Hello and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! It’s a four-review week! With two works of history, a work of political theory, and a novel! Plus the return of Ed’s Corner! We also had some exciting elections and more coming up for Citizens of the Review, so, uh, give me money and join the community! Enjoy!
CONTENTS
REVIEWS-
Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire
Ernst Jünger, The Worker
Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev
Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: I'm Sorry, I'm Typing This With My Thumbs & Granularity
REVIEWS
Taylor Branch, “Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-1965” (1998) - This is the second in a big bow-wow flagship popular-history trilogy about the civil rights movement, written by journalist Taylor Branch and published between 1988 and 2006. When I say something is “bow-wow flagship popular-history” I mean big, long, meaty, usually political histories and biographies, the kind that really sailed into market in the period Branch was writing. Stuff you get for your uncle who’s into history, in a more serious vein than the History Channel but not a PhD.
I’m an uncle (and pleased as punch to be one) who is into history, but also a PhD- split the difference! Sometimes historians make impassioned cries for more narrative in works of history. Cultural and social history, focused as they are on trends and groups more than individuals, neglect narrative flow, they say. Well, split the difference there, too, I guess- I do think that historians, especially cultural, social, and intellectual historians, could use to be better writers and pay more attention to craft. That’s not the same as saying they should follow novelistic narrative conventions which wouldn’t suit their historiographical projects. Also, there’s narrative literature other than the Victorian triple-decker and realist novels historians seem to have in mind when they talk about narrative…
Anyway! I thought this was pretty good. Being who I am, I inevitably compare the middle of any trilogy to “The Empire Strikes Back.” This is kind of the opposite, as “Pillar of Fire” depicts what is arguably the high water mark of the civil rights movement in the US. The nonviolent movement wins over segregation in Birmingham, despite losing four children to a bomb in a church basement. Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act. He’s challenged for the presidency by Barry Goldwater, who opens an aperture — opposed to civil rights, but on notionally color-blind grounds — that the liberal establishment can convince itself shuts for good after Johnson annihilates Goldwater in the election. King wins the Nobel Peace Prize, a massive recognition of his international legitimacy, even as he’s despised by millions at home.
But all is not well. Branch has a lot of balls in the air, and most of them spell trouble. He does not begin the book with King, but with followers of the Nation of Islam, black people who oppose much of what King stands for. We read a lot about King’s supposed opposite number, Malcolm X, and his struggles within and eventually against the Nation after he gets expelled for outing Elijah Muhammad’s infidelities and perversions of Islam. The line that “whites would talk to Martin because they didn’t want to talk to Malcolm” is way too simple to take very seriously, but they did exist in a complicated dialectic, one cut off by Malcolm’s murder towards the end of the time covered by this book.
Other balls Branch keeps in the air include the alphabet soup of civil rights group — SCLC, NAACP, SNCC, CORE — and their wrangling over their respective visions. All of them respect King, none of them agree with him entirely, and between the perils of the movement and the liabilities of success, cracks are starting to show. We see a lot from the perspective of the Johnson White House. After the previous volume covered the Kennedy administration extensively, you get an interesting tonal shift. There’s a lot less of the Kennedy-style image-management. Say what you want against Johnson — and there’s plenty to say — but he was a lot more sincere, both about helping people and just in general — than JFK or most people in JFK’s circle. Sadly, that included his commitment to the “Cold War” part of “Cold War liberalism,” and we follow the war in Vietnam as it escalates.
All of these things come together to help doom King’s project, which is presumably what the last part of the book is about. Even his signal successes — the end of formal segregation — turn against his larger project, as they allow cynical whites to claim that racism is over, the project is done. King and the rest of the people who made up the civil rights movement certainly didn’t think that (pace certain cynical leftists, black and white, who paint integration as the goal of sickly lovers of whiteness). Branch isn’t shy about King’s failings, and discusses his serial on-the-road infidelities, though mostly as they affect the movement. Revelations about these activities formed the core of the package the FBI sent to King in an effort to get King to kill himself. If there’s one guy you could remove from American history, there’s a strong argument to be made for J. Edgar Hoover… arguably, Branch puts too many chips on King. He doesn’t do so in narrative terms, but whether or not people — Malcolm, Stokely Carmichael, NAACP, whoever — grasp (read: agree with) King’s nonviolent vision becomes a measure of their seriousness about black freedom, and that doesn’t scan.
But above all, this is a movement history, and a well done one. I knew about the Vietnam stuff and a certain amount of the difficulties in SNCC from prior reading, but what will stick with me is the roll call of honor, battles won and lost by the movement: Birmingham, Alabama; Albany, Georgia; St. Augustine, Florida; Neshoba County, Mississippi; Selma, Alabama, on and on, while everyone from Malcolm and King on down knew that worse tests would come when they would have to take their fight north, to the de jure racism that governed the lives of the children of the great migration. Branch conveys the wild hope and the sheer terror of defying generations of racist power. I was struck by the demonic adaptability of the southern power structure, marshaling everything from Klan murderers to sophisticated PR-management to get their way. I was also struck by the sheer humanity of the civil rights organizers, their internal stresses, burnout, the looming issue of racial inequities within the movement as white students streamed south to help… I can’t claim to have seen stories as epic as theirs, but I’ve seen many of the same dynamics. It’s terrifying to think we need to rely on the weak instruments of human will and blood against entrenched power machines, but it’s what we’ve got. ****’
Ernst Jünger, “The Worker” (1932) (translated from the German by Bogdan Costea and Laurence Hemming) - I used to think I was clever, telling leftists how much they had to learn from reactionary sources. I don’t think I was wrong, really, but there’s definitely diminishing returns. I guess I just like sampling many kinds of ideas and writing and wanted a rationale to get friends on board. Maybe a better rationale is that if you expand your knowledge-base you get a broader and more flexible idea of how thought works. You see patterns you might otherwise miss. Dump a bunch of shit into the hopper and see what materializes.
Ernst Jünger typically yields fewer excuses for reading than other right-wing figures, because he’s been assimilated as a “literary” figure, largely on the strength of his First World War memoir/novel “Storm of Steel” and because his politics were pretty heterodox. But he was definitely “in the mix” of fractious ideological politics in the interwar period, hovering around the Conservative Revolutionary faction- antidemocratic German nationalists who were a bit too aristocratic and intellectual for the Nazis (who wound up stealing most of their thunder). Jünger wasn’t much of a joiner, it seems, though good biographical material on him isn’t easy to find in English. Not being a joiner is one of those things that might make it hard to get into print, but sometimes adds staying power to the works that do make it- and avoiding joining the Nazis, as Jünger did, was a pretty good move. They liked him (mostly), he didn’t like them, though was perfectly willing to cooperate with them when they were in power.
On the eve of the Nazi takeover, Jünger published an ideological/philosophical polemic, “The Worker.” Jünger studied entomology and practiced photography at high levels, along with writing and war. His eye attuned to arresting images and subtle categorization schemes combines with his immersion in German philosophy to produce a strange, unsettling, fascinating work.
The basic thrust of “The Worker” appears to be this: far from workers being defined by their relationship to the means of production, what makes a worker is a sort of existential status, conferred not by power-relations but by what could be called task-relations. Roughly, if your life is organized around tasks, you are a worker, in Jünger’s conception. The worker stands in contrast to the bourgeoisie, whose life is organized around self-image, more or less, and security. The bourgeoisie is individualist and thinks in terms of his rights and obligations, even when trying to organize collectively- this is how Jünger dismisses Marxism. The worker thinks collectively even when expressing himself, always thinking in terms of getting the job done.
Technology and politics make the eclipse of the bourgeoisie by the worker inevitable, Jünger argues, and cites rapid industrialization and the First World War as proof. As technology and social organization grows in complexity, the politics that governed past orders become obsolete, and so too do the people that populated them. There’s a lot of philosophical back-and-forth here about forms, types, and dominion, in the way that continental philosophy has with its terminologies. The situation is too dynamic to be specific — Jünger is often maddeningly unspecific and probably often elliptically refers to figures in German life at the time that I don’t know about — but he confidently proclaims that the dominion of the worker — meaning the imposition of the form of the worker, a social order defined around him — is at hand. Moreover, this is tied in (again, largely elliptically) with Germany’s rising from the ashes of its defeat in the war and ending the Weimar/Versailles order.
There’s a lot more to it than that, and there are interesting nuggets and graceful turns of phrase all over this dense book, but that’s the basic gist. He applies his ideas to art and to politics towards the end, all the time coming to the conclusion that man, as conceived of by the bourgeoisie nineteenth century, is all over, that something determined by “the work character” will replace him. Well… is he wrong? I do sometimes make a game of thinking about how I would interact with people from the past. The more I learn, the harder it seems like it would be to communicate with people from even relatively recent history. People, especially bourgeois, educated people, were supposed to have so many accoutrements to their personhood that contemporary people (even people with similar class backgrounds) lack…
But in other respects, of course, Jünger really whiffed the predictive aspect (though he was sufficiently vague that he could’ve raised an eyebrow and say- “did I??” On top of everything else, he lived to be 102!). You can argue that American power (and a lot of Soviet power too) devoted itself in the post-WWII period to suppressing the unholy “dominion” of obsessive, death-and-discomfort-disregarding task-completion-ends-before-means ubermenschen Jünger foresaw. The consumer, not the worker, became the central figure in America’s world-building project, and the Soviet Union, dedicated (in Jünger’s telling) to a fake socially-conscious Marxist idea of work, tagged along. To the extent anyone today on the right reads Jünger and gets past “Storm of Steel” to this work, they mostly see “The Worker” as something (something nicely, technically non-Nazi) to which to aspire, something that has yet to happen.
Jünger lived the life of the scary early twentieth century cultured, amoral ubermensch, from war hero to literary star to guy who scared the Nazis while not deviating from his own eccentric but right-wing politics to extraordinarily long-lived and productive literary institution. Arguably, he lived it longer and more categorically than anybody. I don’t generally think people in the past were better or smarter than people in the present (or vice versa), but I do think that shifts in context change what people look and act like. They really don’t make people simultaneously that educated and, for lack of a better word, crazy anymore. Our contemporary meritocratic bourgeoisie likes to pay itself in the back for its SAT scores but they couldn’t touch Jünger or millions of others like him across the global bourgeoisie in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike a lot of the crazy, absurdly well-educated people who made life so interesting, Jünger was also actually smart- perceptive, adaptable. That didn’t mean he was right about things, but he was smart.
So I’m not trying to dunk on the guy, or any rate bag on his brains, when I say that in a lot of parts of “The Worker” I found myself thinking about two contemporary figures: Elon Musk and Mike Rowe. In terms of intelligence, sensitivity, culture, capacity for expression, there is no meaningful comparison between those two utter dullards and Jünger. But Jünger himself makes clear that the task is what matters, and capitalism harnessed task-centric thinking to its own machine for producing legitimacy. Given his denunciation of the fineness of bourgeois distinctions and the “museal” quality of culture the dying bourgeoisie produced, how could Jünger complain if something rather a lot like his “total work character” or “typus of the worker” gets dumbed down (that is, rendered into an effective tool for a task) into the sentimental, emotive American idiom and sold to schmucks by the bourgeoisie to get them to work harder, disregard safety regulations, absolutely refuse to unionize? Jünger rather pointedly ignores America in “The Worker.” But the idea that the “real” class distinction is between those who do the work and those who don’t, and that management and labor are on the same side against whoever… well, Jünger would no doubt quibble, or else fuck off on a hike to take acid (he was friends with Albert Hoffman!) and collect bug samples. Being a continental ubermensch of Jünger’s vintage means never having to say you’re sorry.
Like I said, none of this is to draw a straight line between “The Worker” and Musk’s bro-Pinochetery or Rowe’s abject “dirty job” cosplaying. It’s highly unlikely either have read Jünger or would understand this book meaningfully. Rather, and here we get back to the beginning of this review, I think it’s useful, or anyway poignant and interesting, to look at how ideas and tropes migrate, appear and reappear, in varying contexts according to disparate but often related logics. Broadly speaking, Jünger and Musk face some of the same problems — legitimizing hierarchy — in radically different but genetically/temporally related contexts. The differences in context are many and don’t need explication beyond pointing to the vast decline in literary standards between the thirties and now. The similarities include a widespread disbelief in established authorities on the part of classes that are supposed to support them and a prevailing sense of emergency. What do you need in an emergency? Jünger makes nods to Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception” towards the end of “The Worker,” Musk just tweets about coups. Tragedy, farce, etc.
I suppose, to subcategorize like “The Worker” with Jünger would a bug, we could say that both Jünger and Musk attempt to make effort — putting in the hours, as CEOs are indeed wont to do, sometimes — the marker of a worker’s legitimacy whilst avoiding much of, if not all, of the sentimental baggage previous iterations of the same concept carried. Neither Musk nor Jünger are/were your father’s management hack. No gold watch at retirement, no cuckoo clock, no country songs. What you get are appeals to youth, force, power, the future (which in turn validate the “cooler” aspects of the past). Of course, with Musk, things are just stripped down to their lowest common denominator appeal, whereas in “The Worker” you have a product of high-end (if occasionally fatuously) European thought… I know which I prefer, but I also know what does “the work” it was intended to do at this moment in time. Ah, well. *****
Victor Serge, “The Case of Comrade Tulayev” (1949) (translated from the French by Willard Trask) - Is Victor Serge the great Trotskyite writer? He certainly is pretty great, I guess I’m just curious if there’s some other big time Trotskyite novelist I’m not thinking of? Either way, Serge lived an adventurous life — raised by anti-Czarist Russian emigres in Belgium, bummed around the anarchist scene as a youth, went to Russia to help with the Revolution, fell in with Trotsky, prison, exile, narrowly avoided being killed by both Stalin and Hitler’s people — and began writing novels towards the end of it, after the Stalinist communist presses blackballed him from publishing essays. He never went right, never turned his coat, so novels became what he could get out. It sucked for him but it turned out to be pretty good for literature.
“The Case of Comrade Tulayev” finds the titular comrade, a big man in the Soviet government, shot dead on the streets of Moscow one snowy evening. We know who did it from the beginning- a rando with a gun and fleeting inspiration. But how random can it be in the midst of Stalin’s great terror? The machinery of repression goes into motion and numerous people are sucked in. The first half or so or the book introduces characters that get brought in as suspicious. Most of them were already marked, one way or another. There’s Erchov, the head of the secret service, marked for his failure to protect Tulayev and because secret service chiefs, coordinators of so much terror, only have so much shelf life. Rublev the historian is a leftover old Bolshevik, yet to be cleaned up by Stalin’s jealousies and ripe for cutting down. Makeyev, a regional governor, got too big for his britches and his wife, enraged by his infidelities, turned him in. Kondratiev returned from overseeing the Stalinist repression of rival left forces on the Republican side of the Spanish civil war only to find himself suspect.
Their various fates have little to do with their personalities or qualities, and of course nothing to do with innocence or guilt. There’s some reasonably interesting twists and turns as you try to figure out what will happen with this one or that one. The investigators are not notably competent at their jobs, even the job of backbiting and fucking people over, so things don’t go well for them, either. The person of Stalin, referred to as “the Chief,” occasionally intervenes, to condemn or save as was his wont. A kind of demoniac perversity seems to rule the day in what’s supposed to be a realm of human reason. A character tries to speak up in such a way that Stalin will kill him, and it backfires; a veteran apparatchik is done in by the momentary idealism of a family member. We see Tulayev’s killer in the end- he escapes consequences, but is stuck with the system. He moves and starts over again every few years, and it seems to work ok for him- wonder how viable that was in the Soviet system in real life?
You see this elsewhere in Serge’s take on the Soviet Union, this perversity- the stores full of fake goods, the peasants moved to incredible deeds by falsehoods or failing to do what they need to faced with facts, the whole self-aware machinery of lying, obedience, and repression. Many of the characters had been involved with the initial Bolshevik revolution, which also threw at them massive difficulties and betrayals, but none of them seem to regret it (as Serge didn’t, in life). The perversity of the revolutionary life — the sheer dogged stubbornness of the world’s flaws and failures, dotted with just enough sublime success to bait the trap, to keep you going — shaded into the perversity of the counterrevolution of Stalinism. I think that, more than any mystical tendency for revolutionists to turn against each other, makes up the continuum between revolutions and their failure: it’s fucking hard to change things, to keep at it year after year and failure after failure. Serge, I think, understood that, and not for nothing is he the great — Trotskyite — novelist, in that he kept going and never stopped trying to improve (and never stopped criticizing). That critical eye can make for good writing, sometimes. ****’
Pekka Hämäläinen, “Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power” (2019) (narrated by Joe Barrett) - Trends in the historiography of Native Americans go around and around, like any history, but a little more fraught considering just how much of the modern world has been built on indigenous peoples’ death and dispossession. The first histories, or anyway the first produced by the American historical profession, depicted the Native Americans as savages who needed to be cleared away for the good of civilization (Theodore Roosevelt contributed to this historiography). Some of these writings allowed that there was tragedy and atrocity involved. But it took a later era to write histories that brought those elements to the fore, coinciding both with the coming of social history, “from below” stuff, and the rise of militant indigenous movements in the sixties and after.
Now the thing is to “give indigenous people back their agency,” though the fact that the leader in this historiography is a white dude from Finland does make it a bit funny, like, “thanks, product of Nordic social democracy, for our agency back!” I’m sure Pekka Hämäläinen is sensitive about this dynamic, he seems a smart and sensible guy. He wrote “The Comanche Empire” a few years back, and now casts his gaze north across the American plains to the domain of the Lakota Sioux. I’m still not sure why he chose the Lakota, specifically — he gets across the idea they were the dominant strain of the alliance that made up the Sioux over the Dakota (even if the latter get the states named after them), and also that Sioux was originally a slur — but either way, he makes an argument about them similar to that he made for the Comanche. The Lakota were not savages but they were also no mere victims. They adapted and remade the world around them. They were ambitious, flexible, human. Hämäläinen claimed that the Comanche played empires off each other, and he claims the Lakota did the same, and more- they offered a competitive version of American empire.
In general, this makes for an improvement on the previous historiography, at least from the cheap seats in which I reside. And it also basically allows good old-fashioned political history — leaders, empires, wars — in through the back door, as it were. Of course, Hämäläinen includes social and ecological context, which is key in thinking about Lakota politics and the politics of the West in general, but he reads the Lakota long counts — illustrated buffalo hides that tell much of the people’s history — like so many war department memoranda.
One niggle- in making the Lakota “human,” what do we mean by “human?” The cultural historians would make great hay of this question, but Hämäläinen throws up the emergency flare of “adaptability” and really, that’s good enough for our purposes. We tend to think of Native Americans as always doing, always having done, whatever it is white people encountered them doing. Even cursory thought shows this couldn’t be true, for anyone and certainly not for the Lakota- horses, the iconic Lakota animal companion, didn’t come to America until the arrival of Europeans (there were some ancient horses but they died off thousands of years before). But the Lakota didn’t take to the horse initially, either. The historical record, and Hämäläinen, first find them in the forests around the Great Lakes, hunting, gathering, and trading. They played the game of trade and war with the French, the Dutch, the British, the Iroquois, and numerous other Native players. They did ok, but ran into trouble and started moving west towards the plains in the mid-eighteenth century.
By and by, the Lakota adopted a lifestyle built around horses and chasing the buffalo herds. Mobile, unified, and capable of both great ruthlessness and clever diplomacy, they created what Hämäläinen claims can only be called an empire. They gathered tribute from other tribes, especially those along the river, who could grow carbohydrate-rich plants that the nomadic lifestyle otherwise lacked. They monopolized control of lucrative trades in furs and buffalo hides, and used these commodities to secure guns, which in turn cemented their military capabilities. Becoming a masterful nomadic military/political machine in a matter of a few generations is, to me, considerably more impressive than some gauzy “we’ve always done this” mythology.
It’s also worth noting the numbers involved. The Lakota didn’t really do censuses, but it seems unlikely they ever numbered above the mid-six figures. Only a minority of those would be fighting-age men. Even at the best of times, the Lakota were afflicted by plagues, internecine fighting, alcohol dependency, the harshness of nomadic life. But not only could they form an empire that subjugated other indigenous people, but one that could, for at least a few years, check the power of the United States, a nation of tens of millions. The Lakota ran the northern plains until the 1870s. They had to adapt to the presence of the Americans, but the Americans weren’t in charge. The Lakota seldom had numerical advantage against the Americans, even tactically (Little Big Horn being a notable exception). What they had was superb tactical and strategic sense paired with unrivaled mobility, leadership structures that valued talent over politics, a solid appreciation for firepower and surprise, and incredible — but sane, calculating — courage. There’s a reason American troops still call uncontrolled areas of countries they occupy “Indian country.” Racism, yes, but also terror- these are still the things insurgents bring to bear to bring down more heavily-equipped enemies.
Of course, it didn’t last. Who knows what a world would look like where it did, or could. Eventually, the Americans decided they wanted the Dakotas and the sacred Black Hills, with their gold. Custer, despite being a self-promoting egomaniac, became a martyr to Americans who went out to avenge him with massacre after massacre. This also entailed ecological warfare, like Phil Sheridan’s orders to destroy the buffalo herds that the Lakota lived off of (it's hard to admire a lot of Union Civil War heroes — Sheridan, Sherman, Lincoln, Grant comes off a little better but not much — when you read them against their record in terms of indigenous people). Courage and strategy can only do so much in the face of demographics and geography. Once there was enough money in their land — and the Dakotas were a classic boom, a huge rush for gold and land, very soon after which the area became pretty much as depressed and thinly populated as it is today — that was all she wrote.
After the generals and troops came the missionaries and the teachers, unapologetically, gleefully, trying to destroy Lakota culture. They didn’t; as Hämäläinen reminds us in the conclusion, the Lakota are adapters, and have continued to adapt into the present. I know many who’d argue we need that adaptivity, and assorted other “indigenous values,” to survive climate change. There’s probably a lot of truth to that, along with some questionable historical assumptions about indigenous homogeneity. Hämäläinen does a lot of commendable work to undo our assumptions about indigenous communities being homogenous, or homogeneity’s ahistorical partner, timeless.
He doesn’t quite go all the way, though. For example- the Black Hills are sacred to the Lakota. I’m completely fine with the Americans returning it to them. But then… the Lakota took it from the Cheyenne! Not that long ago, as far as these things go (Hämäläinen is pretty good about how Lakota spirituality adapted along with the rest of their lives to changing circumstances). I’m sure the Cheyenne and Lakota could come to a deal without our involvement, and I’m sure pretty much anyone would be better stewards of the lands than white Americans at this point, but the point is, if the indigenous are historical actors, it doesn’t make sense to say “they’re historical, up and until we decide to make them ahistorical again.” Among other things, a more consistent, rigorous historicizing attitude could have done more to illuminate the internal economy of the Lakota, the emerging class structure involving captives and the roles of women that the American offensives of the late nineteenth century interrupted. Or, indeed, have used cultural history resources to interrogate how the Lakota themselves understood what they were doing as they adapted. As it stands, it risks falling into a third stereotype, along with “the savage” and “the victim:” the rational actor of economics. In any event, historiographically, Hämäläinen prefers the more political/ecological approach, and I’m sure we’ll see more like this in the near future. It’s pretty good, but could use to be more complete. ****’
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: I'm Sorry, I'm Typing This With My Thumbs & Granularity
I'm afraid this week's Ed's Corner is going to have to be a little short. My laptop's power source abruptly stopped working on me right as I was taking a short dinner break between the outline phase of my intended article for today and getting a second draft together. As such, this article has been written entirely on my smartphone, so no one can say I don't suffer for my craft. I thought that I might just say you were out of luck for the week, and come back next week and write it on the sweet gaming PC I keep promising myself I'm going to buy with my stimulus check, but interestingly the topic I was set to write about kind of overlaps with the unique writing constraints I find myself writing under now. So I thought maybe writing this Ed's Corner in this manner might be a fruitful experiment in both form and function.
The topic I had been writing about was granularity as a concept of design, specifically as it applies to modern media. By "granularity" I mean how finely are the amounts of any given element weighed and deployed by either the designer or user of any given product. It can be meant in strictly a material sense, like how fast does a beer, (or a root beer for those working the program out there), pour from a tap at a bar? Could the bartender pour to a very exact level to top off a patron's drink, or is the mechanism designed to pour out about one pint glass at a time on any given pour? Granularity could also mean how much control over a given quality of the material the user has, like for instance there are several sophisticated taps where the operator can set the temperature of the (root)beer coming out of the tap; how exactly you could control the temperature is a consideration of granularity as well. Can you set it to a specific degree or even a specific tenth of a degree, or do you only really get to choose between "chilled" and "cool?" I think most consumers would be fine with the latter choice if they even wanted any level of granularity, and it'd be a waste of design resources to control the exact temperature, but I'm sure there are some connoisseurs out there that want that level of control in their custom bar set up.
In a sense any given quality of a product could be adjusted to varying values during production or use. How many decibels of sound correspond to each degree turned on a volume knob? If that ratio were one to one, you'd be turning that knob for a while to get any appreciable change in volume, if it were one to two hundred, you'd have to be very careful not to blow out your ears adjusting that dial. That level of granularity might not make a lot of sense for personal music listening, but you could imagine either a recording mix or an arena concert act making use of those respective ratios rather easily. To keep with the musical metaphor, there are any number of values you could adjust. How much bass is in the mix? Is the music primarily panned to the right or left of the stereo output? What's the playback speed? What's the highest range note the recording will hold before cutting it out? What's the lowest note? How are the tracks layered? These are all adjustments you can make on your personal audio system, but also something you can adjust with far more exactitude in any computer audio editing program. The difference between those two abilities to adjust those values are differences in the degree of granularity.
Normally in these articles I try to tease out some commentary on modern society through looking at some issue, but given both the subject matter and the circumstances, I'm going to try and leave you with the basic concept of granularity in media and something to think about on your own. In terms of media, the main value that can be thought of in terms of granularity is time. How much time does it take for the viewer or reader to have a satisfactory experience with the media in question? In the modern day this question of time is trending in two opposite directions. Either media seeks to get across a dense amount of content in extremely fine amounts of time, such as social media posts and ultrashort, densely packed commercials, or media goes the other way and offers hours long "epics," such as Zack Snyder's Justice League, or any other of the big tent pole blockbuster movies, streaming series, or video games. The shorter elements of media are meant as mini respites throughout your day, content condensed down into the few brief seconds you can snatch away from the demands of your job. The longer elements are meant for "bingeing," to essentially make up for all of the content that we're starved of while forced to make due with the bite-sized pieces of content provided by social media.
These two types of media also trend in different directions on how "personal" each are. Social media posts, besides those authored by corporate accounts, succeed by way of the author creating a brief empathetic connection with the audience. Binge content, on the other hand, tends to be highly depersonalized, designed by committee and built off a formula, with a good portion of the content coming in the form of expensive computer effects entirely divorced from lived reality. These trends are not accidental, for while you could conceivably create fine grain content like that of social media without a real live human behind it, the actual lived humanity of any given social media poster is the empathic medium through which social media is able to evoke emotion and interest in such a condensed form as a medium as a whole. So too is the artificialness of binge shows a function of their length. If each of these tentpole releases were a deeply personal, gut wrenching tale that conveyed its meaning with a high degree of empathy, then audiences would eventually be left too emotionally raw to continue well before the three hour mark these media products are hoping to keep the audiences engaged in. The archetypal characters and plots rehashed from other media are a necessary feature of any piece of media that is intended to be consumed over the course of several hours at a stretch. It's worth considering why more medium length shows that adjust to varying levels of granularity in terms of emotional content aren't more prevalent in the present day, but I think just this once I'll keep it short, and let you think on that.
Mithra thought about it while she was laying on me last night, and she doesn’t know what to think! Good thing she’s so pretty.
I've recently started using voice recognition to write things on my phone. Works great, and makes me think harder about what I want to say!