Optimism moves east

[imomus]

The story so far: As Angrael turns into a paranoid alliance of embattled security states lashing out with ever-increasing violence against the very people who control their energy resources, dragging the West ever deeper into a vicious circle of hatred, reprisals against civilians, and the erosion of all legitimacy, any tender-minded and optimistic view of our future slips away into a bloody sunset.

Is it really just ten years ago that we were talking about long booms rather than mid-flight explosions? Our prosperity was going to continue and increase, and we were going to use our wealth to help the poor. Everybody was going to love us. Our children would grow up in a world that was getting better.



This diffuse, warm sense of well-being wasn't just a side-effect of the MDMA tablets everyone was taking back in the 90s. It was related to a sense that world trade talks (the same ones that have just collapsed at Doha) might bring global justice, that information technology was going to raise educational standards and democratize knowledge, that a new post-industrial economy was going to complement bricks and mortar business, and that the 21st century, just on the threshold, would be a wonderland where lifespan would increase and diseases be defeated thanks to gen-tech.



The images on this page show some short-lived kids' bookstore in groovy, optimistic 1990s London, Paris, Berlin, New York or Tokyo, don't they? It went out of business in 2001, didn't it, replaced by a store selling black, beige and cream clothes and fallout shelters? Actually, no. This "haven for little imaginations" is Kids Republic, a childrens' bookstore in Beijing, China. It's just opened.

The optimism, tender-mindedness and benign curiosity apparent in this store (something about its spirit and design reminds me of Oto Kinoko, the sound store in Kyoto I blogged about excitedly earlier this year, only to find it had already closed down) represent everything we in the West have lost in the last ten years; lost because of our clumsy response to 9/11 and Angraeli realpolitik. Who, in the West, would have children now? But it's nice to know that, somewhere, optimism about the future is still intact.

In 30 or 40 years, the Chinese kids in this photo will be running the world. It's hard to imagine them making a worse job of it than we've done.

Comments

Those two books had a massive impact on my thinking.

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

Read it! Read it!

I came to it through Batchelor who references it over and over. It's brilliant (but horribly written).

Re: Those two books had a massive impact on my thinking.

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

I've been working on this idea where one maps ASCII characters to colors, formulaically. I've got the vowels as deep colors, the consonants as pastels. I feel that by using color to depict meaning, we can comprehend the page faster. Little b/w squiggly lines are tedious.

I plan to map common English words (the/a/some/momus) to specific color symbols that take very little space on the page. So one can glance and pick up these common symbols with very little eye effort.

I believe color is the secret to much that we have yet to understand. But I'll hush now or momus might call me eccentric again.

Re: Those two books had a massive impact on my thinking.

[pixelmist.livejournal.com]

To synaesthetes like me this sounds like a normal day! :)

Re: Those two books had a massive impact on my thinking.

[(Anonymous)]

An artist of my acquaintance wrote an essay similarly trying to link color and music: http://www.katlubar.com/html/theories.html. I'm not all that persuaded by her approach (even though she's both musician and painter) but I think some sort of systematic set of analogies might be useful, at least as a sort of heuristic. --2fs

Re: Those two books had a massive impact on my thinking.

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

hey anonymous your post excites me because I once wrote a dumb program (Pascal) that mapped random thoughts&colors to musical notes. But it's totally dumb because I am not a musician and know nothing about how to make music work. But if we can figure out how to coordinate music with color I figure we will take over the known universe. rock on, harriet

Re: Those two books had a massive impact on my thinking.

[kementari2.livejournal.com]

But it drives us synesthetes nuts to see letters in the WRONG colors! Though if one were to try to hit a common note with as many people as possible, a reference like the following would be useful.

Trends in Synesthetically Colored Graphemes and Phonemes (http://www.trismegistos.com/IconicityInLanguage/Articles/Day/default.html)

Re: Those two books had a massive impact on my thinking.

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

hey kement, if things are configured correctly, you syntesthete nuts would see the page in exactly the colors that you favor. See? We all get our own synesthetic preferences!

Re: Those two books had a massive impact on my thinking.

[kementari2.livejournal.com]

Ah :) but we already do see them in our own colors, that's the point. Plus, many synesthetic perceptions of graphemes include things like texture, motion, gender, or personality - things impossible to match with mere color printing.

Still, don't let our quirks distract from what's a great idea in certain settings! And have you seen this article on sparklines?

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/000164.html

(sorry it's not clickable, lj was being weird about it)

Re: Those two books had a massive impact on my thinking.

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

<< perceptions of graphemes include things like texture, motion, gender, or personality - things impossible to match with mere color printing >>

hmm, I think you underestimate color's descriptive abilities. You think I can't depict motion with color? All I have to do is italicize my color and it's in motion!@!!!

Color and gender? must think about that one. I don't see color representing gender distinctions very well but that's just me, I don't see gender distinctions that well myself.

Personality? You assert personality cannot be captured by color? Have you not been listening to mr. pink imomus lately?