Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • About
  • Category
  • Title
  • Publication
  • Year
  • Design
  • The internet of broken things
  • Dezeen
  • 2014
Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • The internet of broken things

You know when there’s a teenager on the bus listening to music on his mobile – without headphones – and all the other passengers are stealing glances, unsure whether he’s oblivious or sociopathic? Well things like that give the impression that cities are getting noisier, and that we need to retreat ever deeper into ourselves. I’m not convinced it’s true. But one man who would have taken this incident as cast-iron proof was the social critic Ivan Illich.

“Silence is a commons,” wrote Illich. He argued that just as the communal pastures were privatised in the 18th century, so now the collective sense of calm is being invaded by technology. He was thinking of loudspeakers, computers and electronic gadgets, which he lumped together in a single category: “the machines”. This was in the 1980s, before email, mobile phones, texting and the infinite stream of social media. One can only imagine what he would have made of this daily communication firebombing. But the battered and shrivelled human attention span, if not quite a commons, would certainly have appeared to Illich as a victim of noise.

What struck me about Illich’s argument is that my own response to the erosion of silence was the exact opposite of what he would have advocated. Faced with a dwindling commons, I was forced to privatise my own patch. I did this with a pair of Bose QuietComfort ® 15 headphones. Not only do they sequester the ears behind a wall of black leather, they feature “Acoustic Noise Cancelling ® technology”. The way noise-cancelling works, in brief, is by measuring enemy sound waves and retaliating with their mirror image, the sonic equivalent of anti-matter. It’s an invisible battle in which competing sound waves cancel each other out. Victory is the sound of orbital noise flatlining – silence is a sonic massacre. In other words, the QC 15s are the product of an arcane branch of physics that the rest of us know simply as “magic”.

Man invented noise-cancelling to improve the signal-to-noise ratio for helicopter and airplane pilots, but later found a much more lucrative market in music lovers. I confess that I am no high-fidelity obsessive. I do not (although I think I’m in the minority here) manoeuvre the city in my own private sound bubble, listening to Eye of the Tiger as I power-cycle down the Clerkenwell Road. I shelled out for this exorbitantly pricey piece of equipment at a time when I was sharing an office and found that I simply couldn’t concentrate. It’s not the roiling drone of the city that is distracting – white noise is just fine. It’s specific noise that is invasive, that conversation that earworms its way into your consciousness and, like a bad guest, won’t leave.

Ideally, I was aiming for a portable isolation ward. Donning the QC 15s, you are met with the gentle roar of a conch shell. But flick the switch on the right ear-cup and you are suddenly hooded in silence. It’s not the hollow sound-freeze of outer space, but at the very least a techy tea cosy that takes the edge off. (Tip: for persistent earworms, add a layer of ambient insulation, something Brian Eno-ish or Arvo Pärt-ish.) Easily distracted people such as myself attune all too readily to the peripheral, and there are times – pace Illich – when what is central must be walled off and gated. This is beginning to sound an awful lot like the neoliberalisation of sound, isn’t it?

Anyway, suffice to say that I got quite used to working this way, and to tuning out with my QC 15s on planes, and generally felt quite protective of my own fenced-off pasture of silence. Given time, I might have devolved into one of those Second Amendment nutjobs guarding the picket fence with their own private firepower. But no. For the beloved headphones broke.

One day I was trying to watch a film clip when all I could pick up was the background music. The dialogue was missing. Mouths moved but no sound issued forth.

Not to worry, I thought. This is an expensive piece of kit, it’s bound to come with an iron-clad five-year warranty. I checked. One year. Naturally, I had owned mine for two.

I wasted no time in emailing Bose customer service. I was polite. I complimented them on their excellent equipment. But I was also a disgruntled consumer with rights. “What do you mean by charging £250 for a pair of headphones that only lasts two years?” I was indignant. I was in charge. I may even have mentioned that I was a journalist. A design critic. The memory’s hazy but it’s possible I threatened to bring this outrage to public attention.

While I awaited the customer service team’s grovelling response, I googled “broken Bose headphones”. Sifting through the forums, I encountered the usual welter of repetitive outrage and fanboy infatuation. The options seemed to be a choice between getting a discount replacement (and prolonging the Bose bromance) or cursing the company’s very existence. There were few options for repairing them oneself (because, I suppose, the majority of consumers are not magicians). Which is a pity, because I had started to see self-help forums as the natural successors to the electrical repair shops that once existed on smaller high streets. Weren’t the DIY and Maker movements supposed to deliver us from the cycle of dispose-and-consume?

Whenever the subject of fixing things comes up, I’m always reminded of two devices in my life that endured against the odds. One was a television set that my American grandparents bought long before I was born, a small wooden wardrobe with a curved screen that still clunked through the channels dependably well into my early adulthood. The other is a Volkswagen Golf from the 1980s belonging to my in-laws that is so famously reliable and economical that strangers in petrol stations still routinely offer to buy it. Despite being mechanically inept, I tend to romanticise a world of mechanical objects – of motorcycles and replacement valves. The obvious problem with today’s hyper-performing, magical products is that they are black boxes. We are so in love with their metaphysics, with their gestalt, that we forgive their ephemerality. No one will ever write a book called Zen and the Art of iPhone Maintenance.

It seems to me that the logic of today’s products is heading ineluctably one way. Our devices will be able to do more and more, while lasting less and less long, until eventually they can do everything for no time at all. In the future, we will bestride the Earth like gods, wielding awesome, omnipotent gadgets that break after two minutes. Calling up customer services at [insert evil tech company] we will be told that the warranty was only one minute, and didn’t we read the terms and conditions?

Here we are fretting about the Internet of Things, and the fact that our toasters will be spying on us, when in fact by the advent of this paradigm shift our household gadgets will be giving up the ghost long before they’ve siphoned off enough data to be of any use to our overlords. The IoBT – the Internet of Broken Things – is not quite such a world-changing proposition. Or perhaps, just perhaps, the allure of accessing all our data will finally persuade manufacturers to make things that last. Maybe consumer brands will give up on built-in obsolescence in return for endless surveillance. Hurray.

After four days there was still no reply from Bose. I tweeted @BoseService, girding myself for an all-out public spat. They were very apologetic. They pointed out that my headphones came with a spare cable. Had I tried swapping the cables?

I hadn’t. And swapping the cables seems – embarrassingly – to have done the trick. My QC 15s are back at peak noise reduction capacity. They’re firing off negative waves like the fury. The silence that Illich said is “taken from us by machines” has been restored to me by my machine. As you were.

 

 

Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • Category
  • Title
  • Publication
  • Year
  • Architecture Activist architects Al Jazeera 2014
  • Architecture Djenné’s mud mosque Icon 2010
  • Architecture Honeywell, I’m home! e-flux journal 2015
  • Architecture Maison Dom-ino Dezeen 2014
  • Architecture PREVI, Lima Domus 2011
  • Architecture Revolutionary housing in Argentina Domus 2011
  • Architecture Robin Hood Gardens SQM 2014
  • Architecture The Base, Chocó Nuevotopias 2013
  • Architecture The High Line Icon 2009
  • Architecture Walter Benjamin puts activists to shame? Here 2013
  • Cities Beirut Icon 2006
  • Cities DIY cities (the limitations) Uncube 2014
  • Cities Edge City (São Paulo) Strelka Press 2012
  • Cities How radical is Radical Urbanism? Catalogue 2015
  • Cities Istanbul Icon 2010
  • Cities Jenin Icon 2005
  • Cities Life on the edge Moscow Urban Forum 2013
  • Cities Seoul Condé Nast Traveller 2012
  • Cities Shenzhen Icon 2008
  • Cities Unreal estate (London) Domus 2012
  • Cities Urban commons The Guardian 2015
  • Design Adventure gear The Guardian 2010
  • Design Beneath the street, the wilderness: Occupy and Bear Grylls Here 2012
  • Design Craft fetishism The Guardian 2011
  • Design Craft fetishism: From objects to things Disegno 2012
  • Design Design and the Right Domus 2013
  • Design Design and violence Dezeen 2013
  • Design Dreaming of year zero Bio 50 2014
  • Design Fabbers, dabblers and microstars Icon 2009
  • Design London riots The Guardian 2011
  • Design Luxury watch culture The Guardian 2010
  • Design Milan’s PR economy The Guardian 2011
  • Design On William Gibson on design Dezeen 2014
  • Design Open design Dezeen 2014
  • Design Samsung vs Apple Domus 2013
  • Design The internet of broken things Dezeen 2014
  • Design The post-spectacular economy Van Abbemuseum 2011
  • Design Ultramundane Domus 2013
  • People Alejandro Aravena Icon 2009
  • People Do Ho Suh Icon 2008
  • People Enzo Mari Icon 2009
  • People Ettore Sottsass Icon 2007
  • People Francis Kere Icon 2010
  • People Richard Sapper Domus 2013
  • Reviews Cool Tools by Kevin Kelly Dezeen 2014
  • Reviews Hearts of the City by Herbert Muschamp Icon 2010
  • Reviews Latin America in Construction at MoMA Architectural Record 2015
  • Reviews Mad Max: Fury Road Dezeen 2015
  • Reviews Max Bill Icon 2010
  • Reviews Philips shaver Icon 2008
  • Reviews Postmodernism at the V&A The Guardian 2010
  • Reviews Rebel Cities by David Harvey Art Review 2012
  • Reviews The Craftsman by Richard Sennett Icon 2008
  • Reviews The Historical Museum, Sarajevo The Guardian 2011
  • Reviews Together by Richard Sennett Art Review 2012
Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • Design
  • The internet of broken things
  • Dezeen
  • 2014
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You know when there’s a teenager on the bus listening to music on his mobile – without headphones – and all the other passengers are stealing glances, unsure whether he’s oblivious or sociopathic? Well things like that give the impression that cities are getting noisier, and that we need to retreat ever deeper into ourselves. I’m not convinced it’s true. But one man who would have taken this incident as cast-iron proof was the social critic Ivan Illich.

“Silence is a commons,” wrote Illich. He argued that just as the communal pastures were privatised in the 18th century, so now the collective sense of calm is being invaded by technology. He was thinking of loudspeakers, computers and electronic gadgets, which he lumped together in a single category: “the machines”. This was in the 1980s, before email, mobile phones, texting and the infinite stream of social media. One can only imagine what he would have made of this daily communication firebombing. But the battered and shrivelled human attention span, if not quite a commons, would certainly have appeared to Illich as a victim of noise.

What struck me about Illich’s argument is that my own response to the erosion of silence was the exact opposite of what he would have advocated. Faced with a dwindling commons, I was forced to privatise my own patch. I did this with a pair of Bose QuietComfort ® 15 headphones. Not only do they sequester the ears behind a wall of black leather, they feature “Acoustic Noise Cancelling ® technology”. The way noise-cancelling works, in brief, is by measuring enemy sound waves and retaliating with their mirror image, the sonic equivalent of anti-matter. It’s an invisible battle in which competing sound waves cancel each other out. Victory is the sound of orbital noise flatlining – silence is a sonic massacre. In other words, the QC 15s are the product of an arcane branch of physics that the rest of us know simply as “magic”.

Man invented noise-cancelling to improve the signal-to-noise ratio for helicopter and airplane pilots, but later found a much more lucrative market in music lovers. I confess that I am no high-fidelity obsessive. I do not (although I think I’m in the minority here) manoeuvre the city in my own private sound bubble, listening to Eye of the Tiger as I power-cycle down the Clerkenwell Road. I shelled out for this exorbitantly pricey piece of equipment at a time when I was sharing an office and found that I simply couldn’t concentrate. It’s not the roiling drone of the city that is distracting – white noise is just fine. It’s specific noise that is invasive, that conversation that earworms its way into your consciousness and, like a bad guest, won’t leave.

Ideally, I was aiming for a portable isolation ward. Donning the QC 15s, you are met with the gentle roar of a conch shell. But flick the switch on the right ear-cup and you are suddenly hooded in silence. It’s not the hollow sound-freeze of outer space, but at the very least a techy tea cosy that takes the edge off. (Tip: for persistent earworms, add a layer of ambient insulation, something Brian Eno-ish or Arvo Pärt-ish.) Easily distracted people such as myself attune all too readily to the peripheral, and there are times – pace Illich – when what is central must be walled off and gated. This is beginning to sound an awful lot like the neoliberalisation of sound, isn’t it?

Anyway, suffice to say that I got quite used to working this way, and to tuning out with my QC 15s on planes, and generally felt quite protective of my own fenced-off pasture of silence. Given time, I might have devolved into one of those Second Amendment nutjobs guarding the picket fence with their own private firepower. But no. For the beloved headphones broke.

One day I was trying to watch a film clip when all I could pick up was the background music. The dialogue was missing. Mouths moved but no sound issued forth.

Not to worry, I thought. This is an expensive piece of kit, it’s bound to come with an iron-clad five-year warranty. I checked. One year. Naturally, I had owned mine for two.

I wasted no time in emailing Bose customer service. I was polite. I complimented them on their excellent equipment. But I was also a disgruntled consumer with rights. “What do you mean by charging £250 for a pair of headphones that only lasts two years?” I was indignant. I was in charge. I may even have mentioned that I was a journalist. A design critic. The memory’s hazy but it’s possible I threatened to bring this outrage to public attention.

While I awaited the customer service team’s grovelling response, I googled “broken Bose headphones”. Sifting through the forums, I encountered the usual welter of repetitive outrage and fanboy infatuation. The options seemed to be a choice between getting a discount replacement (and prolonging the Bose bromance) or cursing the company’s very existence. There were few options for repairing them oneself (because, I suppose, the majority of consumers are not magicians). Which is a pity, because I had started to see self-help forums as the natural successors to the electrical repair shops that once existed on smaller high streets. Weren’t the DIY and Maker movements supposed to deliver us from the cycle of dispose-and-consume?

Whenever the subject of fixing things comes up, I’m always reminded of two devices in my life that endured against the odds. One was a television set that my American grandparents bought long before I was born, a small wooden wardrobe with a curved screen that still clunked through the channels dependably well into my early adulthood. The other is a Volkswagen Golf from the 1980s belonging to my in-laws that is so famously reliable and economical that strangers in petrol stations still routinely offer to buy it. Despite being mechanically inept, I tend to romanticise a world of mechanical objects – of motorcycles and replacement valves. The obvious problem with today’s hyper-performing, magical products is that they are black boxes. We are so in love with their metaphysics, with their gestalt, that we forgive their ephemerality. No one will ever write a book called Zen and the Art of iPhone Maintenance.

It seems to me that the logic of today’s products is heading ineluctably one way. Our devices will be able to do more and more, while lasting less and less long, until eventually they can do everything for no time at all. In the future, we will bestride the Earth like gods, wielding awesome, omnipotent gadgets that break after two minutes. Calling up customer services at [insert evil tech company] we will be told that the warranty was only one minute, and didn’t we read the terms and conditions?

Here we are fretting about the Internet of Things, and the fact that our toasters will be spying on us, when in fact by the advent of this paradigm shift our household gadgets will be giving up the ghost long before they’ve siphoned off enough data to be of any use to our overlords. The IoBT – the Internet of Broken Things – is not quite such a world-changing proposition. Or perhaps, just perhaps, the allure of accessing all our data will finally persuade manufacturers to make things that last. Maybe consumer brands will give up on built-in obsolescence in return for endless surveillance. Hurray.

After four days there was still no reply from Bose. I tweeted @BoseService, girding myself for an all-out public spat. They were very apologetic. They pointed out that my headphones came with a spare cable. Had I tried swapping the cables?

I hadn’t. And swapping the cables seems – embarrassingly – to have done the trick. My QC 15s are back at peak noise reduction capacity. They’re firing off negative waves like the fury. The silence that Illich said is “taken from us by machines” has been restored to me by my machine. As you were.

 

 

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