This of course applies to all images viewed digitally, whether in artistic, illustrative, journalistic, or any other context. The device used to view the image is part of the aesthetic experience of the image as object.

This isn’t to say one form is better than the other in absolute terms. Many photographers use books, for example, as a specific way of contextualizing their work (indeed, many photographers work primarily in book form; their work in print, isolated on a gallery work, generally is not nearly as successful), distinct from a physical print, and the size of a book need not mimic the size of the same photographs when printed and framed. They’re different objects, and therefore different things to receive and interpret, despite displaying the same image.

It’s my opinion that the inherent fungibility of display size for digital objects, images, and video is therefore an unavoidable characteristic of the work itself, and that successful digital art is cognizant of this characteristic. I’m thinking here specifically of digital art made after the PC, which automatically assumes that a work will be viewed on multiple screen sizes, although the variation in average screen size in 1981 or 2001 was certainly much lower (orders of magnitude, even) than in 2021.

So, again, what is “NFT Photography?” In truth I think that’s a basically meaningless categorization whose most powerful component is to be a useful hashtag to help pump up the market. It’s done wonders to sell a lot of work. It’s also done wonders to help artists find each other, which is a good thing.

Nonetheless in my opinion that isn’t sufficient, and not very interesting. Far better is to leverage the medium either aesthetically or technologically. Within that approach, the token delineates a substantive difference.

With this in mind, I’ve begun minting my Promenades series as individual NFTs. There will be 128 in all – 32 images, from each of the four original volumes. They will be minted in the same sequence as in the books. The primary difference is that in the books, most images were one half of a diptych (aside from the first and last images of each book), and those diptychs were a key component to the editing and sequencing. With the NFTs, those diptychs no longer exist; the overall sequence is intact, but obviously the tokens can be collected individually and sequenced however the owners wish. This feels like a faint homage to the original Polaroids, made in 2008, all as sketches – the equivalent now to using my phone while walking around a city. It makes them less precious.

I’ve long wanted to re-print the original four Promenades volumes, bound in a single special edition. The original edition sizes, 50 of each book, was too small in retrospect. They are hard to find; I’m not sure I even have a copy of each book anymore.

If enough of the Promenades NFTs sell (I don’t think it would need to be all of them, but probably at least 33%), it should enable me to print a special edition, and then send a copy to each token holder, with a print of the image of their relevant token. If all of the NFTs sell, that likely would make it possible to publish both a special new edition (of 128, each with a print) and a larger new edition, without prints. Since this token-physical link isn’t spelled out in the minting contract, there will need to be a burn-and-swap later on, with a new contract. The functional element of the tokens here is important to me – that they explicitly memorialize the token-physical relationship is to utilize the medium appropriately, and usefully.

Will this work? We’ll see.

Promenades was at first an exercise in editing. For a while I worked with two cameras simultaneously, shooting both 35mm and Polaroids. The 35mm film constituted the “real work;” the Polaroids were offhand sketches (which, thinking back on this now, didn’t make much sense economically – 35mm film was far cheaper per image than Polaroids, which in 2008 I think cost about $2 each). Over time I tended to carry my Polaroid more often than my 35mm, especially at night (the SLR680 is one of the best cameras ever made, capable of focusing in complete darkness due to its sonar autofocus system). Polaroids were a great way of photographing strangers, since you could leave them with a souvenir. The images as physical objects were great to hold, like trading cards, and were also unique, so each one – even the mistakes, and sometimes especially the mistakes – felt like a little treasure.

A box of Polaroids taken in Germany and around Eastern Europe begged to be utilized, but didn’t fit elsewhere. A short simple book seemed an appropriate way to enjoy the images, and was a creative exercise, drawing from a discrete set of images. Cropping and enlarging divorced them from the easy charm of the Polaroid frame and emphasized them as images rather than objects – an important recontextualization to make the book feel cohesive, a singular creative act, rather than a series of cartes de visage.

In editing the sequence, and pairing the diptychs, I noticed many tendencies that I’d previously missed, or that I had maybe tried to smother in my 35mm work. This, I think, is a common problem for young artists, intent on being taken seriously, or wanting to make their work fit a certain mold. Working intuitively, and in turn harnessing that same intuition when editing, is really difficult. It’s part of why many great photographers are hapless editors, and have only achieved their great status courtesy of strong collaborative relationships with talented ones.

My satisfaction with the first volume encouraged me to take on the same exercise with a second volume, drawing from a larger body of Polaroids taken over a few years, primarily in New York City. This body of work is immediately more personal (in contrast to the first volume, which is defined so much by the act of observing from a distance, and briefly), and includes many images of friends, daily surroundings. An intimate inward gaze.

The third and fourth volumes were both edited from images made over the course of the year preceding their publication, and thus the image-making was far more conscientious. This had good and bad outcomes. They contain the strongest individual images – the compositions are generally more deliberate and studied – and many of the best diptychs. But they have less of the intuitive elasticity in the first volume. It’s no coincidence that I bought my first iPhone in 2011, and by 2013 was using it to make photographs and videos in the same sketchbook manner as I’d done with Polaroids a few years earlier. By this point Polaroid had gone out of business and I had exhausted my hoard of original film, which was also becoming very yellowed and faded and difficult to use (the images in volume four are more heavily color-corrected than in the others as a result, are more uniform in palette, and give a softer impression). My use of Polaroids basically came to an end when I completed the fourth book.

The arc of the image sequence tracks several arcs of mine, either directly or inadvertently – travels, relationships, creative process – but is primarily focused on the act of looking. The title Promenades was first a reference to how many of the images were created: during long walks around Berlin, Prague, and other cities. Some of these walks were on routes I took every day. Others were in places I visited once and to which I’ll never return. But the promenade is also a place to be seen publicly, to be an object of observation.

The collection can be found on Foundation.

https://twitter.com/0ddette/status/1376008296415559680

My undergrad photography program, like most liberal art programs, was built on a structure emphasizing fundamentals as a first step along a path of cumulative experimentation–in intellectual development, in visual style, and in tools used. The cornerstone was analog: shooting black and white 35mm film, developing the negatives yourself, and making prints in the darkroom. Later years had time devoted to large format view cameras, lighting, studio setups–all the stuff that’s been around for 50-100 years–and, of course, digital capture, editing, and printing.

In my last two years at school a department-wide debate emerged: whether to still require incoming freshmen to learn the wet darkroom or let them go directly digital. For a lot of younger students it made no sense to grok a skill and set of equipment they didn’t want to use. For a lot of older students it made no sense to experiment at the cutting edge without appreciation for the art’s history. Faculty, who practiced in a wide range of media, seemed caught in the middle.

Working in color captured these questions well. It isn’t practical (or really even possible) for someone to develop color film themselves, so shooting color means taking it to an outside lab as a first step; already once removed from the artist’s hands. Chromogenic prints cannot be made in the same type of wet darkroom as gelatin silver prints since no visible spectrum of light is safe to use with the paper, so they’re exposed in total darkness (in small individual darkrooms), and developed by a machine the size of a truck that’s accessed through a closet (at Tisch ours was a Colenta and probably cost $350,000 when new, in the 1990s). No hands in trays of chemicals, no fighting over control of the stereo. The complexity and relative absurdity of the process–working in complete darkness at each step, going in and out of different tiny rooms–in fact makes it far more esoteric than black and white printing, which can be done by almost anyone in almost any dark space with a few buckets and a red light bulb. But at one time, it was the vanguard. While I was in school, it was still the dominant method of printing color, and what you saw most often on gallery walls in Chelsea.

My thesis exhibition (in 2009) was entirely chromogenic prints, and if I remember correctly about a third of my classmates did the same. Within two years, the program’s head technician emailed me saying I could have the Colenta if I would get it out of the building.

https://twitter.com/lemiscate/status/1369237479317004289

Ethereum opened a new space and provides an opportunity for artists to work with a previously unknown medium. This is exciting to the point of mania-inducing, which is what makes it feel simultaneously hopeful and dangerous. It’s also what creates a financial bubble, which for the obvious reasons is dramatically exacerbated in the case of NFTs. Worst of all, it’s what often pushes aside the most interesting work being done, work which is trying to understand what the technology unlocks–what it enables in itself–separate from how it can merely transport an existing object (say, a JPEG) into a different realm (say, a hyperfinancial one). I’m talking about the work that literally cannot exist without the specific tool.

An excellent example of this is Robin Sloan’s Amulets project.

ethereum://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7/815

An amulet results from the appearance of sequential 8’s in the sha256 hash of a short piece of text; it cannot exist separate from the sha256 hash function (which is integral, but not unique, to Ethereum). The quantity of 8’s determines the amulet’s rarity (as established by the artist). The full definition and set of rules are very worth reading. It’s a nice game. It’s hard to imagine anyone paying a lot of money for these.

Framergence is particularly interesting because the creative mechanism is tied explicitly to Ethereum, in that the set of tokens that exists can be modified in real time on-chain by the owners. Each piece is algorithmically generated based on fractal patterns; the contract also rewards token burning by re-minting an n-1 amount of new tokens. This has led to people purchasing examples they intend to burn in the hunt for more pleasing iterations.

Ezra Miller’s Solvency, a personal favorite, is not only technically accomplished, with the assets stored entirely on Ethereum and Arweave, but the individual mints are also beautiful, aesthetically complex and varied, yet still cohesive as a body of work. Their infinite runtime is the kicker (I highly recommend viewing the full WebGL renders on a laptop or desktop machine).

https://solvency.s3.amazonaws.com/444-1619141967765.mp4

These examples demonstrate the positive feedback loop that emerges from strong artist-tool relationships and leads to canonical outcomes. In the best cases it is indistinguishable from collaboration. I would go further and say that the strongest relationships depend on high friction environments. In these cases, the tools are new. They’re difficult to understand and often expensive to use. There’s a lot of trial and error. Much of the work has to be done “by hand,” and it’s slow going. The audience doesn’t have good references to understand the output; there’s probably very little criticism to place it in a historical context. The conditions are conducive to failure rather than success. And this leads to a lot of “failures.” Outside the small ecosystem of devoted creators and users, the work that employs the most experimental elements of a new technological space tends to be misunderstood, undervalued, and in many cases lost entirely.

The same dynamic (with the opposite effect on market price) can apply to esoteric and “outdated” tools and processes that nonetheless are preserved by devoted practicians. It was no surprise that the best paper maker in Japan had custom-designed all of his equipment, worked without the use of any bleach or other additives, and had not changed the process first established by his family 8 generations prior. Of course, his output is 1/100th of what a modernized paper maker can achieve, let alone a factory.

What constitutes high friction (and low friction) is an ever-moving target and always relative. In 2007 digital photography was high friction (to achieve comparable results to analog, or to embrace the unique aesthetics of pixels), analog low friction. That has since inverted. Today, shooting 4K video on your phone feels easy; it will eventually feel cumbersome when most people have contact lens wearables, or something equally absurd-sounding.

https://twitter.com/etheria_feed/status/1370825688647884802

https://twitter.com/samspike/status/1439030208640823305?s=20

I originally began this essay in March. Etheria has since been resuscitated; NFT archeology in the search of yield is an active pursuit. Generative art is now rampant with derivatives. Copies of copies of copies. As with everything, the financial mechanisms of crypto allow–if not require–this speedrunning. Thus, we are already in a transient period of low friction and increasing mania. We’re surrounded by work that deploys the technology as an inherent component, but is otherwise artistically unremarkable. Its newness nonetheless commands enormous value. This, too, can cause artists’ work to be overlooked. Launch a series on Art Blocks and you tap into an automatic market of collectors and liquidity. Launch the same series on your own site and you may be lucky to sell a handful (probably not in this market, but you know what I mean). This problem isn’t unique to NFTs; the same dynamic is built into the structures of the legacy art world. Indeed the same dynamic emerges any time a certain technology (and its associated market) becomes frictionless enough.

It’s a failure both when a technology is used as a non-tool acceleration vehicle, and when it’s worshipped as a self-solving perpetual motion machine. During a bubble the technology exhibits both properties. Everybody rushes in because it’s a money printer, and many of those involved begin to see it as a Rosetta stone device. Irrational exuberance. Soon after the bubble pops because it’s discovered that the tools are insufficient for the narrative they sell.

A similar mistake can be made with tools and their characteristics of nostalgia. This was at the heart of the debate at Tisch. Many saw digital photography as a fad, a shortcut, and aesthetically insufficient (“It’s a lower resolution than film, what’s the point?”). Thus black and white wet darkroom printing had to be learned; when the current iteration of digital technology was no longer in use, the artist would still have the through-line to grasp. A safety net, and therefore superior.

This is the common misconception of any new technology: riskier, less reliable, less future-proof. Because it’s iterating so quickly, it’s impermanent whenever and wherever it’s measured. It appears fleeting because most of it is fleeting. But that’s measuring the products of a tool; it’s not taking stock of the tool itself, on its inherent conceptual terms. Certain foundational components attain extreme Lindy status, while many cutting-edge experiments are ultimately relegated to history after leapfrogging each other during the rapid expansion phase. Here’s where we start arguing about Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Of course, even gelatin silver prints, the most Lindy form of photography in history, are becoming harder to make and more homogenized–the number of companies still producing the necessary materials (film, paper, chemicals) and equipment (enlargers, cameras) has shrunk dramatically, a process that began well before digital photography became superior (the market re-prices according to future developments, not current realities). For the few photographers still working in black and white wet darkrooms, they’ve had to further hone their craft. But most have moved on to digital.

DeafBeef understands this well:

Your old smartphone is junk. On the other hand, an analog signal processor can be repaired, repurposed, and scavenged for parts. Oscilloscopes remain useful tools for electrical engineers. Vinyl and magnetic tape recordings from the 60s can still be played. ASCII terminal screens, for those who know how to use them, remain the most efficient way to interact with a computer for many tasks.

Eventually, the old smartphone will also be a field to harvest. And it turns out that inkjet prints are actually more stable and conservation-friendly than chromogenic prints; they also don’t require the use of harsh chemicals. Thus the point is not necessarily to be faithful to a specific tool, but to a certain intellectual approach, which is reliant on an appreciation for and handiness with a certain set of tools, and an ability to recognize which tools hold the most potency for honing and distilling.

I’m reminded now of David Rudnick’s rhetorical device of primacy–Physical Prime vs. Digital Prime. We’re rapidly approaching the event horizon of digital primacy, the point at which we will spend more of our time in digital spaces rather than physical ones. The exponential deployment of digital objects as totemic and memetic devices is testament to this. These totems help us form narratives, and their appearance (in absolute numbers, in iterative qualities, in variability of aesthetics) has a direct relationship to our distance from the threshold.

A major risk is in not recognizing the threshold; the result is a digital-prime world built with tools we can’t understand, illustrating myths that only abstract our social relationship to them. It inflates a bubble. Life feels easy. But we’re really in limbo.

Dean Kissick writes of a similar problem between cultural output and friction:

Much of culture now has the hollow, vacant feeling of having been made by algorithm. Consider the drab, broken anti-spectacle of Addison Rae performing trending TikTok dances onstage with Jimmy Kimmel or NFTs sold for millions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s—it’s art and pop stripped of all verve, fertility, and eroticism. What’s left is the new aesthetic of lifelessness and void, a consumer culture of throwaway experiences that wash right over you like an Ambien. It’s made to be experienced without friction: seamless post-death entertainment from an empire ruled over by a sleepy, old man. “Avoiding friction,” the critic Rob Horning has noted, “becomes a kind of content in itself—‘readable books’; ‘listenable music’; ‘vibes’; ‘ambience,’ etc.” And this is in keeping with a generational preference for light demi-pleasures: bumps not lines; microdosing, not getting high; sugary milks made of oats; podcasts, not conversation; the simulated intimacy of ASMR. Each of life’s pleasures in small amounts.

Recognizing the threshold is particularly important for artists. They must grok the requisite tools and use them to shape the narrative surrounding the technological shift. They must sustain a high friction environment both as creators and for their audience. They must shock.

High tool fluency, up and down the spiral (closer to and further from the threshold), is necessary. One must know one’s history, and then push forward. Otherwise the response to an algorithmic existence itself is honed by algorithm, so as not to be too disruptive; to sell.

Part of what makes this urgent is the constant stream of legacy systems busting rivets left and right.

The ship as totem: a menacing combination of high meme content, an esoteric community, and structural fragility.

The physical prime world is literally breaking as it optimizes for digital prime users. Its systems are consolidating in the name of efficiency and introducing centralized weaknesses that halt entire networks. Its tools are opaque, if not entirely unknown, to its supposed beneficiaries. It is completely mispriced.

It’s easy to see this as a sign that all things analog are destined for obsolescence. There are many in the NFT realm who seem to think–or at least proclaim loudly, to sustain a trade–there’s no going back; a switch has flipped, we’ve discovered a new set of tools that are better in every way, and a panacea is upon us. That there’s a direct relationship between one’s financial exposure to said tools and one’s insistence on their panacean qualities is no surprise. It should be obvious that this binary relationship between past and future is wrong, but to extrapolate a bit: culture doesn’t lurch forward in a series of discrete steps. Generative art is not new. We might think of Sol Lewitt’s Wall Drawings as generative artworks (Mitchell F Chan certainly does), or Marina Abramovic, or Bruce Nauman, or Lawrence Weiner… The Louvre predates photography and will still exist long after NFTs are outdated. A museum is a tool–a piece of infrastructure so implicit to society that it will both adapt to and force the adaptation of new aesthetics, new concepts, new media. If NFTs are successful as an artistic medium it will be because they expand culture, not fork it.

It seems to me that the turbulence of our time is a result of not allowing ourselves to cleave our digital selves from the physical and thus nurture both. We insist on bringing the algorithmic efficiency of digital primacy to bear on everything we do, eat, say, build.

A dramatic inversion is necessary, and this brings me to Loot.

Loot has been discussed mostly as a game primitive, but I think this is too simple. Loot is a generative artwork: a set of variables spawning artistic outputs off chain. Each bag is a recursive digital-prime totem, a memetic device that leads to expansive world building within digital primacy. A set of instructions.

Its recursion is a direct result of its pliability through time. It’s non-static; it reflects and refracts the underlying technology. Each bag is a tool.

The rapid and frothy growth of Loot derivatives (and knock-offs) is confirmation of this. It shows the power of the idea: ”this is so stupid that I must spend my time mocking it;” “this allows us to build our own universes, how exciting;” “this will make me a lot of money.” It immediately (well, it took three days) became a bubble market. Most of these derivatives will go bust. The naysayers will celebrate. The devoted will continue building, sometimes in the wrong directions.

But as with the bubble of generative blockchain art, and the bubble of NFTs, and the (current) bubble of crypto, there remains a potent signal to which we should pay attention.

ethereum://0x3B3ee1931Dc30C1957379FAc9aba94D1C48a5405/161

“Shelf of a field, green, within easy reach, the grass on it not yet high, papered with blue sky through which yellow has grown to make pure green, the surface colour of what the basin of the world contains, attendant field, shelf between sky and sea, fronted with a curtain of printed trees, friable at its edges, the corners of it rounded, answering the sun with heat, shelf on a wall through which from time to time a cuckoo is audible, shelf on which she keeps the invisible and intangible jars of her pleasure, field that I have always known, I am lying raised up on one elbow wondering whether in any direction I can see beyond where you stop. The wire around you is the horizon.”

From Field, by John Berger

I’ve spent countless hours this year clearing land. The property where we live in New York was owned for about 30 years by a couple that rarely used it, and they long ago stopped mowing the fields that used to be cattle pasture. Trees have marched forward from the edges of the woods. Most of them are pines that grow a foot taller every year. Because we’re working to re-establish a farm on the property, a lot of these young pines have to go.

Clearing land is slow work when done alone with simple tools. Becoming comfortable and familiar with the chainsaw was easy enough; the thrilling part is when you see the trunk begin to lean away from you ever so slightly and then quickly snap with a gutteral creak. Very slowly and then all at once. The hard part is cleaning up: removing each small limb, moving them into a pile to burn or chip, then bucking the larger limbs into shorter pieces that can be piled into or dragged behind the pickup. The slowness of the cleaning is characterized by a certain zen. The removal of a living thing from the land, for something new to grow, is bittersweet.

There are a few chores that continue to feel like chores. Re-baiting the mousetraps is one. Unfolded laundry another. Maybe they’re the chores that are most familiar from the pre-farm days. Over time even the chainsaw, even the tractor, will sit unused, I guess.

We’d been seriously looking for a place to farm for about a year and a half before we ended up here. I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to live and raise children in a rural area, with a small local community. It’s not how I was raised, and it’s not how I have ever lived before a year ago. If I was forced to point to a moment early in life that set me on this trajectory, I could probably argue it was my time spent in IRC rooms and on small forums as an early teenager.

For anyone who lives in a city long enough, Nature becomes a place to go -- a public park on the way home from the subway; a state park 30 minutes away by car; a weeklong national park vacation. It’s a space safely entered and exited, supporting a subset of rare Human activities. Many of us acknowledge that it’s the home of Animals, and we generally agree the Animals deserve a home. Rarely is it appreciated for its entropic tendencies. Generally those tendencies are cast only in destructive terms.

This is not an essay about climate change. I’m not talking about the impending chaos of accelerating rates of hurricane formations. This is not about how Nature Is In Control (although I do believe that).

Rather, I’m interested in minimizing the boundaries between my (our) ordered human life and the messiness of the woods. I hesitate to push back those boundaries, even if it’s in service of developing a place that approaches a certain harmony between chaos and order. I get over this hesitation by walking around the property over and over, feeling how I move through it efficiently (when we need to find a path for the tractor or truck) or not (when we want a place that promotes wandering). Trying to imprint the contours of the land onto my body.

Berger’s field is a field of activity, a theater. I first read the essay about 15 years ago. For most of my life since then, I saw the field as the entire space of concern, the zone that could impart meaning upon both spectator and participant. This seemed a useful and accurate metaphor. But now I understand the field is also a moment, and explicitly incomplete. It’s a pause. There are some creatures which leave the security of the woods, wander serenely through cleared land, and disappear again between trees. Some creatures leave the woods by mistake, and immediately turn back. The blackbirds spend most of their days out of the woods; “their coming and going remains quite unaffected by the trains.” For both Human and Animal, the field is an irregular interruption. But it might facilitate thoughtful reflection.

Now I’m thinking about another Berger essay, The Eaters and the Eaten:

“The principal regular meal. For the peasant this meal is usually at midday; for the bourgeois it is usually dinner in the evening. The practical reasons for this are so obvious that they need not be listed. What may be significant is that the peasant meal is in the middle of the day, surrounded by work. It is placed in the day’s stomach. The bourgeois meal comes after the day’s work and marks the transition between day and evening. It is closer to the day’s head (if the day begins with getting to the feet) and to dreams.

At the peasant’s table the relationship between implements, food and eaters is intimate, and a value is conferred on use and handling. Each person has his own knife which he may well take out of his pocket. The knife is worn, used for many purposes other than eating, and usefully sharp. Whenever possible the same plate is kept throughout the meal, and between dishes it is cleaned with bread which is eaten. Each eater takes his share of the food and drink which are placed before all. For example: he holds the bread to his body, cuts a piece of it towards himself, and puts the bread down for another. Likewise with cheese or sausage. Contiguity as between uses, users and foods is treated as natural. There is a minimum of division.

On the bourgeois table everything that can be is kept untouched and separate. Every dish has its own cutlery and plate. In general plates are not cleaned by eating — because eating and cleaning are distinct activities. Each eater (or a servant) holds the serving dish to allow another to serve himself. The meal is a series of discrete, untouched gifts.

To the peasant all food represents work accomplished. The work may or may not have been his own or that of his family, but if it isn’t, the work represented is nevertheless directly exchangeable with his own work. Because food represents physical work, the eater’s body already ‘knows’ the food it is going to eat. (The peasant’s strong resistance to eating any ‘foreign’ food for the first time is partly because its origin in the work process is unknown.) He does not expect to be surprised by food — except, sometimes, by its quality. His food is familiar like his own body. Its action on his body is continuous with the previous action of the body (labour) on the food. He eats in the room in which the food is prepared and cooked.”

And here it’s only appropriate to recall the videos that have become so popular lately, of Afghani or Pakistani peasants eating western foods like pizza for the first time.

In more normal times, I’m working away from home at least a third of the year. The farm was always intended as a respite from this type of continuous movement around the world. I would be in New York, in Los Angeles, in Seoul, and then return to the woods. Two zones, with a clear delineation between them. This delineation now seems pretty absurd.

I think often about the community I joined de facto in January 2020 and in earnest a month later, and what distinguishes it from all my previous time spent in cities. I’ve spent many months of my life driving throughout the country in search of similar data and have a few initial ideas. Urban environments are built on substantial decentralization and anonymization of services; this cultivates a mindset of a large, mostly-invisible controlling force that keeps everything running for everybody. Eating and cleaning are distinct activities. Life is made as predictable as possible to make sure it runs as smoothly as possible for the greatest number of participants. This framework also breaks most human-level community; people live primarily as individuals, knowing few of their neighbors, perhaps interacting hundreds of times with the same worker at the same business without ever learning each others’ name. There’s a certain predictable linearity to urbanized life.

This is inverted in rural areas, where services are often the responsibility of the individual (or the family), and a strong local community provides the foundation that enables people to live this way: by directly sharing equipment, food, childcare, skills. Life is inherently unpredictable, the future is uncertain, and mistakes are expected. Repairs are frequent. Good tools are invaluable. Most systems have a direct user-operator relationship by design, and those that aren’t (bureaucratic) are the source of endless complaints. The fire department is staffed by volunteers.

Recently an acquaintance directed me towards Wendell Berry’s framework of exploitation and nurture, as discussed in his Unsettling of America:

“The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health—his land’s health, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? […] The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order—a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery.”

Earlier this afternoon I went to buy some parts for the tractor. One of the metal pins I needed was Made In India, and I momentarily felt a twang of unhappiness. In the past several years, and particularly this year, I've made a purposeful decision to buy products made in the United States as often as possible. I don't do this for nationalistic reasons, at least not directly. In general, I've found that Made In USA products are better-made and last longer, at least when it's an American brand, the same being true for Japanese brands made in Japan, or Italian in Italy -- localism generally implies highest possible quality. But I also prefer to buy these "locally made" goods because it means the motivations of the company are not pure profit; if that was the goal, they'd be exploiting workers in countries where worker protection laws are weaker and wages lower. This seems obvious maybe, but the higher quality of work must come in large part from the individual's higher quantity of pride in their work -- a skill developed as a result of nurturing at the individual level (through an apprenticeship, or through a long career at a single company) and at the group level (by implementing the Toyota Production System). The benefit of labor unions, for instance, is their ability to foster the conditions conducive to nurturing by creating friction between the company and the worker. They do not maximize for efficiency and exploitation.

There’s a connection here between pride taken in one’s work as a means to supporting one’s community -- a peasant mindset, Berger might say -- and why this pride disappears in urban environments. It’s not only because urban environments, and the culture around them, encourage capitalistic, bourgeois pursuits. It’s also because the very functional structure of urban environments cleaves the individual from their work. Their work goes out into the city and disappears. Their rewards are delivered from other sources, and often are provided by an easy access to credit. Ultimately, the rewards for work done, and the debts taken for rewards desired -- at the societal level -- are unevenly distributed throughout the entire system. History has shown where this leads.

I can’t assert that all rural inhabitants retain the purity of the farmer’s mindset. Neither are all city creatures following their own social codes. Farhad Manjoo -- the NYTimes Op-Ed columnist (“lefties like myself who proudly believe in science and ostentatiously defer to expertise”) -- recently wrote, “I worry about life passing us by just as we’re trying to save it. If 2020 has taught me anything, it is to resist taking the future for granted.” This is the central talking point the right, and rural areas, have been articulating all year, and generally following -- returning to church, eating with friends, whatever. It’s also what the left has been communicating, through its actions, by going to the streets. All of this is about building up communities. At the root, all of this is about working through problems pragmatically. Of course, this is not how all of this is seen by each side.

A top comment on the column, with which I also agree: “This discussion does not include the millions of people that don't have the privilege of isolating or communing in pods. The folks that keep the lights on, that sell us food and supplies, that deliver our heating fuel, mail and packages, the medical profession, expose themselves to risks everyday. We who can should isolate so that those who can't isolate have a safer environment when they go to work. Sure, Zoom is a poor substitute for in-person visits, but it makes little sense to travel during these few weeks if you don't need to.”

As with all things, neither of the extremes is workable, at any level. The individual must, and does, make decisions about what to exploit and what to nurture. The community makes the same decisions.

I look forward to keeping a part of my mind with the entropy of the woods when I find myself on the road again, drinking coffee in the brightness of an airport, the air above me in a constant state of rapidly recirculating disinfection.

One of the recurring motifs of this year, here at the homestead, is friends visiting from the city and willfully taking on manual labor. One stayed a week and chopped firewood every day. Another helped lay out the deer fencing. Others dug holes, moved rocks, pulled nails. All do this with hardly any invitation, let alone prodding. At the end of their visit, they seem calmer. The zen of the wheelbarrow.

This essay was originally published on January 13, 2021 on usually.world.

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