Last year, a Yale-led research project produced an innovative dataset that mapped the history of urban settlements. Covering a 6,000 year period, the project traced the location and size of cities across the world, starting in 3700 BC (when the first known urban dwellings emerged in Sumer) and continuing through 2000 AD. According to Yale’s Meredith Reba, if we understand “how cities have grown and changed over time, throughout history, it might tell us something useful about how they are changing today,” and particularly whether we can find ways to make modern cities sustainable.
The Yale dataset was originally published in Scientific Data in 2016. And before too long, some enterprising YouTuber brought the data to life. Above, the history of urban life unfolds before your eyes. The action starts off slow, but then later kicks into high gear.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Long before World of Warcraft, before Everquest and Second Life, and even before Ultima Online, computer-gamers of the 1980s looking for an online world to explore with others of their kind could fire up their Commodore 64s, switch on their dial-up modems, and log into Habitat. Brought out for the Commodore online service Quantum Link by Lucasfilm Games (later known as the developer of such classic point-and-click adventure games as Maniac Mansion and The Secret of MonkeyIsland, now known as Lucasarts), Habitat debuted as the very first large-scale graphical virtual community, blazing a trail for all the massively multiplayer online role-playing games (or MMORPGs) so many of us spend so much of our time playing today.
Designed, in the words of creators Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, to “support a population of thousands of users in a single shared cyberspace,” Habitat presented “a real-time animated view into an online simulated world in which users can communicate, play games, go on adventures, fall in love, get married, get divorced, start businesses, found religions, wage wars, protest against them, and experiment with self-government.” All that happened and more within the service’s virtual reality during its pilot run from 1986 to 1988. The features both cautiously and recklessly implemented by Habitat’s developers, and the feedback they received from its users, laid down the template for all the more advanced graphical online worlds to come.
At the top of the post, you can watch Lucasfilm’s original Habitat promotional video promise a “strange new world where names can change as quickly as events, surprises lurk at every turn, and the keynotes of existence are fantasy and fun,” one where “thousands of avatars, each controlled by a different human, can converge to shape an imaginary society.” (All performed, the narrator notes, “with the cooperation of a huge mainframe computer in Virginia.”) The form this society eventually took impressed Habitat’s creators as much as anyone, as Farmer writes in his “Habitat Anecdotes” from 1988, an examination of the most memorable happenings and phenomena among its users.
Farmer found he could group those users into five now-familiar categories: the Passives (who “want to ‘be entertained’ with no effort, like watching TV”), the Active (whose “biggest problem is overspending”), the Motivators (the most valuable users, for they “understand that Habitat is what they make of it”), the Caretakers (employees who “help the new users, control personal conflicts, record bugs” and so on), and the Geek Gods (the virtual world’s all-powerful administrators). Sometimes everyone got along smoothly, and sometimes — inevitably, given that everyone had to define the properties of this brand new medium even as they experienced it — they didn’t.
“At first, during early testing, we found out that people were taking stuff out of others’ hands and shooting people in their own homes,” Farmer writes. Later, a Greek Orthodox Minister opened Habitat’s first church, but “I had to eventually put a lock on the Church’s front door because every time he decorated (with flowers), someone would steal and pawn them while he was not logged in!” This citizen-governed virtual society eventually elected a sheriff from among its users, though the designers could never quite decide what powers to grant him. Other surprisingly “real world” institutions developed, including a newspaper whose user-publisher “tirelessly spent 20–40 hours a week composing a 20, 30, 40 or even 50 page tabloid containing the latest news, events, rumors, and even fictional articles.”
Though developing this then-advanced software for “the ludicrous Commodore 64” posed a serious technical challenge, write Farmer and Morningstar in their 1990 paper “The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat,”the real work began when the users logged on. All the avatars needed houses, “organized into towns and cities with associated traffic arteries and shopping and recreational areas” with “wilderness areas between the towns so that everyone would not be jammed together into the same place.” Most of all, they needed interesting places to visit, “and since they can’t all be in the same place at the same time, they needed a lot of interesting places to visit. [ … ] Each of those houses, towns, roads, shops, forests, theaters, arenas, and other places is a distinct entity that someone needs to design and create. Attempting to play the role of omniscient central planners, we were swamped.”
All this, the creators discovered, required them to stop thinking like the engineers and game designers they were, giving up all hope of rigorous central planning and world-building in favor of figuring out the tricker problem of how, “like the cruise director on an ocean voyage,” to make Habitat fun for everyone. Farmer faces that question again today, having launched the open-source NeoHabitat project earlier this year with the aim of reviving the Habitat world for the 21st century. As much progress as graphical multiplayer online games have made in the past thirty years, the conclusion Farmer and Morningstar reached after their experience creating the first one holds as true as ever: “Cyberspace may indeed change humanity, but only if it begins with humanity as it really is.”
Apple Watch designer Marc Newson has created an hourglass that stands about 6 inches tall, measures 5 inches wide, and features 1,249,996 tiny spheres called “nanoballs,” each made of stainless steel and covered with a fine copper coating. It takes 10 minutes for the nanoballs to pour through the glass, from first to last. The action looks pretty mesmerizing, to say the least.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Self proclaimed tea geek, Shunan Teng’s knowledge of her chosen subject extends well beyond the proper way to serve and prepare her best-loved beverage.
Her recent TED-Ed lesson on the History of Tea, above, hints at centuries of bloodshed and mercenary trade practices, discreetly masked by Steff Lee’s benign animation.
Addiction, war, and child labor—the last, a grim ongoing reality…. Meditate on that the next time you’re enjoying a nice cup of Darjeeling, or better yet, matcha, a preparation whose Western buzz is starting to approximate that of the Tang dynasty.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She’ll be appearing onstage in New York City this June as one of the clowns in Paul David Young’s Faust 3. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Amidst what is now an ordinary day’s chaos and turmoil in the news, you may have noticed some outrage circulating over comments made by erstwhile brain surgeon, former presidential candidate, and current Secretary of HUD Ben Carson. Poverty, he said, is a “state of mind.” The idea fits squarely in the wheelhouse of Carson’s brand of magical thinking, as well as into what has always been a self-help tradition in the U.S. since Poor Richard’s Almanac.
Consider, for example, the immense popularity of a book written during the Great Depression, Napoleon Hill’s 1937 Think and Grow Rich, which has increased every year since its publication. By 2015, the book had sold around 100 million copies worldwide. Hill’s prolific self-help cottage industry occupies a prominent place in a distinctly American genre, and an economy unto itself. Books, videos, seminars, and megachurches promise the faithful that they need only to change themselves to change their economic outcomes, in order not only thrive but to “grow rich.”
The notion has had purchase among wealthy opponents of a welfare state, who find it a convenient way to blame the poor for circumstances outside their control. But it also, as robust sales indicate, has wide appeal among the not-so-wealthy. Why? One reason—the presciently, acerbically insightful observer of American culture, Kurt Vonnegut might argue—has to do with the fact that Americans think of poverty as a personal failing rather than a social condition, and conversely conflate wealth with intelligence and capability.
Vonnegut articulates these observations in his 1969 classicSlaughterhouse-Five, through a character named Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American playwright who becomes a Nazi propagandist (and who stands trial in Israel in an earlier novel, Mother Night). Ostensibly quoting from a monograph of Campbell’s, Vonnegut writes, “America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.” Campbell’s monograph continues:
To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
The Kin Hubbard quoted here may now be largely forgotten, but in the first three decades of the 20th century, he was a humorist as widely admired as Mark Twain or Will Rogers. Hubbard drew a popular comic strip based on a character called Abe Martin, and his humor was once described as a “comical mixture of hoss sense and no sense at all.” The quote above comes from one of Martin’s many pithy political ruminations, which include lines like “It’s all right t’ aspire to office, but when a feller begins t’ perspire fer one it’s time t’ watch out.”
The Hubbard-quoting Campbell, writes Vonnegut with wry humor, was “said by some to have had the highest I.Q., of all the war criminals who were made to face a death by hanging.” He also pitches his appeals to the common man, and ties together the “think and grow rich” phenomenon and the tendency of so many of the country’s less-well-off to support candidates and policies that routinely endanger access to public services, quality education, and healthcare.
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.
Campbell appears elsewhere in the novel in an attempt to recruit American POWs into “a German military unit called ‘The Free American Corps,” of which he is “the inventor and commander.” Near the top of the post, see the character in the 1972 Slaughterhouse-Five film defend his alliance with the Nazis and explain his bizarre uniform in terms one commentator sees as distinctly resonant with today’s far-right rhetoric. For all his outlandish presentation, he is a complicated figure—something of an amalgam of the far right’s showmen and hucksters and its cynical intellectuals, who often understand very well how the stark divisions of race and class are maintained in the U.S., and exploit that knowledge for political gain.
It took a bit longer for the youth rock revolution to hit German televisions compared to the United States–where American Bandstand was already in existence pre-Elvis–and the United Kingdom, where Oh Boy debuted in 1958 as that country’s first pop show. But when German television premiered Beat Club in September 1965, it would profoundly change the culture.
The show took its visual cues from both the UK–with its London Underground-aping logo–and the US, with its go-go dancers. It even borrowed some of its hosts from across the Channel, like Dave Lee Travis, who was working at pirate station Radio Caroline at the time.
The show’s producer Michael Leckebusch was a more traditional man who preferred musicals to rock, but he knew his market, and he knew how to check the pulse of the scene, by attending The Star Club in Hamburg–one of the venues where the Beatles paid their dues.
Over its seven years of shows, which went into color broadcast right when psychedelia was taking off, Beat Club introduced German teenagers to the likes of The Kinks, King Crimson, The Grateful Dead, Captain Beefheart, Cream, Frank Zappa, The Small Faces, The Rolling Stones, Steppenwolf, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and David Bowie, among many others.
In fact, German acts did not appear on the show until 1971. But by that time Beat Club had also strayed from rock and was exploring jazz-rock, fusion, and other non-pop formats.
The impact on a country that was used to quiz shows and coffee and cake on a Sunday afternoon can’t be overstated. It was, as the announcer Wilhelm Wiegen told the viewers, a show “by young people, for young people.” That sounds like basic marketing now, but at the time it was a lifeline to an entire generation.
But Beat-Club kept the youth on its side, pulling in 70 million viewers from approximately 30 countries — from Hungary and Finland to as far as Thailand and Tanzania. At its peak, 63 percent of Germany’s under-30s were regularly tuning in to the music show.
These were the beginnings of the youth that would become the Studentenbewegung (“student movement”), also known as the 68ers. With hits such as The Who’s “My Generation” and the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” Beat-Club gave its “Beat-friends” the motivation to stand up and fight back against an out-dated generation. It was a soundtrack for a new life.
There is plenty of footage of the show knocking around YouTube, including this channel devoted to full episodes, and numerous other clips. And though the show stopped in 1972, a nostalgic radio version continues to broadcast with its original female host Uschi Nerke.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Anyone who has read the prose of philosopher-provocateur Slavoj Žižek, a potent mixture of the academic and the psychedelic, has to wonder what material has influenced his way of thinking. Those who have seen his film-analyzing documentaries The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology might come to suspect that he’s watched even more than he’s read, and the interview clip above gives us a sense of which movies have done the most to shape his internal universe. Asked to name his five favorite films, he improvises the following list:
Melancholia (Lars von Trier), “because it’s the end of the world, and I’m a pessimist. I think it’s good if the world ends”
The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949), “ultracapitalist propaganda, but it’s so ridiculous that I cannot but love it”
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), because “Vertigo is still too romantic” and “after Psycho, everything goes down”
To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942), “madness, you cannot do a better comedy”
You can watch a part of Žižek’s breakdown of Psycho, which he describes as “the perfect film for me,” in the Pervert’s Guide to Cinema clip just above. He views the house of Norman Bates, the titular psycho, as a reproduction of “the three levels of human subjectivity. The ground floor is ego: Norman behaves there as a normal son, whatever remains of his normal ego taking over. Up there it’s the superego — maternal superego, because the dead mother is basically a figure of superego. Down in the cellar, it’s the id, the reservoir of these illicit drives.” Ultimately, “it’s as if he is transposing her in his own mind as a psychic agency from superego to id.” But given that Žižek’s interpretive powers extend to the hermenutics of toilets and well beyond, he could probably see just about anything as a Freudian nightmare.
You can watch another of Žižek’s five favorite films, Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera, which we featured here on Open Culture a few years ago, just above. Whether or not you can tune into the right intellectual wavelength to enjoy Žižek’s own work, the man can certainly put together a stimulating viewing list.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.