Expressway to Yr Skull - by Drew Austin
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One of my more vivid memories from the haze of Y2K-era television is an MTV Cribs episode in which Tommy Lee reveals the fully staffed Starbucks that he’s installed inside his Malibu house. I had to Google this today to make sure I wasn’t imagining it; my memory is real but the Starbucks itself is no more (the mansion was destroyed by wildfires in 2019). Although it was already absurd when the Cribs episode aired, Tommy Lee’s home Starbucks is one of those images that has become far more absurd in the decades since, not because of the excess it represents but because of how unappealing it seems now: In 2000, the presence of a Starbucks may have still retained some luster (although that’s a stretch) but today it’s hard to imagine a more mundane brand to invoke, or a cornier flex. Encountering a Starbucks is about as exciting as finding a gas station. The Cribs episode, furthermore, raised obvious questions about the logistics of inviting a commercial enterprise to operate inside your home, with baristas clocking in and out, inventory being restocked, and a general sacrifice of domestic privacy to a corporate chain. With brands already fighting for access to every facet of our lives, why go so far out of your way to let them in?
As 2023 draws to its close, it seems like it’s the year the internet took a decisive turn for the worse, at least according to critical consensus among the millennial cohort whose internet heyday was solidly in the 2010s. We’ve entered the terror twilight of the zero-interest-rate social media era, and perhaps the beginning of another that hasn’t yet come into clear focus. I’ll offer Tommy Lee’s home Starbucks as the ideal metaphor for what the internet is currently like: a corporate miasma that we’ve piped into the most intimate spaces of our lives, against our better judgment, eagerly providing free access or even footing the bill for exposure that companies should probably be paying us to obtain (but would never need to). Then, we complain about the flood of unwanted swill that comes pouring through the valves we’ve willingly opened. In a recent post about online shopping and the convergence of physical merchandise and digital content, I wrote that “the internet is a funhouse full of trapdoors…We don’t fall through them so much as the network pushes stuff through them in the reverse direction, toward us.” Not only does that network expect us to make ourselves available in this way, it also asks us to install the trapdoors that let all the stuff flow in. Content, digital or physical, must flow—this is a law of contemporary life, and we all must do our part to uphold it.
The internet’s intrusion into every last domain is a continuation of a trend that began last century, when American domestic life reoriented itself around the presence of TV screens. Because content must flow, screens inexorably proliferate, seemingly outside of the inflationary paradigm that has us complaining about groceries and other necessities. “The American consumer economy is just throwing TVs at you,” @Y2Kmindset tweeted recently. “There’s so many TVs. You end up just falling into a pile of white elephant TVs from 4 years ago that other people gave you because they had no room for it anymore.” TVs are thus a useful indicator of our shifting relationship to physical objects as well as information. Every Christmas season’s gift-buying struggle heightens my attunement to material stuff and in recent years I’ve taken stock of how that materiality has changed. Nearly everything I wanted as a gift when I was younger—mostly CDs and DVDs—has since become immaterial, and in many cases effectively free. Gift giving today is often less a struggle against budgetary constraints than a struggle against the dematerialization that consumes one thing after another, sublimating physical objects into an ethereal cocktail of gift cards and subscriptions and promo codes, undermining the need for a pile of wrapped boxes under the Christmas tree. As for the objects that have resisted that transformation so far—like the hardware we still need to transmit all the content we consume—they feel increasingly utilitarian, less discretionary and giftable, more like the cable box from Verizon, a mandatory conduit of global flow. Today, Tommy Lee could still have a Starbucks inside his house, but if he did, I doubt he’d show it off.
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Last summer, I participated in Summer of Protocols as a researcher along with about 30 others from a wide range of fields. Our overarching goal was to figure out what protocols are, exactly, and why they matter. My contribution to that effort was this essay about the role of protocols in urban systems (in PDF format), as well as an attempt to tie protocols into Christopher Alexander’s pattern language concept. I’m really happy with how it all turned out and am excited to share it here. There’s also a lot of excellent work from my fellow researchers which you can find here, and which is being published in an ongoing series of installments. Get in touch if you want to discuss this or learn more about the project!
Reads:
Elena Saavedra Buckley on the Las Vegas Sphere. “For me, the question of the Sphere was not really about the subjects that other journalists had focused on—the state of live entertainment, or what screens do to our attention spans—but about whether a physical object could still truly excite us, siphon and sustain our normally starved collective passions.”
America’s best example of turning around a dying downtown. Cleveland leads the nation in finding new uses for empty office buildings.
Reggie James on digital quality of life. “I remember popping down to Miami when everyone and their mother was fleeing SF. And the number 1 thing that stood out was that no one was talking about technology, ideas, or hardly even Miami itself—they were talking about money.”
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