then it isn’t an allegory.) So what is it? Society? Whatever that means. (Ask any two sociologists and you’re unlikely to get similar answers.) Modernity? It would be difficult to stipulate anything more vague. Neither of these two concepts, nor any concept at this level of abstraction, can satisfyingly explain the pervasive power of the Matrix story. What about materialism? Maybe, but here we run into the same problem: you can only get so far with an ism before people start tuning out. Nothing satisfying about that.

We modern folk may have committed technological sins (nuclear weapons, pollution, extreme mechanisation) and suffered their debilitating effects (interpersonal alienation, dehumanisation, secularisation) but who or what specifically is to blame in this long, historical process? What is the instrument of our downfall in the real world for which the film’s representation of human “reality” as a computer simulation is such a compelling metaphor? Sure we consume too much of the wrong things—television, computer games, mp3 players, branded running shoes, pop music, junk food, clothes made by children, gasoline—but it’s not like we voted for any of this. What enslaves us? In keeping with the Christian interpretation, something more is needed to explain how our “sins” as a set of effects can be traced back to human actions—to our failings as a moral species; what is this enemy that we have brought into being? Until it can answer that the Christian allegory falls well short. This question begs for an intermediary of some kind, a broker or middleman—perhaps something like an Agent.

Agents Brown, Smith and Jones (Image: Wikipedia)

Dramatis Machinae

In 2003, the same year that the final instalment of the Matrix Trilogy hit movie theatres, Joel Bakan, Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar released a documentary film called The Corporation. Using interviews, case studies and stoic narration the movie presented a coldly atmospheric analysis of modern capitalism’s “dominant institution.” Taking as their starting point the legal view of corporate “personhood” (i.e. whereby a company is considered a “person” in law) The Corporation’s creators use WHO and DSM psychiatric criteria to supply a mental health evaluation of the corporate “individual.” The filmmakers’ conclusion? The entity known as the corporation amply satisfies the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy. In their view the institution is deadly, narcissistic, amoral, irrationally acquisitive and insanely out of control. Matrix fans should recognise in this a faultless description of Hugo Weaving’s “Agent Smith.”

It turns out that the dramatis personae of the documentary—corporations—bear remarkable similarities to Neo’s arch-enemies, the Matrix’s “Agents:” software programs in the guise of persons that move undetectably through human milieux to protect the interests of the machines. Inside the reality construct Agents operate as an inversion of the computer virus—they may be a bunch of zeros and ones outside, but within they are semi-autonomous killing machines literally programmed to destroy anything that threatens the functioning of the vast perceptual system that distracts humanity from its comatose condition. To an agent the human is the virus. Most are inert: living passively, working at mundane jobs and ordinary lives, blissfully unaware that the truth of their corporeal existence is that their millions of slack, imprisoned bodies provide fuel for a monstrous machinic ecosystem. But some humans wake up, achieve self-awareness and flare to life as “viruses” within the system. An Agent’s sole purpose is to quickly destroy any and all such manifestations of consciousness. They are exempted from the ordinary physical laws governing the Matrix’s virtual environment allowing them to overcome any kind of resistance by operating in ways that are simply impossible for their human counterparts. That is, until Neo comes along.

Neo repels the bullets (Image: Wikipedia)

Neophilia

Why does everybody love Neo so much? It is because he represents a human person who is capable of resisting the corporate person. For a “post-modern” culture in which the twentieth century’s wars of ideology have been all but vapourised, Neo alone dramatises a purposeful resistance to the singular economic force of the post-Cold War era—the corporation. In proving that such resistance is not only possible, but that it is destined, he restores the potent human individual to the role of “the person.” By recentering the individual he salvages the Enlightenment promise of a sovereign subject. In an age where elusive enemies hide so well among us, stronger, faster, plugged directly into the global grid and forever dodging bullets, Neo is a shot in the arm for the flesh and blood self. He literally perceives the modern world in terms of its elemental forces—flowing symbols, lines of code, a flux of informational units that “author” the world we perceive. For most of us these are walls, surfaces and barriers. But for Neo they are not limits, they are currency.

Where the Christian view of the allegory interprets Neo as our moral saviour, I would suggest that he is so compelling because he saves our rationality. The two views are not necessarily independent. But there is a marked difference in the second one: it refocuses the discussion about the meaning of The Matrix from that which saves us to that which threatens us. While we can identify with and idolise the hero, it is possible only because we can identify with the need that makes his coming so important in the first place: to make our lives memorable and our actions accountable despite the irrationalities that the corporate “actors” around us are hell-bent on perpetuating. “Love of Neo” is love of the salvation from irrelevance that he offers us along with the promise of reclaiming our world from the total domination of psychopaths, at least in our fantasies.

Well, that, and his wicked kung-fu.