POLITICAL MYTHOLOGY AND GOAT YOGA

When I read this article on "Goat Yoga," in the New York Times last week, my immediate thought was, this is it, this is why Donald Trump won the election. We thought freedom and human rights, diversity and respect, different and weird had already won--we still had some unconscious biases to weed out, sure, but we were comfortable enough that at least formally, consciously, aspirationally, America was a country of reason and respect and humanism for us to allow ourselves this kind of kumbaya capitalist decadence. 

Of course it's more complicated than that, but it was my first thought. It falls in line with numerous Rome-analogy pieces like this one from March 2016--disturbingly far in advance of the election--that are taking on a knew significance now, as the hogwash but powerful Mythology of Trump bleeds into full-on garish hyperreality.

Goat Yoga has everything you could possibly want in a news story right now to comfort the reeling elite liberal ego: off-beat intrigue, factual reporting, adjectives like "hummocky"; a hip way to get healthy exercise with a global internet community and a mantra of inclusion (despite its definitionally-expensive actual physical requirements).* It's comfortable and warm; the mere existence of such an article leads us to feel like we're living in a Hillary Clinton world. It's the very feeling that, perhaps, prevented us from actually living in one.

We need a better MacGuffin, sadly, one farther removed from detail and fact. As different as Trump's and Obama's objectives and ideologies, and as measured and pragmatic as the latter has been as President, as candidates, they won the same way: with a general, blanket feeling you could twist to build your own narrative on. It's a rhetorical platform you can use to incite discord as well as harmony, for anger and fear as for hope. They both, notably, tapped into a fervent desire for change. We now need a new mythic counter-mechanism, another unifying, positive emotion with the power to override things like goat yoga for our attention. I'm not sure yet what the the right MacGuffin-myth is--i think, maybe, Bernie hit a chord close to it--but I have my eyes peeled. 

*When I re-read this sentence I realized it sounded like Stefon from SNL reviewing the city's hottest new club, but decided to stand by it, yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

STRATEGIC DESIGN AND THE 2016 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

One of the most important ideas in Dan Hill's Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary is that of a MacGuffin. It's a Hitchcockian appropriation, a critical plot trigger with little to no value in and of itself. Hill explains, first quoting Hitchcock:

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"'A MacGuffin you see in most films about spies. It’s the thing that the spies are after. In the days of Rudyard Kipling, it would be the plans of the fort on the Khyber Pass. It would be the plans of an airplane engine, and the plans of an atom bomb, anything you like. It’s always called the thing that the characters on the screen worry about but the audience don’t care… It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story.' 

According to the British Film Institute’s Mark Duguid, the MacGuffin, is 'the engine that sets the story in motion.' In Notorious, it’s uranium ore hidden in wine bottles. In North by Northwest, it’s the entirely vague 'government secrets.' There is a long history to the idea of the plot element that kick-starts and drives the narrative but is somewhat inconsequential in the end. More obviously, the golden fleece is what drove Jason and his Argonauts through multiple narrative scenarios in Greek mythology. More recently, the briefcase in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is a good example."

Hill then goes on to provide an extended example of how this works in strategic design, recounting a building development project that acts as a MacGuffin for larger, systemic changes, for example, to the Finnish fire codes. 

I thought a lot about Dark Matter and Trojan Horses, strategic design, and MacGuffins specifically reading this Vox article on the deceptively ambitious scope of Hillary Clinton's platform--almost too perfectly summed up in the rhetoric of innovation as "a plan for a minimal viable product of social democracy."

The image of Hillary Clinton as strategic designer, using a collection of incremental fine-print policy changes as MacGuffins that together create a colossal societal paradigm shift, fascinates me for several reasons:

1. MacGuffins tend to be bottom-up strategies, often specifically designed to trigger the powerful into enacting systemic change by those who lack the power and political clout to do so themselves. 
2. It goes against the candidate mythology that's been built up in this election, pitting Clinton as an entrenched "Washington elite" contra Donald Trump as the "outsider who would stir things up." 
3. Dark Matter and Trojan Horses is written from a Nordic perspective; Hill is specifically interested in how to allow for the extreme positive outliers you find in US-style capitalist societies while maintaining the Nordic floor. Clinton faces precisely the opposite challenge. (In the Vox article, Lane Kenworthy posits: “I think a lot of Clinton’s proposals are very much a step in the direction of a Nordic-style or social democratic welfare state.")

Peter Thiel notwithstanding, Clinton is the innovator's candidate. And not just because she's Silicon Valley's choice. She may not be very likable, but she seems like a shrewd strategic designer aimed at the same no-ceiling-high-floor spot Dan Hill describes. As the most powerful person in the world, she might just be able to prototype and pilot it. Given the alternative ("Make America Great Again" is, incidentally, the ugly flip side of futuristic nostalgia), I sure hope she gets the chance to try.

DELPOZO, WESTWORLD, AND FUTURISTIC NOSTALGIA

Delpozo's recent SS17 collection bordered on transcendent: organic yet architectural, somehow simultaneously channeling both sci-fi futurism and Victorian nostalgia. They are the kinds of clothes one might imagine wearing to a formal ball hosted by Luke Skywalker or a rave with Anna Karenina. As Vogue nicely put it, "The resulting lineup was a bit Old World, yet undeniably modern; even the designer's most otherworldly proportions felt featherweight."

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Delpozo SS17 - What to wear to a formal ball hosted by Luke Skywalker, or a rave with Anna Karenina.

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Depozo SS17 - Equally appropriate for futuristic human technocrat and wild-western cyborg.

I thought a lot about Josep Font's creations this week as I watched the first three episodes of HBO's new series "Westworld"--and not just because many of his designs would seem equally appropriate on its human women and robot "hosts." If the end goal of technical innovation is immortality, a key implied requirement is the ability to inorganically mimic the organic. Forget blinking buttons and spacesuits--the height of technical innovation is rather its own obfuscation, an unnatural return to nature not so much for the purpose of passing a Turing test as rendering one obsolete in the inextricable blending of the two. 

Based on Michael Crichton's 1973 theme-park-gone-wrong precursor to Jurassic Park but more like an extended sequel to 2015's Ex Machina, the new "Westworld" depicts an application of naturalistic technology aimed precisely at manufacturing pre-digital nostalgia into a highly-marketable recursive loop. It's a clever premise, appealing simultaneously to our fetishization of future and past, the glamour of immortality-seeking innovation and the glamour of the bloody Wild West in a way that, as Rolling Stone points out, feels very now. Perhaps that's because, according to Emily Nussbaum, what "Westworld" is really about is HBO today:

"Like HBO showrunners, Westworld’s designers “pitch” plot arcs. They “massage” story lines. They plant backstories to deepen characterizations. When glitches appear, they panic over the need to halt production, much as 'Westworld' itself did, when it shut down during shooting for a rewrite. They are uneasy, at times, about the ethics of their labor. In real life, 'Westworld' can’t just be good—it needs to be a hit, too. It’s HBO’s bid for a franchise to succeed 'Game of Thrones,' following two pricey flops, 'Vinyl' and 'True Detective.' For both the show and the show inside the show, the key is to reproduce the alchemy that HBO perfected when it slid the Bada Bing into 'The Sopranos'..."

Even from the opening credits to "Westworld"--a macro-lens tour through an über-stylized Vitruvian workshop of technical materials and human organs, eerily serenaded by a skeleton pianist who gives way to a player-piano--it's clear this show is HBO out-HBOing itself. 

When I picture the showrunners, they too are wearing Delpozo SS17. 

SELFIES AND THE INNOVATION OF SELF-MYTHMAKING

Paris selfie - croissant in tow.

The mere mention of Paris conjures up images of lovers: walking along the Seine, kissing, maybe sharing a croissant. But on this trip, it has been the mass-demonstration of another kind of love that's struck me. It shouldn't have. Selfies are, by now, so ubiquitous that they are no longer even embarrassing (as in the decadent Rome of Cavelli's opera Eliogabalo, "where everyone is guilty, everyone is innocent"). In Japan this Spring, I saw more signs regulating selfie sticks than bicycles. Here in Paris, they're more easily procured than miniature replicas of the Eiffel Tower. 

The bewitching appeal of self-love is hardly new. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, wise Tiresias rhetorically asks Narcissus:

Caravaggio, Narcissus, ~1597-9.

"Why try to catch an always fleeting image
Poor credulous youngster? What you seek is nowhere
And if you turn away, you will take with you
The boy you love. The vision is only shadow,
Only reflection, lacking any substance."

Looking at Narcissus's conundrum as a design problem, he faces two main issues:

1. Lack of control - Narcissus's image is "nowhere," eluding capture
2. Impermanence - Narcissus's image is "always fleeting," eluding documentation

I think the selfie is so successful as an innovation because it seems to solve for both of these long-standing problems with Narcissism. It provides the subject with the impression of control over his or her self-image as actor-director, coupled with the ability to "immortalize" it on the internet.

CONTROL

When I look at photographs from childhood trips, taken by friendly strangers (or in this case, probably my mom), there are usually other tourists in the background. I don't think it's a coincidence that one of the main things selfie sticks and digital enhancement allow for is their removal. As Jonathan Franzen writes in Freedom, "nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special."

Selfies give us the impression of control on two levels: first, directly from our perspective, and second, recursively from the perspective of others, dreaming of the illusions we will create in others' dreams. 

As the ultimate manifestation of images "known to be false but felt to be true," selfies glamorously highlight some details while obscuring others to reinforce our own specialness. 

The fantasy of someone else fantasizing about you is an even more cunning trick of mind. While, as Virginia Postrel points out, "Glamour is not something you possess, but something you perceive," the recursive perception of another's perception offers the illusion of possession--an illusion that can be seemingly quantified and insatiably fed by "likes," and archived for posterity on Facebook or especially Instagram, everyone's personal museum, digital formaldehyde. 

IMMORTALITY

Selfies thus offer intimations of immortality on our own terms; they are a modern form of mummification. It's really no wonder that people are, increasingly, willing to risk dying for the perfect shot, and actively want to plan for their "digital afterlife." 

Evan Carroll, the founder of Loggacy, a digital afterlife platform, explains that "the emergence of online digital legacy tools, that provide us with the opportunity to record our lives online and leave an everlasting legacy, provide a meaningful solution to the...conundrum concerning 'immortality.'" 

That's a lot of provisions. The thing is, we're not preserving a record of our lives--selfies are carefully-staged simulacra, not faithful representations. Archiving them offers the promise not of self-history, but metamorphic self-mythology.

I'm reminded of a book I vaguely remember from childhood, where the main character is a little boy in search of perfection. He eventually finds it, if I remember correctly--and it's this boring room filled with people doing nothing. Perfection, he realizes, is way overrated; flowers are glamorous, but it's way more fun to be a boy.