Tokyo Babylon

A reader wrote: 

“I think the intention of convenience was to make things easier but over time, it has become the antonym for society. Like, making things more convenient is supposed to free up your time so you can do more things you want to do like socialize and be merry. Unfortunately, more things take up that time, and thus, we are too busy and work too much. Down with convenience!”

This reader makes some interesting points, pointing out that time saving tech at home means more time slaving away in the office. There are a number of books and reams of articles on this topic. For years now people have been writing about ‘the end of work’. This is a bit like that ex-State Department pundit Fukuyama saying that now is “The End of History”, and being taken seriously. When someone comes and tells you that ‘this’ is the best things are ever going to be, my advice is to congratulate him or her on how good their life is and then ask them who they are working for.

I agree that work has become the antonym for society, but I think rather that it is the manner of work that is the problem. Looking down from my apartment window I see two old men with the metal helmets standing outside a building site, looking like the helmeted guys from George Lucas’ THX1138 thirty years later. It apparently requires two of them to indicate to pedestrians that they should walk in a straight line past the front of the construction site. You would have to wonder who would inadvertantly wander into a building site, bu then again Japan seems filled with these jobs and whilst I have no problems with finding work for people to do, shouldn’t it be rewarding work if at all possible?

For many years I’ve been critical of the idea of an eternally expanding economy. You know when you read that this economy or that economy grew by 6% or 10% you have to sit back and wonder where that rising line is going (if indeed there is a final destination). It seems to me that there is no stated objective, no goal that we are trying to reach with this line, that it is eternal. If you take that analogy to it’s logical conclusion then what you have is not a line but a circle. Not the golden road to the future but rather a metal wheel in a cage; humanity as mindless hamsters hypnotised by the blurring bars in front of them.

What would happen if instead of running a consumption machine designed to process greater and greater amounts of finite resources in the name of GDP growth we started doing things in an intelligent fashion. By intelligent I mean building things correctly the first time; building things that last and by virtue of being in harmony with nature more likely to endure. It seems to me that much of what is boring in work, that takes all the fun out of it, is repetition. However when you think of it, that repetition is what GDP growth is built upon. If you built things so they stayed built and did not require repair or replacement then you would remove a chunk of the GDP Mount Olympus that we are climbing. We’re climbing that path in the clouds not knowing where we’re going. Work today is not about making the world a better place, it’s about making more, regardless of whether we need to do so.

Now imagine a world where many things only needed doing the once. My hobby horse here is farming or more precisely what is called HEIA or High External Input Agriculture. It’s repetitive and immensely destructive. It uses crops that need constant resowing, leaves the soil exposed to erosion, bombards it with enduring chemicals that nature has long since sidestepped but which end up in our body fat nonetheless. Now you might ask what kind of farming would you only need to do the once? To answer that you need to ask yourself what is the eventual goal of landscapes. In many places it is to be a forest, in other places to be a prairie but perhaps the defining feature of both is that they are dominated by perennial plants that come back year after year without the need for resowing. Forest gardens, towering creations that produces crops in a 3D box rather than in a predominantly 2D field, could I believe lead us to a place where we advance to the role of hunter gatherers once more, managers of nature rather than attempted masters of it. Now doesn’t that make more sense to let nature do most of the work? People freed up from the bulk of endless repetition would be free to advance our world culturally, socially, technologically in every way.

Thus to my mind the problem with work today is that it’s a hamster wheel. It’s almost never tied to an identifiable goal and so is endless. If you start from the assumption that work should have a worthwhile objective then work will have a goal, it will have meaning and be something to take pleasure in - such that we might need to call it something else. I believe most people would like to leave the world around them a little better than the way they found it; to know that their life had meaning and that there was a purpose to their life besides mindless consumption of material goods and mind numbing ‘entertainment’. Thus it falls to us not to say ‘give me a job’ but rather ‘give me a project’. It falls to us to point out that a lot of what is being done is irrelevant, even counterproductive, to the task of enobling human endeavor and making the world as we know it a better place for all of us.

Ever had to cause to wonder what is meant by convenience? I sometimes wonder what is meant by convenience. Take washing for instance. Washing used to be carrying a big basket of dirty laundry down to the river, or to the local spigot. There you would sit and hammer away at the linen while gabbing merrily with one’s neighbours; perhaps someone would sing but there would be a kind of social connectedness in doing laundry. Now acquiring convenience apparently dictates that you don’t head to the river, the spigot or the easy familiarity of working at a common task. That you sit at home and move between your convenience producing technology like a florist with a water spray.

What I’m saying is laundry used to be social. The same way music used to be social. The same way work used to be social. All within the community. Now communities are composed of tasks that separate social connections from community.

Laundry used to be social but it got convenienced out of existence by washing machines. Working used to be social but cars convenienced the hell out of that too. Music is piped to your living room and with the idiot box, ny father’s name for the television, conveniently suppresses the desire to go out and actually talk to people.

Mind you all these ‘conveniences’ need to be paid for not just in estrangement but also in cold hard cash. It’s nice to know that so many people are making money from misery. I think most people would put merely drug dealers and arms dealers, and maybe US doctors in this category. I like to spread my net a little wider.

Finally, how would you define convenience. Is it just me or is convenience the antonym for society?

Yeah, you know what I’m going to say next… “Women are stranger”, and indeed I am in agreement with The Doors that it certainly seems that way to me. Yesterday I was walking back to Tokyo Agricultural Library after taking a break from McNamara’s Corporatism in South Korea, when I spied that most unusual of sights. A western woman. It was strange I know, but I’ve been in Tokyo long enough to know that most foreigners look on you as if your presence is spoiling their authentic Nihonese experience. So I shrugged and kept walking.

Ever found yourself in the position of thinking “I don’t walk to walk behind her in case she thinks I’m following her”? Well walking in the gate I made my way to the right, a path that would take me past the run down brick building on my right towards the concrete Corbussier nightmare a little further on, on my right.

Anyway it seems that no matter how much I diverge my path from hers she alters her course till she is once more stomping on the head of my shadow, like a scene from a 1950’s thriller. Though I imagine it’s hard to imagine film noir with heat shimmer coming off the tarmac and images of illusory camels in the distance; wobbling as if transposed onto the shiny flexible half cones used to tan the underside of your neck.

So I continue walking back to the library and she continues walking in front of me and then off to the side of me. She comes to the sign that says. This is a door, but it’s not being used as a door but rather as place to hang a helpful sign, which reads ‘please walk around the building to the door that is being used as a door’. Spying her confusion I walk over and say the entrance is around the side and that I’m heading that way.

She walks in and I stay outside eating my ice cream. When I’m finished I head and take up my McNamara again. It occurs to me that perhaps the place on the shelf where I got this book would have other tomes of equal relevance to the one I’m holding. So I walk upstairs into the baleful glare of the western woman I’ve just helped.

It’s lovely when a stare is an accusation, isn’t it? I shrug feeling rather miffed thinking ‘well be like that’ and continue onwards. I then find another book with some interesting things in it. The title being something like Restructuring the Korean Economy for the 21st century. Take my advice and read it. It has a racy plot, some interesting characters but sadly less sex than the Bible with nary a beget or begat in sight.

Anyway still troubled by my encounter with Miss Judge and Jury I head downstairs to look up some other things on the computer index. She walks out and away and doesn’t look back. If she were driving that would have been a criminal offence.

 My apartment is south facing it’s sun warmed but apparently not air cooled. I wouldn’t be surprised if the building grew taller during the day as the building materials expanded. I’m frankly surprised it doesn’t spread out into the road or obstruct flight paths to Narita during the day.

You would think that architects would have to consider the environmental effects when they were designing it. They don’t seem to, which is rather like a boat designer not really being concerned about water.  As things progress and weather becomes more extreme I imagine architects will become masters of the clip on technological fix. It’s too hot, let’s put in AC units. Ah the AC units are too heavy for the roof, well let’s reinforce it. What we need deeper foundations to support the extra weight and earthquakes could be a problem? Well we could put a gyroscopic weight on the roof to counter sway in the event of an earthquake, and we could install foundation dampers when we have to raise the entire building on hydraulics so as to make the foundations deeper.

You have to think that there’s a thing as too much learning sometimes. What is it, like 4 years of Uni so Japanese designers can design a 14 storey free standing solar oven, whose secondary function appears to be baking it’s occupants in summer.

There’s been ways around this sort of things since time immemorial, but it seems only the architects in the less advanced nations have mastered any of them. It’s interesting to note that progress these seems to be defined as the ability to call oneself advanced while simultaneously going backwards, without I might add watching where you are going.

People aren’t killing the planet. It’s the blind stupidity of people who should know better that is killing the planet.

Ask anyone in the street what they want from a house and they’ll tell you. I’d like it to be cool in the blistering heat of summer and warm in the chill of winter. And here we have architects giving us a technological balancing act that does nothing but suck in power, convert it into heat and then add it to the reflective radiated heat of the concrete.

I warrant that if one were to come up with a definition for moron it would say ‘See Architect’.