"that I came to the sober realization that anime has at last penetrated so deeply into the American mainstream as to become kind of trashy"
I came to this realization after moving back to Austin from California and realizing that all the low rent trashy cars have the Naruto stickers, and sometimes even hentai stickers.
Weirdly, amidst many corpses, California and Texas have some of the only remaining healthy malls I know about. I can think of examples of healthy indoor malls in LA, San Jose, Austin and Houston. San Jose's Great Mall in particular is still crowded as all hell, or was in 2019 when I last went.
All of the healthy malls I know sell mostly premium mediocre, the kind of upscale stuff upper middle class people have now in place of the sharper image. Every one of them has a Uniqlo, a Lego store, an Aeropostale, a Victoria's Secret, and a Van's. Almost all of them are owned by Simon.
I was promised the death of the mall! It was in the news and everything. I'm honestly kind of bothered that it's thriving *anywhere*.
----
Incidentally my parents were from Morristown and Kinnelon, and half my extended family live there. I think I've been to Rockaway mall. I wish I'd done a better job journaling things like that.
----
I firmly believe that the social network and the pocket touch screen and the infinite news crawl were inevitable. Truly, like the endless waves of migrating tribes exerting pressure on the late Roman empire, there was latent pressure, enormous latent pressure, which already existed as soon as pre-industrial life became the minority experience. For a hundred years, disconnected people with no idea how to spend their time cast about for something, anything that fit their mammal social brain and their lizard attention brain. These were captured by the most captivating advances. Any further optimizations are just that: optimizations, which will just do a better job capturing. TikTok replaces Youtube, ad nauseum.
I *was* Silicon Valley, by location and experience, for about ten years. I sat in a cubicle three hundred feet away from the Google leadership, eating glorious free food, and tried in vain to write machine learned models to stop the decline of news source quality, before anyone ever uttered the words "fake news", and I did it with far too little oversight, and I failed, and I went home. Silicon Valley, to the extent that it is people at all, is best regarded as Marcus Aurelius, and Maximinus Thrax, and Diocletian, and Theodosius, and Stilicho. Each gets his choice how to deal with the barbarian invasions, with significant lasting consequences, but none gets to choose the pressure itself.
Quick thought—that's something in Marx that I feel is lost on a lot of people. In his description, not even the capitalist class gets to relax in security. The pressure on the individual firm to keep competing, keep growing, and keep devising and exploiting new economic advantages is *constant.* A milieu like Silicon Valley is like shark biology in organizational form. If it slows down, it dies.
Hmm. What are they like? What makes them valuable to people?
I lived on Saint Thomas for several months (don't ask), and I don't have many concrete recollections of the mall there. (Mostly I visited the K-Mart anchoring it.) I feel like it was a bit...anemic.
The main ones at least are pretty vibrant and usually very crowded. On the weekends and holidays it’s even hard to find parking even though the parking lots are massive. I’m not sure why people still go so much. I need to think about it a bit, but I feel we haven’t completely replaced brick and mortar with online. It’s also cooler in them than outside, especially for the elderly. In a lot of places there’s also not a lot to do, so going to the mall is still a big to do and it’s relatively close, even in towns farther from the main metro area.
You're really into malls these days, huh? Well, for what it's worth, here is my mall story.
My childhood mall is actually still going strong. Funnily enough, I moved within walking distance of it, so it's now also my "corner shop". Even more than that, the mall is owned by the real estate arm of my public pension fund, so the more I shop there, the richer I become. That's how that works, right? Anyway, I just get a feeling it's doing its job better as a symbiotic part of the community. Maybe it's a question of number of malls in an area, density, access by public transit. There must be some kind of recipe for equilibrium.
It's probably been hit hard by Internet shopping just like anywhere else, but the shops that close get replaced by new, different stuff in an endless cycle. The comic book store has gotten so huge it's an actual anchor store. Parts of the mall seem to get demolished and rebuilt constantly. So it's always changing, sometimes almost imperceptibly, but kind of always staying the same. It's basically what I thought malls should be: the forests of commerce, seemingly tranquil on the surface, but actually an endless cycle of death and rebirth. Economic Darwinism.
That stuff catches up on you though. I asked a clerk if the cinnamon bun place was still open... but then I realized it probably closed before she was even born, in a wing of the mall that's completely gone now. Ouch. It's true, anime stuff used to be deeply hidden, only for the truest of nerds. Now it's even on crappy convenience store t-shirts. What's new to me is kids actually going to the mall in full anime cosplay, with no convention for miles around. Now that's just weird. They should get off my lawn.
Loved this. It synthesizes a ton of interests to make some keen observations, about current year, and about the state (such as it is) of our culture. I am now fixed on the question of whether or not Web 2.0 was inevitable, and I wonder if "platform" history will be the next Art History. Thanks!
I wonder what the whole humanities curriculum is going to look like in twenty, fifty years. Will it be more important for students to know about Rembrandt and Monet than about the history of the iconography of the GUIs they interact with? How relevant and necessary is literature to education when we're a culture of streaming video? Will we decide that the well-rounded citizen ought to have some knowledge of Super Mario Bros. World 1-1 and the design principles it exemplifies?? Etc., etc.
There's a strong historical pattern to work from, which suggests it will be a status thing.
Every new medium is accepted with a dichotomy of high and low status material. The high status material joins the great pantheon of study, with the older mediums (literature, sculpture, oil painting, etc) still occupying a little bit higher status than the newer ones.
For sometimes arbitrary and sometimes sensible reasons, various things get placed in the high bucket or the low bucket. Sometimes they even change buckets.
Personally I *genuinely* think your Earthbound essay is a very good example of early *high* criticism of early *high* art in the video game medium or digital medium.
The kids 50 years from now won't study Candy Crush or wellsfargo.com at all. They'll touch briefly on Virtua Fighter in a technology class that covers the hardware and software architectures of the early video game systems. They'll spend 20 seconds on MySpace as part of a culture class about early social networks, covering the precursors to Facebook almost in the space of a single paragraph.
But they'll study Super Mario World as art. They'll study Earthbound as obscure, influential art.
Thanks for all of this—the Sony Ericsson blew my mind. When I visited Japan for a month as a college student in the mid-2000s, I found it kind of odd that both of the host families I stayed with only had dial-up internet at home. Didn't even occur to me that the kids were doing most of their browsing &c. on their phones.
>>prior to the iPhone arriving, most Japanese sites were designed with the “needs to be consumable on a feature phone” requirement firmly in mind.
This made something click for me. In the 2000s, I'd occasionally wander onto Japanese web pages—at this point I can't even remember what I was doing/looking for—and I remember wondering why Japanese web design consistently seemed so basic and spread out and *flat.* Fast forward a decade and some change, and I find myself feeling put off by how Western web design has been changing to accommodate smartphone users—by becoming basic and spread out and *flat.*
It's inevitable because all of the innovations are chasing a real signal: how best to captivate the human animal and consume all of that animal's time. Galapogos finches are a beautiful metaphor, because ultimately, with contact, there was and is and must be convergent evolution. Eventually iPhone wins everywhere. Eventually best social network wins everywhere.
I remember my tribe (American tech makers with some deep connections to Japan) being fascinated by Japan's ability to hold off the iPhone and Web 2.0 websites for so long, and yet unsurprised that in the end, there was convergence.
"that I came to the sober realization that anime has at last penetrated so deeply into the American mainstream as to become kind of trashy"
I came to this realization after moving back to Austin from California and realizing that all the low rent trashy cars have the Naruto stickers, and sometimes even hentai stickers.
Weirdly, amidst many corpses, California and Texas have some of the only remaining healthy malls I know about. I can think of examples of healthy indoor malls in LA, San Jose, Austin and Houston. San Jose's Great Mall in particular is still crowded as all hell, or was in 2019 when I last went.
All of the healthy malls I know sell mostly premium mediocre, the kind of upscale stuff upper middle class people have now in place of the sharper image. Every one of them has a Uniqlo, a Lego store, an Aeropostale, a Victoria's Secret, and a Van's. Almost all of them are owned by Simon.
I was promised the death of the mall! It was in the news and everything. I'm honestly kind of bothered that it's thriving *anywhere*.
----
Incidentally my parents were from Morristown and Kinnelon, and half my extended family live there. I think I've been to Rockaway mall. I wish I'd done a better job journaling things like that.
----
I firmly believe that the social network and the pocket touch screen and the infinite news crawl were inevitable. Truly, like the endless waves of migrating tribes exerting pressure on the late Roman empire, there was latent pressure, enormous latent pressure, which already existed as soon as pre-industrial life became the minority experience. For a hundred years, disconnected people with no idea how to spend their time cast about for something, anything that fit their mammal social brain and their lizard attention brain. These were captured by the most captivating advances. Any further optimizations are just that: optimizations, which will just do a better job capturing. TikTok replaces Youtube, ad nauseum.
I *was* Silicon Valley, by location and experience, for about ten years. I sat in a cubicle three hundred feet away from the Google leadership, eating glorious free food, and tried in vain to write machine learned models to stop the decline of news source quality, before anyone ever uttered the words "fake news", and I did it with far too little oversight, and I failed, and I went home. Silicon Valley, to the extent that it is people at all, is best regarded as Marcus Aurelius, and Maximinus Thrax, and Diocletian, and Theodosius, and Stilicho. Each gets his choice how to deal with the barbarian invasions, with significant lasting consequences, but none gets to choose the pressure itself.
Quick thought—that's something in Marx that I feel is lost on a lot of people. In his description, not even the capitalist class gets to relax in security. The pressure on the individual firm to keep competing, keep growing, and keep devising and exploiting new economic advantages is *constant.* A milieu like Silicon Valley is like shark biology in organizational form. If it slows down, it dies.
Since you mentioned taínos, malls in Puerto Rico are for the most part alive and well.
Hmm. What are they like? What makes them valuable to people?
I lived on Saint Thomas for several months (don't ask), and I don't have many concrete recollections of the mall there. (Mostly I visited the K-Mart anchoring it.) I feel like it was a bit...anemic.
The main ones at least are pretty vibrant and usually very crowded. On the weekends and holidays it’s even hard to find parking even though the parking lots are massive. I’m not sure why people still go so much. I need to think about it a bit, but I feel we haven’t completely replaced brick and mortar with online. It’s also cooler in them than outside, especially for the elderly. In a lot of places there’s also not a lot to do, so going to the mall is still a big to do and it’s relatively close, even in towns farther from the main metro area.
You're really into malls these days, huh? Well, for what it's worth, here is my mall story.
My childhood mall is actually still going strong. Funnily enough, I moved within walking distance of it, so it's now also my "corner shop". Even more than that, the mall is owned by the real estate arm of my public pension fund, so the more I shop there, the richer I become. That's how that works, right? Anyway, I just get a feeling it's doing its job better as a symbiotic part of the community. Maybe it's a question of number of malls in an area, density, access by public transit. There must be some kind of recipe for equilibrium.
It's probably been hit hard by Internet shopping just like anywhere else, but the shops that close get replaced by new, different stuff in an endless cycle. The comic book store has gotten so huge it's an actual anchor store. Parts of the mall seem to get demolished and rebuilt constantly. So it's always changing, sometimes almost imperceptibly, but kind of always staying the same. It's basically what I thought malls should be: the forests of commerce, seemingly tranquil on the surface, but actually an endless cycle of death and rebirth. Economic Darwinism.
That stuff catches up on you though. I asked a clerk if the cinnamon bun place was still open... but then I realized it probably closed before she was even born, in a wing of the mall that's completely gone now. Ouch. It's true, anime stuff used to be deeply hidden, only for the truest of nerds. Now it's even on crappy convenience store t-shirts. What's new to me is kids actually going to the mall in full anime cosplay, with no convention for miles around. Now that's just weird. They should get off my lawn.
Loved this. It synthesizes a ton of interests to make some keen observations, about current year, and about the state (such as it is) of our culture. I am now fixed on the question of whether or not Web 2.0 was inevitable, and I wonder if "platform" history will be the next Art History. Thanks!
Thanks for the encouragement!
I wonder what the whole humanities curriculum is going to look like in twenty, fifty years. Will it be more important for students to know about Rembrandt and Monet than about the history of the iconography of the GUIs they interact with? How relevant and necessary is literature to education when we're a culture of streaming video? Will we decide that the well-rounded citizen ought to have some knowledge of Super Mario Bros. World 1-1 and the design principles it exemplifies?? Etc., etc.
There's a strong historical pattern to work from, which suggests it will be a status thing.
Every new medium is accepted with a dichotomy of high and low status material. The high status material joins the great pantheon of study, with the older mediums (literature, sculpture, oil painting, etc) still occupying a little bit higher status than the newer ones.
For sometimes arbitrary and sometimes sensible reasons, various things get placed in the high bucket or the low bucket. Sometimes they even change buckets.
Personally I *genuinely* think your Earthbound essay is a very good example of early *high* criticism of early *high* art in the video game medium or digital medium.
The kids 50 years from now won't study Candy Crush or wellsfargo.com at all. They'll touch briefly on Virtua Fighter in a technology class that covers the hardware and software architectures of the early video game systems. They'll spend 20 seconds on MySpace as part of a culture class about early social networks, covering the precursors to Facebook almost in the space of a single paragraph.
But they'll study Super Mario World as art. They'll study Earthbound as obscure, influential art.
Thanks for all of this—the Sony Ericsson blew my mind. When I visited Japan for a month as a college student in the mid-2000s, I found it kind of odd that both of the host families I stayed with only had dial-up internet at home. Didn't even occur to me that the kids were doing most of their browsing &c. on their phones.
>>prior to the iPhone arriving, most Japanese sites were designed with the “needs to be consumable on a feature phone” requirement firmly in mind.
This made something click for me. In the 2000s, I'd occasionally wander onto Japanese web pages—at this point I can't even remember what I was doing/looking for—and I remember wondering why Japanese web design consistently seemed so basic and spread out and *flat.* Fast forward a decade and some change, and I find myself feeling put off by how Western web design has been changing to accommodate smartphone users—by becoming basic and spread out and *flat.*
It's inevitable because all of the innovations are chasing a real signal: how best to captivate the human animal and consume all of that animal's time. Galapogos finches are a beautiful metaphor, because ultimately, with contact, there was and is and must be convergent evolution. Eventually iPhone wins everywhere. Eventually best social network wins everywhere.
I remember my tribe (American tech makers with some deep connections to Japan) being fascinated by Japan's ability to hold off the iPhone and Web 2.0 websites for so long, and yet unsurprised that in the end, there was convergence.