New and Old #197
Friday roundup and commentary
The Generous Limits of Analogue, Matt Civico, January 20, 2021
Most digital media, from Spotify to Facebook to smartphones, offer a functional everything to each customer: Here’s the only device/app/service you’ll ever need! The pitch aggravates FOMO (the fear of missing out) by ostensibly offering to fix it. Facebook makes sure no one misses those baby photos and Netflix promises to recommend the next series you need to watch. This is the exact opposite of the constrained experience offered by analogue tools.
Last year, I bought a second-hand Sony Walkman from the year I was born, 1989. Yes, one of those big yellow bricks that plays audio cassettes. And it’s not a dusty collector’s item. I use it regularly for the runtime of the average Bruce Springsteen album. When I brought home this prize, it was in rough shape; it didn’t just work. So, after securing a discount, I got to work at my kitchen table.
Heh. A lot of this old gear fails to just work, unless you pay a lot for something that’s been worked on by someone who knows what they’re doing. There are in fact repaired Walkmans on eBay, and belt kits to attempt it yourself (the belt is usually all that’s wrong). And fixing this stuff is awesome.
The bit here that really draws me in, though is this line: “This is the exact opposite of the constrained experience offered by analogue tools.” In other words, the nature of the thing imposed limits, rather than appearing to demolish limits (while also imposing different ones in a more anxiety-inducing way).
The old technologies (analog, we tend to say, but digital, in the case of physical media like the CD) did some of the work of choosing for you. You listen to the tape or the CD, because that’s what it is and that’s what it’s for. Having technology that makes us feel like little gods in control of our own little low-stakes infinitude basically imposes a lot of mental work on us.
More:
I’m not what people call handy but the object before me was comprehensible. I could see its (missing) hinges and mechanisms. As an object this Walkman was the antithesis of the modern “smart” device, which are presented as frictionless portals. In place of a scrying stones whose technological wizardry is indistinguishable from magic, I held mere matter in my hands, and I worked my will upon it. I cut a length of paper-clip with pliers, bending it back on itself, and inserted my makeshift hinge. After some shimmying, the door that secures the tape deck clicked into place. A small act, maybe, but one that reminds me of my personal agency within an increasingly inscrutable world of black-box devices and services.
I wrote much the same thoughts here and probably elsewhere, in various appreciations of old tech over the years. I don’t think I ever came across Civico’s essay before; I simply had the same impression and experience fiddling with these old devices. This whole vein of critique regarding digital technology, smartphones, streaming, the internet—I love it.
Recovering the Lost Art of Mixed-Use Development, Strong Towns, Edward Erfurt, December 2, 2022
Mixed-use buildings come in infinite combinations and can be located anywhere within a neighborhood or along the street. They may be small in scale, such as a live–work unit, or large, such as an apartment tower with ground-floor retail.
Strong towns require a balance and composition of mixed-use neighborhoods, streets, and buildings. This variety meets demands for daily needs (like shopping for groceries) and for finding housing, all within proximity of each other. Mixed use is essential to the art of town building, but it’s not intuitive to many Americans, including planners and elected officials, who have lived their whole life in a world in which it is the rare exception. We need to recover this art.
This is basic stuff if you’re already in this world, as many of you are, but it’s a great primer on what “mixed use” really means. I forget sometimes that the majority of people have never heard any of this stuff, and that the thing I say—“old small towns and city neighborhoods are the development pattern we lost and want to restore”—might still be assuming too much. I.e., people intuitively tend to like those kinds of places, but not everyone could explain why. Sometimes simple is best.
The discount grocers are not trying to expand into just any space, though.
They tend to need fewer square feet or acres than a mainstream grocery store. A traditional grocery store would normally need to be built on around 5 acres of land, while one like Aldi only needs 2 or 3 acres, said Tim McNamara, senior director of Cushman & Wakefield (CWK), who has represented Aldi in New England and New York for the past 15 years. But even though discount grocers may be seeking smaller spaces, they aren’t aiming to be in no-man’s-land.
There are two interesting things here. The first, above this passage and not quoted here, is that Dollar General is greatly expanding its grocery offerings, making it, as I put it once, almost a tiny version of a supercenter store.
The other is that these smaller-format discount grocery stores are in some ways redeveloping or reintroducing the way groceries were sold several decades ago, when the first truly modern supermarkets were appearing. Those were much smaller stores than the major supermarkets today—only 10,000, maybe up to 20,000 square feet—and often were in urban settings.
In some ways, the closest thing today to a state-of-the-art American supermarket circa 1950 is actually an Aldi or a Lidl. I find that very interesting. Though I’m not sure if the “in urban settings”—e.g., a Lidl filling a 12,000-square-foot space on a Main Street—is going to happen. I’d like to see it, though.
Jeff Guin: Okay. You actually mentioned a third city as an example of your golden mean, and that’s your home town of Durham, North Carolina.
Aaron Lubeck: Sure. Well I love Durham and I’ll admit, perhaps it sounds self-serving but you know, it’s not a perfect town, but I think it’s a great example of a town that has adapted very well towards market demands. This is a town that didn’t exist 110, 120 years ago, so it’s very young. Absolutely boomed because of tobacco. By 1910, the majority of the tobacco world came out of Durham, and all of the architecture that is now so amazing in Durham is rooted in that tobacco history. So, we have these great old tobacco mills from American Tobacco and the Chesterfield Building and so forth that came out of this era that are now being adapted. No tobacco today is made in Durham….
The last cigarettes were rolled in about 1993, and that’s the sort of transformation that would kill most towns in America, but part of it is good policy and part of it is that we are blessed. We are sandwiched between Duke University and Research Triangle Park. There are a lot of creative class people, there’s a lot of really bright people who want to be there, who want to take advantage of the excellent architecture. Part of it is really good policy for historic preservation. We have substantial tax credits in North Carolina that have been a huge driver of urban renewal, for lack of a better word, urban rebirth let’s say, and that’s really helped Durham come from…even when I was younger, growing up in Chapel Hill, a relatively dangerous place to a place that is really the most desired city of the triangle now.
This is a really interesting, somewhat in-the-weeds conversation. (There’s a comparison of Houston and Detroit and their approaches to adaptation and real-estate development, for example.) The transcript is handy, too, if you don’t want to listen in podcast form. Give it a listen!
Here, by the way, is one of those restored tobacco buildings in Durham:
Related Reading:
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The idea of limits is powerful.
Being handy works both ways, and limits work both ways.
I'm developing courseware that runs on the web. I'm fairly familiar with how to make stuff happen in a browser, in other words I know how to use paperclips and ductape in javascript and html.
So I can see the strict limits imposed by the web. Back in the 90s my courseware began as a Windows program, only runnable on Windows. In that setup, with a fixed and unchanging set of external rules, I developed some powerful interactive learning techniques. After I moved online in 2014, I had to eliminate most of the interesting stuff. Each browser has different requirements, and each browser constantly updates to CHANGE the requirements. Most of my good stuff was immediately impossible, and more of it had to be cast off with each new "flexibility" of the outer world.
The same rule works in civic life or a live classroom. When culture or teacher enforces a highly restrictive and unchanging external universe of manners and civility, free exchange of ideas is possible. When culture is constantly changing and enforced by dozens of competing forces, you have to say only what the most powerful force allows as of this minute. Any violation of some previously unguessed standard will be pounced on and annihilated by bullies.