Nothing Changes if Nothing Changes
“The greys intend to win. Stop. Rainbow needed urgently. Stop.”
— Zapatista communique, reprinted in Our Word is Our Weapon.
Fig. 1
I dropped out of highschool at 16. I was allowed to do this on the condition that I immediately get my GED and enroll in night classes offered by the University of Maryland, on the NATO base where my mom worked. So, by the time I actually found myself in a degree program at a university, I’d banked a solid portion of my undergrad gen-ed requirements. This included writing. It did not, according to my university’s administration, cover the writing seminar they mandated. Those seminars had themes. I no longer remember any but the one I chose: The Tyranny of Technology.
Mind you, this was 1996. The internet was but a baby, and e-commerce had not yet begun stripping the information highway of its liberatory, democratizing potential. Being a child of very working-class origins, I had none of the blanket romance for downward mobility popular with my peers on the left. So, I went into many of the seminar’s assigned works with a fair amount of skepticism. They nonetheless imprinted on me. Specifically, Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, and Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.
Even more than those, a theme the young professor hammered on stayed with me: Alienation. We toss this word around in ways that can render it meaningless. But it has very real conceptual contours. In effect, it refers to being locked out of or made spectator to things that impact us. When Marx used it, he was referring to our inability to locate our creative labor in the things we produce, or have any control over how the value of them is distributed. When my writing professor used it, he was –in a manner of speaking– referring to the fact that most of us could, if asked, list the names of seven different car models, but not the ideal conditions for growing apples.
When we talk about things like “cognitive offloading” and brain-function decline as one’s use of GenAI goes up, it’s a variation on that theme. It’s actually something people talked about when, millennia ago, scripts for writing and recording information began to proliferate. When we introduce technological innovation, there’s always something we’re letting go of. That’s not always a bad thing. It’s just that new selves always come with a price tag. The problem is, it’s often just behind us. And we tend to be easily seduced by what’s ahead.
When writing was introduced to the world, at stake was a certain relationship with and practice of memory. Today, it appears to be cognition altogether. Technical innovation at scale typically requires sizable investments. Under capitalist arrangements, that means someone has to accumulate that capital, by extracting surplus value from workers and concentrating it in private ownership.That means someone else is deciding what we’ll let go of when that innovation is rolled out.
Suddenly, we’re not just locked out of the things we once had at our disposal – we’re locked out of the decisions that got us there.
Fig. 2
Fast forward a little over two decades from my writing seminar. 2020-2021. I publish a couple features with international coffee culture quarterly Standart. Sort of the equivalent of getting to work with Scorsese, for someone like me. When the first one drops, I am stunned by how many people in my networks order it. Many of them not even coffee people. Some even become Standart subscribers. I am beside myself. My work rarely generates such enthusiastic response.
Looking around me, I see a few potentially instructive conditions swirling around all this. First, we’re neck-deep in the pandemic. Vaccines are only just being rolled out, and a near-year of collective hibernation has re-oriented a lot of people’s tastes and priorities. They’ve been rediscovering tactile joys. Baking. Reading. Exercising. Creating. Not just the pleasure, but the accessibility. In effect, an inversion of control’s trajectory as the world spun out around COVID. An embodied experience of self-determination where little of it was to be found elsewhere.
Sourdough one kneaded with one’s own hands. The progress and placement of a bookmark, one day to the next. One’s physical shape and capacity shifting with routine exertion. Many of us were rediscovering that we could do things that had measurable impact on our lives, amidst the institutional betrayal we felt – be it critical public health mismanagement, or just the false promise that our hard work would yield ease and security.
It certainly helped that every issue of Standart was (and remains) a work of art, in a limited run. The magazine’s articles are not mirrored online. They exist exclusively in a physical object, much in the way music did when I was first going to basement punk shows. Some kid’s record distro selling similarly beautiful physical objects, at the back of the room. A 7” a band put out was more than just a replayable document of a musical composition. It was the tangible accumulation of creative choices – right down to the artwork and the texture of the stock it was printed on. Further, it laid down a marker of possibility. Permission. Small choices we’d never thought of, much less considered making ourselves. A glimpse of our own plausible, future selves read into the turns and texture of this piece of art. In our hands. On our shelf or coffee table. Or shared with others with whom we might pursue plausible, collective selves.
Fig. 3
At the end of this past year, I decamped to Ho Chi Minh City to circumnavigate a few objects thrown in my path, per my visa status in Thailand. I landed with two weeks booked in a flat in a working-class foreigner of District 3, knowing I needed to pass a month before returning to Bangkok. Beyond that, I had enough to cook meals twice a day, and keep bottled water stocked. The back two weeks were an open question. Never mind visa application fees for my return, or the flights I’d have to book in order to submit said application.
Basically, I had two weeks of runway to figure out how to survive long enough to get home.
So, I researched on-demand printing options, and began offering prints of my photography for sale. I didn’t expect much. We were weeks out from Christmas, and I assumed most people’s gift-giving had already monopolized their near-term budgets. I was quickly proven wrong. Within a few days, I had enough to cover the remaining two weeks' rent on my place. A few days further, I had my sustenance covered. Within a week I had the costs of my visa application locked down. I was even able to extend my phone’s roaming-data coverage and get a croissant once or twice.
Much like those Standart articles, people came out of the woodwork wanting to get their hands on something. Often, people I rarely talked to. People I didn’t know cared – not least because much of this photography had been sitting on my website and social media for years, seeing little engagement. And the pieces folks ordered often surprised me; scenes I found incredibly moving, personally, but whose stories were culturally and geographically remote from the people seemingly eager to hang them on their walls.
Fig. 4
There’s a mantra in addiction-recovery work that goes: Nothing changes if nothing changes. I’m not now nor have I ever been an addict of any variety, but its terms have circulated in my life’s ambiance such that I have a passable command of them. The aforementioned mantra is a spin on the far more time-honored truism that the definition of insanity is ritually repeating an action and expecting to be surprised by the result. Lamentably it is, in a manner of speaking, how I’ve spent much of the last half-decade when it comes to my survival.
I am not built for efforts with quarterly metrics. I think slower burns are valuable. I do not believe people are, broadly, anywhere near as stupid or intellectually unambitious as presumed by most of the employers or clients who’ve hired me. In fact, I’m fairly confident that most people are so alienated from and spiritually starved by life under late capitalism that they are desperate to be challenged; desperate to be exposed to, assured of, and connected to things larger than themselves; desperate to have their own authenticity and complexity reflected back at them in the rough edges of ideas and objects not neutered for maximal engagement.
Moreover, I think ignoring all of that is productively suicidal. Put me in a room with a brand or project, and I’m likely to tell them that when the Strait of Hormuz shutters after two years of televised genocide, and global energy supply suddenly shrinks at twice the rate demand did when the world went into pandemic lockdown, they’lll wish they’d cared about conditioning their audience to trust them. Because when the floor collapses beneath us, most people put a premium on anything that seems durable and load-bearing. You can’t pivot into connection or credibility amidst a storm if you never worked at establishing either before it made landfall. None of the proverbial adults in the room will acknowledge as much, but in the biz that’s called poor planning. The irony is that everything said adults have failed to see coming was utterly predictable.
Even more ironic: I labored under the delusion I could make them. I threw myself at that fool’s errand, as some concession to the necessity of compromise. As though submitting to the wisdom of some scold about measures of maturity. Or like I might pray away what I could see with my own eyes if I just suspended my stubborn, blinkered idealism. As if it all wasn’t just one big casino.
And not just in my communications work. My return to photography –as a professional endeavor– was similarly hamstrung. It felt taboo and cheapening to color outside the lines of established mechanisms for attracting paid photo work; work that (rarefied as it was) mostly replicated the lack of narrative or connective ambition I found in other professional mediums. The same drive toward lowest-common denominators and refusal to show people anything but what they were already accustomed to seeing. A refusal to show people familiar things in new ways. A refusal to lean in and say “You’re not wrong. The world is not done with us. Other versions of this life are possible.”
Worse, I did that as someone whose first punk band recorded a handful of songs on a four-track in a friend’s basement, found a cassette-production house in the suburbs and pooled some cash to have them put those songs on cassettes. A few of which were deposited with the local indie record store on consignment. Despite, at best, sophomoric and middling performances opening local basement shows with a mic run through a bass amp, to maybe twenty people at time, we returned a few weeks later to find the shop had sold out of those cassettes.
If I’d failed to notice that treating my photography the exact same way generated more income in the span of a few weeks than anything I’d done all year (spare a short ghostwriting contract), everyone in my life would’ve been within rights to chase me into the sea. If I’d failed to put together that, in this moment especially, people are ravenous for tactile things to hold in their hands, hang in their homes, discuss with loved ones, and return to now and again to see anew… I might as well have walked into the sea, on my own.
Fig. 5
And so, In the coming month, I am rolling out the first of a number of planned photobooks, accompanied by longform written reflections: Notes on Nourishment, Bangkok. This first project is an attempt at counternarrative, per the city that adopted me six years ago. The city I have woken up to and wandered, across those years. The city cast out of frame by Orientalist attention-spans, tourist economy branding, and increasing cinematic and social media influencer representations. My hope is not that it will satisfy any outsider’s curiosity. Rather my aim is to deliver something that prompts –perhaps instructs– you to observe your own surroundings differently; to refuse the call to instrumentalize them or show up to them as a self toggling between consumer and investor.
Will it work? Will it attract anyone beyond my meager network? I don’t know.
I do know that the odds of my ever working again are negligible. Setting aside billionaires cannibalizing and eradicating any value attached to the humanities is practically a fait accompli at this point, the current tailspin toward energy crisis is likely to prompt demand destruction unseen in our (or maybe any) lifetime. The economic impact of that is likely to be cascading and long term. And I know that nothing changes if nothing changes.
Eventually, these books will be available in a store housed here. For now, preorders are open, shipping internationally for €40. Upon receipt of the book, all preorders are entitled to a print of any (one) image from it along with a note on that image’s backstory — postmarked from Bangkok. If that interests you, you can ping me through the contact page.
