Change V: Boycott BP

I covered the "Move Your Money" campaign in my first cynical change post. Well, Boycott BP may have the advantage that there's plenty of reliable other gas stations to fuel up. But they're at a disadvantage. Here's an email from some progressive group (Democracy for America) declaring victory in the Boycott BP campaign, quoting from Convenience Store News:

A chain of Convenience Stores in Philipsburg, Pa decided to debrand three of its BP-branded stations:

"We are debranding BP. We will no longer be associated with BP by the end of the month. We are doing this because of the backlash and bad publicity from the handling of BP's catastrophe," Sean Lay, vice president of operations, said in the report. "We don't want to be associated with them anymore. We've had enough."[Convenience Store News]

They are, rightly, declaring that their action is having a positive response because BP gas station operators don't want to be connected to the company. But clearly they're able to adapt. In Los Angeles, there's a big refinery that used to be owned by Arco. It had a massive, three story tall flag over the front that said "ARCO." When it was bought out by BP, they put the name BRITISH PETROLEUM on it -- at the time, they were not called BP. There was some displeasure at that, so they rebranded the factory with a flag that said BP. Then they tried putting up a flag that said "BETTER PETROLEUM" (the 'Kitchen Fresh Chicken' of the oil world). That didn't take. So now the flag is just a gigantic American flag. And people are basically mollified.

Do you know where the name Exxon comes from? It's actually the result of a multi-million dollar consulting project that concluded that the best name for the brand would be a completely neutral name that no one had any associations with. Then Exxon-Valdez happened, and all of a sudden we all had associations with that name, so the tactic was ineffective. But if they'd waited a year and then changed the name, people might not have noticed.

Have you heard of Altria Group? That's the name that they came up with so that you would no longer associate Kraft with Phillip Morris -- even though they're part of the same company. God forbid your disdain of tobacco influence your taste in cheese.

I hope that the American consumer keeps tabs on brand ownership, or they're going to have a hard time figuring out what they're boycotting. Otherwise they might get duped, like the whole CREDO Mobile thing.

Change III: Detritus of the Past

The Economist has an article about possible trends in the future of the architecture business. Will we have cities that are based around auto-piloting cars as living spaces? Or will we have walkable cities with robotic delivery systems?

The note that The Economist leaves us on, as they always, do, cuts against the grain of the rest of the article:

But perhaps the whole exercise is misconceived. Cities are perfect examples of the sorts of system that emerge from unplanned preferences even as they seem to demand large-scale planning. The question is whether the patterns of that emergence can be shaped by changing the objects of desire, or whether it is necessary to change the desire itself. If the former, then experts in beautiful buildings and sleek aluminium have a chance. If the latter, the question becomes a whole lot harder.

Leaving aside The Economist's tendency to finish an article telling you why it probably isn't as important as they spent the preceding paragraphs telling you it was... the whole problem with utopian futurism is that if you want to build a model in real life, you have to answer the question -- what happens with the detritus of the past?

The problem goes beyond people's desires. The problem is that if you look at the world around us, very little of it was actually built in our lifetimes. I'm in Orange County, California right now; most of the city was built in the 1970s, and that's considered extremely new on the urban timescale. New York City is even older -- a city of ghosts. And yet, if you compare it to world cities, its a spring chicken.

But every generation only adds a little of what is new to a mass of what is old. The key changes to history come from some small new thing that manages to change the shape of the old things around it. For instance, the transcontinental railway managed to reshape the geography of the Mid-West even though most of the prairie folks still lived in pre-Industrial Revolution towns and life-styles.

So a successful dream of the future is going to have to plan for the detritus of the past. You can't bring the future command-economy style. Unless of course you are China. But you can figure out how the new thing can change the old thing, so that the changes will be magnified. They say that car culture is ending. But if you want to propose a vision of the future without cars, you're going to have to account for the layout of suburbs, the infrastructure of freeways, the many people whose lifestyles are built around cars. You're going to have to deal with the detritus of the past.

That's why, to quote William Gibbons, "The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

Actor's Equity

File this post under "Guy is frustrated at the bull that theater world shovels constantly."

I was talking with a friend of mine from the Neo-Classical Ensemble about the upcoming remount of Twelfth Night (which y'all should see, if you're in New York).

I asked about whether NCE had reached the first major breakthrough in the life of a downtown theater company: whether she and her co-workers were being paid for their time. She said no, that wasn't on the cards yet, although if their remount goes well it might be on the horizon. Basically, the only people being paid are the designers from outside the company, or if they're a member of AEA.

She also said that the upcoming remount is going to be $1300 more expensive because, as a remounted showcase, anyone they re-hire has to be Equity, and there has to be an Equity SM. Basically, it forces more Equity into a non-equity company.

Is this good for Equity actors? I guess it is. It creates more work, and while they're working, they're making a basic wage. But it is harder for the company as a whole to work towards sustainability because of the limit of the run, and becomes a problem for the industry.

The problem seems to me to have a similar problem that intellectual property, and maybe organizations like the Auto Industry/Auto Unions. We created a system to protect things that were good. But the system also protected itself--so that the people who were against the system (union-busters) wouldn't be able to dismantle it or ignore it. But now this new system is preserving itself to the exclusion of new systems, new organization, new strains of thought. A new theater company that wants to get on its feet finds their purpose blocked by the AEA.

That's the cycle, I guess, the reason every generation rises and winds up making sweeping changes to the systems around them. Time to be on the lookout for those systems. The League of Independent Theaters looks promising, but I have no clue what they're doing and how it'll work.

Economic Plan

Key points:

1) It is CC Licensed. That's not part of his plan, but it is hugely important to me... not just because it means I can drop it into my blog. It is important because it means he's taking open government as part of an approach to a free culture.

2) He begins by linking the statistics to the actual social impact of statistics. Thats exactly the sort of empathy and good priority I've always seen in him.

Now the actual plan:

3) Investing in Federal Infrastructure: This stuck out to me as being a little odd for being thrown into the "key points of my economic plan" speech... it saves money, and makes jobs, and I don't doubt its a good and necessary step, but he makes it sound like a priority.

4) Investing in Transportation Infrastructure: This is also clearly necessary, but I'm a little disappointed by the means. Handing money to the states/communities with a "use it/lose it" dictum is a good way to promote use of the money--but it also promotes short-term planning and waste. The National Highway System was a big investment, but it was already centrally planned. Why not a National High-Speed Rail System, like Joe Biden is probably for?

5) Investing in Educational Infrastructure: Well, when I'm coming up with these headlines, these bullet points make a lot more sense than the first time I heard the speech. Anyways, fixing school buildings is great, necessary, and I particularly like the shout-out to the broadband initiative. This, like point 1, means that he's listening to his old friend Lawrence Lessig in all the right ways.

6) Investing in Health Care Infrastructure: This is not part of the overall health care reform, but it is part of it. He's clearly in favor of a single electronic health file that can follow patients wherever they go. And in this moment, he's going to finally piss off civil libertarians who knew he wouldn't be their favorite President, but wanted him more than the wire-tapping/no-Habeas-Corpus Republicans. Privacy, privacy, privacy. I'm also confused as to how Obama will make this practice standardized amongst a whole bunch of independent bodies.

Still, I like what I hear. He is starting on the long process of distilling the word "Change" into a bunch of concrete, actionable reforms. Best of luck to him.

Political Theater: Trust

It's very easy, in the current political climate, the conclude that democracy is a binary system of government. 1 = Democracy, 0 = Dictatorship. A whole range of governments can fall into 0: Putin's Autocracy-in-sheep's-clothes, Lebanon's terrorist-hijacked-confessionalism, China's outright-totalitarianism, and Chavez's centralized cult-of-personality. In the other category, differences are considered purely superficial, divided between two categories: parliamentary or American-style.

But in reality, it is not just the form of government which determins the "democracy" of a country-- whether or not the people are free and representative. It is also the nation's culture. Voter apathy may make a government unrepresentative, or a culture in which politicians are not held accountable can become unrepresentative. One need only look at the titles of some of the 20th Century's greatest villain, to notice that Chancellor Adolf Hitler, President Mugabe, President Milosovic, or President Taylor all ran so-called "democratic" countries that quickly made it undemocratic, even when preserving most of the country's laws (except a few of the most important).

Our founding fathers, in addition to the form of our government, tried to instill a culture of revolution in our country, or at least a culture of criticism and skepticism. That's why we've engrained the protection of multiplicity of voices; why libel and slander laws don't protect public officials the same way, and why freedom of the press is held as important as a fair trial. Because in order for our democracy to stay a democracy, we need to examine the way that power is being allocated--not just in theory, but in practice. This is precisely the sort of examination we need to make today.

So why is this post about Theater? Because the form of my play Orchestration is designed for the examination of power on the stage. Because it is not just heads of state and international organizations who wield power; even on the personal level, the examination of power is key. Racism, sexism, marriage, education; almost any issue can be examined from an angle of power verses powerlessness. Perfect equality is perfectly impossible, so there is always a power balance, which is the nature of drama.

So this form which I've developed is built to exaine precisely that. Because I believe that you can never have something as the subject of the play which is not built into the form of the play. And indeed, the form of the play can also be part of the subject; a play willing to lay itself open to examination encourages that examination from the audience both in itself and in the world outside.

The form is as thus:

• to create a theatrical world on the stage which is aware of its own theatricality
• to invest power over that theatrical world in one of those characters
• to allow that theatrical world to both come into being and leave existence before the eyes of the audience.

Orchestration proceeded as such: a character named Jean enters the space, greets the audience, and leads in characters. He cues the music, organizes the dance, and proceeds to control the play as it progresses. Power flows out from him, through his pet creatures, and into the world. What is important is that at no point does he actually force anything onto the characters of the play; when one ensemble-member rebels, it is the other ensemble members who (at Jean's prompting but without coersion) force him to conform again. As more and more characters become alienated from Jean, however, the power fades, until at the end, Jean is powerless over the ensemble, who leave. Jean then ends the lights, lashes out at the technical operator onstage, and ejects the audience from the theater.

The universe of power is consistent, because it revolves around power as a mutual belief. In human society, one of the most powerful phenomena are the collaborative fictions which are given the weight of truth. Take, for instance, money. Money has absolutely no intrinsic value; even in the days of gold bars/coins, it was intrinsically valueless, and nowadays we have pieces of paper which by their own admission are only valued inasmuch as they represent something elsewhere. In short, money is only worth because we all agree on what money is worth. And as our collaborative belief in money gains or loses confidence, so does the worth of the money.

Yet if you read a play like Death of a Salesman or Glengarry Glen Ross, you can see the power that this fictional concept of "money" can wield over people. Why? Because of our belief in money. These beliefs, invested with our suspension of disbelief, can have such complicated and absurd powers as to take on a life of their own; an excellent description of this is in John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, when he discusses the confrontation between Farmers and the representatives of the bank:

The tenant men looked up alarmed. But what'll happen to us? How will we eat?

You'll have to get off the land. The plows'll go through the dooryard. ... We know that--all that. It's not us, ti's the bank. A bank isn't like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn't like a man either. That's the monster....

Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

No, you're wrong there--quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

It is imporant to know about these collaborative fictions and their effects, for obvious reasons. At the end of the day, it is possible to control them; in our current banking crisis, for instance, there are options of how to control or allieviate the beast.

In Orchestration, the ensemble enters the play with the implicit assumption that Jean carries that power. Like Laws in the United States, if enough people strongly believe that a law is real, it doesn't matter what makes them believe the law is true. The question of "Why?" is irrelevant. One strong example of this, for me, is in the audience. When Jean ends the show abruptly, when he speaks after having not spoken for more than half of the play, the audience is jarred. Why? They have implicitly taken the assumptions and conventions of theater to be their own, because they trust the production. We call this trust "suspension of disbelief." They trust that there is a reason the artist wants things this way, so it does not entirely matter why. So too does it not matter why Jean has power over the ensemble; he simply does.

Then the ensemble discovers, almost by accident and almost by fate, that there is no power at all except the power that has been in their minds. This liberation can only happens when the vast majority are of the same opinion--for instance, when one character in the first half rebels on his own, he is unable to break free. But when each of the characters has abandoned Jean, it is inevitable that they break free.

My history teacher once remarked that the transition from 'kings' to 'tyrants' in Ancient Greece was the first step toward democracy, because 'tyrants' could only rule when a majority of the military was on their side; they were often forced to be populist. Plato, in his Seventh Letter, describes a tyrant who abuses the people, philosophers, politicians, but suddenly finds himself in danger when he attempts to lower the pay of the soldiers. A far cry from representative democracy, but the first moment when a group of 'people' has the right to hold a leader accountable.

Why is a 'king' not the same way? Because a 'king' has, behind him, the collaborative fiction of religious right to rule. The early kings were absolutists; they had absolute power because they ruled by divine right. And so long as the people respected that divine right, the rule of power could be easily passed down from king to king. But once the fiction of 'divine right' was overturned (in England, for instance, at about the time of the Magna Carta and King James I), Kings lost the safety which allowed them to disregard the desires of the people.

The inspiration for this train of thought in my work, which is far more eloquent than I could ever be, is President Vaclav Havel's essay "Power of the Powerless" about totalitarian communism. Because more than any other society in the world, totalitarian communism had a deliberately constructed form of collaborative fiction; communism had a loaded, complicated set of assumptions that folks were required to be a part of in order to avoid punishment.

This is the power of belief; the power of mental enslavement. Orwell's 1984 is another excellent exploration of the phenomenon; or Aldoux Huxley's Brave New World. In fact, most Utopian/Dystopian "worlds" require the author to knit a very tight, worldwide collaborative fiction in order to hold their clockwork societies in place. With 1984 it is the important maxims of "War = Peace; Freedom = Slavery" and the concept of doublethink; with Brave New World it is the important role that "soma" plays in society. In both, it is a childlike trust in the policies and directions of the leader.

Trust. Trust is a form of belief which grants a huge amount of power to the person in whom trust is vested. Whether its Big Brother or Lenin, in order to turn over a large amount of power to any one individual it requires a large amount of trust. Patriotism, for instance, has been defined as some as trust in your country. This is why it is invoked by those who want more power; they want you to 'trust' them to run the country right.

Is trust compatible with democracy? Yes. In fact, democracy cannot operate without trust. Yet at the same time, democracy cannot operate with total trust; Americans, for instance, have an innate and deep trust that no matter what happens, America will survive of prevail. It does not matter who is in charge, the worst that can happens is something bad for certain people. But the truth is, there needs to be a constant scrutiny--distrust--in society to keep it operating.

And yet at the same time, in order for solutions to be found, some folks must earn our trust; some folks must be given the power to search for solutions and implement them. If we distrust that our government can ever provide healthcare or services to the poor, then we will never empower them to provide those things.

Trust is a dicey issue, as is power, which is why we never tire of seeing it in art or in the media. Our country obsesses about trust and its betrayal--certainly, the media around the recent resignation of Eliot Spitzer and the divison between Clinton's voters and Obama's voters speaks to certain cynicisms regarding trust. Just as we continue to love even with our hearts broken, we continue to trust even after betrayals. But we need to continue to examine trust and where we invest it.

Culture Future

We have a culture. It is unavoidable to have a culture. Culture, it seems, is something which simply happens. It develops, like an organism, over time. It (and I hope I'm not being too controversial) evolves, shedding antiquated layers and developing new strategies for survival. Cultures stack; the way that cells combine to form tissues and tissues for organs and so on, so too do local cultures combine with larger cultures. There is a global culture, Western and Eastern cultures, national cultures, state cultures, all the way down to neighborhood cultures.

Culture is often portrayed as something almost fate-like in origin. Unseen and unalterable rules govern its existence, forming its members the way that water forms mountains. Sometimes we excuse bad actions as being cultural in origins, sometimes we see events and call them inevitable because of their cultural origins. This is partly because culture is overwhelming: it encapsulates everything we do, all of the spheres of our thoughts and our public and private activities. To manage our image of culture, we imagine that only the best of culture is actually culture; Rembrant is called 'cultural' but Hannah Montana is not.

Unfortunately, culture is everything. And everything is overwhelming. It is easy to believe that we cannot change culture, because it is so large. So we throw our hands up and accept it as fate. But it doesn't have to be. In fact, it is because we treat culture's problems as large problems that we are helpless in the face of it. But culture does not need to be vast and monolithic. It may be greater than the sum of its parts, but it is still vulnerable to changes in any of its parts. By altering the parts of culture within our reach, we can slowly shift the seemingly massive edifice of culture, first on a local level, then on larger and larger levels.

And, of course, the more people you have working with you, the more change you can make. What we notice as 'history' are those moments when enough people, or a few people in just the right places, have the opportunity to shift the edifice of culture more than just a little bit. But those opportunities always exist, in greater and lesser degrees.

This blog is about the future of culture. It cannot be about the future of all culture, only the future of culture from one perspective. The things I am interested will influence what, in culture, I am focusing on: theater, politics, and satire are among the elements that awaken my own critical focus. Because the first step in changing culture is observing it, understanding it, and seeing how the cogs turn. Then the discussion begins as to whether the culture needs the change, and how to effect it. These changes should not have to be radical, but they can happen, and they can happen for good.