November 20th, 2021
David Stairs
Dick Clark at the Moulin Rouge by David Stairs
In a land governed by capital, it comes as no surprise that so much value is attached to celebrity. One of the first great modern personalities, Oscar Wilde, said, “Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.” Thus, it would seem the cult of celebrity sets us all up to fail, encouraging us to emulate the false god popularity.
Celebrated people are everywhere in capitalist media: athletes shilling insurance, actresses gushing over perfume, leading men expressing ecstasy for their luxury vehicles. Louis Vuitton once even coaxed Mikhail Gorbachev, former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to pose for one of its magazine ads. Look out Xi Jinping!
Part of the problem is that we reward narcissism. Internet influencers reap huge followings for the slimmest of accomplishments. Advertising has been quick to take advantage of this, fanning the flames of personality hysteria. Grand standers like Elon Musk provoke reactions with hyperbolic statements some take as gospel.
Second-tier personalities plump pillows and hawk appliances, salesmen elevated to fame by the sheer banality of their schtick. You see them on TV, in public transit, online, and at the ball park, playing the buffoon for profit. Or as Dave Thomas the founder of Wendys said: “You are what you eat. Which makes me cheap, quick and easy.”
Color and commentary talking heads wax poetic as they regurgitate a torrent of statistics and anecdote in an effort to make the endless repetition of sports seem compelling, “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” as ABC’s Wide World of Sports used to put it.
For others, celebrity is of the Warholian fifteen minute variety: game show screamers, disaster interviewees, and reality show wannabes, fame barely stopping to grace them with a glancing caress.
In a society where change is rapid, history is unpopular. And yet, even where people know more about pop culture than anything else, such clues on Jeopardy need to be tailored to events of the last couple decades or they are missed.
The bully pulpit of social media elects new representatives to the pantheon of infamy with each news cycle. Whether a horn-headed QAnon protester storming the Capitol, a womanizing actor’s sexist remarks, or a misguided racist congresswoman from Georgia, with social amnesia as the prevailing philosophy, there is no shortage of losers to choose from.
Attention spans are actively reduced from advertising’s 30-second spot to TikTok’s six-second span to Hinge, the dating app that disappears after use. Who needs memory when everyone is living in the moment?
Of course, not everyone trades in instantaniety. Novelists and film makers fish in the oceans of memory. Television series follow story arcs based upon careful writing, and photographers document the present for posterity.
The fact that the vast horde of the populace is satisfied with their cupidity, gullability, and naivité only seems to occur to cranks and curmudgeons, those self-styled critics of society occupying the pedestals of academia and media flame.
And yet, outbursts of populist anger are still possible in the republic of capital. When an alliance of hackers and gamers could stop short-selling hedge fund managers in their tracks by using a Reddit finance bulletin board to prop up GameStop shares, perhaps a unique form of celebrity is upon us. In bringing down Robinhood, a group of real-life Merry Men were able to steal from the rich and infamous by giving to the poor and hacker-ish.
Wilde also said, “No man is rich enough to buy back his past.” Of course, he didn’t live in an era of corporate stock buy-backs, and it is a sentiment much too subtle for our celebrity former president. But maybe some of the rest of us can still learn from our failures, one grudging trade at a time.
David Stairs is the founding editor of the Design-Altruism-Project.
Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Land of the Free, Home of the Influenced
October 20th, 2021
David Stairs
Every three years I am tasked with guiding a group of senior design students through their capstone year. Once upon a time it was enough to mount a student’s portfolio for public exhibition, and this process can still be seen at end-of-year design exhibitions across the country. Design being a supposedly “problem solving” discipline, students are often coached to take on a design problem to research and develop or expand upon. Such projects address topics large and small, ranging from homeless shelters to user experience apps, and everything in between.
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Posted in Altruism Memeplex | Comments Off on Racism as a Topic for Design Research
September 18th, 2021
David Stairs
As the AIGA gears up for its annual conference, I find myself pondering. In a year of magical thinking, like everyone else the AIGA has reinvented its conference schedule for online delivery. If this is just a matter of the new normal, obviously this cannot be an issue. What, then, makes the organization so damned annoying? Actually, I’ve been struggling to figure this out for years.
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Posted in Ideas | Comments Off on A Poke in the Eye
August 21st, 2021
David Stairs
There are a lot of people criticizing techno-capitalism these days, those so-called social pariahs demonstrating for economic “justice” and “equity.” But surely, these things are not givens in a free enterprise economy. They have generally needed the assistance of government regulation. In a system influenced by corporate lobbyists and deluded by the notion of limitless growth, even environmental degradation is not enough to staunch the lust for short-term gain. In fact, it may even accelerate it.
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Posted in Altruism Memeplex | Comments Off on F*ck the Fortune 500
July 25th, 2021
David Stairs
While China installs a nationwide video surveillance system, people in the West fret about the potential damage to their privacy by CTV cameras. But, apart from high profile failures, like Toronto’s “smart city” project, we’ve actually been normalizing surveillance for decades. Just consider reality television.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Summer’s Peeping Toms
June 25th, 2021
David Stairs
UPDATE:
As of July 23rd, 2021, following Anthony Fauci’s recent congressional testimony, this story is now being reported by the BBC.
A double arginine codon inserted at the S1/S2 furan cleavage site of the SARS CoV-2 virus’s genome
It was once the best of times……. except now we are coming to know the truth about how it became the worst of times……. and it begins with human folly compounded by deceit that results in a catastrophe.
Donald Trump was widely panned for claiming that Covid 19 was a Chinese invention, the “Kung Flu” as he often referred to it. The liberal press painted this as the worst sort of conspiracy theory, the China-bashing an embattled candidate for reelection might peddle to convince his base he was tough on foreign affairs. Only it turns out he was right, even if for the wrong reasons.
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Posted in Feature | Comments Off on How to Design a Pandemic
May 26th, 2021
David Stairs
When Thomas McNeill was made pastor of St. Margaret’s parish in 1948, he inherited little more than a twenty-year-old mission church in a growing suburb north of Syracuse, New York. McNeill had been a Navy chaplain in the Pacific during the war, but his dream was to expand Catholic education, and he would devote the best years of his life to the work.
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Posted in Ideas | Comments Off on On Outliving an Institution
April 24th, 2021
David Stairs
Another day, another mass shooting. We’re led to believe by television that Mayhem is a guy in a suit, played by actor Dean Winters, who causes mass upheaval wherever he goes. If only it were that simple.
Glock semi-automatic pistol designed by Gaston Glock
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Designing Mayhem
March 15th, 2021
David Stairs
Tom Tierney’s Rita Hayworth paper doll published by Dover
As I sit by my Thermopane picture window reflecting on the wintry scene outdoors, I am distracted by the arrival of a mated pair of songbirds. A male cardinal hops onto my bird-feeder while his subtle mate shelters in a nearby bush.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Is Fashion Unnatural?
February 11th, 2021
David Stairs
Deep fake of the Queen’s Christmas address; courtesy Channel 4
A man walks into a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C. armed with an automatic rifle determined to free children he believes are victims of a peadophilic sex trafficking “deep state.” People interviewed at a Stop the Steal rally in Atlanta tell interviewers a commission is needed to investigate the Democrat’s efforts to corrupt a widely certified election. A man in Nashville (not Robert Altman’s version) destroys a city block blowing himself up at the same time in protest of AT&T’s roll out of 5G wifi service. In another era one might be tempted to agree that “the time is out of joint,” except this bizarro world is our everyday reality.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Fluoride for Truth Decay
January 9th, 2021
David Stairs
Steve Zdep is dead, that much is certain. He passed away on November 6th, 2020 from causes not revealed in his obituary.
The author in more innocent times
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Death’s Trombone
December 9th, 2020
David Stairs
With states reporting record numbers of infections, there is no doubt that this Christmas season will be one many will find hard to forget. The malls and retail centers we so precipitously abandoned way back in March do not have the same attraction of earlier years. Since Covid is THE story of 2020, even overshadowing the presidential election, we’ve scrounged up a few holiday suggestions for that extra special Christmas 2020 memento of the years’ most familiar meme.
A “Clovid” orange
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Have Yourself a Merry Little Covid
November 2nd, 2020
Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Don’t Regret November 3rd
October 26th, 2020
David Stairs
Max is over, thank God.
And by Max I mean Adobe Max, that brightshiny overripe bells-and-whistles software tradeshow masquerading as an allconsuming excuse to be pretentiously jejeune.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Maxed Out
August 21st, 2020
David Stairs
A wild back yard
Except for a couple of thunderstorms, it hasn’t rained much in central Michigan this summer. It has been quite hot, and as usual, very humid. After aggressively mowing the grass in late May and June, it’s growth abates and it mostly browns off. The only way to keep grass green is by watering it, and in a world of diminishing clean fresh water, there has to be a better use for it than golf green lawn grass.
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Posted in Ideas | Comments Off on The Design of Summer
July 3rd, 2020
David Stairs
America has finally caught mask fever, fifteen years later than Asian people. There are still many who refuse to “suit up” including Covid deniers, those suffering from claustrophobia, and some who claim medical excuses. But the possible reasons for not wearing a mask are narrowing, with major airlines rejecting travelers who renege.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Masks! Of Course!
June 13th, 2020
David Stairs
I thought I was speaking truth, but now I’m not sure that it wasn’t simply “my truth” rather than something absolute. Maybe absolute truth doesn’t exist, no matter how much we’d like to believe in it. But, if this is the case, then we’re really doomed.
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Posted in Ideas | Comments Off on Relevance
May 14th, 2020
David Stairs
Courtesy Wikipedia
America’s got troubles. I don’t mean the song lyric kind, but, you know, serious troubles. And they’re not the soft purring type you might find on a now infamous classic sci-fi show. Those are tribbles, the sort that pundits and wags like to compare to Donald Trump’s hair.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on The Tribble With Troubles
April 19th, 2020
David Stairs
Are you just about sick and tired of seeing pictures of viruses?
Courtesy NIH
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Alternate Coronas
March 31st, 2020
David Stairs
A sign of our times
There are interesting new ways to mark the passage of time. I generally take account each week when I venture out of my home to grocery shop.
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Posted in Feature | Comments Off on Lady Macbeth Did Not Have an N95
March 17th, 2020
David Stairs
Informatics is enjoying a renaissance.
Courtesy LiveScience.com
If you haven’t already encountered it, this graph is bound to become the most talked about x-y axis since Al Gore’s Nobel prize-winning acceptance speech. And it represents events more immediate than climate change, if not more important.
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Posted in Feature | Comments Off on Of Flattened Curves and Ballooning Statistics
March 2nd, 2020
David Stairs
I suppose bookmarks are a personal thing. Some are woven; some are printed; some are just bits of stuff. My son uses a piece of red thread. I won’t say that I collect bookmarks either, but when I am in a bespoke store I will not leave without one. In honor of my favorite bookstores, I’d like to share their bookmarks.
Out west, in Portland there’s Powell’s City of Books. This venerable warehouse on West Burnside Street is always crowded and, while I’d like to say you can find anything there, the greater liklihood is that you will get lost looking. For those who like to get lost, this will not be a problem.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on A Good Bookstore Deserves a Good Bookmark
January 19th, 2020
David Stairs
Paramount
“We Are the Borg.”
With these words, Maurice Hurley, writing for the Star Trek TNG episode Q Who?, unleashed one of television’s most implacable adversaries on the world. But, as with much speculative fiction, Hurley and his co-writers were only mining the literature of science and engineering probability.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Resistance is Futile
December 15th, 2019
David Stairs
Who doesn’t love a podcast?
Some weird personality or obscure ideology you need to catch up on on that long commute to work in the morning? Needing to block out ambient noise in your open space office cubicle? What better way for a busy person to stay both informed and amused?
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Posted in Letters | Comments Off on Pod People
November 1st, 2019
David Stairs
Have you ever been in a super loud environment? I don’t mean the usual sort, like a kindergarten classroom or a football stadium on an autumn weekend— a scene of audio cacaphony— I mean a visually loud room. The Victorians were sometimes guilty of visual clutter, with their knick-knack trophies and flowered wallpaper, but they had nothing on modern commercial interiors.
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Posted in Ideas | Comments Off on Overbranded
