Hello lovely friends, hope all’s alright. I’m getting interested in the gap between what’s true, and what one believes to be true. You might assume that gap shouldn’t exist, but maybe we need it. So this week, an unlikely story.
š“ My Human-Powered Office: Recently I’ve been thinking about the power consumption of contemporary technologies, which in some cases is surprisingly high. When I totted up the draw of all my Echos and Hubs and so forth, it prompted me to put a fair few of them back in their boxes. So it was probably inevitable that a pedal-powered home-office would catch my eye: perhaps also a good rebuttal of the sedentary lifestyle.
š¹ John Cage Fans Celebrate Chord Change In 639-Year-Long Performance: a chord just changed in a 639-year-long performance of an organ composition by John Cage for the first time in nearly seven years. The John Cage Organ Project is taking the 1987 work “Organ2/ASLSP,” or “As Slow As Possible,” very seriously.
š© Dettol gets itself in a mess after commuters criticise ‘cringe’ back to office ad: The brand’s ‘Keep Protecting’ campaign is designed to remind people that little hygiene habits are huge acts of care and protection. However, one ad, about returning to the office, left some feeling Dettol failed to read the room by conjuring up an idealised version of an office that doesn’t exist.
š Braun Design Guidelines Manual: Designed by Wolfgang Schmittel in 1958, Braun’s guidelines for the visual design of information and advertising is a delight.
šāāļø Why efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better: Economists teach us that if we want to make material progress, we must become more efficient. Streamlined supply chains, just-in-time deliveries and no slack in the workforce all serve to raise efficiency. Achieve this, and all our lives will get better, or so we’re promised.
š We fall in love with the new, but not everything old is obsolete: We persistently conflate the technological frontier with the workhorse technologies we actually use. Sometimes old technologies work as well as anything newer. Electric cars may be the vehicles of the future, but the first land speed record was set in 1898 in an electric car.
The golden age of deception
Gerry Rafferty’s 1978 worldwide hit is crowned by a searing saxophone riff performed, surprisingly, by television presenter Bob Holness.
Except it wasn’t: this hoax was placed in the NME by writer Stuart Maconie and has been widely repeated since, even in the coverage of the passing of the real saxophonist, Raphael Ravenscroft. But the fact the Holness hoax and thousands of others like it are well-documented as such does nothing to dampen their persistence.
Hoaxes may have grown from satire taken too seriously, but the internet has ushered in the golden age. Popular online destinations are awash with hoaxes old and new, as well as bonafide reporting branded as such by those with nefarious intent.
Fake news, the shape of the planet, the pandemic and the climate crisis are popular areas for hoaxes by their thousands, even in the face of solid scientific evidence. The distortion of truth is coming to define this era, and social media acts as manure. What’s evident, but perhaps wasn’t in an optimistic past, is that the high availability of information leads to an age of misinformation.
For us as individuals, there are two contrasting consequences. One is we become obsessed with ’truth’, perpetually digging to reach the bottom of a problem but taking far too much time to do so. The other is we become overwhelmed by the volume of informationāaccurate and inaccurateāthen, having decided we can’t master the issue, we fall back to pre-existing beliefs and prejudices.
