Discussion:
Evgeny Morozov and the Perils of "Highbrow
John Young
2014-10-20 11:17:02 UTC
Permalink
There is a correlation between the rise of publicity (public relations and
advertising) and diminution of quality standards and enforcement. So
much that quality control, like privacy policy, is a publicity gambit not
the actual performance.

In the architecture and engineering design fields the growing influence
of publicity over genuine quality is endemic, as seen in the giant
compensation of CEOs, stars and award winners, whose main role
is to garner commissions, loveshack clients, lecture and media
headtalk,underwrite ghost-written philosophies of "public interest"
approaches to the healthy, safe and well-being of the physical
environment. Not alone are politicos, university and hospital
and social service and spy heads are reaping the benefits of
press relations offices essential to fabricate celebrity as
top produce.

A corollary is the increasing short life span of the newly built
environment, so short, repairs are necessary well before completion
and continue for the diminished period of durability promised by
the rainmakers and quality assurance teams. Repair and
maintenance are giant industries to patch what designers
and builders (writers,editors and publishers) no longer do as
well as advertised and publicized. Instead, as problems
arise, the budgets for legal and PR defenses are kicked
in, which in turn have become giant industries aided and
abetted by giant judicial and penal systems.

The biggest beneficiary of diminished quality and greater
publicity is the insurance industry. About 27% of the cost
of construction is for insurance for all the parties involved,
much of it aimed at those blame shifting among the
parties. Nobody completes work, profit is taken instead.
The await claimants of the killed and injured by shoddy
design and work, gambling that failures will be excused
as "standards of the industry," acts of god, or caused
by someone with more insurance, worse lawyers and
less adapt public relations. Civil courts are jammed
with years long waits while miscreants remain well
ahead of injustice actuaries being deliberately slowed
by SEC, DoJ, SCOTUS, FISC and the hundreds of
state, municipal and arbitration featherbed institutions
where office tenure assures snails prevail.

Still, fixing things, physical and intellectual, is an ancient
practice. Standards are meant to be ignored after garnering
attention. Repair and maintenance are the premier usefulness
of all of use, along with finding fault, fingerpointing, ridiculing
pretention, attacking celebrity while angling for it usually by
artful disavowal.

In Germany the "Culture of Repair" has received attention,
and has promise to counter the abysmal record of the new
(especially news media) if it is not overtaken by the
cocaine of publicity, melodramatizing never-ending war,
terrorism and ISIS wannabes pushing an imaginary glorious
ancient religion of perfection, so perfect it appears written
by ANSI to curate embalming the never-rotting lilies of
Cezanne and comparable of entablature incisions (adverts
mandatory in recycled historicist piles as with the rollcall
of donors along the Metropolitan's stairway, the gyp board
printed stars of the New Museum, no gyp board pun please).

MOMA Big Art lilies and literary Masterpiece Theaters,
prefaced by names of donors, Debbie and Mel, Koch
and Soros, Nobel and Booker, Pritzker and Pulitzer,
Snowden and Manning, Greenwald and Morozov,
Omidyar and Bezos, this is it, publicity is our secular
faith, don't defy it except to get more of it as precursed
by runts on top of giants.

But do watch for falling buildings and infrastructure
(World Trade Center), terrorists, disease, backstabbing,
rep bashing, tenure dying on the vine, and treachery of
pulp intellectualism (as if there were any other).
John Hopkins
2014-10-20 17:22:05 UTC
Permalink
Hei John -
Post by John Young
There is a correlation between the rise of publicity (public relations and
advertising) and diminution of quality standards and enforcement. So
much that quality control, like privacy policy, is a publicity gambit not
the actual performance.
...snip...
Post by John Young
But do watch for falling buildings and infrastructure
(World Trade Center), terrorists, disease, backstabbing,
rep bashing, tenure dying on the vine, and treachery of
pulp intellectualism (as if there were any other).
But all of this may be framed as being (merely!) the effects of entropy that
flies in the face of our illusions that we really *do* control our world!

In the present process of restoring a 50+ year old house, I find shoddy
workmanship is nothing new, while down the street a neighbor, an extremely
skilled fabricator -- a Russian immigrant who started work on Soviet ICBM
installations, worked on Boston's "Big Dig", and is now retired -- he re-built
his entire house to a standard rarely seen except in the very highest-end custom
construction trades. You can be damn sure he expended significantly more
resources on the work (both in embodied labor and materials) than is typical.
Without both those imputs, something remains shoddy. And shoddy becomes the
standard. (And this happening through the inability of the local government to
enforce standards -- they appear to, they 'try', but they don't have the
resources to do it.) All this evidence of a system that has reached a peak some
time ago where it had 'higher' standards, and is now in the throes of a psychic
crisis where it no longer has the (energy) resources to maintain those standards.

A simple example was a number I ran across when researching the US Interstate
(aka, the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense
Highways) system -- that right now it would take the energy equivalent of all
remaining declared Suadi oil reserves to re-build that system. THe absolute
lifetime, in engineering standards, of such a highway is a maximum of 40 years,
and much of this system has reached 50 years. The US no longer has free access
to the energy resources necessary to project this system into the future, and if
you want to directly experience entropy, simply drive around the US on that
system. Better have an SUV with a good suspension, perhaps a Hummer, as you will
need it!

JH
--
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
grounded on a granite batholith
twitter: @neoscenes
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
d***@public.gmane.org
2014-10-20 22:17:01 UTC
Permalink
Post by John Hopkins
A simple example was a number I ran across when researching the US
Interstate (aka, the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of
Interstate and Defense Highways) system -- that right now it would
take the energy equivalent of all remaining declared Suadi oil
reserves to re-build that system. THe absolute lifetime, in engineering
standards, of such a highway is a maximum of 40 years, and much of
this system has reached 50 years. The US no longer has free access
to the energy resources necessary to project this system into the
future, and if you want to directly experience entropy, simply drive
around the US on that system. Better have an SUV with a good
suspension, perhaps a Hummer, as you will need it!
In computer systems, it is clear and proven that we can build systems
too complex to understand and predictably operate. The easiest
example is that of financial "flash crashes." One might ask whether
or not the Smart Grid and/or wholesale conversion to Electronic
Health Records might prove this yet again.

In the meantime, for your facts file, the Big Dig in Boston worked
out to well over $50,000 per foot of lane. If you are a US taxpayer,
that's what you were buying. Had those funds been used to endow
the public transit system, at that system's current scale it could
have been free in perpetuity. One may certainly argue that the
ability of tax-levying entities to sell bonds at below-market
interest rates serves to generate such bubbles as you describe
extending to the debasement of that debt through (induced) inflation.

We're probably in a rat hole,

--dan

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