SOUNDTRACK: SA-ROC-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #30 (June 4, 2020).
I have never heard of Sa-Roc, but I was blown away by her lyrics and delivery. I really enjoyed that her delivery was intense and serious, even angry, but her delivery was so thoughtful.
If you want protest music for the uprising of the American consciousness, then look no further. Sa-Roc (born Assata Perkins) is an emcee from southeast Washington, D.C.
Sa-Roc bears her heart and soul here, weaving together influential threads from her upbringing; Pan-Africanism, the hardship of her father’s experience as a sharecropper in Virginia and her own childhood in Congress Heights, D.C., an area ravaged by violence and the crack epidemic in the 1980s.
In this Tiny Desk (home) concert, she debuted two exclusives, “Deliverance” is about reassessing where you are in making a commitment to change things. I love the beats and the lyrics. She references Posdnous and De la Soul and then has this moment where she says this is the world’s tiniest violin and a violin sample plays.
After the song, she lights some sage to clear the energy. She wants her space to experience joy and to be a stress-free peaceful environments.
“Hand of God” is her latest single about staying true to yourself. It has a sung chorus and Sa-Roc has a pretty singing voice along with her flow. In the second verse she raps with a sped up version of herself which is pretty neat.
“r(E)volution,” is from her upcoming album, The Sharecropper’s Daughter, which is produced by her partner in life and DJ, Sol Messiah. It starts with a pretty guitar and a great bass line
On “r(E)volution” she spits bars: “Embedded in the home of the brave, the darkest of interiors. / Saw street scholars and soldiers defect cuz they post-traumatic stressed from the American experience.”
“Forever” is for little girls who ever felt like they were held to impossible societal standards; and if the world told them they weren’t good enough, weren’t valuable enough, weren’t worthy enough, weren’t dope enough to take up space or use their voice; they didn’t come from the right area or the right class or education; didn’t have the right skin tone or complexion; anything that made them feel less than. This is about how dope you really are with all of your perfect imperfections.
I love that after a quiet clapping moment the song soars with guitars and bass.
[READ: May 8, 2020] Kitten Clone
In the Douglas Coupland collection Shopping in Jail, there was an essay called “All Governments Seem to Be Winging it Except for China.” The essay said that it came from this book: Kitten Clone.
I wasn’t sure how interested I really was in reading about the history of Alcatel-Lucent, but I should have known that Coupland would do his thing and find an interesting and unique way to write about something that should be dull.
The only weird thing is that Coupland implies that he is alone on this excursion, but the photographs are not his (which is surprising since he loves art) the pictures are by Olivia Arthur.
This book is part of a series called Writers in Residence created by Alain de Botton, with the slogan: “There are many places in the modern world that we do not understand because we cannot get inside them.” Coupland’s book is the third in the series. The other two are Geoff Dyer: Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush and Liaquat Ahamed: Money and Tough Love: On Tour with the IMF.
This book looks into the past, present and future of Alcatel-Lucent and the cover of the book sets the stage:
You’re holding a book about a company you’ve most likely never heard of. This company has no Steve Jobs, nor does it have a CEO who jet-skis with starlets. It’s only the 461st largest company on earth, but were it to vanish tomorrow, our modern world would immediately be the worse for its absence.
It opens in Belfort, France in 1871 with a man named Alphonse Garreau. I assume this is all true, but told in Coupland’s casual style.
He saves a kitten from being drowned, presents the cute animal to a farm girl. She insists that he visit the kitten every day. The kitten makes him so happy he wants to share it with the world . But how? You could draw a picture, but it would take ages to draw and share a picture. But the world first photograph was taken only fifty miles away, maybe making prints of a kitten would be easier–make them in to postcards and put them on trains to get them around the county.
Coupland moves on to the formal Past: Holmdel and Berkeley Heights NJ and the home of Bell Labs–a campus made of brick the color of a wet golden lab.
Alcatel-Lucent owns Bell labs. Alctel-Lucent was formed in 2006 via the merger of France’s Alcatel and the States’ Lucent Technology. In the 1990s, Lucent went from $7 a share to $84 in four years When the market crashed in 2002 it was worth 55 cents [I had Lucent stock during the crash]. The company now employs 80,000 people in 130 countries and has a revenue of 16 billion Euros annually. It is responsible for transmitting our voices, movies and data between landlines, mobile devices and the internet. It doesn’t provide content it provides channels. You likely interact with A-L hundreds of times a day without knowing it.
I enjoy the way he plays with typography. On page 28 while giving a very techie answer to something, he has the type font slowly shrink as it runs off the page because it is so much technobabble and no one is actually reading it (I did, even if it was very hard).
The display cases show all of the technology that this facility has created: the first transistor (1947), the first laser (1957), the first satellite (1961). The current number of patents from the building’s occupants is 29,002 as of the day he is there.
And yet the place seems to be lost in time. It is very dark with no bulbs apparently more than 40 watts.
He tours the facilities and talks to various people. He talks to Markus Hoffman, head of Bell Labs who tells him all kinds of things but during the discussion, Coupland imagines talking to Alphonse Garreau. He imagines trying to explain Google to someone from 1871 or even 1971.
His most interesting observation here is that the future of technology seems inevitable yet it is so hard to predict. The iPhone is here and seems like it’s been here forever and seems so obvious. But science fiction has few devices that resemble the iPhone. The Star Trek tricorder is used for sensor scanning, data analysis and recording data.
Indeed, the future turns out to be boringly like now. There are no flying cars. Buildings remain, nature doesn’t change (expect for global warming). Changes are subtle–new cleaning products and new pets.
I also like when he makes observations that you never think about like how foolish an article called “Use Computing to Boost Your Productivity” would sound in 2014.
He talks to another person who says that in 1995, nobody in Bell Labs used the internet, People used UNIX command-line addresses (Bell Labs invented UNIX in 1969). But the technician says he’s surprised by how quickly the internet became huge .
The future of the internet is not about delivering or organizing technology but about managing the tide of information.
Coupland observes that he has written over a thousand messages on Twitter. Multiply by the 140 character limit and that’s basically a novel.
I loved re-reading about the Murray Hill anechoic chamber
In Bit Rot there’s an essay called “Peace” which talks about the chamber. I had summarized:
The real reason libraries are quiet is because “irregularly protruding book spines are terrific for dispersing sound and creating environments that are mildly free of echoes. But it has nothing on the quietest place on earth–the Bell Laboratories Murray Hill anechoic chamber. It absorbs over 99.995 percent of the incidental acoustic energy above two hundred hertz. The lab staff popped a balloon in his face and it made no sound.
The middle of the book is the Present, set in Kanata, Ontario, Canada and Calais and Paris, France. He’s in Paris, meeting Ben Verwaayen, the Dutch head of Alca-Loo (as it is called).
Coupland asks him if Alca-Loo is a French or American and he laughs and says it is genuinely multinational.
Then he goes to Kanata Ontario. Ontario is gun shy about technology because they had Nortel. Its stock was highly valued and it employed nearly 100,00 people. But it failed hard because Nortel made deals with all of the new telecom companies (after deregulation). They’d build the network for free as long as they got a share of the future profits. But everybody built more network than was needed. And it overvalued what money it would make. Soon enough the stock went from $124 to .47 cents [I didn’t invest in this one].
I enjoyed the nerdy insult in this book. Coupland tries to be “cool” when they ask where he wants his photo taken. He says “Lets do it here by these 7710 SR-c12 routers.” The tech worker rolls his eyes and says “That’s not a 7710 SR-c12 router; it’s a 7710 SR-c4.”
I was also fascinated to learn about the five nines standard. A network has to work a minimum of 99.999 percent of the time.
90% availability means downtime per year is 36.5 days
99% availability means downtime per year is 3.65 days
99.9% availability means downtime per year is 8.76 hours
99.99% availability means downtime per year is 52.56 minutes
99.999% availability means downtime per year is 5.26 minutes
99.9999% availability means downtime per year is 21.5 seconds
They also talk about a series of ad from 1993 from AT&T called “You Will.” I vaguely recall these ads. They did a good job nailing the future except that there was always “something wrong in some slightly tragic way.”
A guy looks like he is holding an iPad and the ad says “Have you ever sent someone a fax… from the beach.” AT&T basically made an iPad for a commercial but then used it to send a fax.
Have you ever tucked your baby in…from a phone booth. So they anticipated Skype but put it in a public phone booth.
The one huge horrifying error in the book comes on page 105 when Coupland says you are in New Jersey driving on the Golden State Parkway. Come on Golden? It’s the Garden State Parkway, Doug.
The Future is of course in China. When Alcatel bought ITT in 2002, Shanghai Bell came with it, this allowed China technological entry on a massive scale.
Coupland expects to see what we all think we’ll see there–slave labor, darkness, unhappiness. But it seems that China has totally embraced the 21st century in ways that the West hasn’t. Their buildings are beautiful and open–they have embraced personal happiness even while embracing communism and they really have a sense of the kind of output they want to have. He says that whereas Western leaders are politicians, Chinese leaders are economists.
Bits and pieces appeared in essays in Bit Rot. He is amazed at how clean, efficient and quiet it is in the factories.
One of the guys he talked to at the China branch of Alca-Loo says “we add one Holland worth of customers a month into China.” Machine to machine communication is absolutely the future of speed, profit, capacity and bandwidth maximization.
Like the North American Gen X, China has the Pre-80s and post-80s: 240 million people have been born since the government implemented the one child policy. Their upbringing is so different that they seem like another species to the older generation: my daughter challenges everything I say. Also, you never hear someone ask a European what their country will be like in 20 years, but everyone wants to know what China will be like.
Coupland looks at this factory and wonders why there isn’t one also in Michigan where 10 million primates needing 2,500 calories a day are sitting on top of a cold rock in the middle of the North American continent and they’ve got nothing to do all day except go online and watch porn, TED ideas and bit-torrented movies…. “Is North America to become what China is now ceasing to be, a place where you might as well work for thirty cents an hour making baubles because there’s absolutely nothing else to do except shop from your jail cell?”
The next technological step for China is 4G-PDX optical broadband to every home in China. Twenty years ago the internet used zero percent of the world’s energy. This year [2013], it used 4 percent. That doesn’t sound like much, bit one must remember that a relatively short time ago it was zero.
In five years these numbers will seem absurdly small. He wrote this in 2013. For comparison, in 1994 internet was still italicized and people unironically said information superhighway.
In China he learns that their technological innovation was able to jump generations
In 1980, a phone in your house took a years salary. Soon every person in China will have a mobile phone and access to broadband. They planned to have every citizen in China have access to broadband in five years (Which would be around now. Wonder if it worked).
The book ends with a fantasy about technology in 2245.
The year is 2245. Your name is Saager, and you’re just getting back to work after a snack break. … You visit your son, who works for the same company, except in the Kerguelen Islands in the middle of the Antarctic ocean. Well, technically he’s not your son–he’s your clone, and one of many, as you carry around a mutant gene that made you unreceptive to a strain of influenza K that swept through the world thirty years previously. The overlords decided to make your DNA go wide.
So you call your clone son. he says
“I just had my work break and it was great. Number seventeen and I re-chipped the canteen’s sucrose dispenser, and tricked it into cranking out zygotes. I made thirty-seven great-grandchildren, but then the bell rang and here I am, back to work.”
“What did you do with the zygotes?”
“I ate them.”
The father says he found feline DNA from the archives. It’s maybe three hundred years old. The son sequences it and attempts to rebuild it (it takes 30 seconds). The father watches the son remove a small fluffy kitten from the tank. It’s wet but healthy. The father asks him what it looks like.
“It’s very–what’s the word… cute. Yes. I think it’s what people used to call ‘cute.'”
You look at the kitten. It’s a… well, it’s a kitten. Just like in the Grand Archive images.
“What do I do with it now, Dad?”
“What do you mean, what do you do with it? … I don’t know. Make it a pet?”
“People haven’t had pets in over a hundred years.”
“Can you give it as a birthday present?”
“The Kerguelen Islands are a No Small Mammal Zone.”
“Well then…”
“Holy crap! My boss is coming this way! What do I do with the kitten?”
“You better eat it. Hurry!”
“Good idea”
You watch your son eat the kitten in four quick bites. A chip off the old block.
Crazy man.
I really enjoy Coupland a lot. I love looking at things through his eyes.
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