6x7: We Have It All Figured Out And We're Serious This Time

Those four posters hang in a gallery dominated by a 12 foot by 12 foot wooden model of "Broadacre," a concept for a city designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, where he proposes to resettle the entire US population into evenly distributed communities, where everything is small-scale and everyone has everything they need nearby. New technologies like radio were eliminating the need for everyone to live so close together.

This is a very modern theme, connecting these exhibits; it's the idea that we (mankind) know what we're doing this time, we understand the best practices on how to live, and we can put them in place if we can get ourselves organized. Professionals have studied this stuff, the technology exists. 

This concept, I've learned, is called "high modernism." (I'll credit the Scope of Work newsletter for introducing me to the concept.)

I mentioned last issue I was reading a book about Buckminster Fuller: Inventor of the Future, by Alec Nevala-Lee. I started it in October, then set it down for a while, and finished it in January, it's really long. Fuller invented, or at least popularized, the geodesic dome, so he's kind of an inventor, but more than that he had big ideas about Where Humanity Is Going. 

What confused me about Fuller is how he achieved widespread fame—I kept expecting some big payoff at the end, for the author to explain what mattered about Fuller, but I never really got that. 

Time and time again, the book describes how Fuller had the idea for a new kind of house, or a car, and then someone does most of the development work, and then Fuller takes credit, and then it doesn't sell. Neither do his books. He was not a popular or serious academic, so it's not like he was making important contributions for future scholars. He made his money on lecturing, but lost most of it on bad investments in his inventions. So Fuller devoted himself "applying the principles of science to solving the problems of humanity," but I spent the whole book wondering, "Okay? Is that it?" because he never actually did that. All he did was talk about it. But he still got very famous, somehow! 

Here's what I think might have happened: the United States in the middle of the 20th century was reaching the peak of high modernism. If I was a college student in the late 1950s and heard—for the first time—someone say "if we design things well it can tangibly and quantifiably improve people's lives," well. That's pretty exciting. 

When Buckminster Fuller cast an optimistic version of the future, saying that technology was improving and developing at a rapid pace and this would give us the power to create better cities and eradicate poverty, that's a powerful message. So popular, in fact, that you wouldn't even need to follow through on your ideas, presenting them is good enough.

I appreciate the optimism of the high modernism. It is exciting when a new technology comes along and can change everything for the better. This is the delight I feel when looking at those posters: it really is remarkable I can contact the world using the telephone. Bringing running water to rural farms is a sign of incredible progress, and it portends great things about what we'll be able to do next. 

***

I've started putting pen to paper on some fiction that ties of some of these ideas together. If it works out, big if, then all this will have been really valuable research to lay the groundwork. 

If not, then I still got to MoMA and saw all these things. That's the part of the New York trip I keep telling people about, to mixed reviews. A poster advertising running water? Isn't The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh also at MoMA? (It is.) 

Do you want to see a few more advertisements for public services that were created in the early-mid 20th century that I found while researching these artists and ideas? Twist my arm. Just two, though, I've got a whole newsletter to get through.

I heard about Bochner from the writer and artist Austin Kleon, who has been on a bit of a notebook kick recently. He had this post about notebooks in movies, the most prominent of which is Dr. Henry Jones' in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. A full PDF recreation of that journal is also available if you want to look and see (the download site looks untrustworthy but I trusted it just fine with no consequences). 

Work (Hard)

The day after we went to MoMA, and after we went and saw Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in the movie theater, Becky and I went to McNally Jackson Books in Williamsburg. To replace Rogue Male, which I had finished, I picked up Office Politics, by Gerard Steen. We're at a literary magazine, The Outsider, staff of about six, and the editor-in-chief is paranoid that there's mutiny afoot, he worries his subordinates have hatched a conspiracy to take over the magazine. (There absolutely is.)  

The author's note says "The Outsider resembles no magazine, living or dead." So it's up to the reader to supply the magazine of their choice for the imagined world of the novel. When I worked at Lapham's Quarterly it was a similar size, and dinner after work was a load-bearing segment of the workday. Aesthetically, Office Politics feels adjacent to The New Yorker and its midcentury literary charm. A J. Crew New Yorker collection just came out, and before that they featured staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe in an unrelated menswear campaign, which caught my eye, I think that's great.

The New Yorker then reminded me in turn of The French Dispatch, which spends an hour and forty-eight minutes basking in a midcentury literariness very similar to the The New Yorker, but more charming. Let's see some covers from the fictional magazine commissioned for the real movie. 

During my brief stint at the St. Maries Gazette-Record, I hung up three of those posters next to my desk, because I was having a very difficult time being a journalist, and these reminded me that being a writer placed me in the same category as the characters in The French Dispatch, which I found comforting. 

This was late 2021, so the beginning of "The Great Resignation," where quits and job openings set all-time highs, a pattern that I both participated in and later studied, here in my current position at Lightcast, the global leader in labor market analytics. 

Having a bad job, and then finding a new job, and then studying the labor market at a time in which it was undergoing extreme change all made me very interested in the ways people work, maybe you've heard me share that before. 

I enjoyed two things over the past few weeks relevant to that. The first was an essay about HR Tech, which is the world Lightcast lives in (though we are not in the worker-surveillance business the article criticizes, you'll be pleased to hear). 

The second is a really impressive data visualization about "sitters" and "standers." The balance between knowledge workers, in the office on the computer, and everyone doing something practical, is a weird one, and it's one of the biggest problems facing the modern labor market, I think. We've written about it at work. The Sitters/Standers site is a decent introduction, and it's fun to explore.

Very briefly, before we bring it all home: when we were at McNally Jackson, while I was buying Office Politics, Becky bought me some Blackwing pencils, which was a very kind gift. I'd heard good things about Blackwing but never tried them. The lead is softer than I'm used to, which creates a very soft writing experience in a good way, smooth but not weak. The last time Becky bought me pencils they were Mitsubishi—if you're interested in reading 4,000 words about the Golden Age of Japanese Pencil Manufacturing (and the rivalry between Mitsubishi and Tombow that dominated it), then step right this way.

Which is useful to know, I guess—and it would be clarifying to say "Septology is about work, writing, and design" instead of "what I'm thinking about" if it ever gets there. But in the meantime it doesn't really help me organize a newsletter. 

So instead what I did was this: I reorganized my ideas roughly based on the chronology of the New York trip, because there were enough intersections that it could work. Horizontal connections were related themes, and the flow of the newsletter goes top to bottom, and every New York thing happened in order. Made a few revisions after that, as you'll see, but this was pretty close to final. My intention was to bring it all full circle, as the "Planning for Empire" section ties back to Rogue Male and high modernism. It's a little more ambitious than usual, structurally, and in a few weeks I'll look back and decide if it works.