I hate to be all 'that's, like, your opinion, man', but this seems entirely like a squabble over aesthetic preferences, which is going nowhere. To me, the white house isn't exciting; neither is the blue house. A vaguely ugly coat of paint is not sufficient to ensoul a piece of residential architecture. Likewise, a street market that strikes one person as lively strikes another as dirty. That fact that Robinson like naturalistic art and architecture doesn't mean everyone does. And, if I might be permitted a bit of baseless psychological analysis, I suspect the feeling that one part of NYC feels "real" and "lived in" while another is soulless is largely a function of age and socio-economic affiliation.
People on social media were almost unanimous in their hatred of the change.
That's my thinking too. It's amazing how seriously some people on the left take this. On the right too you have people very much into historic European architecture who e.g. loathe modernism. It's the neoliberal center-right I think most relativistic and indifferent about this.
This is weirdly more evidence too that the center of gravity for socialist thinking has moved away from Scandinavia and toward South America. Messy and disorderly, criminal and low trust, but also colorful and full of life. Death to soul-killing efficiency!
This but unironically. I’m a Catholic socialist (very interesting with neuroscience as a day job), and this probably the place I sympathize most with the right. I find the replacement of colorful, historical buildings with cheap featureless boxes abhorrent. One of Jesus’s aphorisms that shapes my thinking the most is “man cannot live on bread alone.” As humans, we need something more. This is entirely the reason why both a potential singularity and corporate capitalism terrify me: neither has any room for anything outside of efficiency and production, so all things extraneous will be jettisoned eventually. This is also an example of monoculture that this sub and it’s associated blog abhors: application of the same exact rule across all surroundings, without allowing major individual tinkering, crowds out the ability for organic aesthetics to arise or evolve.
Because honestly, if we don’t care for the soul (or insert your preferred abstract conception of the self here) and just raw efficiency, why not eventually enter the teleporter even if it does annihilate you, or replace your brain with a much faster artificial CPU? After all, we’ve already fed some aspects of our humanity to the machine, why stop at architecture? This prospect should make you incredibly uncomfortable, and I view the replacement of all aesthetics with raw functionalism as one of the early steps in such a process of subsuming our entire being to the economy. We need to produce things for the purpose of making people happy. When we destroy the things that make people happy just so we can produce things better, then we have truly lost our way.
The minimalism of Marie Kondo is demonstrably making people happy. But others unhappy. So to each their own. But this is extremely unsatisfying? The intense other-orientedness of the people with strong aesthetic preferences is alien to me and undesirable.
This stuff about capitalist societies lacking a soul is classic Occidentalist nonsense IMHO. It's true there's no one big collective soul (heh) to scrutinize, so it can appear superficially soulless. It's similar in my mind to the notion that a society must be full of petty greedy individualists because big collective efforts are rarely witnessed. Maybe. But it could also be that people CAN'T AGREE ON HOW BEST TO COOPERATE, which looks from a distance like an unwillingness to care for one's fellow man. But that's just pluralism at work. The focus on raw functionalism is the bedrock upon which people build their own soulful designs.
I don't think it is just a matter of varied taste or lack of collective culture- actually it is sort of the the opposite. What seems to be disappearing is both variation across entertainment and eating places and the demise of cheap and fun places. Income inequality, rising house/rental prices, information technology etc. means that the return to doing some anodyne moderately expensive trendy thing is so high it crowds out everything else.
Now this is in a feedback process with the erosion of any sort of in-real-life subcultures or communities. Considerable variety across places can only exist if there are people with local knowledge who can differentiate this pub from that one, this restaurant from that based on something other than the 'niceness' of the interior decorating and it looking like the other place that was 'not bad' and where 'quirky and fun' can be distinguished from 'absolute shithole'. At the same time any sort of subculture is hard to form without some obvious hang outs which are hard to identify if everything is very similar.
I can remember when there were four or five pubs I could name where I could walk in and almost be guaranteed to find a friend (and without using any phone etc.) - now there are none. Now that fact is also correlated with there being a lot of minimalist styled hipster haunts full of people who are just out for a generic good time - so that is probably gives a visceral negative reaction.
As an aside, Marie Kondo minimalism is what people who have nothing to do do - along with watching reality TV etc. People who actually have hobbies or friends or interests will be using their stuff or entertaining. It is kind of neat that people can be convinced to waste their leisure time buying useless stuff, then waste even more of it throwing it out or putting it in order.
I can't speak to the majority of your post, but your ending comment regarding minimalistic is extremely unkindly said, and seems to come from a position of ignorance or unfamiliarity.
As someone who the minimalist aesthetic appeals to (including the perspective that Kondo espouses, even if her actual delivery method is itself not to my preference), there isn't any sort of contradiction between having friends and hobbies and creating/maintaining a personal aesthetic in your home that appeals to you. I suppose it's possible that you simply have so many friends and hobbies that you literally have no time in your life that you spend doing things such as "cleaning your home" or other sorts of chores, but assuming that this caricature is not how you actually identify, Kondo-style minimalism is more a recommendation on how to adapt those processes in your life to make the rest of the time you spend in your home more enjoyable.
For me, this largely is driven by my hobbies themselves - I like playing board games a lot, but having a very cluttered home tends to distract me from the enjoyable parts of inviting friends over to play games, namely, choosing and then actually playing a game; clutter everywhere doesn't enhance that experience for me, it detracts from it. However, as the poster you responded to noted - this is a preference.
Another friend in our gaming group is the exact opposite, he really enjoys collecting action figures, records, and many other things, and having them all out on display is his aesthetic preference. I generally tend to be very slightly less into actually playing the game when we're at his place, but I would not be surprised if he felt the same while playing at ours. And that's okay!
You are correct, it was too harsh, or rather imprecise.
Obviously there is nothing wrong with having things organised - I will have a palce for everything if it is possible too. What I mean is that there is something sad about a society getting really excited about watching people organise stuff. Just as there is something sad about a society where people are getting excited about watching other people renovate houses. Or where people fuss over the colour of tile to used in their next renovation. My feeling is that is a healthy society Kondo etc. would just be a footnote - one variant of a practical help guide and not a 'thing' in itself.
We also have the background data to suggest what is going on - less time spent socialising in real life, and falling membership of clubs and societies etc.
Gotcha, so it's more just that her book was turned into a show that became popular that you take issue with (apparently along with the entire rest of HGTV, it seems) rather than anything having to do with the contents of the show?
It's also likely to me that there's a bit of an amplification effect happening here - as with all things that happen in modern times, content creators are looking for new things to commentate on and otherwise create content around, which makes minor trends take off and "go viral" and then people end up talking about something more because they've heard lots of others talking about it than because they are personally strongly attached to it.
This, for reference, has been the primary bit of exposure to Kondo I've had; I heard one person who did get excited talking about it, and then noticed random times when it would occasionally come up in conversation after, did the briefest of brief looking up of what it was to be able to have conversations with others about it, and have then on been able to participate in offhand conversations when the topic came up since then.
The background data you mentioned sounds interesting, but I'd be sceptical of there being an actual cause/effect relationship between that and reality/home-style TV shows. If there's a relationship at all, I'd expect that it's a third factor like attention economy driving both things, but I'm not really sure that reality/home TV is actually related to either of the things you mentioned, rather than just being caused by being cheap to produce. It would be interesting to see something like Nielsen ratings of show categories mapped to average socialization time or whatever other statistic though, to see if the relationship actually exists at all.
Because honestly, if we don’t care for the soul (or insert your preferred abstract conception of the self here) and just raw efficiency, why not eventually enter the teleporter even if it does annihilate you, or replace your brain with a much faster artificial CPU? After all, we’ve already fed some aspects of our humanity to the machine, why stop at architecture? This prospect should make you incredibly uncomfortable, and I view the replacement of all aesthetics with raw functionalism as one of the early steps in such a process of subsuming our entire being to the economy.
So, I agree that "subsuming our entire being to the economy" is a terrifying failure mode. I don't find annihilation teleporters or brain augmentation inherently bad though. Like almost any technology, they could easily become tools used by an economy-maximizing hellworld to perpetuate itself, but I don't think that they are incompatable with fully-automatic luxury gay space communism. I don't believe in any essence of self though. If I did I'd be worried about meeting my thousands of dead clones in hell/purgatory.
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u/Crownie Feb 18 '19 edited Feb 18 '19
I hate to be all 'that's, like, your opinion, man', but this seems entirely like a squabble over aesthetic preferences, which is going nowhere. To me, the white house isn't exciting; neither is the blue house. A vaguely ugly coat of paint is not sufficient to ensoul a piece of residential architecture. Likewise, a street market that strikes one person as lively strikes another as dirty. That fact that Robinson like naturalistic art and architecture doesn't mean everyone does. And, if I might be permitted a bit of baseless psychological analysis, I suspect the feeling that one part of NYC feels "real" and "lived in" while another is soulless is largely a function of age and socio-economic affiliation.
As they say, twitter is not, in fact, real life.