"The White Plague" & Mumford and the Slothrop Paper Company

[ish mailian]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_00bbE9oxQ

On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 6:26 AM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
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> from Mumford's _The City in History_
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> To believe, therefore, that human culture has reached a marvelous final culmination in the modern metropolis one must avert one‘s eyes from the grim details of the daily routine. And that is precisely what the metropolitan denizen schools himself to do: he lives, not in the real world, but in a shadow world projected around him at every moment by means of paper and celluloid and adroitly manipulated lights: a world in which he is insulated by glass, cellophane and film from the mortifications of living. In short, a world of professional illusionists and their credulous victims.
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> The swish and crackle of paper is the underlying sound of the metropolis. What is visible and real in this world is only what has been transferred to paper or has been even further etherialised on a microfilm or a tape recorder. The essential daily gossip of the metropolis is no longer that of people meeting face to face at a cross-roads, at the dinner, table, in the marketplace: a few dozen people writing in the newspapers, a dozen or so more broadcasting over radio and television, provide the daily interpretation of movements and happenings with slick professional adroitness. Thus. even the most spontaneous human activities come under professional surveillance and centralized control. The spread of manifolding devices of every sort gives to the most ephemeral and mediocre products of the mind a temporary durability they do not deserve: whole books are printed to justify the loose evacuations of the tape recorder.
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> All the major activities of the metropolis are directly connected with paper and its plastic substitutes; and printing and packaging are among its principal industries. The activities pursued in the offices of the metropolis are directly connected with paper: the tabulating machines, the journals, the ledgers, the card-catalogues, the deeds, the contracts, the mortgages, the briefs, the trial records: so, to, plioo, the prospectuses, the advertisements, the magazines, the newspapers. As early as the eighteenth century Mercier had observed this metropolitan form of the White Plague. Modern methods of manifolding have not lessened the disease: they have only exchanged easygoing slipshod ways, which often sufficed, for a more exact record, whose elaboration and cost are out of all proportion to the value of what is recorded. What was a mere trickle in Mercier’s day has now becoming a ravaging flood of paper.
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> As the day’s routine proceeds the pile of paper mounts higher: the trashbaskets are filled and emptied and filled again. The ticker tape exudes its quotation of stocks and its report of news; the students in the schools and universities fill their notebooks, digest and disgorge the contents of books, as the silkworm feeds on mulberry leaves and manufactures its cocoon, unraveling themselves on examination day. In the theatre, in literature, in music, in business, reputations are made on paper. The scholar with his degrees and publications, the actress with her newspaper clippings, and the financier with his shares and his voting proxies, measure their power and importance by the amount of paper they can command. No wonder the anarchists once invented the grim phrase: ‘Incinerate the documents!’ That would ruin this whole world quicker than universal flood or earthquake, if not as fatally as a shower of hydrogen bombs. That life is an occasion for living, and not a pretext for supplying items to newspapers, interviews on television, or a Spectacle for crowds of otherwise vacant bystanders these notions do not occur in the metropolitan mind. For them the Show is the reality, and ‘ the show must go on!’ This metropolitan world, then, is a world where tears and blood are less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to achieve a more fullbodied and satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as leaders, spectators, listeners, passive observers. Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them, and no less remote from the nature that is within, it is no wonder that they turn more and more of the functions of life, even thought itself, to the machines that their inventors have created. In this disordered environment only machines retain some of the attributes of life, while human beings are progressively reduced to a bundle of reflexes, without self-starting impulses or autonomous goals: ‘behaviourist man’.