How Lava Lamps Help Secure the Internet

in Technology | January 12th, 2021

Try not to think too hard about the con­cept of ran­dom­ness — and espe­cial­ly about the ques­tion of how, exact­ly, one gen­er­ates a ran­dom num­ber. Most of us, of course, sim­ply ask a com­put­er to do it. But how can a com­put­er, which by its very nature fol­lows unam­bigu­ous direc­tions in a pre­dictable man­ner, come up with a tru­ly ran­dom num­ber, in the lit­er­al sense of the word? As far as the every­day pur­pos­es for which we might need “ran­dom” num­bers — set­ting the com­bi­na­tion on a lock, for instance — mere­ly unpre­dictable num­bers suf­fice. But where, exact­ly, can we draw the line between unpre­dictabil­i­ty and ran­dom­ness?

Albert Ein­stein famous­ly pro­nounced that “God does not play dice with the uni­verse,” draw­ing on a metaphor still cen­tral to human­i­ty’s con­cep­tion of ran­dom­ness. Dice pro­vide “ran­dom” num­bers in that, when thrown, they’re sub­ject to too many phys­i­cal fac­tors — an area of some inter­est for Ein­stein — for us to reli­ably guess which way they’ll land. And so we find our­selves again deliv­ered back from ran­dom­ness into unpre­dictabil­i­ty. But achiev­ing ever-greater unpre­dictabil­i­ty, which has proven invalu­able to fields like cryp­tog­ra­phy, has neces­si­tat­ed com­bin­ing com­put­ers with ana­log phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­na essen­tial­ly sim­i­lar to the rolling of dice.

Using a some­what less ancient tech­nol­o­gy, inter­net secu­ri­ty provider Cloud­flare has tak­en a step clos­er to gen­uine ran­dom­ness. “Every time you log in to any web­site, you’re assigned a unique iden­ti­fi­ca­tion num­ber,” explains Wired’s Ellen Airhart. “It should be ran­dom, because if hack­ers can pre­dict the num­ber, they’ll imper­son­ate you.” But who could pre­dict “the goopy mes­mer­ic swirlings of oil, water, and wax” with­in a lava lamp, let alone an entire wall cov­ered with them? “Cloud­flare films the lamps 24/7 and uses the ever-chang­ing arrange­ment of pix­els to help cre­ate a super­pow­ered cryp­to­graph­ic key.”

The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, Airhart acknowl­edges, “bad guys could sneak their own cam­era into Cloudflare’s lob­by to cap­ture the same scene,” but the com­pa­ny also “films the move­ments of a pen­du­lum in its Lon­don office and records the mea­sure­ments of a Geiger counter in Sin­ga­pore to add more chaos to the equa­tion. Crack that, Rus­sians.” Con­stant vig­i­lance against a threat from Rus­sia aid­ed by psy­che­del­ic bed­room light fix­tures? You’d be for­giv­en for feel­ing unstuck in time, par­tial­ly trans­port­ed to the real­i­ty of half a cen­tu­ry ago. But then, Cloud­flare is head­quar­tered in San Fran­cis­co — a city where the ground­break­ing and the groovy haven’t part­ed ways just yet.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Fry Explains Cloud Com­put­ing in a Short Ani­mat­ed Video

“The Bay Lights,” The World’s Largest LED Light Sculp­ture, Debuts in San Fran­cis­co

How Art Nou­veau Inspired the Psy­che­del­ic Designs of the 1960s

Visu­al­iz­ing WiFi Sig­nals with Light

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Discover the First Illustrated Book Printed in English, William Caxton’s Mirror of the World (1481)

in Books, History | January 12th, 2021

The print­ing his­to­ry of ear­ly Eng­lish books may not seem like the most fas­ci­nat­ing sub­ject in the world, but if you men­tion the name William Cax­ton to a book his­to­ri­an, you may get a fas­ci­nat­ing lec­ture nonethe­less. Cax­ton, the mer­chant and diplo­mat who intro­duced the print­ing press to Eng­land in 1476, was an unusu­al­ly enter­pris­ing fig­ure. He first learned the trade in Cologne and was pres­sured to begin print­ing in Eng­lish after the suc­cess of his trans­la­tion of the Recuyell of the His­to­ryes of Troye, a series of sto­ries based on Homer’s Ili­ad. His first known print­ed book was Chaucer’s Can­ter­bury Tales, and he went on to print trans­la­tions of clas­si­cal and medieval texts from the French.

Caxton’s (often inac­cu­rate) trans­la­tions became so pop­u­lar that, like Chaucer, he intro­duced new stan­dards into the lan­guage as a whole with his use of court Chancery Eng­lish. The books print­ed at the time also give us a fas­ci­nat­ing look at how the print­ed book evolved slow­ly as a new source of sci­en­tif­ic infor­ma­tion and a means of lit­er­ary inno­va­tion.

The so-called Guten­berg Rev­o­lu­tion did not ush­er in a rad­i­cal break with the late medieval past so much as a grad­ual evo­lu­tion away from its adher­ence to clas­si­cal and church author­i­ties and chival­ric romance sto­ries. It would take ear­ly mod­ern writ­ers like Shake­speare, Cer­vantes, and Fran­cis Bacon to tru­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ize the pos­si­bil­i­ties of print.

The first illus­trat­ed book Cax­ton print­ed in Eng­lish offers an excel­lent exam­ple of ear­ly print­ing history’s reliance on repro­duc­ing extant medieval ideas rather than dis­sem­i­nat­ing new ones. The Mir­ror of the World, first writ­ten in French as L’image du monde, was an ency­clo­pe­dia based on a 12th cen­tu­ry text by Hon­o­rius Augus­to­dunen­sis called Ima­go mun­di. “Ency­clo­pe­dic texts were pop­u­lar through­out the Mid­dle Ages,” Glas­gow Uni­ver­si­ty Library notes. “Dur­ing this peri­od it was com­mon­ly believed that it was pos­si­ble to cre­ate one vol­ume digests of all knowl­edge,” draw­ing sole­ly on clas­si­cal and Bib­li­cal author­i­ties. In the intro­duc­tion to Caxton’s text, we are told that the book “treateth of the world & of the won­der­ful dyui­sion [divi­sion] there­of.”

We are quite a long way yet from the Roy­al Society’s mot­to Nul­lius in ver­ba, or “take no one’s word for it.” But Caxton’s press made sev­er­al medieval man­u­script prose works avail­able for the first time to a new read­er­ship. “Evi­dence of ear­ly own­er­ship of copies of his edi­tions,” writes the British Library, “sug­gests the social breadth of that audi­ence, includ­ing roy­al­ty, nobil­i­ty, gen­try, the mer­can­tile class­es and reli­gious hous­es.” Cax­ton was “not con­tent to sim­ply draw on  pre-exist­ing mar­kets for man­u­scripts.” And he would even­tu­al­ly use print “to cre­ate new mar­kets for nov­el and dif­fer­ent kinds of writ­ing,” such as the 1485 pub­li­ca­tion of Thomas Malory’s con­tem­po­rary Arthuri­an romance, Le Morte D’arthur.

Rep­re­sent­ing the con­fi­dent but cramped world­view of the medieval sci­ences, the Mir­ror of the World is “ambi­tious,” Alli­son Meier writes at Hyper­al­ler­gic, dis­pelling any notion of a flat Earth, with descrip­tions of “large ideas like the round­ness of the Earth and why we expe­ri­ence day and night… Along with some his­tor­i­cal infor­ma­tion, there are descrip­tions of the Earth, the solar sys­tem, and eclipses. The round shape of the Earth is illus­trat­ed by two men who stand back-to-back, walk­ing away from each oth­er and meet­ing again in a cir­cle. Anoth­er describes the same idea with a rock tossed through a hole sliced in the world, with it tum­bling out the oth­er side.”

Mike Mill­ward of the Black­burn Muse­um describes the images fur­ther:

The illus­tra­tions are wood­cut prints which could be print­ed as part of the text. Cax­ton’s prints were prob­a­bly pro­duced in Eng­land and are rather prim­i­tive. Many are mere­ly illus­tra­tive… Oth­ers are essen­tial to an under­stand­ing of the text, such those illus­trat­ing the round­ness of the Earth and the effect of grav­i­ty, both show­ing a sur­pris­ing­ly mod­ern under­stand­ing

These illus­tra­tions, notes John T. McQuil­lan, assis­tant cura­tor of print­ed books at the Pier­pont Mor­gan library, were remark­ably pre­served from the orig­i­nal French text of two cen­turies ear­li­er. “Print only car­ried on exist­ing man­u­script and tex­tu­al tra­di­tions,” he notes, “and did not rad­i­cal­ly alter them, at first. Any­one who want­ed to buy this text would have expect­ed it to have these spe­cif­ic illus­tra­tions, and Cax­ton pro­vid­ed that to them.” Pier­pont Mor­gan him­self, who owned sev­er­al of Caxton’s ear­ly print­ed books, “val­ued Cax­ton even over Guten­berg,” Meier writes, and “had the print­er paint­ed on the ceil­ing of his library’s East Room.”

Anoth­er rare books library, Princeton’s Schei­de, which holds per­haps the finest col­lec­tion of ear­ly Euro­pean and Amer­i­can print­ing in the world, fea­tures a scanned full-text edi­tion of Mir­ror of the World, the first illus­trat­ed book print­ed in Eng­land and a work that sits square­ly on the thresh­old between the medieval and the mod­ern, and that chal­lenges our ideas about both des­ig­na­tions.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

One of World’s Old­est Books Print­ed in Mul­ti-Col­or Now Opened & Dig­i­tized for the First Time

See the Old­est Print­ed Adver­tise­ment in Eng­lish: An Ad for a Book from 1476

The Old­est Book Print­ed with Mov­able Type is Not The Guten­berg Bible: Jikji, a Col­lec­tion of Kore­an Bud­dhist Teach­ings, Pre­dat­ed It By 78 Years and It’s Now Dig­i­tized Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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New Documentary Sisters with Transistors Tells the Story of Electronic Music’s Female Pioneers

in Film, Music | January 11th, 2021

“Tech­nol­o­gy is a tremen­dous lib­er­a­tor,” says Lau­rie Ander­son in her voiceover nar­ra­tion for the new doc­u­men­tary Sis­ters with Tran­sis­tors, a look at the women who have pio­neered elec­tron­ic music since its begin­nings and been inte­gral to invent­ing new sounds and ways of mak­ing them. “Women were nat­u­ral­ly drawn to elec­tron­ic music. You didn’t have to be accept­ed by any of the male-dom­i­nat­ed resources. You could make some­thing with elec­tron­ics, and you could present music direct­ly to an audi­ence.”

Tech­nol­o­gy as lib­er­a­tor may sound utopi­an to our jad­ed 21st cen­tu­ry ears, accus­tomed as we are to focus­ing on tech’s mis­us­es and abus­es. But machines have very often been a means of social progress, just as when “bicy­cles promised free­dom to women long accus­tomed to rely­ing on men for trans­porta­tion.” The cre­ation and inno­va­tion of record­ing and broad­cast­ing equip­ment deserves its own place in women’s his­to­ry.

Radio in par­tic­u­lar gave women the oppor­tu­ni­ty to exper­i­ment with sound and reach mil­lions who might not oth­er­wise give them a hear­ing. The influ­ence of BBC radio com­posers like Delia Der­byshire and Daphne Oram, for exam­ple, remains per­va­sive, and the elec­tron­ic sound­scapes they cre­at­ed for radio and tele­vi­sion helped define the son­ic world we now inhab­it. It is a world, direc­tor Lisa Rovn­er tells AFI’s Malin Kan below, per­me­at­ed by elec­tron­ic music.

“I can’t actu­al­ly remem­ber,” says Rovn­er, “a time when I wasn’t aware of elec­tron­ic music. Elec­tron­ic music pen­e­trates pret­ty much every sin­gle aspect of my life since I was a kid, whether that’s stuff that’s on tele­vi­sion or the video games that I played with my broth­er.” Her inter­est in the music’s “tran­scen­dent” qual­i­ties was first piqued, she says, at a rave. The film project hap­pened to “check all the box­es” for her, with its focus not only on the elec­tron­ic music women have made for over a cen­tu­ry, but also on “the wider social, polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al con­text of the 20th cen­tu­ry,” as the film’s site notes.

Sis­ters with Tran­sis­tors cov­ers a range of com­posers, sev­er­al of whom we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured on Open Cul­ture, includ­ing Der­byshire, Oram, Clara Rock­more, Bebe Bar­ron, Maryanne Amach­er, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, Lau­rie Spiegel, and Pauline Oliv­eros. “The his­to­ry of women has been a his­to­ry of silence,” Rovn­er writes. “Music is no excep­tion.” Or as Oliv­eros put it in a 1970 New York Times Op-Ed:

Why have there been no “great” women com­posers? The ques­tion is often asked. The answer is no mys­tery. In the past, tal­ent, edu­ca­tion, abil­i­ty, inter­ests, moti­va­tion were irrel­e­vant because being female was a unique qual­i­fi­ca­tion for domes­tic work and for con­tin­u­al obe­di­ence to and depen­dence upon men.

As Sis­ters with Tran­sis­tors shows, new tech­nolo­gies broke that depen­dence for many women, includ­ing Oliv­eros, who pro­vid­ed us with a dif­fer­ent answer to ques­tions about the pauci­ty of women com­posers. Why are there no “great” women in elec­tron­ic music? Because you haven’t heard them yet. Learn their names and sto­ries in the new doc­u­men­tary.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Clara Rock­more, the Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Musi­cian Who First Rocked the Theremin in the Ear­ly 1920s

The Deeply Med­i­ta­tive Elec­tron­ic Music of Avant-Garde Com­pos­er Eliane Radigue

Two Doc­u­men­taries Intro­duce Delia Der­byshire, the Pio­neer in Elec­tron­ic Music

Daphne Oram Cre­at­ed the BBC’s First-Ever Piece of Elec­tron­ic Music (1957)

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938–2014)

Meet Four Women Who Pio­neered Elec­tron­ic Music: Daphne Oram, Lau­rie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliv­eros

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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See Devo Perform Live for the Very First Time (Kent State University, 1973)

in Music | January 11th, 2021

Kent State Uni­ver­si­ty is known as the site of two impor­tant events in Amer­i­can cul­ture: the mas­sacre of May 4, 1970, and the for­ma­tion of Devo. When the Nation­al Guard shot thir­teen stu­dents at a Viet­nam War protest, it sig­naled to many the end of the youth-dri­ven opti­mism of the late 1960s. It also moti­vat­ed a group of musi­cal­ly inclined under­grad­u­ates to con­sol­i­date the band/conceptual art project they’d premised on the idea of “de-evo­lu­tion.” Around that time, the group’s founders, art stu­dents Ger­ald Casale and Bob Lewis, met a key­boardist named Mark Moth­ers­baugh, who con­tributed some of the sig­na­ture musi­cal and comedic sen­si­bil­i­ties of what would become Devo.

“The band, or at least a band known as Sex­tet Devo, first per­formed at a 1973 arts fes­ti­val in Kent,” writes Calvin C. Ryd­bom in The Akron Sound: The Hey­day of the Mid­west­’s Punk Cap­i­tal. Fill­ing out that sex­tet were Casale’s broth­er Bob, drum­mer Rod Reis­man, and vocal­ist Fred Weber. A hand­out for the show promis­es a series of “polyrhyth­mic exer­cis­es in de-evo­lu­tion,” includ­ing a num­ber called “Pri­vate Sec­re­tary,” footage of which appears above.

“The group were all dressed odd­ly, Bob in scrubs, Jer­ry in a butcher’s coat, Bob Lewis behind the key­boards in a mon­key mask, and Mark in a doc­tor’s robe,” writes George Gimarc in Punk Diary: The Ulti­mate Trainspot­ter’s Guide to Under­ground Rock, 1970–1982. “The audi­ence was, at times, con­fused, amused, and some even danced.”

Sex­tet Devo “would have been off the charts in most envi­ron­ments,” says Myopia, a ret­ro­spec­tive vol­ume on Moth­ers­baugh­’s work. At the Kent Cre­ative Arts Fes­ti­val “the band actu­al­ly fit with­in the spec­trum of nor­mal behav­ior, albeit at the far end of the scale.” But even their most appre­cia­tive view­ers could­n’t have known how far the con­cept of de-evo­lu­tion had to go, to say noth­ing of the pop-cul­tur­al heights to which the odd­balls onstage would car­ry it. Just five years lat­er, Devo would make their nation­al-tele­vi­sion debut as a quin­tet on Sat­ur­day Night Live, “de-evolv­ing” the Rolling Stones’ “Sat­is­fac­tion.” But they did­n’t for­get where they’d come from: near­ly thir­ty years after their first show, they came back around to 1970 for a de-evo­lu­tion of Cros­by, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Wave Music – DEVO, Talk­ing Heads, Blondie, Elvis Costel­lo — Gets Intro­duced to Amer­i­ca by ABC’s TV Show, 20/20 (1979)

Devo De-Evolves the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Sat­is­fac­tion”: See Their Ground­break­ing Music Video and Sat­ur­day Night Live Per­for­mance (1978)

The Phi­los­o­phy & Music of Devo, the Avant-Garde Art Project Ded­i­cat­ed to Reveal­ing the Truth About De-Evo­lu­tion

The Mas­ter­mind of Devo, Mark Moth­ers­baugh, Presents His Per­son­al Syn­the­siz­er Col­lec­tion

DEVO Is Now Sell­ing COVID-19 Per­son­al Pro­tec­tive Equip­ment: Ener­gy Dome Face Shields

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

 

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300 Rarely-Seen, Risqué Drawings by Andy Warhol Published in the New Book, Andy Warhol: Love, Sex, and Desire. Drawings (1950–1962)

in Art, Life | January 11th, 2021

It’s not the ingre­di­ents that sell the prod­uct. It’s how Warhol makes you feel about the prod­uct. 

—Young and Rubi­cam employ­ee, cir­ca ear­ly 1950s

It did not take Andy Warhol long to find the sta­tus he sought as a young man. Short­ly after mov­ing to New York City in 1949, he estab­lished him­self as one of the high­est paid free­lance illus­tra­tors of the peri­od.

His whim­si­cal, eye-catch­ing line draw­ings for var­i­ous lux­u­ry brands appeared in such high pro­file pub­li­ca­tions as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.

The sense of pret­ti­ness and play that ani­mat­ed his pic­tures of shoes, cats, and per­fume bot­tles is evi­dent in the 1000-some homo­erot­ic draw­ings he pro­duced dur­ing the same time, but those proved to be a tougher sell.

In an era when sodomy was judged to be a felony in every state, full-frontal male nudi­ty was con­sid­ered obscene, and the art world was in the thrall of the macho Abstract Expres­sion­ists, Warhol had dif­fi­cul­ty find­ing a gallery to show his gen­tle depic­tions of gay inti­ma­cy.

Final­ly, a per­son­al con­nec­tion at the Bod­ley Gallery on New York’s Upper East Side agreed to host a small exhi­bi­tion, open­ing Stud­ies for a Boy Book by Andy Warhol on Valentine’s Day 1956.

The draw­ings were rem­i­nis­cent of Warhol favorite Jean Cocteau’s sketch­es’ in both sub­ject mat­ter and clean­ly exe­cut­ed line. His mod­els were friends, lovers, assis­tants, and oth­er scene­mak­ers.

Warhol’s friend, Robert Fleis­ch­er, a sta­tionery buy­er at Bergdorf Goodman’s, recalled:

He used to come over to my apart­ment on 76th Street. He used to come quite often. He always want­ed to sketch me. At the same time, just about that time, I became a mod­el. I was pho­tographed a lot, and I was in retail­ing but earned part of my income by mod­el­ing and Andy used to sketch and sketch and sketch and sketch… He said he was going to do what he called his ‘Boy Book,’ and he want­ed all of us to pose nude, and we did. There was loads of us… Andy loved to sketch mod­els and very inti­mate sex­u­al acts. Real­ly! 

Warhol’s ambi­tion to pub­lish a mono­graph of A Boy Book went unre­al­ized dur­ing his life­time, but 300 of the draw­ings appear in Taschen’s just-released Andy Warhol. Love, Sex, and Desire. Draw­ings 1950–1962.

The col­lec­tion also fea­tures essays by biog­ra­ph­er Blake Gop­nik and crit­ic Drew Zei­ba, as well as poems by James Bald­win, Thom Gunn, Harold Norse, Allen Gins­berg, and Essex Hemphill.

Warhol’s first stu­dio assis­tant, anti­quar­i­an and illus­tra­tor Vito Gial­lo, remem­bered Warhol dur­ing this peri­od: “He nev­er con­sid­ered him­self a fine artist but he wished he could be. We often talked about that.”

As Michael Day­ton Her­mann, who edit­ed Andy Warhol. Love, Sex, and Desire. Draw­ings 1950–1962 observes:

Col­lec­tive­ly, the hun­dreds of draw­ings Warhol made from life dur­ing this peri­od pro­vide a touch­ing por­trait of the one per­son not depict­ed in any of them—Andy Warhol.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

130,000 Pho­tographs by Andy Warhol Are Now Avail­able Online, Cour­tesy of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty

When Andy Warhol & Edie Sedg­wick, the First Cou­ple of Pop Art, Made an Odd Appear­ance on the Merv Grif­fin Show (1965)

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of the Andy Warhol Exhi­bi­tion at the Tate Mod­ern

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Arnold Schwarzenegger Reflects on the Parallels Between Trumpism & Nazism, and How We Can Save Our Democracy

in Current Affairs | January 10th, 2021

He grew up in the ruins of World War II–the ruins cre­at­ed by the Nazism and its ide­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ment to con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, vio­lence and white suprema­cy. Based on that for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence, the for­mer Repub­li­can gov­er­nor offers his take on this week’s coup attempt in Wash­ing­ton: “Being from Europe, I’ve seen how things can spin out of con­trol… We must be aware of the dire con­se­quences of self­ish­ness and cyn­i­cism. Pres­i­dent Trump sought to over­turn the results of an elec­tion, of a fair elec­tion. He sought a coup by mis­lead­ing peo­ple with lies. My father and our neigh­bors were also mis­led with lies, and I know where such lies lead.” To avoid a sim­i­lar fate, we must hold the con­spir­a­tors account­able, find pub­lic ser­vants who will serve high­er ideals, and, most impor­tant­ly, “look past our­selves, our par­ties and our dis­agree­ments, and put our democ­ra­cy first.” Amen Arnold.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism: A Time­ly List from Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism: Rick Steves’ Doc­u­men­tary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

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20 Lessons from the 20th Century About How to Defend Democracy from Authoritarianism: A Timely List from Yale Historian Timothy Snyder

in History | January 9th, 2021

Image by Rob Kall, via Flickr Com­mons

Tim­o­thy Sny­der, Housum Pro­fes­sor of His­to­ry at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty, is one of the fore­most schol­ars in the U.S. and Europe on the rise and fall of total­i­tar­i­an­ism dur­ing the 1930s and 40s. Among his long list of appoint­ments and pub­li­ca­tions, he has won mul­ti­ple awards for his recent inter­na­tion­al best­sellers Blood­lands: Europe between Hitler and Stal­in and last year’s Black Earth: The Holo­caust as His­to­ry and Warn­ing. That book in part makes the argu­ment that Nazism wasn’t only a Ger­man nation­al­ist move­ment but had glob­al colo­nial­ist origins—in Rus­sia, Africa, and in the U.S., the nation that pio­neered so many meth­ods of human exter­mi­na­tion, racist dehu­man­iza­tion, and ide­o­log­i­cal­ly-jus­ti­fied land grabs.

The hyper-cap­i­tal­ism por­trayed in the U.S.—even dur­ing the Depression—Snyder writes, fueled Hitler’s imag­i­na­tion, such that he promised Ger­mans “a life com­pa­ra­ble to that of the Amer­i­can peo­ple,” whose “racial­ly pure and uncor­rupt­ed” Ger­man pop­u­la­tion he described as “world class.” Sny­der describes Hitler’s ide­ol­o­gy as a myth of racial­ist strug­gle in which “there are real­ly no val­ues in the world except for the stark real­i­ty that we are born in order to take things from oth­er peo­ple.” Or as we often hear these days, that act­ing in accor­dance with this prin­ci­ple is the “smart” thing to do. Like many far right fig­ures before and after, Hitler aimed to restore a state of nature that for him was a per­pet­u­al state of race war for impe­r­i­al dom­i­nance.

After the Novem­ber 2016 elec­tion, Sny­der wrote a pro­file of Hitler, a short piece that made no direct com­par­isons to any con­tem­po­rary fig­ure. But read­ing the facts of the his­tor­i­cal case alarmed most read­ers. A few days lat­er, the his­to­ri­an appeared on a Slate pod­cast to dis­cuss the arti­cle, say­ing that after he sub­mit­ted it, “I real­ized there was more.… there are an awful lot of echoes.” Sny­der admits that his­to­ry doesn’t actu­al­ly repeat itself. But we’re far too quick, he says, to dis­miss that idea as a cliché “and not think about his­to­ry at all. His­to­ry shows a range of pos­si­bil­i­ties.” Sim­i­lar events occur across time under sim­i­lar kinds of con­di­tions. And it is, of course, pos­si­ble to learn from the past.

If you’ve heard oth­er informed analy­sis but haven’t read Snyder’s New York Review of Books columns on fas­cism in Putin’s Rus­sia or the for­mer Yanukovich’s Ukraine, or his long arti­cle “Hitler’s World May Not Be So Far Away,” you may have seen his wide­ly-shared Face­book post mak­ing the rounds. As he argued in The Guardian last Sep­tem­ber, today we may be “too cer­tain we are eth­i­cal­ly supe­ri­or to the Euro­peans of the 1940s.” On Novem­ber, 15, 2016 Sny­der wrote on Face­book that “Amer­i­cans are no wis­er than the Euro­peans who saw democ­ra­cy yield to fas­cism, Nazism, or com­mu­nism.” Sny­der has been crit­i­cized for con­flat­ing these regimes, and ris­ing “into the top rungs of pun­dit­dom,” but when it comes to body counts and lev­els of sup­pres­sive malig­nan­cy, it’s hard to argue that Stal­in­ist Rus­sia, any more than Tsarist Rus­sia, was anyone’s idea of a democ­ra­cy.

Rather than mak­ing a his­tor­i­cal case for view­ing the U.S. as exact­ly like one of the total­i­tar­i­an regimes of WWII Europe, Sny­der presents 20 lessons we might learn from those times and use cre­ative­ly in our own where they apply. In my view, fol­low­ing his sug­ges­tions would make us wis­er, more self-aware, proac­tive, respon­si­ble cit­i­zens, what­ev­er lies ahead. Read Snyder’s lessons from his Face­book post below and con­sid­er order­ing his lat­est book On Tyran­ny: Twen­ty Lessons from the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry:

1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the pow­er of author­i­tar­i­an­ism is freely giv­en. In times like these, indi­vid­u­als think ahead about what a more repres­sive gov­ern­ment will want, and then start to do it with­out being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Antic­i­pa­to­ry obe­di­ence teach­es author­i­ties what is pos­si­ble and accel­er­ates unfree­dom.

2. Defend an insti­tu­tion. Fol­low the courts or the media, or a court or a news­pa­per. Do not speak of “our insti­tu­tions” unless you are mak­ing them yours by act­ing on their behalf. Insti­tu­tions don’t pro­tect them­selves. They go down like domi­noes unless each is defend­ed from the begin­ning.

3. Recall pro­fes­sion­al ethics. When the lead­ers of state set a neg­a­tive exam­ple, pro­fes­sion­al com­mit­ments to just prac­tice become much more impor­tant. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state with­out lawyers, and it is hard to have show tri­als with­out judges.

4. When lis­ten­ing to politi­cians, dis­tin­guish cer­tain words. Look out for the expan­sive use of “ter­ror­ism” and “extrem­ism.” Be alive to the fatal notions of “excep­tion” and “emer­gency.” Be angry about the treach­er­ous use of patri­ot­ic vocab­u­lary.

5. Be calm when the unthink­able arrives. When the ter­ror­ist attack comes, remem­ber that all author­i­tar­i­ans at all times either await or plan such events in order to con­sol­i­date pow­er. Think of the Reich­stag fire. The sud­den dis­as­ter that requires the end of the bal­ance of pow­er, the end of oppo­si­tion par­ties, and so on, is the old­est trick in the Hit­ler­ian book. Don’t fall for it.

6. Be kind to our lan­guage. Avoid pro­nounc­ing the phras­es every­one else does. Think up your own way of speak­ing, even if only to con­vey that thing you think every­one is say­ing. (Don’t use the inter­net before bed. Charge your gad­gets away from your bed­room, and read.) What to read? Per­haps “The Pow­er of the Pow­er­less” by Václav Hav­el, 1984 by George Orwell, The Cap­tive Mind by Czesław Milosz, The Rebel by Albert Camus, The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism by Han­nah Arendt, or Noth­ing is True and Every­thing is Pos­si­ble by Peter Pomer­ant­sev.

7. Stand out. Some­one has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to fol­low along. It can feel strange to do or say some­thing dif­fer­ent. But with­out that unease, there is no free­dom. And the moment you set an exam­ple, the spell of the sta­tus quo is bro­ken, and oth­ers will fol­low.

8. Believe in truth. To aban­don facts is to aban­don free­dom. If noth­ing is true, then no one can crit­i­cize pow­er, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If noth­ing is true, then all is spec­ta­cle. The biggest wal­let pays for the most blind­ing lights.

9. Inves­ti­gate. Fig­ure things out for your­self. Spend more time with long arti­cles. Sub­si­dize inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism by sub­scrib­ing to print media. Real­ize that some of what is on your screen is there to harm you. Learn about sites that inves­ti­gate for­eign pro­pa­gan­da push­es.

10. Prac­tice cor­po­re­al pol­i­tics. Pow­er wants your body soft­en­ing in your chair and your emo­tions dis­si­pat­ing on the screen. Get out­side. Put your body in unfa­mil­iar places with unfa­mil­iar peo­ple. Make new friends and march with them.

11. Make eye con­tact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is a way to stay in touch with your sur­round­ings, break down unnec­es­sary social bar­ri­ers, and come to under­stand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a cul­ture of denun­ci­a­tion, you will want to know the psy­cho­log­i­cal land­scape of your dai­ly life.

12. Take respon­si­bil­i­ty for the face of the world. Notice the swastikas and the oth­er signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them your­self and set an exam­ple for oth­ers to do so.

13. Hin­der the one-par­ty state. The par­ties that took over states were once some­thing else. They exploit­ed a his­tor­i­cal moment to make polit­i­cal life impos­si­ble for their rivals. Vote in local and state elec­tions while you can.

14. Give reg­u­lar­ly to good caus­es, if you can. Pick a char­i­ty and set up auto­pay. Then you will know that you have made a free choice that is sup­port­ing civ­il soci­ety help­ing oth­ers doing some­thing good.

15. Estab­lish a pri­vate life. Nas­ti­er rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your com­put­er of mal­ware. Remem­ber that email is sky­writ­ing. Con­sid­er using alter­na­tive forms of the inter­net, or sim­ply using it less. Have per­son­al exchanges in per­son. For the same rea­son, resolve any legal trou­ble. Author­i­tar­i­an­ism works as a black­mail state, look­ing for the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have too many hooks.

16. Learn from oth­ers in oth­er coun­tries. Keep up your friend­ships abroad, or make new friends abroad. The present dif­fi­cul­ties here are an ele­ment of a gen­er­al trend. And no coun­try is going to find a solu­tion by itself. Make sure you and your fam­i­ly have pass­ports.

17. Watch out for the para­mil­i­taries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the sys­tem start wear­ing uni­forms and march­ing around with torch­es and pic­tures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader para­mil­i­tary and the offi­cial police and mil­i­tary inter­min­gle, the game is over.

18. Be reflec­tive if you must be armed. If you car­ry a weapon in pub­lic ser­vice, God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved police­men and sol­diers find­ing them­selves, one day, doing irreg­u­lar things. Be ready to say no. (If you do not know what this means, con­tact the Unit­ed States Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al Muse­um and ask about train­ing in pro­fes­sion­al ethics.)

19. Be as coura­geous as you can. If none of us is pre­pared to die for free­dom, then all of us will die in unfree­dom.

20. Be a patri­ot. The incom­ing pres­i­dent [Trump] is not. Set a good exam­ple of what Amer­i­ca means for the gen­er­a­tions to come. They will need it.

via Kot­tke

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in Jan­u­ary 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism: Rick Steves’ Doc­u­men­tary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

George Orwell’s Final Warn­ing: Don’t Let This Night­mare Sit­u­a­tion Hap­pen. It Depends on You!

Yale Pro­fes­sor Jason Stan­ley Iden­ti­fies 3 Essen­tial Fea­tures of Fas­cism: Invok­ing a Myth­ic Past, Sow­ing Divi­sion & Attack­ing Truth

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Behold an Interactive Online Edition of Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants (1868)

in Books, History, Science | January 8th, 2021

Of all the var­ied objects of cre­ation there is, prob­a­bly, no por­tion that affords so much grat­i­fi­ca­tion and delight to mankind as plants. —Eliz­a­beth Twin­ing

“Who owned nature in the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry?” asks Lon­da Schiebinger in Plants and Empire, a study of what the Stan­ford his­to­ri­an of sci­ence calls “colo­nial bio­prospect­ing in the Atlantic World.” The ques­tion was large­ly decid­ed at the time by “hero­ic voy­ag­ing botanists” and “biopi­rates” who claimed the world’s nat­ur­al resources as their own. The mat­ter was set­tled in the next cou­ple cen­turies by mer­chants like Thomas Twin­ing and his descen­dants, pro­pri­etors of Twin­ings tea. Found­ed as Britain’s first known tea shop in 1706, the com­pa­ny went on to become one of the largest pur­vey­ors of teas grown in the British colonies.

One of Twining’s descen­dants, Eliz­a­beth Twin­ing, car­ried on the lega­cy as what Schiebinger calls one of many “arm­chair nat­u­ral­ists, who coor­di­nat­ed and syn­the­sized col­lect­ing from sinecures in Europe,” a role often tak­en on by women who could not trav­el the world. Twin­ing aimed, how­ev­er, not to cre­ate tax­onomies of the world’s plants but those of her own coun­try in a com­par­a­tive analy­sis.

Her 1868 Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants, she wrote in her intro­duc­tion, was “the first work which has thus done due hon­our to our British plants by con­nect­ing with oth­ers, and plac­ing them when­ev­er pos­si­ble at the head of the Order to be illus­trat­ed.”

Twining’s reval­u­a­tion of local British plants was in keep­ing with the reformist spir­it of the age, and she her­self was such a reformer. “Apart from her artis­tic endeav­ors,” writes Nicholas Rougeaux, Twin­ing “was a notable phil­an­thropist,” estab­lish­ing almshous­es and tem­per­ance halls, found­ing “mother’s meet­ings” in Lon­don, and help­ing to found the Bed­ford Col­lege for Women. She was inspired by Curtis’s The Botan­i­cal Mag­a­zine and “she prac­ticed by mak­ing sketch­es from works in the Dul­wich Pic­ture Gallery, and toured famous muse­ums thanks to her father’s patron­age.”

Twin­ing authored and illus­trat­ed sev­er­al botan­i­cal books, “most notably,” Rougeux writes, “the two vol­ume Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants, which includ­ed a total of 160 hand-col­ored lith­o­graphs, roy­al folio, report­ed­ly based on obser­va­tion at the Roy­al Botan­i­cal Gar­dens in Kew and at Lex­den Park in Colch­ester.” Rougeux has done for her work what the design­er pre­vi­ous­ly did for oth­er illus­trat­ed clas­sics of sci­ence and math (see the relat­ed links below): dig­i­tiz­ing the illus­tra­tions and translit­er­at­ing the text into a dig­i­tal for­mat, with hyper­links and shar­ing fea­tures.

Rougeux’s Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants offers itself as “a com­plete repro­duc­tion and restora­tion… enhanced with inter­ac­tive illus­tra­tions, descrip­tions, and posters fea­tur­ing the illus­tra­tions.” The first two vol­umes of the orig­i­nal book were pub­lished in 1849 and 1855. Rougeux’s online ver­sion of the text is based on the 1868 sec­ond edi­tion “with re-drawn illus­tra­tions based on her orig­i­nals.” (See pages from the text above and below.) Rougeux’s dig­i­tized text is thus two steps removed from Twining’s orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions, but we can see the care and atten­tion she put into clas­si­fy­ing the flo­ra of her native coun­try.

“Twin­ing chose to illus­trate plants using the clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem cre­at­ed by Augustin-Pyra­me de Can­dolle based on mul­ti­ple char­ac­ter­is­tics of plants—rather than the more wide­ly used sys­tem by Carl Lin­naeus which was focused on plants’ repro­duc­tive char­ac­ter­is­tics,” notes Rougeux, “because the De Can­dolle sys­tem was new­er and she want­ed her read­ers to be up to date as clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems were evolv­ing.”

Although bio­log­i­cal tax­onomies have changed con­sid­er­ably since her time, Twining’s Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants remains an intrigu­ing “snap­shot in time” that depicts not only the lat­est ideas about plant clas­si­fi­ca­tion in the mid-19th cen­tu­ry but also the atti­tudes a promi­nent mem­ber of the British rul­ing class adopt­ed toward nature as a whole. See Rougeux’s online edi­tion of Twin­ing’s text here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Explore an Inter­ac­tive, Online Ver­sion of the Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed, 200-Year-Old British & Exot­ic Min­er­al­o­gy

A Beau­ti­ful­ly-Designed Edi­tion of Euclid’s Ele­ments from 1847 Gets Dig­i­tized: Explore the New Online, Inter­ac­tive Repro­duc­tion

Explore an Inter­ac­tive, Online Ver­sion of Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours, a 200-Year-Old Guide to the Col­ors of the Nat­ur­al World

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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