Technological Reproducibility

One of the best-known essays by the critic Walter Benjamin explored the transformation in the world of art caused by the ease of reproduction - an example of what we should now call Digital Disruption.

If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization.

Writing at a time when Fascism was on the rise, Benjamin thought this unnatural utilization would be found in war.

Technology has now come full circle, thanks to the Blockchain. Massive increases in the quantity and speed of technical devices, together with absurd levels of energy consumption, nowadays find their most unnatural utilization in Non-Fungible Tokens - works of art whose only purpose appears to be their non-reproducibility.

David Morris argues that

NFTs are valuable in themselves and represent a totally novel category because they give digital objects a claim on the sense of presence, history, and authenticity previously reserved for physical objects.

But Tom Whyman disagrees

But look closer, and one will see that this can’t possibly be what NFTs are doing at all. The tokens might be non-fungible: but the art (or similar) that any given NFT is associated with remains just as reproducible as it was before. ... When you own an NFT then, what you have purchased is not really a sports clip, or a piece of digital art , but simply a string of cryptographic information – information whose scarcity is guaranteed by the immense amount of real, planet-destroying energy that is required to produce it. As NFTs are becoming more widespread, then, the aura of art has if anything just been further profaned: on the blockchain, art is stripped of all its old value: all that was once sacred melted down into crypto.

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Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)

David Z. Morris, Art in the Age of Digital Scarcity: Why NFTs Enchant Us (CoinDesk, 30 August 2021)

Tom Whyman, The Work of Art in the Age of the Non-Fungible Token (Logically, 16 March 2021)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Walter Benjamin

Wikipedia: Non-Fungible Token, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Related post: Let the Coin take the Strain (October 2021)

What Was She Thinking?

When @emilythornberry MP saw a house draped with the flag of St George, white van parked outside, she couldn't resist tweeting a picture to her followers back in her constituency.

Emily Thornberry is the Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury, which, as the Guardian constituency profile acidly remarks, "is routinely maligned as the natural habitat of the hypocritical, well-off, ostensibly liberal chattering classes". Perhaps as a result of this unfortunate stereotype her innocent action was widely interpreted as a snobbish reference, from a member of the North London urban elite, to the working class voters of Rochester, and she was forced to resign her position in the Shadow Cabinet.

But her constituency isn't homogeneously affluent, and she tweeted a photo of herself earlier this week, happily delivering leaflets in a housing estate. So not snobbery exactly.

So what motivated her to post the Rochester tweet in the first place, and who was its intended audience? It is now common for people to post pictures from their travels onto Facebook and Twitter, as a modern equivalent of the postcard home. So Emily Thornberry's tweet from Rochester makes it seem as if she regarded her visit to Rochester as a kind of rustication (or missus ad rusticos).

As @freedland writes, "even Thornberry’s defenders do not pretend she was trying to recruit white van drivers who fly the English flag from their homes. At best, she appeared to express the fascination of a visiting anthropologist for the natives of Rochester and Strood with their curious cultural customs." Or perhaps as @sarahditum suggests, she is drawing attention to the supposed jingoism of the Rochester and Strood electorate. How on earth could that be interpreted as class warfare?

To the extent that her thoughts and tweets are directed at the people back home in North London, she is keeping the Kentish voters at arm's length. As far as I can see, she doesn't appear in any of the photos she tweeted from Rochester and Strood, even as a tourist. Like many tourists, her tweets often lack explicit meaning, which then prompts people to project their own interpretation onto the real purpose of her communication. She casually labels everything #Rochester, although Strood has a significantly different demographic: most of the UKIP support was in Strood, while Rochester remained solidly Conservative.

Further insight into her London-centric vision can be inferred from her having retweeted a post from Buzzfeed called 27 Reasons To Fall In Love With A Londoner, which starts with the assertion that Londoners are the coolest people in the country. Yes indeed, Lady Thornberry, yes indeed.

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Adam Donald, Emily Thornberry: How one tweet led to her resignation (BBC News 21 November 2014)

Jonathan Freedland, The Emily Thornberry affair proves it: US-style culture wars have come to Britain (Guardian 21 November 2014)

Sarah Ditum, Tweeting a picture of a house is not an act of class warfare, whatever the Sun says (New Statesman 21 November 2014)


Updated 26 Nov 2014

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Out delivering Annual Report in St Peters with crack team. Kent this afternoon #labourdoorstep #whypaygymmembership? pic.twitter.com/ZQrG9Xnm6M
— Emily Thornberry MP (@EmilyThornberry) November 17, 2014

Absolutely & so many more >>27 Reasons To Fall In Love With A Londoner http://t.co/jIw7LuTTwr @FloPerry
— Emily Thornberry MP (@EmilyThornberry) November 12, 2014

Is this really as nature intended?

@AsNatIntended (As Nature Intended) is an excellent health food chain in London. I visit the Ealing branch regularly, but I can't help thinking that the name is a bit misleading, based on a romanticized idea of Nature.

Because some of us might think Nature intended apples to create apple trees, not apple pies. Surely fruit is "designed" to attract insects and birds rather than humans? And for that matter, didn't Nature intend men and women to smell of honest sweat, rather than organic lavender soap and fennel toothpaste?

Upmarket health food is based on a rather strange notion of authenticity. As @stephenpoole writes

"It is widely assumed that food sold as organic is purer and closer to an assumedly benign Nature, although no food is made from inorganic matter and organic farming standards sanction the use of neurotoxic fertilisers." Stephen Poole, Why are we so obsessed with the pursuit of authenticity? (New Statesman March 2013)

But the idea that Nature's purpose is to serve mankind is an old one. We can find it in the Bible and in Ralph Waldo Emerson.

• "Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things." (Genesis 9:3)

• "Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man." (Emerson "On Nature", Chapter 2 Commodity)

And the idea that mankind has subverted Nature's purpose is also an old one. @DaveZinczenko suggests that "Whereas our sweet tooth was once nature’s way of protecting us from disease, now it’s the food industry’s way of tricking us into it." (Origins of the Sweet Tooth, Mens Health July 2004) via @br1anv. See also The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food (New York Times Feb 2013) via @EllenNaylor.

Meanwhile, there are endless ideas about restoring Nature's purpose - from naked cooking to public nudity. There was a 1961 film by Harrison Marks called Naked as Nature Intended (Link Not Safe For Work), and there are several militant naturists around these days, including Vincent Bethell and Stephen Gough. There are also some rather alarming ideas for Restoring Nature's Homeostasis (Link Not Safe For Mealtimes).

But is letting nature decide such a good idea (asks @stephenpoole)? 'After all, he reminds us, nature tried to kill us all with the Black Death. Nature is currently experimenting feverishly to find just the right strain of avian flu to cause a global pandemic. "Nature," as the young microbiologist points out in the zombie film World War Z, "is a serial killer." ' Is our love of nature writing bourgeois escapism? (Guardian July 2013)

It could be dangerous to regard nature as benign. The only consistent intention nature seems to have for us it is that we should get old and die. Et in Arcadia Ego.

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See also Madeleine Somerville, Natural's not in it: just because a product calls itself 'natural' doesn't make it good (Guardian 8 March 2016). (I'm guessing the headline was a Guardian subeditor's tribute to the Gang of Four song "Natural's not in it".)

@MadeleineSix "Natural is not in it your relations are of power We all have good intentions but all with strings attached" @gangof4official

— Richard Veryard (@richardveryard) March 8, 2016

“@MadeleineSix: @richardveryard that what the title is from?? The reference was lost on me!”- our ideas are not "natural"; humans make them

— GANG OF FOUR (@gangof4official) March 8, 2016

Finally, @HadleyFreeman writes that "perhaps the most striking thing about the natural trend is how much it reinforces gender stereotypes". If the cavemen did it or ate it, it’s got to be good for you. Right? (Guardian 16 April 2016)


Related posts: Viral Pandemic (April 2005) Arguments from Nature (December 2010) The Purpose of Baldness (Jan 2011). Related category: Death
(Links Not Safe For Romantics)

Updated 17 April 2016