Time is changing. Human agency and experience lose their primacy in the complexity and scale of social organization today. The leading actors are instead complex systems, infrastructures and networks in which the future replaces the present as the structuring condition of time. As the political Left and Right struggle to deal with this new situation, we are increasingly wholly pre-empted and post-everything.

Time Arrives From the Future

Armen Avanessian: The basic thesis of post-contemporary is that time is changing. We are not just living in a new time or accelerated time, but time itself — the direction of time — has changed. We no longer have a linear time, in the sense of the past being followed by the present and then the future. It’s rather the other way around: the future happens before the present, time arrives from the future. If people have the impression that time is out of joint, or that time doesn’t make sense anymore, or it isn’t as it used to be, then the reason is, I think, that they have — or we all have — problems getting used to living in such a speculative time or within a speculative temporality.

Suhail Malik: Yes, and the main reason for the speculative reorganization of time is the complexity and scale of social organization today. If the leading conditions of complex societies are systems, infrastructures and networks rather than individual human agents, human experience loses its primacy as do the semantics and politics based on it. Correspondingly, if the present has been the primary category of human experience thanks to biological sentience, this basis for the understanding of time now loses its priority in favor of what we could call a time-complex.¹

One theoretical ramification of the deprioritization of the present we can mention straightaway, but will need to return to later, is that it is no longer necessary to explain the movement of the past and the future on the basis of the present. We are instead in a situation where human experience is only a part of — or even subordinated to — more complex formations constructed historically and with a view to what can be obtained in the future. The past and the future are equally important in the organization of the system and this overshadows the present as the leading configuration of time.
Complex societies — which means more-than-human societies at scales of sociotechnical organization that surpass phenomenological determination — are those in which the past, the present, and the future enter into an economy where maybe none of these modes is primary, or where the future replaces the present as the lead structuring aspect of time. This is not absolutely new, of course: for a long time political economy and social processes have been practically dealing with the subordination of the human to the social and technical organization of complex societies. Equally, under the heading of Speculative Realism, philosophy too has recently been trying to reset the notion of speculation as the task of finding more-than-human forms of knowledge by establishing the conditions within conceptual thought of knowledge of what is beyond human experience. That project is certainly attached to the conditions of the time-complex but is also distinct to it —

AA: – And to some concrete examples of the speculative time-complex that we know from everyday experience or from daily news. These are phenomena that usually start with the prefix “pre-,” like preemptive strikes, preemptive policing, the preemptive personality—

SM: Could you outline these phenomena?

AA: What has been called preemptive personality or personalization is how you get a certain package or information about what you might want that you haven’t explicitly asked for from a commercial service.² We know a version of this from Amazon: its algorithmic procedures give us recommendations for books associated with one’s actual choices but the preemptive personality is one step ahead: you get a product that you actually want. The company’s algorithms know your desires, they know your needs even before you become aware of them yourself. It doesn’t make sense to say in advance that “I’ll send it back” because it is likely that it will be something you will need. I don’t think that all this is necessarily bad, but we do have to learn how to deal with it in a productive or more pro-active manner.

Another thing, often criticized, is the politics of preemptive strikes, which is also a new phenomenon of the 21st century. Brian Massumi and others have written about the kind of recursive truth they produce: you bomb somewhere and then afterwards you will find the enemy you expected.³ You produce a situation that was initially a speculation. The logic here is recursive and, to reiterate, the strike is not made in order to avoid something, a deterrence before the enemy strikes. It’s also very different to the twentieth century logic of the balance of threats or prevention. Rather, what happens in the present is based on a preemption of the future, and of course this is also linked to what has been called a tendency towards premediation in the media.

Another everyday example of this new speculative temporality discussed a lot nowadays is preemptive policing. You have it in science fiction, notably with the “PreCrime” and precog detection of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report (and the Spielberg film based on it). Versions of this are adopted more and more in policing today. This has to be distinguished from other current surveillance strategies; for example, CCTV is more of an older idea of watching what people are doing or documenting what they have done, to reinforce exclusion mechanisms. The question today, if one puts it in chronological terms, seems to be more along the lines: what kind of policing is needed to apprehend people even before they do something, with what they will do — as if the future-position promises more power, which creates a future-paranoia? This is less a surveillance directed to the exclusion of people than one that deals with people inside the social space, with the value they produce. How can they be observed and how to extract value from their activities? There is of course a hugely important biopolitical factor in this regulation of the population, especially with regards to medicine and insurance.

SM: Along with “pre-,” what’s advanced by the time-complex is also a condition of the “post-,” the current ubiquity of which characterizes where we are at now, and which is maybe added to with the contention of the post-contemporary. Everything now seems to be “post-” something else, which indexes that our understanding of what is happening now has some relation to but is also disconnected to historically given conditions.… While the “pre-” indexes a kind of anticipatory deduction of the future that is acting in the present — so that future is already working within the now, again indicating how the present isn’t the primary category but is understood to be organized by the future — what the “post-” marks is how what’s happening now is in relationship to what has happened but is no longer. We are the future of something else. The “post-” is also a mark of the deprioritization of the present.
If we are post-contemporary, or post-postmodern, post-internet, or post-whatever — if we are now post-everything — it is because historically-given semantics don’t quite work anymore. So, in a way, the present itself is a speculative relationship to a past that we have already exceeded. If the speculative is a name for the relationship to the future, the “post-” is a way in which we recognize the present itself to be speculative in relationship to the past. We are in a future which has surpassed the conditions and the terms of the past.
Combined, the present is not just the realization of the speculative future (the “pre-”) but also a future of the past that we are already exceeding. As many contributors to this issue propose, we don’t quite have the bearings or the stability or the conventions that the past offers to us (the “post-”).

AA: That’s the important thing, that the change of the present, the shaping of the present, is not necessarily determined by the past. The present can no longer primarily be deduced from the past nor is it an act of a pure decisionism, but it’s shaped by the future. For me, that’s the key problem and the key indication that the logic of the contemporary with its fixation on the present — you called it the human fixation on experience — that this presentism has difficulties or even completely fails in dealing with the logic of being constituted by the future.
I think that’s partly the reason for all the critical reasoning and questioning of contemporaneity in recent years that happened parallel to the so-called speculative turn. Unfortunately, speculation is often discussed as just a logical or philosophical issue but not in its unique time aspect. But obviously we are also still looking for the right philosophical or speculative concepts for this post-contemporary (or past-contemporary) condition or time-complex.

SM: Yes, as much as we are each indebted in different ways to speculative realism, and shared the move away from the poststructuralist or late-twentieth century models of philosophy that we both come from, nonetheless speculative realism has mostly argued for an intra-philosophical or conceptual notion of speculation, which is to think of the outside of thought and the experience of thought. The interest of the post-contemporary is to understand and operationalize the present from outside of itself. I don’t know at this point if that is also outside of thought. But, in any case, the time-complex can be thought, with “speculation” taken primarily as a time-historical speculation, like futurity, rather than an exteriority to experience or an exteriority of thought. This brings us much closer to current business and technical operations rather than the conceptual demands of speculative realism.

Operationalizing the Speculative Time-Complex

SM: One instructive manifestation of the operationalized speculative time-complex are derivatives. Of course, derivatives are now key to speculative finance, and they are “speculative” in that they use the unknown future price of an asset and the risks involved therein to draw profits against a present price. As Elena Esposito shows really clearly in her contribution, with derivatives the uncertainties of the future are used to construct prices in the present and this scrambles the standard time structure of past-present-future. The derivative is a clear example of how profits are not extracted on the basis of production or from fixed capital like equipment, plant and construction, all of which depend upon the history of investment, nor from variable capital like labor or wages. These belong to traditional industrial models of accumulation, in which a factory is built, workers are employed and paid, materials are used at a certain price, a product made or grown, then sold at a higher price than the costs, and profits made. All of which means that the profits are accrued from production that has happened in the past and subsequently exchanged on the market. The exchange of the product is the completion of a sequence that must have already happened. With the derivative model, on the other hand, a price in the future which is yet to happen is anticipated, and it is this future eventuality which is unknown that is operationalized to extract profits — on the basis, to reiterate, of a future that is unknown and unactualized.

Derivatives are, in Natalia Zuluaga’s phrase, a specific kind of future-mining, an extraction from the future in the present. But this mining of the future in the present changes what the present is. The present isn’t the one that you started with. The very construction of a speculatively constituted present — the “pre-” — actively puts the present into a past that it also is, the “post-.” There’s one version of this configuration that you and others have described through pre-emptive policing, pre-emptive strikes, pre-emptive personality and so on, which are also anticipated through big data, and the use of algorithms through consumer information. But it also differs from the logic of preemption where, taking the example of a preemptive strike, you eliminate a possible enemy in order to prevent what might have happened — but which also may not. It’s rather that your act — price setting in the case of derivatives, but the construction is generalizable — is itself modified because you take this very proximate future into account as a condition of the act that should then be made. The future is acting now to transform the present even before the present has happened. As Esposito argues, it is not only the linear schematic of time that is scrambled, but also the very openness of the present to the future.
But aren’t these conditions just what you and Anke Henning were also dealing with in your Speculative Poetics project, be it more in relation to formal literary and linguistic analysis?⁴

AA: Anke and I wanted to problematize certain initial assumptions, such as the very easy and oversimplified tension between speculative realism and poststructuralism. You and I also sought to rework that opposition with the essays collected in Genealogies of Speculation, which looks to vindicate a speculative dimension in the philosophy of the last decades.⁵ But, in particular, Anke and I explored how a prehistory of the current speculative philosophy took up the idea of speculative temporality.

SM: One of the things you and Anke do in Present Tense, which is really important to emphasize here, is to introduce grammar structures within language as a kind of time-complex. Language for you seems to be a cognitive, plastic and manipulable medium of the time-complex.⁶

AA: Language has one unique and key feature in this regard: a tense system. The tense system is really important to our understanding and construction of time, even more fundamental than the experience of time because it structures that experience — though not in a relativist sense. Most continental philosophies of language or time actually don’t deal with what is specific to this system because they don’t really focus on the grammar. It’s a problem with phenomenology as well as with a lot of deconstructivist and post-structuralist philosophies. What is more instructive than those traditions has been analytic philosophy and non-Saussurean linguistics. For example, John McTaggart and Gustave Guillaume think a lot about sentences like “every past was a future” and “every future will be a past.” These basic structural paradoxes — or apparent structural paradoxes — can be tackled via an analysis of grammar. There are some important technical issues here that I had better not go into—

SM: Yes, maybe later. The core point seems to be that formulations like “every past was a future” and “every future will be a past”—

AA: And so on: every present as well—

SM: That’s what I was going to say: what’s very relevant about those two formulations for the identification of the speculative time-complex that we are here calling the post-contemporary is that they articulate a time structuring in which the present drops out. So determinations of time can be established that don’t require the present as their basis. The tense structure of language allows for that, formulating the non-necessity of the present as a structuring condition of the tense structure.

AA: And what struck me as necessary for speculative realism or any kind of speculative philosophy was a better understanding of what I would call a speculative and materialist temporality. For Anke and me, this meant understanding time on the basis of the grammatical structures of language — language understood as something material — and to develop not a time-philosophy but rather a tense-philosophy.

SM: At the same time, you make the criticism that speculative realism, as we mainly have it, doesn’t take ordinary or literary language seriously enough because it consigns it to correlationism — meaning, effectively, the dimension of human experience that never leaves itself.

AA: Yes, but that’s their self-misunderstanding.

SM: And why did you call it speculative poetics?

AA: Because our work also implies a polemic against aesthetics and the general focus on aisthesis [perception] in modern philosophy; and, to return to your earlier point, also against the primacy of experience.

SM: By “constructive,” do you mean that tense can be operationalized in order to structure time differently? The sentences formulating that the past was the future and eclipsing the present are not just descriptive. They also construct time relations within language, especially through narrative. Does the same operationalization of tense happen outside of human languages, for example through the derivative structures we mentioned?

AA: The point is rather that “experience” of time and the construction of something like chronological time are only effects of grammar, not a representation of the direction of time or of what time really is. It’s the tenses in language that create an ontology of chronological time for us, and we live this time as the illusion of having a biography.

SM: Isn’t this limitation of consecutive ordering what the speculative time-complex surpasses? What we have with the speculative time-complex is that the future, which includes the future we don’t know, gets included within the current reckoning and the present is coming disconnected from the past. The dismantling of the linear ordering and the primacy of the present equalizes past, present and future.

AA: Absolutely. Some of today’s fiction and, more precisely, present-tense novels are far more dangerous than traditional narrative in really forcing time out of joint. As the result of 20th century vangardisms, present-tense novels subject readers to a speculative somatics of time. Maybe A.N. Whitehead would call this mode of sentience “feeling.” This time does indeed “feel” hallucinogenic, haunting, urging, hyperstitious, horrific, as David Roden shows in his contribution to this issue. In short, one feels time’s power coming from the future. In the most radical case this speculative feeling makes you change your life. Becoming on a par with the future you have speculated initiates a metanoia. But this goes very far…. The temporal phenomenon we were interested in is how all the aesthetic understanding of literature doesn’t understand that the present tense produces asynchrony.

SM: Asynchrony?

AA: That the present is not fully experienceable but is split in itself, and that tense structures can actively operationalize this splitting. It is laden with innumerable past-presents. It presents actual phenomena as post-X phenomena and it desynchronizes time.

Left and Right Contemporaneity

SM: This comes back to what we were saying earlier: that the future itself becomes part of the present. This could be taken as an extension of the present without a future radically distinct from it. And it often is, with the leftist-critical claim of the loss of futurity under the capitalism of complex societies. That is the fundamental limitation of contemporary leftism that Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams have identified, and which they look to countermand with their specific determination of what, in their contribution to this issue, they identify to be “a better future,” which provides an active horizon to direct the politics of the present.

AA: I think we have a slight disagreement on the current state of neoliberalism, which you define as a state-business nexus directed to the concentration of capital and power, which requires and consolidates increasingly autocratic elites. I tend to think that we are already going past this stage. For me and others, neoliberalism is a move toward something one can call financial neofeudalism, in which key columns or foundations of the political economy of capitalism — like a safe nation-state, a governed population and a market regulating itself, or other basic economic assumptions like economic recovery or growth leading to more jobs or higher profits leading to greater competition instead of monopolies or oligopolies etc. — have started to disappear, and we are now in a fundamental financial and social crisis, with increasing depth of inequality.
But instead of debating whether we are at a new financial feudalism or just another stage in capitalism, let’s instead focus here on the basic hypothesis we are jointly proposing: given the social, technological, and political transformations since the 1960s and 70s that we’ve already mentioned, and which are also embodied in contemporary art and in literature with the emergence and consolidation of the present tense novel in the period since, we live in a new, speculative time structure. There have been basically two responses to this transformation. On the one side, there is a right-wing or reactionary countermanding, looking toward the past as a kind of counter-balance against the negative aspects that everyone observes and feels: the frustrations, disadvantages and mistakes of neoliberal financial neofeudalism. The other standard response to the speculative time structure is the left or critical one, which is also the prevalent one in contemporary art. The focus here is not the past as a place of semantic security but instead on the present as a site or condition of resistance against the change to a speculative time.
Yet, for all the contentions between left-critical and right-reactionary responses to the emergence of the neoliberal mobilization of the speculative time-complex, both are just playing in different ways into the hands of this new formation of neoliberal capitalism, or financial feudalism. It’s perhaps more obvious with the right-wing reactionary tendencies, which in no way disrupt but rather reinforce power structures that enabled the new social, economic, political formation. However, with left-critical reactions too, there is a kind of suffocation, to the extent that most people have the feeling of not being able to gain traction in the present, to change something, and to have something like a future worthy of its name. Contemporary art is both a symptom and surrogate of that futurelessness, with its constant celebration of experience: aesthetic experience, criticality, presentness and so on.

SM: That is an instructive formulation of typical left and right reactions, and typical defensive moves around the emergence of the speculative time-complex and the loss of bearings that it institutes in relationship to both the past and the future. Though there are many ways of understanding or setting up a relationship to the speculative time-complex, what the right does is to simplify it, to reduce it as a complex, and to recenter it on the present as the dominant moment on the basis of tradition. The right has always done this in modernity: if modernity is a paradigm in which the new happens in the now, what has characterized the right is a defense against the emergence of the new as the basis for actions, social organizations, aesthetics, meaning and so on. The authority of past conditions is invoked as a stabilization mechanism for modernization. To be clear: the right is not necessarily against modernization but stabilizes its disruptive effects by calling on what are then necessarily conservative or reactive historical formations. And faced with the operationalized speculative time-complex of neoliberal capitalism, in a way the right can carry on doing what it has always done without necessarily recognizing that what it is reacting against is no longer the modern but a new condition.
The Rightism of neoliberalism makes sense on this basis: even though I disagree with the adequacy of the phrase “financial neofeudalism” to describe what is happening in capitalism, it nonetheless serves to capture the increasing autocracy that goes along with the neoliberal restructuring. The political question then is how that autocratic, post-democratic kind of power is to be legitimized. Those on the right are very useful just here because what they endorse, essentially, is the authority of a recognised historical or elite formation that stabilizes semantics — and perhaps only semantics — in the newly established conditions.

AA: And the left-critical abreaction?

SM: In a way, leftism makes the problem of “the contemporary” more evident because the left in its progressive forms has been attached to modernism. The now in which the new takes place is the fetish of change for the progressive left, exemplified by its revolutionary ideals and clichés. The left’s abreaction to the speculative time-complex is to retrench the present as the venue or the site for thinking about and confronting the reconstitution of social and time organization, and semantic reorganization too. Instead of seeing the future as condition of the present, the present is instead taken to extend out indefinitely and cancel out the radically different future (the revolution, notably).
But the speculative present as we are identifying it is, by contrast to this leftist melancholy, the entrenchment of the future and the past which folds into the present, in a way that certainly deprioritizes it and maybe even makes it drop out — as in the phrases demonstrating tense structures we discussed earlier. The past was the future, and the future will be the past.

AA: There is no critical interruption from the present in this speculative present.

SM: No, it’s constructed by the uncertainties of the future and the absence of the past.

AA: That’s why the left-critical thinking of the event or the emptiness or openness of the present — of contemporaneity — is still vestigially modernist. And, as Laboria Cuboniks remark in their contribution from several different angles, it’s not adequate to the tasks and conditions of the twenty-first century.

SM: What the left sees in the speculative complexification of time is an extension of the present rather than its thinning out by the forcing of the future or the disestablishment of the past. Historical, futural, anticipatory relationships are maintained with an emphatic insistence on the presentness of action, aesthetics or experience. This is insistence on “the contemporary.” It is still premised on the present as the primary tense. And what happens with the emphasis on contemporaneity is a determination of the present as indefinitely extended. The contemporary is a time form that saturates both the past and the future, a metastable condition.
A leftism still attached to modernism won’t have traction on the speculative present, even if that leftism is more attentive to the time-complex than the right because it’s not trying to restore a past (though its revolutionary wing does seem largely interested in restoring a historical semantics, while its social-democratic wing now maintains an interest in failed market solutions). Even if it’s accepted that the left is more open to modernity than the right (which is questionable outside of the left’s self-reinforcing phantasm), it holds that the present extends into both the past and into the future, which supposedly destroys the future as a future. And, as Esposito remarks in her contribution, it doesn’t see that what it is actually involved with is the future now. That today is tomorrow, as you put it in another occasion.

AA: It was “Tomorrow Today.”⁷

SM: Exactly. That title indexes how the speculative present is in a pre-post formation, or post-contemporary. The present now is not the time in which the decisions are made or the basis for the new, as it was in modernism. The new is happening instead in a transition between a past and a future that is not a unidirectional flux, but a speculative construction in or from the directions of past and present at once.

AA: The whole idea of what in German is called Zeitgenossenschaft — the contemporary, more literally, “comrade of time” — is problematic because it far too often signifies the wish to change the present completely with an insistence on the present. The contemporaneity of Zeitgenossenschaft indicates the idea of having traction in the present by getting closer to it, and that is no longer adequate to the task. It is simply the wrong way to think. What is needed instead is neither Gegenwartsgenossenschaft — comradeship of the present, nor Vergangenheitsgenossenschaft — comradeship of the past, but rather a Zeitgenossenschaft from the future (die Zukunft), a kind of Zukunftsgenossenschaft. We need to become comrades with and of the future and approach the present from that direction.

Artist Simon Fujiwara enlisted his economist brother Daniel to consult on The Happy Museum (2016), his project for the 9th Berlin Biennale. Daniel is an expert in the growing economic field of Happy Economics—a trend in which happiness and well-being are valued and monetized. What is the value in Euros of the happiness gained from dancing, per person, per year? Daniel Fujiwara’s company Simetrica could give you an exact figure, helping you to decide if it is worth it to you. This conversation took place leading up to the exhibition.

SIMON FUJIWARA Can you describe what Simetrica is, the company you have founded?

DANIEL FUJIWARA Simetrica is a research organization that uses economics and other disciplines such as philosophy, behavioral science, and neuroscience to understand human behavior, feelings, and values, in order to better comprehend the impact of policies and actions on society’s well-being. Our work is technical and quantitative in that we use a wide range of mathematical and statistical concepts and tools, but all of our work is also grounded in a highly structured and detailed ethical approach, which draws on key areas of normative ethics and applied ethics. To give you a more concrete example, we have been working on what value means in the arts and culture and how we can measure it. We have been doing this work for a number of governments and arts councils across the world.

SF So to put it simply, the goal is to help organizations understand how they impact the well-being of people in society. There has recently been a big wave of companies that believe their image is not just about the products they sell but their effect on the world. This idea of doing good or making people happy has become an advertising ploy. Do you see the work you’re doing as related to this, or do you think something else is happening? Do you think there is genuine good being done?

DF This is a really tricky and interesting question, because it depends to a large extent on how we define doing “genuine good.” One ethical approach to thinking about “good” is to evaluate an action only in terms of the outcomes that it produces. This is known as consequentialist ethics, and within this way of thinking we would conclude that companies doing good are genuinely doing good. But in many cases, outcomes are not the only way to evaluate an action. Deontological ethics holds that issues such as the process behind an action, rights, and duties are also morally important. In this sense we may also care about the intentions behind an action. If we feel that it is wrong to do “good” community work only with the intention of making more profit, then we would have to say that those companies giving back to society out of self-interest are not doing “genuine good.” We actually find that the motives and intentions of companies really vary; some companies do think about the bottom line and their profits as part of their corporate responsibility. They may believe that if they have good social responsibility schemes and if their employees volunteer, that will look favorably on their company image and hence boost profits. But, as I said, whether this is right or wrong is an ethical question. Our particular standpoint is that all organizations, public or private, have a social duty to improve the wellbeing of people, animals, and the environment over the long term.

SF How do you feel about the relationship between technology and human life, the direction it’s going?

DF In our field, technology has been a huge benefit in terms of collecting data from lots of people in real time. It really allows us to get a better understanding of what is important to our lives and what makes us happy. Historically we’ve never had that kind of data before. It allows us to test our philosophical assumptions: What is happiness and what makes us happy? As long as we all use this data in a safe and responsible way, and people consent to it being used for the purposes of research, I think it can make our lives better, and it is already doing so in many countries across the world.

SF It’s funny—in many of our conversations over the years, one thing that has become increasingly clear is that due to your work as an economist—in a field that’s pushing things forward in quite a radical way—you are willing to accept new modes of thinking that radically break with the old. In a sense, this makes you adopt the traditional avant-garde position that artists used to occupy. In contrast, I as an artist and many individuals of my generation with whom I discuss your work, almost come across as reactionary and conservative, because we say: “Hey, wait, we don’t want economists or scientists to colonize and quantify every aspect of human life. We do not need to know about human happiness to experience it. We need to retain an aspect of mystery, to believe that life is more than knowledge.” It’s almost as if by having access to so much information through the internet, we long for a kind of self-imposed ignorance, like the peasants in Galileo Galilei’s time who refuted his astronomical discoveries to preserve the magic of the skies. Where do you see such attitudes within the spectrum of your work?

DF Economics is a very exciting field, as we love to learn and borrow heavily from lots of other fields, such as philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, math, physics, and biology. This interdisciplinary approach is my main area of research, and it is what we do at Simetrica. Certain areas of our work and research definitely have a heightened sense of romanticism in many ways, areas which many of us think should not be the subject of quantitative or technical research and analysis. I feel, however, that quantification and measurement is one key way of helping us to better understand the phenomena that surround us, and in this respect, people’s well-being and happiness is no different. As a discipline, we have certainly learned a lot about what happiness is and what makes us happy, and we are now just starting to be able to respond to some of the key questions about happiness that were posed to us by the likes of Aristotle, Epicurus, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, which I think is exciting. But we must understand that any discussion about happiness and the measurement of happiness has to be grounded in a proper philosophical or ethical debate and approach. This is absolutely key for me, and it shows in our work. Art has an important place in society in terms of how it relates to human well-being. Our research consistently shows that people who are engaged with the arts and cultural activities have higher levels of well-being, as measured on lots of different scales, such as life satisfaction, happiness, feeling relaxed, and having a sense of purpose in life. Artists along with teachers have the highest levels of purpose in their lives. There are lots of other interesting findings here too. For example, we find that being interested in the arts (going to see films, visiting galleries, going to the opera, etc.) is great for one’s happiness, but it is even better if you go to these events and activities alone. The wellbeing data is just starting to allow us to paint a picture of how the arts impact our happiness. Because the arts have positive implications for our well-being, they hold benefits for society. Our future research will focus on this in more detail.

SF Since you mention visiting galleries alone, do you have any reflections on the increasing individualization of society, and do you feel that your work is promoting it? The fact that we’re becoming increasingly detached from family and community approval and more dependent on selfjudgment— do you accept that as a good thing?

DF The process of individualization was set in motion by the thinkers of the Enlightenment period, and so I think we have been on this trajectory for a long time. In fact, the current research on wellbeing in many ways has its roots in Enlightenment thinking. What is interesting is that by asking people about how they feel as individuals, we have found that many societies are still very non-individualistic, and that individual happiness is hugely dependent on community engagement and involvement, and relationships with others. By understanding more about individuals and their happiness, we have affirmed that society and interconnectedness are key to human life.

SF What would you propose as a nonmonetary word for valuation? Instead of saying something creates “x pounds,” what would it create? How does looking at a van Gogh impact us? Or what exactly does a dementia patient get from touching Neolithic bronze sculptures? What and how are these outcomes described?

DF To be precise here, the term “valuation” has no a priori link to money. Value, in its purest sense, is simply a gauge of how strongly we feel about or care for something. Value is an inclusive concept, which applies to any sentient being and not just humans. That is, elephants, whales, and dogs can perceive value just as we do. Value can be described and measured in many different ways, for example, how wildly a football player celebrates when he scores a goal, how quickly a dog gobbles up his meal, how loudly a child cries when her favorite toy is broken, how much we are willing to pay for something, how much time we are willing to spend on something, how much effort we put into defending something, and so on. We could use these behaviors and actions to measure the value that people place on certain market or non-market goods, services, and outcomes. Monetary valuation is just one form of valuing something. I think it gets a bad name in some quarters, because the meaning is used loosely, and often it is not employed in the same way that it is used in economics. In economics the monetary value of something like a car or social experience is the amount of money it would take to improve someone’s quality of life and well-being to the same extent that the car or social experience does. Money is literally just a quantitative gauge of how much people’s quality of life has improved, just like degrees Celsius is merely a quantitative gauge of heat or cold. For example, we could measure the value of a car or a social experience by looking at how much people shout about or discuss them on social media, but policy makers like monetary valuation, because you can compare the benefits of a policy to its costs in the same terms. For people who like van Gogh, looking at a van Gogh will create a valuable experience, which we could measure in monetary terms (and we have done so in the past for various museums), but which we could equally measure in non-monetary terms by assessing how long they spend looking at the painting, how much they say they enjoy looking at the painting, and so on. A similar process would apply to the valuation of any other item, experience, or outcome. An example I like to consider is a football player who scores a goal against the same team in one season and again in another season, but the value of each goal differs considerably due to the different circumstances that prevail at each time. The first goal leads to the team winning something, whereas the second goal is almost meaningless for that match and the team’s season. The way that the player celebrates will be very different for those two goals, although the settings and parameters are identical (i.e., a goal against team x). So we can look at value in terms of behavior—in terms of how wildly the player celebrates after scoring the goal. Does he give a few high fives, or does he rip his shirt off and jump into the crowd? That’s the first order of magnitude for thinking about value—looking at it through behavior. Then we may need to think about quantification. In economics we would do this by looking at how someone’s quality of life is impacted on scale of zero to ten, for example. The first goal would improve the player’s quality of life and well-being much more than the second. Then we could go one step further, taking that scale and monetizing it into something. So what does an improvement from two to four on that quality-of-life scale mean in monetary terms? What does it mean in other quantitative terms? The question is how far we can quantify that person ripping of their shirt and screaming and yelling—that feeling!

SIMON FUJIWARA’s The Happy Museum (2016) is a collection of artworks, everyday objects, advertising, clothing, performances, and videos that explore Germany’s material expressions of happiness in the 21st century.

IMAGES: Simon Fujiwara, Hello, 2015. Courtesy of the artist. Simon Fujiwara, advertisements for Simetrica, 2016.

We like to think of our love as a very personal thing, but it follows statistical preferences. In every society certain features are perceived as more attractive than others. Telling someone who is scoring below average that we are all beautiful, is like telling someone who is poor that money doesn’t matter. It’s ignorant, if not cynical.

This is where completism comes into play. Completism aspires to an intimate completion of justice. Its practitioners, the Army of Love, offer all-encompassing sensual love—care, desire, sex, and respect—to all who need it. Read how the Army of Love is about to change the course of (not just human) history.

COMPLETE ROMANTICISM
Capitalism has commodified romantic love to such a degree that true romantic transgression sets its sights on the one taboo intrinsic to the welfare state: violence. Those who prefer to think of themselves as lone wolves will opt for the rampage, while those searching for connection to the group become hooligans or extremists.

But what option is there for those of us who want to be good without being taken for horrible bores? How can we commit equally drastic offences—that are unequivocally good? It is only possible through love, the same overwhelming love that the Romantics exalted and that has never been fulfilled. Even if our society understands itself as hedonistic, psychotropic drugs are dimming the libido of a large part of the population. People who do not find enough love are told to blame their upbringing. Why not give them love instead?

Today’s welfare states equip most of us with sufficient time and leisure not only to open up to love, like the hippies did, but to systematically drill into it, creating love that applies not only to an individual, family, horde, or nation, but to everyone. This means, in effect, that on the street we not only give out “free hugs” but also “free petting” and gaze at one another in awe. It means that we extend more than just sympathy to our neighbors and that our desire for love—including sensual love—is always magically fulfilled, everywhere. Even the most brutal violence does not seem radical enough in the face of the Army of Love’s complete love.

COMPLETE WELFARE
With rising material prosperity and leisure, the need for intimacy and physical love tends to grow. Marriage feels less and less binding, and as we hunt for new and better lovers, those that we discriminate against as old, ugly, handicapped, or unsuccessful get the short end of the stick. Sex can be bought, but in an affluent society sensual love is almost prohibitively expensive. Only someone who is famished can love another for a loaf of bread in return.

Socialism’s fight against unequal ownership structures ignored the unequal distribution of attractiveness: In a nonviolent society without private property, everyone has access to basic commodities, although when it comes to desired sex and love partners, you still need the other’s consent. The hippies, following the tradition of Charles Fourier, assumed that sex and love need only be liberated from the prison of monogamy for it to blossom and flourish and produce abundance for all. Still, relinquishing libidinous ownership might free us from faithfulness, but not from the aesthetic, intellectual, and character standards that we set for our partners. Free love, in the end, only expands liberalism to the intimate sphere.

A complete love of our fellows demands more surmounting effort than the usual charitable love. Yet it also rewards us with the most extraordinary experiences and the deepest gratitude. And only then will a welfare society satisfy the demand for comprehensive justice for all. This reinforces its acceptance, on the side of both those who take and those who give.

COMPLETE DEVOTION
The Army of Love is an army in the original sense. At a time when violence is increasingly outlawed, love becomes the greatest weapon of all—a weapon that also can be dangerous and even kill people.

To love in a completist sense without causing damage, we have to learn to distinguish between the truly needy and those who really like to be alone or are only suffering temporary heartache. We have to reassure them that this isn’t just a cruel joke, ruse, or obscure fetish. We have to constantly love and desire them, and also stir their love and desire, without anyone becoming so fixated on the other person that it prevents handing over the love duties to another completist in the event of relocation, illness, or some other problem.

For this, we need the strict regime of an army and also its insignia, perhaps even ranks and medals. If you love and trust your soldier, then you will always, to some extent, love the army as a whole. If the soldier loves the needy, then you see not only the individual soldier but an entire regiment of beautiful, lustful, open-minded people who do good. Scholarships allow young people to complete a year of civil service in the Army of Love after finishing high school, when their attractiveness, potency, and curiosity are at their highest. But the Army of Love recruits those that it has served as well. The best way of avoiding permanent dependency on its services is to train to join the army yourself. Even if your age and appearance are not generally considered to be attractive, you may be perfectly suited for special missions.

COMPLETE COMPASSION
Completist love is the opposite of regressive. Unlike free love, the point is to love the very people, to whom we haven’t yet felt any attraction; and we’ve got to drill ourselves to perform this love. Instead of fighting emotions, habituation can engender them—the desired love—in the first place, whereby hatred becomes less and less excusable. We learn from sex workers to desire the other by making her or him desire us and so satisfying our self-love. If we can’t pull it off on our own, we may also rely on the assistance of substances such as MDMA (more attraction), oxytocin (more attachment), and Viagra (more erection).

As we all find our yearning for love promptly quenched, there will be less and less room for jealousy and hatred. Their place is taken by compersion: happiness is the fact that a person can find more love than only ours. We don’t love each other because we are desperate. We may be looking for a very special love, precisely because we’re basically provided for, and we’re able to find it without insisting on reciprocation. Sensual charitable love doesn’t imply a new humanist essentialism. On the contrary, the extension of sexual love to people who don’t meet our accustomed standards is only the first step on the way to utterly unrestrained desire and sex, also across the species barrier.

COMPLETE OURSELVES
The Army of Love is driven by diverse motives.

Ideological motives: Justice, as it’s not enough to just redistribute money and opportunities for earning money; you have to redistribute the possibilities for being loved as well. Charity, as it feels strange and incomplete that in Christianity and other religions the “love of your neighbor” excludes all sensual manifestations of love. Anti-fascism, as Western society’s general beauty preferences are pretty much the same as in fascism. Anti-consumerism and anti-capitalism, as those who have more money shouldn’t receive more love on top. Communism, as it failed in its previous manifestations because it socialized material goods alone. Communitarianism and anarchism, as completist practice is making both the members of the Army of Love and the receivers of their love less jealous, less hateful, less materialistic, more trustful, and more generous. Environmentalism and transhumanism, as the love of neglected humans is a step towards the love of non-humans.

Personal motives: Some love soldiers have been exposed to people falling in love with them easily, and they want to learn to give back. Some love soldiers fall in love easily but usually with people who are already being loved sufficiently or whom to love physically would be abusive, and these soldiers want to focus on loving those who need it. Some love soldiers already have preferences that make them love people who often lack love, but these preferences have been discriminated against as perversions, and they want them to be respected as something good. Some love soldiers are just looking for the next great adventure, the next great frontier. 

COMPLETE CONTROVERSY
Should the Army of Love be a movement, a congregation, a lodge, a sect, a guerilla organization, an NGO, or a compulsory service for all those who test as highly attractive? Should the nature of the Army of Love be kept open as long as possible to first gather experiences and gain momentum, or should it be institutionalized as soon as possible to avoid being trapped in misconceptions and abuses?

As the need for love among the more than seven billion people in the world is enormous, how to select the people whom the Army of Love should serve first? Should the Army of Love focus on people who are generally discriminated against because of low income, poor education, old age, disease, and disability, or would that imply further, if positive, discrimination? Would giving love to those neglected by society only make general injustice more unbearable? From a utilitarian perspective, it might be more effective to give love to the generally privileged, as it could make them more generous, but it would be unfair.

Would potential threats to the Army of Love—misogynists, racists, rapists—have to be excluded from its services, or is it precisely the lack of encompassing love that makes them cruel in the first place? Should the Army of Love express its love in ways that would find consent among the majority or, to meet the personal needs of the receivers, should it engage in practices and role play that would offend most people? Should the Army of Love only serve those who ask for its help, or should it seek out the people who are most in need? How to deal with people who claim to be in need but only find the services of the Army of Love more comfortable than “real” love? How to deal with people who are obviously in need but don’t want to be helped? Is it legitimate for the Army of Love to work secretly, similarly to the Romeo spies of the Cold War, to avoid the stigma of charity work?

COMPLETE ACTION
For more information visit www.thearmyoflove.net. Join the Army of Love now!

INGO NIERMANN is a writer and the editor of the Solution series (Sternberg Press). The Army of Love first came into existence in his book Drill Nation (2015) which envisions a unified Korea as the new model state of an affluent society. For the 9th Berlin Biennale, he collaborated with filmmaker Alexa Karolinski on the video Army of Love (2016), shot at a Berlin spa. Further manifestations of the Army of Love are unfolding in Niermann’s novel Complete Love, his collaboration with Dora García for the Wiesbaden Biennale, and an architectural proposal with Martti Kalliala for the exhibition 1000 m2 of Desire at CCCB in Barcelona (all in 2016).

IMAGES: Alexa Karolinski/Ingo Niermann, Army of Love, 2016, advertisement

åyr We wanted to have this conversation to revisit an interview that you did together in 1998 for the 1st Berlin Biennale catalogue. Back then you talked about your projects in Berlin at a time when the city was undergoing a dramatic transformation. The interview started with your research from the early 1970s, “The Berlin Wall as Architecture.” In some ways the installation that we are doing for the 9th Berlin Biennale at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art is a response to a number of the ideas you discussed. We want to address the ways in which access, separation, and protection are structured beyond the archetypal architectural element of the wall; we are shifting its classical utilization as a divider and nuancing that legacy by looking at the wall as a technology also providing protection and intimacy. These different ideas about walls seem to follow an evolution from your research in early 1970s to some of your most recent projects in Berlin, such as the Axel Springer Campus. Do you remember what you talked about in the interview for the catalogue in 1998?

HANS ULRICH OBRIST The catalogue of the first edition of the Berlin Biennale, which Klaus Biesenbach, Nancy Spector, and I curated, was a subverted city guide. We wanted to have Rem’s view on what was and wasn’t happening in Berlin at the time. Back then you were comparing Berlin to a Chinese city, claiming the master plans had failed and that Berlin had produced too much building volume in too short a time for any sort of traditional sedimentation to occur. Eighteen years later, the obvious question is whether Berlin really has become a Chinese city!

REM KOOLHAAS I would say yes and no. Yes, in the case of the extremely rapid production at Potsdamer Platz. The accumulation and assembly of building volumes results from a situation in which architects barely communicate with one another—because they are all driven by commercial interests. This has lead to similar results almost everywhere. But I have to admit, my opinion about Hans Stimmann, who was Berlin’s Secretary of Planning and subsequently Building Commissioner from 1991 to 2006, has completely changed since then. I no longer think that he frustrated creativity, and I actually think that by being so conservative and intolerant he actually saved the city from a lot of garbage. It’s one of these cases in which a situation with a theory is by definition better than a situation without a theory. Or to put it in other words, to a certain extent a strong and dogmatic regime is better than a free-for-all.

åyr Do you think it is possible to draw a parallel between the Berlin Wall and contemporary digital platforms, both being apparatuses or technologies that intensify communication while creating spatial obstacles?

RK The Wall obviously intensified the meaning of the two sides—by creating a reason to communicate.

åyr Your current project, the Axel Springer Campus, is defined by an absence of walls and an immense atrium running across an area on the property once occupied by the Berlin Wall. Openness and communication are achieved through visual connection but not through separation, not through walls.

RK What you are saying just implies that if you had a wall in an office, people would be desperate to know what the people on the other side are doing, but that is not the case. This is not an ideological situation; this is a post-ideological situation. Within an office space, walls wouldn’t have the slightest impact on people’s eagerness to communicate.

åyr When we first proposed our project to the 9th Berlin Biennale curatorial team, we started talking about the Wall as an architectural archetype and as something that is part of Berlin’s DNA. In a way, they actually got a bit scared.

RK I think that the art scene is one of the most conservative at this point in time, and the Wall is one of the few elements that everyone agrees should really not have been where it was.

åyr For us, focusing on the element of the Wall was a paradoxical situation, and I’m wondering if it was the same for you in terms of the Axel Springer Campus, even though your client chose the site. In a way, you did choose to work with that context, because you took the Wall’s original path into account when designing the building. Perhaps this was a pragmatic choice.

RK I’m not saying it’s pragmatic. It really just deals with the consequences of deterritorialization.

HUO When we did our interview in 1998 it was just when the Netherlands had commissioned you to build the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, a major public commission. Now you have more private commissions, such as the Axel Springer Campus with its focus on what you call “digital bohemia.” It would be great to hear more about this new subject.

RK Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer SE, explicitly requested us to find a way in which the building could be inviting and make the case for the digital elite of what he calls “bohemia.” This is interesting, because there’s hardly any loyalty to a place in digital culture. Place is always shifting. He thought he needed a building that articulated this shift, and that its deliberateness would act as a tool for mobilizing the brightest people from that context.

åyr We see the Springer project as embodying the transformation of Berlin into a kind of European Silicon Valley, a place where there is a strong start-up culture. Is this project trying to address that condition in terms of office design?

RK What I really appreciate about Mathias Döpfner is that although he is totally European, he has steered the company towards the digital, almost without hesitation, which is extremely rare. They are clearly fascinated by Silicon Valley, almost to the point of caricature. Yet they didn’t import Silicon Valley culture wholesale. I think they are really at the forefront of wanting to define a European opposition to the imperialistic dimension of Silicon Valley. Start-up culture is by definition a culture that can invade any environment and feels most at home in buildings that are not new. Our building has a European approach. Informality and domestic pampering are not present in this building at all. In a sense, it’s a Prussian building of the digital era.

åyr The Springer project is one of the very few contemporary projects that tries to deal with the digital, not in purely aesthetic or technological terms but as a “form of life.” There is a strong emphasis on this building as conceived for people who are constantly connected. We’d be interested to hear how this has affected your design. Orientation, communication, experience— all these things are transformed by devices, whereby architecture often seems to stay the same.

RK That issue is totally unconnected to Springer. Maybe it is relevant to a series of projects that started with the Universal Studios headquarters in Los Angeles. We are addressing two questions here: How does a very complex organization function as a whole without suffering from total fragmentation? And how can one address the danger of fragmentation present in any digital office? Today fragmentation is not dependent on physical isolation. For example, in OMA’s recent project for the G-Star Raw Headquarters we created a quite complicated split-level situation. In the end, they told us that the entire company sent 60 percent less emails. For me this is the greatest compliment, but it also points to the greatest potential achievement for architecture now—reintroducing physicality into this endless flow of information, which is not only so incredibly redundant, incredibly irritating, incredibly exhausting but also gives everyone a false sense of real productivity.

åyr So how do you think the administrative or organizational role of architecture has moved onto digital platforms? Is architecture now able to be a bit freer, more liberated? Now that digital platforms have become more mature, one can observe a return of materiality—or, more precisely, the possibility of a return of the wall, but a wall which is friendlier, stripped for some of its modernist violence. In the 1990s architecture was dominated by parametric dreams and the rhetoric of openness, unpredictability, and newness. All of a sudden we don’t want this so much anymore. There is a greater interest in small rooms, a booth, a nook— more legibility, more intimacy, another materiality. This is the genealogy we are showing—from “The Berlin Wall as Architecture” to the pierced cozy wall of contemporary office design.

RK It’s not simply that architecture is becoming digital or that we can use the digital to make interesting architecture. The digital world is a world of totally different adventures, of conceptual, mental spaces. So maybe architecture can focus on exactly what you’re describing—physical and material experiences and the various emotions generated or offered by those experiences and not available in cyberspace.

åyr We are skeptical of chaos as a means of creating the unexpected—and causing people to shop more, talk more, and communicate more. We would speculate that maybe now we have enough solicitation coming from our devices, and therefore what is somehow desired are quiet spaces. I was just reading this morning on Facebook that most video adverts on Facebook are played without sound. This is a new approach that could be applied to architecture. Not to the degree of Peter Zumthor though … [Laughs]

We guess this comes from a certain frustration of our generation, which has grown up in the architectural discourse of the mid-nineties and the early two-thousands, when the canonical architectural values of institutions and collective spaces were guided by the intention to smooth boundaries, open up, and enhance communication and visibility.

RK Well, larger obstacles keep arising, of which security is one. This presents some very serious contradictions: the aesthetic of continuity and the security-thinking of enclosure and protection.

HUO I have one last question: In our conversation in 1998 you said that Berlin was very scary in the way its modernism was performing an exorcism on the city. So, is Berlin still scary eighteen years later?

RK I’m surprisingly indifferent to it. I’m not outraged by it.

åyr What about your own relation to technology. Do you have daily experiences with Uber, Airbnb, these kinds of things. In terms of your identity, is this part of your experience?

RK Not really, because I have no real need for it. Well of course in terms of getting tickets, in terms of making reservations, of course. OK, next question.

åyr On a more general level, what is your relationship to contemporary art? Are you interested in it?

RK Your question is really crazy. Why are you asking this? This is just gossip: But anyway, I think your projects are really interesting, but as I said earlier, I feel more like a participant than a subject.

This conversation is the edited and condensed version of two conversations between Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and the members of åyr on February 12, 2016, at the OMA offices in Rotterdam and on February 21, 2016, at the Ambassade Hotel in Amsterdam. åyr (formerly AIRBNB-Pavilion) is an art collective based in London whose work focuses on contemporary forms of domesticity.

åyr was founded in 2014 by Fabrizio Ballabio, Alessandro Bava, Luis Ortega Govela, and Octave Perrault. The collective was formed in occasion of an exhibition inaugurated during the opening days of the 14th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, which took place in apartments rented on a flat sharing website. Through performances, installations, and writing, åyr investigates the relationship between objects and their environments and the effects of the internet on the city. åyr is not connected to or endorsed by Airbnb, Inc. or any other Airbnb group, company, or affiliate.

REM KOOLHAAS founded OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) in 1975 together with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis, and Madelon Vriesendorp. He graduated from the Architectural Association in London and in 1978 published Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. In 1995 his book S,M,L,XL summarized the work of OMA in “a novel about architecture.” He heads the work of both OMA and AMO, the research branch of OMA, operating in areas beyond the realm of architecture such as media, politics, renewable energy, and fashion. Koolhaas is a professor at Harvard University where he conducts the Project on the City. In 2014, he was the director of the 14th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, entitled Fundamentals.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST (born 1968) is a curator, critic, and art historian. He is Codirector of Exhibitions and Programs and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London. Obrist is the author of The Interview Project, an extensive ongoing series of interviews. He is also coeditor of the Cahiers d’art revue.

IMAGES: åyr, Berlin Feature Wall, 2016; åyr, home is wherever I am with you, 2014, AIRBNB-Pavilion, Instagram; åyr, #my space of reproduction, 2014, AIRBNBPavilion, Instagram; OMA, concept model of the Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe) renovation; OMA, interior view of the Axel Springer Campus; Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Berlin field trip, 1972

An aspirational New Age lifestyle has emerged in Gulf countries in recent years, one based on the central tenet of positive energy. An amalgamation of feng shui, Reiki, Quantum Touch, and corporate happiness strategies, this “belief in the power of belief” is manifested as a deliberately optimistic mindset. Its proponents circulate on daytime talk shows and YouTube channels, while a Silicon Valley inspired, New Age office culture has infiltrated the offices of governments and corporations. With conference tables that double as ping-pong tables, feng shui consultants on staff, relaxation zones, and government sanctioned “brainstorming sessions,” happiness and productivity go hand in hand in the Gulf’s contemporary office culture. The state predicates its achievements on the success of its individual subjects; and as a way of developing human capital it aims to mold its subjects into happy, and therefore efficient, productive, and capital- generating members of the economy. Recently, the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, announced the establishment of a Minister of State for Happiness to foster both “social good and satisfaction.” But what are the implications of applying the same strategies meant for individual “improvement” to the mechanisms of the state? How is the notion of positive energy reconciled with aspects of Arab culture that are traditionally rooted in sadness—or with orthodox Islam? With the increased militarization of society, should personal coaching or holistic healing practices be an essential service provided by the government? To what extent has a community or “industry” of New Age practitioners formed in the Gulf in recent years? And to what degree has the belief in positivity become a popular phenomenon? We posed these and other questions to positive energy healers and life coaches from states in the Gulf countries. Below are excerpts from our conversations. 

DR. YOUSEF AL BADER
Naturopath/Feng Shui Consultant

GCC Many aspects of Arab culture are traditionally rooted in sadness. How do you reconcile this with the seemingly opposite notion of positive energy?

YAB That is the reason why we’re so backwards! There are two things that keep us from moving forward and modernizing, and those are fear and sadness—sadness over the past, and fear of what’s to come. So you’re stuck. It keeps you from achieving anything, because you’re afraid to fail in your future endeavor, or you’re be too busy lamenting lamenting the disasters of the past. This goes against the culture of Islam. God said, “Those who have faith . . . on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.” He also said, “In order that ye may not despair over matters that pass you by, nor exult over favors bestowed upon you.” Why is that? It is because you must balance the issues. So positive thinking doesn’t mean that I simply say I’m a positive person, but in fact this negativity you mention is in our very being. We [as Arabs] are made of burden and melancholy. Over time this has become part of our DNA, which we bestow upon our children. So turning a person who has inherited this intergenerational negativity into a positive person is a big challenge!

GCC Do you think people in the Gulf are more accepting and open to the idea of alternative healing and positive energy than they used to be?

YAB Yes, thank God! When I started fifteen years ago, people thought everything I said was fantasy. Now the situation is much better. Just look at how people [in Kuwait] are consuming organic food, for example, or at the upswing in health consciousness, in the rise of meditation and yoga, in stress management, and feng shui. Actually, you are now sitting in a feng shui office. I’ve had this office for fifteen years—the same paint, the same furniture, the same things. It’s relaxing here. You see that chair over there? It cost 4,500 Euro. It’s made of pure leather and pure wood. If we sit at this desk for two to three hours, we won’t be tired. The slight curvature in the shape of the desk has made the conversation with the two of you so much easier. So, yes, people are much more open than they used to be.

GCC Do you see the success of Dubai as directly related to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid’s positive outlook?

YAB Sheikh Mohammed is the government. When the market collapsed in 2008, Dubai came to a halt, but he decided to go on. When you decide to persevere in the face of catastrophe, that is the biggest sign of success. Had he faltered, then the Burj Khalifa would have stood unfinished, a decaying monument to stagnation and negativity. The real nature of a positive person shines when he is down but continues to be productive, despite the circumstances. Dubai’s budget is relatively small when compared to the rest of the Gulf, and look at what he’s done! But it’s not just about what he’s done. It’s about how he did it, creating something from nothing, despite all of these limitations. Dubai was nothing, just dirt and humidity, and now even the humidity is gone!

DALAL AL-JANAIE
Life Coach

GCC Do you see the desire to become more productive or more fulfilled as operating on a governmental or social level?

DAJ A couple years ago I read this Harvard study on happiness. No one had ever spent so much money on studying happiness before. It described how the US government is now involved in this happiness project. It was funny to read that happiness is good for business, not just good for society. It’s good for the economy. Previously people believed that, if you want to be happy, you must be successful—and then you will be happy. Be rich, and then you will be happy. Get married, and then you will be happy. Today, we understand that no, that’s not the way it is. It’s actually the other way around. Be happy, and you will be successful in your job. Be happy, and you will be successful in your relationships. Be happy, and you will fall in love. People are beginning to understand that this is the original building block to any structure you want to build in your life. This is coming from social media. It’s coming from Oprah Winfrey. It’s coming through The Secret. People today really understand that happiness cannot be bought. This is something that may have not been so prevalent or obvious some ten or twenty years ago.

GCC We’ve been talking about happiness as a way to influence productivity, which means that it is in a nation’s best interest to promote happiness. Should personal coaching or holistic practices be an essential service provided by the government, for example?

DAJ If I were to just blurt out and answer, then: “Yes!” I read somewhere that Dubai has set the goal of becoming one of the happiest places in the world. I don’t know where Kuwait is going with this. I know that the Kuwaiti people have chosen to be happy regardless of what’s happening, and they are choosing to block stuff that doesn’t work for them. A lot of people have stopped listening to the news. They no longer listen to parliament, and they no longer want to discuss all this stuff about money and government corruption. We don’t care what’s not working. We’re going to focus on what works. It would be nice if the government helped, but it will happen regardless.

ANFAL AL QAISI
Quantum Touch Healer

GCC What is Quantum Touch?

AAQ You heal people by running the energy, but it’s not like normal energy. It enters from your crown chakra, and it goes through the rest of your body chakras, and then goes out through your feet. Three things must be there. The breathing and sweeping, the intention, and of course be open to the energy. Be positive. It doesn’t matter if you work on someone who doesn’t believe. There are skeptics all over the world. It’s like the law of gravity. You cannot deny it.

GCC Tell us about distance healing.

AAQ There’s no need to heal people by actual touching. In fact, when you run energy from country to country, it’s stronger. Distance healing is stronger. Why? We radiate energy. And if someone is sending energy from Bahrain, and someone is receiving energy in America, that energy is like rays coming out from the center of a circle. And these rays, they go out and meet. When we do distance healing on Skype, it is more powerful because the amount of light generated while sending the energy from one point to another is very big, just like a pizza.

GCC A lot of healers use stock imagery in their company branding, including their Instagram profiles, YouTube channels, and websites. Is this visual language helpful?

AAQ For meditation, yes. When you meditate, you have to see a beautiful view, because you need that kind of energy—that consciousness. It needs to be pretty and beautiful and positive. But if you’re an artist wanting to send a message about what’s going on in Iraq or Syria, then you have to draw reality.

GCC There’s a big demand for this practice and a growing supply of providers. We see more and more healers and practitioners on TV talk shows, with Instagram profiles, and with YouTube channels. What are the implications?

AAQ Actually, in 2012 I was invited to appear on Bahrain TV. It was the first time that a practitioner was on TV in Bahrain. It happened coincidentally, a call from the universe. I was sitting at a funeral, and as we were all making small talk, one lady commented that a healer had and tried to heal this guy, and then he had died. So I said, “Come on, it’s not the healer’s fault. Everybody has to die.” I talked more about healing, and then they asked me to heal them. So I started working on the ladies at the funeral. There was a lady with a back problem. So I ran the energy into her, her spine started straightening and she began walking normally. Then the presenter from Bahrain TV called me and said, “What did you do to my aunt? For three years she hadn’t walked properly and had back pain.” I said to him, “I use Quantum Touch.” So he invited me to the show, and even though I was only on air for thirteen minutes, the director told me that they received a hundred calls: “What happened? We have never received that many calls?!” I showed some posters on the show—before and after images, people’s transformations—and people went crazy. I wasn’t ready for it.

LAILA KAIZEN
Positive Energy Entrepreneur

GCC Many aspects of Arab culture are traditionally rooted in sadness. How do you reconcile this with the seemingly opposite notion of positive energy?

LK I was one of those sullen, depressing people who loved this moody stuff in my era of ignorance, as I call it. I used to love the sad songs, crying, and sentimentality, until I changed. You know, people’s tastes are prone to shift. One day you like apples, and the next day you don’t, and that’s because of energy. So when we work on someone and shift their energy, their tastes change. This person won’t be able to handle the depressing stuff anymore, the sad songs, the melodramatic TV shows. If you ask all the people around us right now if you can play them a sad song, they’ll say, “No, we can’t stomach it!” Why? Because with this energy a person can only listen to something agreeable. You appreciate a sad song when you are down, but if you are a happy person, you don’t.

GCC Do you see a conflict between what you do and orthodox Islam?

LK In the beginning, yes, there were a lot of attacks against us, until people realized that dealing with our brains and our bodies is different from dealing with God. So for example, when I’m healing you, I’m healing your body. It has nothing to do with religion. Just like when you go to the doctor and he gives you a pill—it’s the same thing.

GCC Do you think it’s being applied as policy in Dubai?

LK Yes it is. Any project without a system will lead to chaos. You see, I have a system for my daily life. I know exactly what my daughter is doing right now. It shows up on my phone. I know what she’s eating, I set up a system with the staff at the house, so whatever she does—she ate this, she said that, she sang this song, she took this many steps—they update the program, and I see it on my phone. So every person must have a system, and Mohammed bin Rashid has a strong one. He knows about all the stuff we’re talking about right now. He has a life coach. He has a twenty-year vision—not what he’s going to have for dinner tonight but what he’s going to be doing for the next twenty years!

GCC Some people use techniques similar to yours for financial gain. What do you think about this?

LK I’ve noticed that some people have the wrong idea. What do they think? They think money is a disgrace! This is the mentality of a poor person. Money helps treat illnesses. It helps facilitate things. It’s the reason I have this place. It’s the reason I’m here with you now.

GCC is a collective based in the Arabian Gulf. Their name is taken from the English abbreviation for the Cooperation Council of the Arab States of the Gulf. GCC creates works rooted in a multidimensional, fictional narrative that underlies systems of capital and power across various levels of government and society. The members of the collective are Nanu Al-Hamad, Abdullah Al-Mutairi, Aziz Alqatami, Barrak Alzaid, Khalid al Gharaballi, Amal Khalaf, Fatima Al Qadiri und Monira Al Qadiri.

IMAGES: Ohood Al Roumi, UAE Minister of State for Happiness, gives an oath during her swearing-in ceremony, 2016; video still of Reiki master teacher Maha Nammour, 2002. Maha Nammour, Lebanese Reiki Jin Kei Do master, discussing Reiki and non-Western healing on Omani national TV. With offices in Paris, Kuwait, and Beirut, Nammour was one of the first practitioners to introduce the Gulf public to New Age healing and the concept of energy; GCC, Frequency Pyramids, digital collage; Sirma Natural Water exclusive edition for Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum; still from YouTube video of Laila Kaizen, 2012

We can all tell this story: The rails of human advancement stretching from the Enlightenment to a Bitcoin start-up; innovation measured by increased reach, increased uniformity, increased predictability and size and quickness. The telegraph to the landline to the mobile phone to the Bluetooth wearable; the abacus to Pascal’s mechanical calculator to the room-sized computer to the palm-sized device a million times more powerful than equipment a thousand times its size from only ten years ago; the stone tablet to the book to the internet offering everything, no excuses. We are all connected. We’re at the bright tip of a comet hurtling forward. We can place ourselves, with mild satisfaction. Thank god it’s not then. What kind of person uses a BlackBerry? (Old people!)

But “who isn’t depressed after half an hour on Facebook?” to quote my therapist. It doesn’t smell right. I work so much. I see fewer people. Everyone’s worried. I have a twitching compulsion to always check alerts, to smooth out the notification bar forever. And yes, of course there are long-standing critiques of positivism and the Western notion of objectivity and totalizing systems and bold technocratic visions. But that’s up there, and this is now, and it’s still lonely, this unsettled feeling at the cutting edge of the best time ever made.

I work in high tech, the leading border of innovation, according to the story. My job is designing research and development practices to make secure and private internet communications easier to use and easier to validate. I do this work at a big company, and I love this work. It feels real and necessary, and I can explain it clearly to everyone on the inside. So while the whole thing may not sit comfortably, here I am, in a closed system, shaped by a ubiquitous, glitzy positivism, where it’s hard to imagine what else could be true.

I stumbled upon Ursula Franklin’s 1989 The Real World of Technology,¹ when I was looking to clean the house to a podcast. I thought it would be funny—discussions of technology from 1989 would be wrong in interesting ways! It wasn’t funny. It was wonderful. It brought that kind of recognition that you read novels for, when something familiar and inexpressible is put into words. Who was this person, and how was it that her voice seemed so much more urgent, real, and relevant than the petabytes of breathless journalism comprising our current discourse?

Franklin was born in 1921 in Munich, Germany. She and her family survived the Holocaust and reunited miraculously in Berlin, where she earned a PhD in experimental physics before leaving for a research fellowship in Canada. She is a feminist, a pacifist, a Quaker, a physicist, a metallurgist, and a pioneer of archaeometry (applying modern materials analysis to archaeological objects). She was the first woman to be awarded the highly prestigious title of “University Professor” at the University of Toronto, and she made key contributions to art and cultural history, to the cessation of nuclear testing (her research exposed increasing levels of radiation in children’s teeth), to the anti-war movement, and to the social and political analysis of technology. Weaving through her work is a deep respect for systems, interrelationships, and complexity (the interaction between culture and technology or art and materials, for example). She approaches her subjects not as things to be simplified and mastered, trimmed to fit convenient models, but as parts of larger wholes that could possibly be mapped, but not controlled.

The Real World of Technology can be read as a remapping of the common story of progress; it looks not at the stuff progress makes but at the systems it instantiates and the imprint they leave on us.

Echoing French sociologist Jacques Ellul, Franklin defines technology as a shared practice.² It is the way we do something, not the familiar description of “the sum of the artifacts, of the wheels and gears, of the rails and electronic transmitters.”³ Instead, it is a practice that consists of “organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset.”⁴

Propelling our current innovation juggernaut are what she calls prescriptive technologies. These are practices that split the doing of something into small, identifiable tasks, each performed by a separate person or specialized unit (i.e., the division of labor, as in the assembly line or the production of complex software). Under prescriptive technologies, “control over work moves to the organizer, boss, or manager.”⁵

Backstopped by an eighteenth-century Western worldview that imagines humans as mechanical entities whose activities can be calibrated for increasingly efficient output (from La Mettrie to Taylor to CrossFit)⁶ and driven by the introduction of mechanized labor during the Industrial Revolution and by the high-modernist vogue of master planning,⁷ prescriptive technologies are accepted today as the way activities are organized. Enabling management from afar, mass scale, and the ability to measure outcomes across finely tuned variables.

Not coincidentally, prescriptive technologies also provide the necessary conditions for modern capitalism and global consumer markets. How else could we ceaselessly make more and better things faster? How else could we provide the raw materials that feed financial markets—the ability to quantify, structure, control, and predict that provides gamblers a shared perspective to bet on?

While producing wonderful artifacts and mind-blowing techniques, prescriptive technologies create a world in which it’s normal to do what we’re told, and to do so without the ability to control and shape the process or the outcome. They also require a command and control structure. A class of experts—the architects, the planners—and others who follow the plans and execute the tasks. This structure creates a “culture of compliance . . . ever more conditioned to accept orthodoxy as normal and to accept that there is only one way of doing ‘it.’”⁸ A view through Franklin’s lens reveals that, as a “byproduct” of what we call progress, we have created societies easily ruled and monitored— and accustomed to following orders whose ends they don’t question.

Not that there isn’t resistance. From the Luddites to Occupy, resistance percolates and ruptures. But when it does, it is most often characterized as a natural if unpleasant effect of innovation’s “disruptive” tendencies (to use the current lingo). In this we note that our story of progress views “people as sources of problems and machines and devices as sources of solutions.”⁹ New, better, faster ways of doing things, ways that produce more things more quickly, are right and inevitable. People’s anger, fear, and resistance to new modes and machines are characterized as regressive, stubborn. A problem to be minimized and tolerated.

Franklin connects this propensity to favor “progress” over human experience to our particular reliance on scientific method. “Scientific constructs have become the model for describing reality, rather than one of the ways of describing life around us.”¹⁰ The problem with this is not that science is “wrong,” necessarily, or that it fails to provide a powerful tool with which to understand and confirm general truths in shared ways. At issue are the practice’s overly broad application and its weakness when approaching contexts from which a constant variable can’t easily be isolated. Human experience, emotion, and affect, with their infinitely rich and shifting contexts, is not conducive to scientific “proof.” In a world in which science is the model, individual and shared experience does not “count” alongside other much more easily “provable” facts. The requirement that something be proven scientifically for it to be legible also means that the experts, those with education, standing, and access to scientific authority, become the de facto arbiters of whose experience and concerns are valid—and whose aren’t. A position with significant power. This privileging of the generalizable and scientifically “provable” at the exclusion of lived individual experience is central to the way in which our shared story of progress can so comfortably (and conveniently) focus on the artifacts extruded by innovation, and leave the human cost to the side. “The plural of anecdote is not data,”¹¹ we’re reminded.

“There is no technology for justice. There is only justice.”¹² Ursula Franklin answered when I asked her in December 2015, what to do. I reached out because I wanted her to tell me how to act on the perspectives she brings to the traditional story of progress. As someone building internet technologies, working within this received wisdom, I wanted a recipe, something I could share with others (with you!) and throw my body into.

She was warm and generous and incredibly insightful, and she gave me no smooth answers, no simple way.

Central to our conversation was my worry about the massive surveillance capacities enabled by internet technologies and the way in which public assent to surveillance is fueled by the racism and militarism of the now eternal “War on Terror.” What could we do to combat this narrative? What could we do to change the underlying technologies such that they respect human agency and privacy?

Franklin agreed. This is a grave problem. But not a “technological” problem:

“Whether it’s heathens, witches, women, communists, whoever, the institution of an enemy as a political tool is inappropriate. The only solution is an insistence on a civilized democratic society. A civilized democratic society combats this and the wish of an authority to collect personal information on citizens and their activities and loyalties. Whether it’s done by spying, by bribing children, by workplace monitoring, by confession in the confession box of the church—the collection is the issue. The means—the technology—is secondary. The problem is a problem of authoritarian power. And at the root of this problem is the issue of justice, and justice is political.”

While justice can be understood, can be felt, there is no template to follow, or checklist to work through for ensuring a just outcome. The requirements are humility, a respect for context, and a willingness to listen to the most marginalized voices. Let these define the basic requirements of whatever you do. You must “put yourself in the position of the most vulnerable, in a way that achieves a visceral gut feeling of empathy and perspective—that’s the only way to see what justice is.”

Understanding justice, honoring those most vulnerable and including them as authors of any plan that impacts them, is a necessary starting place. But the problems associated with our current technologies won’t be solved by tweaking gears or redesigning mechanisms. A roadmap that centers on justice is only the first step. “For a very long time gadgets and machinery have been anti-people. If one wants to get away from the anti-people component, then you don’t argue technology as much as you argue capitalism.” Even with a view of what justice would look like and could be, attempts at radical change will, of course, be repulsed by powerful actors who benefit richly from the unjust status quo. Political change must be a part of the equation.

This isn’t a frenzied call for revolution. The bigger the scale, the bigger the vision for just change, the more difficult it will be to “get it through” a system in which power is aligned against justice (and, of course, the more difficult it will be to truly understand this vision’s vast impact on vulnerable populations and thus ensure it really supports justice.) Not that working to build practices and plans isn’t worthwhile—it is incredibly worthwhile. But you’re unlikely to have much real impact if you start with a grand announcement. “To proceed in a hostile world,” Franklin suggests, “call it an experiment. Admit that you don’t know how to do it, but ask for space and peace and respect. Then try your experiment, quietly.” In conditions not conducive to success, situate yourself out of the spotlight and proceed subtly, humbly, and be willing to downplay expectations while new forms incubate.

“My favorite word is an old Quaker term, ‘scrupling,’ used as an activity,” Franklin begins, addressing how to approach the vastness of the political and social problems we were discussing. “It comes out of the anti-slavery movement, originally. People would get together to ‘scruple,’ that is, discuss and debate a common problem, something they had scruples about—say, justice—for which they did not have a solution. This is scrupling, and this is something you and your friends can do.”

Gather and talk. Empathize and listen. Don’t chase the spotlight, and accept that some problems are big, and difficult, and that what you’re good at may not fix them. These are not the ways of charismatic executives and flash-bang inventors. These are not instructions for entrepreneurial success. These won’t produce bigger faster newer ways of doing things.

Her parting words were meant to comfort me. “For your own sanity, you have to remember that not all problems can be solved. Not all problems can be solved, but all problems can be illuminated. If the eggs are scrambled, they’re scrambled. You can’t unscramble them. All you can possibly do is cook them and share them with somebody.”

¹ The lectures are the basis of Ursula Franklin’s book, originally published in 1990: The Real World of Technology (Toronto, 1999). The lectures can be streamed for free: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1989-cbc-massey-lectures-the-real-world-of-technology-1.2946845
² Jacques Ellul (1912–94) was a French sociologist, philosopher, and Christian anarchist who authored, among other things, The Technological Society (1954), in which this definition is laid out. When outlining her definition, Franklin cites Ellul as an influence.
³ Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology (Toronto, 1999), p. 2.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid., p. 16.
⁶ Julien Offray de La Mettrie was an eighteenth-century physician and philosopher who wrote L’homme machine, in which he envisions humans as complex machines. Frederick Winslow Taylor was a late-nineteenth-century engineer and author of The Principles of Scientific Management. He analyzed factory workers, compartmentalizing their actions with the goal of defining the most efficient way to produce commodities (i.e., get the most out of workers). CrossFit is a twenty-first century fitness fad that aims to “optimize fitness” through a carefully regimented series of targeted and intense exercises.
⁷ This is an echo of James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which looks at legibility and standardization as requirements for centralized authoritarian planning and control.
⁸ The Real World of Technology, p. 17.
⁹ Ibid., p. 25.
¹⁰ Ibid., p. 31. The italics are Franklin’s.
¹¹ A quip variously credited to about a dozen authors according to the internet.
¹² Ursula Franklin’s statements in this section come from a Skype call on December 19, 2015, between Ursula Franklin, Jane Freeman, and myself. I would like to offer my immense and warmest gratitude to Jane Freeman and to Ursula Franklin for the time and care they spent considering and answering my questions, including many emails, and for all the logistical organization necessary to ensure that Skype was set up and that we were ready to go.

MEREDITH MEREDITH is an internet researcher and poet living and working in New York. Her daily practice focuses on measurement and the use of public data to enforce net neutrality; the application design and artistic thinking to the creation of more delightful, more respectful cryptographically secure technologies; and the ethics, power relations, and affect of the internet—in all it’s unclear definitions—as it inoculates the world’s daily reality.

IMAGES: Jon Rafman, You Are Standing in an Open Field (Gale), 2015. Archival Pigment Print, Wood, Urethane Casting Resin. Courtesy of the Artist. Ursula Franklin at the launch of The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map, at Massey College, Toronto, 2006

A micro-trend, as I understand it, doesn’t last the time it generally takes to be recognized as a proper trend. It burns out because it flares too brightly, too quickly. But micro-trends are often what later inspire larger trends. Something that was too blatant or obvious to become fashionable at its inception but is later recontextualized as a relic can ultimately become a signifier of its era. And this has always been the case. The least chic trends of a decade are always revived twenty years later, almost without fail. But lately, the very format of contemporary reportage has microtized many trends with proper potential. Dynamiting infant trends makes them micro, and this is now easier than ever.

Being short-lived is not the only factor that makes a trend micro. The trend may be followed too wholeheartedly within one age group, for example. It could be a cheap accessory that started too low on the supply chain to trickle back up to high fashion during its first time around. A phenomenon could be bubbling underneath a broader fashion narrative for some time, before it is discovered as something even slightly tangible. Take a T Magazine article from July 2015 about dying armpit hair. The story goes: Manic Panic colors are in style for young women who don’t shave their pits this summer. Actually, as anyone knows, this is an uncommon practice with obvious setbacks, and one that can really only be sustained—as something, quite literally, cool—in images. “The internet, it turns out, is up to its armpits with women who dye theirs,” writes Andrew Adam Newman. “Miley Cyrus displayed her newly pink underarms in a photo she posted to Instagram, drawing more than 396,000 likes and more than 30,000 comments. On Instagram, more than 700 photos of women (and a handful of men) have been posted with the hashtag #dyedpits. And a blog post by Roxie Hunt, a Seattle hairstylist, ‘How to Dye Your Armpit Hair’ has been shared more than 37,000 times since it was published in October.”

Trusting these numbers when it comes to fads blatantly ignores the information that journalists tend to keep in mind when it comes to anything else. An article in Popsugar claims that keeping track of emerging hashtags is important, because “#normcore was the most Googled trend of 2014,” insinuating that because something is Googled a lot, it makes a big impact on the economy or actual fashion. Just because something Miley Cyrus posted got a lot of attention or appreciation does not make the content of the post a trend. And just because something as unusual as a woman putting semi-permanent color on a body part notorious for sweatiness was a topic shared by many does not equate to a group of people automatically following these instructions. It makes the topic a trending one.

Take the #heelconcept, a meme (to be differentiated from a micro-trend by its very deliberate countercultural intention) that started a year ago and continues today. Rolling its eyes at prevalent phenomena ranging from photographing high heels to the emergent obsession with bedroom life on social media and a forced aesthetic connection to feminism, the heel concept bluntly negates the concept of fashion trends. Examples of the meme place a foot in a still life that loosely represents the shape of a high heel, which could never become an actual high heel. No strap holds the structure to the foot, or the heel is made of liquid, or the shoe is rooted to the ground. No designer could steal these concepts without bastardizing what made them so evocative—that they are part of the outside world, staged on taupe wall-to-wall carpet, using drugstore products, and are impossible to place on a walking model. They are not a part of the insular fashion world, nor do they want to be. They are untrendable fashion.

If a trend can come and go before a magazine has time to print it, perhaps it was really an event. Since social media started, runway shows that are put on a whole season ahead of time sometimes end up accidentally dictating the current season. That’s because the world can see everything in fashion as it is happening, not months after, in the ads. Of course, it’s all one and the same. A micro-trend—like dyed armpit hair or impossible shoes—is still part of the fashion cycle, and always has been. The styles seen on runways borrow from concepts found in micro-trends or untrendable fashion, which come from Instagram, and before Instagram existed they came from clubs, raves, protests, secret societies, etc. The runway has always been late in this way—and magazines even later—although both are often sourced as a trend’s earliest sighting. That’s fashion’s job: answering to, solidifying, or codifying something that’s already in the air. That concept is then translated into wearables, or it’s co-opted by a pop star, a store display, or a T article. The message—the concept now formed by a large group of contributors over time—has made its way to more than just the ether. In its nuanced anarchism, the heel concept, for example, is woven into the fabric of a larger trend; it assumes a mood that is a reaction to—not an iteration of—so-called street style.

An article I recently skimmed listed a few “Instagram stars” who have worn bonnets in selfies. “Is #bonnetcore the Next Big Street Style Accessory Trend?” it asks. Most of the images in the ad-riddled slideshow are taken from Instagram, and they show sarcastically pouting people—like stylist and designer Jake Levy and actors Lauren Avery and Lily Rose Depp—in staged pastel portraits and not caught on the street outside a fashion show. Another article I half looked at the other day mentioned that babies might be trending, because they were showing up a lot on runways. Another one, “Mourncore: Hot New Trend or Something We Invented on a Summer Friday?” And “Individuality is Trending.” A response piece to #bonnetcore called out those reporting on and tagging “trendlets” (including plastic bag onesies and heart-shaped hair selfies), saying that because of the way they’re blasted out, they’re always exhausting, and that naming them a trend immediately kills them. Strangely, this article made sure to point out that normcore, in contrast, is “very real.”

A prevalent trend I’ve noticed lately in fashion is that journalistic integrity is something now deemed outmoded by brands and corporate-run magazines, and that the readers are pissed off. Trending now is outrage at trend forecasting. Backlash is never far from any trending topic, although this particular type of backlash, or meta-trend, is fraught with self-loathing. Those who point out that new ways of reporting are too enmeshed in attention-seeking to be trustworthy, they are invariably seeking attention themselves. One upset op-ed demonizes the rest, and it all starts because someone at an aggregation site had to post a certain amount a day and gain a certain amount of traction over time. No wonder that the natural impulse for writers forced to create content every few minutes is to focus on something as serene and simple as bonnets and babies. Those things, they must know, are not trends. But they are welcome reminders of bliss—the straightforward focus it takes to milk cows in the countryside or breastfeed.

It’s not that fashion has actually become faster. “Fast fashion” is certainly a problem, because it puts a greater stress on the system of irresponsible labor practices in the fashion industry, and it might seem logical to blame this on the internet’s quick proliferation of fashion trends. But trendiness has not, in my experience, become a bigger priority over the past few years. The idea that people (meaning a relatively large percentage of the population) go into a frenzy over some new street style phenomenon is inaccurately reported. Over the past decade the only difference that the internet has made in terms of how we view fashion trends is to help reporting become much easier to monetize, and so sensationalist journalism has become more accepted. This is due to a shift in the way we view our media. We filter it through our friends. If our friends can get us to look at something easily, advertisers want to make sure our friends are sharing their stories, whether via a site with which the advertisers are affiliated or through a direct link to a product. Trends, just like all trending items on our feeds, must somehow seem to be at a critical mass to become newsy enough to be shared. Bonnets are not trending, but still lifes are, because Instagram is. But it won’t be forever. That space too is a metatrend. It’s something that overwhelms the industry of trend forecasting, fashion, and art and yet is a trend itself. Trends are trending. Isn’t it boring?

Another article I read a little while ago purported to be an essay about shifts in personal style. It argued, I think, that because it is easier to acquire clothing almost immediately after discovering it, and because clothing production now allows for a wider array of specific trends made for mass consumption at low costs, personal style is becoming more personal. This view seems narrow, seeing as it relies almost completely on cheap labor. Again, an author (most likely working under a tight deadline) has missed the mark, in favor of a quick and shoppable analysis. Personal style can never, in fact, become more personal. It can only become more widely known as one’s own.

When it comes to measuring fashion, before and after the advent of the internet, it’s the coverage that’s changed the most. Fashion coverage is of a different texture than the once-a-month trend forecasting from the heyday of magazines. Personal style blogs have become more financially successful than most magazine websites. Compared to the web component of an existing print magazine, blogs have smaller overhead and are so far viewed as more trustworthy in terms of styling and advice—meaning that readers have become wise to magazines’ relationships with advertisers, while a blogger’s product placement negotiations are harder to spot. And luxury brands notice bloggers and their influence, they notice the importance of street style and social media, and they are paying more attention to e-commerce than ever before. Therefore, magazines seem to be less and less a part of the equation. But it is the job of the magazine not only to understand these developments but to represent and report on them in artistic ways. As a periodical, a magazine becomes a capsule of cultural climate. Some periodicals see this—having always known this. Those become the best stethoscopes for fad pulse-points and, later, the best references of a time period. They will attempt to recognize a micro-tend before reporting on it, and jump to no conclusions. Some trends are best left ignored until they are blazing in full glory. The rest, which, even after decades of cultural relevance, cave to the newly established pressures of guaranteeing their advertisers a flash flood of views, will unfortunately burn out.

NATASHA STAGG´S first novel, Surveys, was published in 2016 by Semiotext(e). She regularly contributes to DIS magazine, Kaleidoscope, and other art journals, and she is the Senior Editor of the New York fashion magazines V and VMAN.

IMAGES, top to bottom, left to right: Lauren Avery, #bonnetcore Instagram, 2015; Daniela Fernandez, #dyedpits Instagram, 2016; _jo_loves_, #hairhearts Instagram, 2016; M.sty, #heelconcept Instagram, 2015; Jake Levy, #bonnetcore Instagram, 2015

A micro-trend, as I understand it, doesn’t last the time it generally takes to be recognized as a proper trend. It burns out because it flares too brightly, too quickly. But micro-trends are often what later inspire larger trends. Something that was too blatant or obvious to become fashionable at its inception but is later recontextualized as a relic can ultimately become a signifier of its era. And this has always been the case. The least chic trends of a decade are always revived twenty years later, almost without fail. But lately, the very format of contemporary reportage has microtized many trends with proper potential. Dynamiting infant trends makes them micro, and this is now easier than ever.

Being short-lived is not the only factor that makes a trend micro. The trend may be followed too wholeheartedly within one age group, for example. It could be a cheap accessory that started too low on the supply chain to trickle back up to high fashion during its first time around. A phenomenon could be bubbling underneath a broader fashion narrative for some time, before it is discovered as something even slightly tangible. Take a T Magazine article from July 2015 about dying armpit hair. The story goes: Manic Panic colors are in style for young women who don’t shave their pits this summer. Actually, as anyone knows, this is an uncommon practice with obvious setbacks, and one that can really only be sustained—as something, quite literally, cool—in images. “The internet, it turns out, is up to its armpits with women who dye theirs,” writes Andrew Adam Newman. “Miley Cyrus displayed her newly pink underarms in a photo she posted to Instagram, drawing more than 396,000 likes and more than 30,000 comments. On Instagram, more than 700 photos of women (and a handful of men) have been posted with the hashtag #dyedpits. And a blog post by Roxie Hunt, a Seattle hairstylist, ‘How to Dye Your Armpit Hair’ has been shared more than 37,000 times since it was published in October.”

Trusting these numbers when it comes to fads blatantly ignores the information that journalists tend to keep in mind when it comes to anything else. An article in Popsugar claims that keeping track of emerging hashtags is important, because “#normcore was the most Googled trend of 2014,” insinuating that because something is Googled a lot, it makes a big impact on the economy or actual fashion. Just because something Miley Cyrus posted got a lot of attention or appreciation does not make the content of the post a trend. And just because something as unusual as a woman putting semi-permanent color on a body part notorious for sweatiness was a topic shared by many does not equate to a group of people automatically following these instructions. It makes the topic a trending one.

Take the #heelconcept, a meme (to be differentiated from a micro-trend by its very deliberate countercultural intention) that started a year ago and continues today. Rolling its eyes at prevalent phenomena ranging from photographing high heels to the emergent obsession with bedroom life on social media and a forced aesthetic connection to feminism, the heel concept bluntly negates the concept of fashion trends. Examples of the meme place a foot in a still life that loosely represents the shape of a high heel, which could never become an actual high heel. No strap holds the structure to the foot, or the heel is made of liquid, or the shoe is rooted to the ground. No designer could steal these concepts without bastardizing what made them so evocative—that they are part of the outside world, staged on taupe wall-to-wall carpet, using drugstore products, and are impossible to place on a walking model. They are not a part of the insular fashion world, nor do they want to be. They are untrendable fashion.

If a trend can come and go before a magazine has time to print it, perhaps it was really an event. Since social media started, runway shows that are put on a whole season ahead of time sometimes end up accidentally dictating the current season. That’s because the world can see everything in fashion as it is happening, not months after, in the ads. Of course, it’s all one and the same. A micro-trend—like dyed armpit hair or impossible shoes—is still part of the fashion cycle, and always has been. The styles seen on runways borrow from concepts found in micro-trends or untrendable fashion, which come from Instagram, and before Instagram existed they came from clubs, raves, protests, secret societies, etc. The runway has always been late in this way—and magazines even later—although both are often sourced as a trend’s earliest sighting. That’s fashion’s job: answering to, solidifying, or codifying something that’s already in the air. That concept is then translated into wearables, or it’s co-opted by a pop star, a store display, or a T article. The message—the concept now formed by a large group of contributors over time—has made its way to more than just the ether. In its nuanced anarchism, the heel concept, for example, is woven into the fabric of a larger trend; it assumes a mood that is a reaction to—not an iteration of—so-called street style.

An article I recently skimmed listed a few “Instagram stars” who have worn bonnets in selfies. “Is #bonnetcore the Next Big Street Style Accessory Trend?” it asks. Most of the images in the ad-riddled slideshow are taken from Instagram, and they show sarcastically pouting people—like stylist and designer Jake Levy and actors Lauren Avery and Lily Rose Depp—in staged pastel portraits and not caught on the street outside a fashion show. Another article I half looked at the other day mentioned that babies might be trending, because they were showing up a lot on runways. Another one, “Mourncore: Hot New Trend or Something We Invented on a Summer Friday?” And “Individuality is Trending.” A response piece to #bonnetcore called out those reporting on and tagging “trendlets” (including plastic bag onesies and heart-shaped hair selfies), saying that because of the way they’re blasted out, they’re always exhausting, and that naming them a trend immediately kills them. Strangely, this article made sure to point out that normcore, in contrast, is “very real.”

A prevalent trend I’ve noticed lately in fashion is that journalistic integrity is something now deemed outmoded by brands and corporate-run magazines, and that the readers are pissed off. Trending now is outrage at trend forecasting. Backlash is never far from any trending topic, although this particular type of backlash, or meta-trend, is fraught with self-loathing. Those who point out that new ways of reporting are too enmeshed in attention-seeking to be trustworthy, they are invariably seeking attention themselves. One upset op-ed demonizes the rest, and it all starts because someone at an aggregation site had to post a certain amount a day and gain a certain amount of traction over time. No wonder that the natural impulse for writers forced to create content every few minutes is to focus on something as serene and simple as bonnets and babies. Those things, they must know, are not trends. But they are welcome reminders of bliss—the straightforward focus it takes to milk cows in the countryside or breastfeed.

It’s not that fashion has actually become faster. “Fast fashion” is certainly a problem, because it puts a greater stress on the system of irresponsible labor practices in the fashion industry, and it might seem logical to blame this on the internet’s quick proliferation of fashion trends. But trendiness has not, in my experience, become a bigger priority over the past few years. The idea that people (meaning a relatively large percentage of the population) go into a frenzy over some new street style phenomenon is inaccurately reported. Over the past decade the only difference that the internet has made in terms of how we view fashion trends is to help reporting become much easier to monetize, and so sensationalist journalism has become more accepted. This is due to a shift in the way we view our media. We filter it through our friends. If our friends can get us to look at something easily, advertisers want to make sure our friends are sharing their stories, whether via a site with which the advertisers are affiliated or through a direct link to a product. Trends, just like all trending items on our feeds, must somehow seem to be at a critical mass to become newsy enough to be shared. Bonnets are not trending, but still lifes are, because Instagram is. But it won’t be forever. That space too is a metatrend. It’s something that overwhelms the industry of trend forecasting, fashion, and art and yet is a trend itself. Trends are trending. Isn’t it boring?

Another article I read a little while ago purported to be an essay about shifts in personal style. It argued, I think, that because it is easier to acquire clothing almost immediately after discovering it, and because clothing production now allows for a wider array of specific trends made for mass consumption at low costs, personal style is becoming more personal. This view seems narrow, seeing as it relies almost completely on cheap labor. Again, an author (most likely working under a tight deadline) has missed the mark, in favor of a quick and shoppable analysis. Personal style can never, in fact, become more personal. It can only become more widely known as one’s own.

When it comes to measuring fashion, before and after the advent of the internet, it’s the coverage that’s changed the most. Fashion coverage is of a different texture than the once-a-month trend forecasting from the heyday of magazines. Personal style blogs have become more financially successful than most magazine websites. Compared to the web component of an existing print magazine, blogs have smaller overhead and are so far viewed as more trustworthy in terms of styling and advice—meaning that readers have become wise to magazines’ relationships with advertisers, while a blogger’s product placement negotiations are harder to spot. And luxury brands notice bloggers and their influence, they notice the importance of street style and social media, and they are paying more attention to e-commerce than ever before. Therefore, magazines seem to be less and less a part of the equation. But it is the job of the magazine not only to understand these developments but to represent and report on them in artistic ways. As a periodical, a magazine becomes a capsule of cultural climate. Some periodicals see this—having always known this. Those become the best stethoscopes for fad pulse-points and, later, the best references of a time period. They will attempt to recognize a micro-tend before reporting on it, and jump to no conclusions. Some trends are best left ignored until they are blazing in full glory. The rest, which, even after decades of cultural relevance, cave to the newly established pressures of guaranteeing their advertisers a flash flood of views, will unfortunately burn out.

NATASHA STAGG´S first novel, Surveys, was published in 2016 by Semiotext(e). She regularly contributes to DIS magazine, Kaleidoscope, and other art journals, and she is the Senior Editor of the New York fashion magazines V and VMAN.

IMAGES, top to bottom, left to right: Lauren Avery, #bonnetcore Instagram, 2015; Daniela Fernandez, #dyedpits Instagram, 2016; _jo_loves_, #hairhearts Instagram, 2016; M.sty, #heelconcept Instagram, 2015; Jake Levy, #bonnetcore Instagram, 2015