Before Twittter, a serious connoisseur might study the Mona Lisa for 20 years before reaching a conclusion. Today, the average museum visitor looks at a work of art for 42 seconds.
Now 45 seconds is a long time compared to the 11 seconds that most shares are owned by high frequency trading machines. But for the Popes of culture and media, who met last week for the third Avignon Forum, this shallow cultural scanning is a reprehensible downside of ‘culture for everyone’ – theme of this year’s gathering. (My report from last year’s Forum is here).
The popes perked up when anthropologist Arjun Appadurai told them to think of culture as a “tool for managing uncertainty” and when Frederic Mitterand, the French minister of culture, described the digital age as a ‘cognitive revolution…a new ecology of mind.’
French elites have good historical reasons to be nervous about revolting masses. As today’s masses reflect on the heavy price they must now pay for their masters’ gambling habit, culture as “a way of organizing people’s understanding” has obvious attractions.
“What are the new channels for transmission?” a policy panjandrum asked – entranced, or so it sounded, by the prospect of hooking up citizens to Seresta-dispensing cultural drips.
As if on cue, a band called Playing For Change invited us to sing along sweetly to the words of Bob Marley:”Let’s Get Together and Feel Alright”.
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Is an environmentally neutral car possible?
The future of the car has been electric for what? Five years now? ten? The answer is 110 years, for it was back in 1899 that La Jamais Contente (“The Never Satisfied”) became the first vehicle to go over 100 km/h (62 mph) at Achères, near Paris.
Since then, as we produced hundreds of millions non-electric cars – and despoiled the biosphere in the process – all manner of non-petrol cars, including electric ones, have come and gone.Tesla in the the US and Norway’s Think are just the latest in a long line of newcomers.
They, too, will fail to break the grip of the gas guzzler for one reason: they do not challenge the production system and business model of an incumbent global industry that is so mature that it can only make incremental changes as new pressures arise. Electric cars such as Tesla fall into this category: they are an incremental improvement, not a replacement for an ecocidal global industry.
This writer has long been sceptical that small private vehicles would have an important role to pay in a sustainable mobility mix. But Riversimple has made me pause for thought.
At a presentation in Leicester, UK, last month, where a deal has been struck with the City Council for 30 vehicles to be piloted there in 2012, we were told that the formal purpose of this new start-up is “to build and operate cars for independent use whilst systematically pursuing elimination of the environmental damage caused by personal transport”.
Not reduce but *eliminate* environmental damage? How could that be possible?
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