If you could pick your own workspace, what would it look like? A friend of mine, a writer by occupation, works from a tower in southern European village and recently shared a picture of his study. It’s quiet, with inspiring views on every side, without obvious distractions but with every necessity near to hand. It is exactly the kind of place that comes to mind when one thinks of a place to write. However, what constitutes a “perfect” work environment appears to vary widely.
Buzzfeed has a photo collection of the studies used by famous writers and designers from the 19th and 20th centuries. Mark Twain’s had a pool table. Some, like EB White’s are monastic in their austereness, as if White deliberately chose to remove anything that might get between him and his typewriter. Others, like Bill Buckley’s, look like a bomb had detonated in it. They are strewn with a profusion of papers and devices. There was probably a hidden order to the apparent disorder but only Buckley’s mind held the key.
Software developers are a somewhat newer type of intellectual and the Business Insider has a collection of pictures posted by people who work in Silicon Valley. What is instantly evident is the almost universal minimalism of their environments. One person works from a laptop while apparently lying on a crummy mattress. Another works out of a shed. A few choose what one might rationally predict a developer’s workspace to look like, a quiet room with a wrap around desk and multiple monitors linked to host a single virtual screen, or perhaps to split up to provide separate portals into distant machines located who knows where.
Many developers have a highly developed awareness of being at once disembodied and central; and so would feel that one really haven’t arrived as a serious developer if you have actually be somewhere physical, as in punching a card to go into a building. They might regard with horror people who are actually required to put on a suit to program. Thus, many work out of laptops despite the limitations of a cramped screen and rotten keyboard because that’s the badge of freedom. An example of status is one featured workspace consisting of a laptop on table somewhere in Mexico implying that next week its owner will be in some other town, in some other country.
Clearly the programmer’s universe is in some internal space, either in the virtual world or in his own mind to which the workspace is incidental. But that was true even of writers in the past. Emily Dickson almost never left Amherst, Massachusetts and was bedridden in her later years. Yet she wrote of her ability to roam the wide spaces of the universe from the confines of her room:
I never saw a moor;
I never saw the sea,
Yet know I how the heather looks
And what a billow be.I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven.
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the checks were given.
It is interesting to contrast a writer’s or developer’s workspace with that of a modern politician, who are also narrative authors of a sort. Ironically one of the most important requirements of a political workspaces is what there should not be in them. Less, much less, is more.
It is claimed for example, that Bill Clinton was allergic to anything which could produce an electronic record and is widely believed to have sent only two emails in his life. The Atlantic believes after some research that the former president may have sent more than a couple, though it is hard put to find the rest. Adrienne LaFrance writes, “the William J. Clinton Presidential Library claims to have just two emails from the former president in its trove of 40 million emails from the Clinton White House. He certainly sent more. Hillary, it seems, is not the only Clinton with disappearing emails.”
LaFrance’s sources suggest that the absence of emails reflects Clinton’s interest in face-to-face communications. He just prefers to press flesh rather than dispatch bits and bytes. The desire for privacy has rubbed off on Hillary to the extent that Daniel Halper of the Weekly Standard says that cameras and cellphones are sometimes confiscated at meetings with Hillary, doubtless so she can devote full attention to her guests.
“On Thursday, Clinton’s motorcade left the SpringHill Suites for Main Street Cafe, where she met privately with party leaders for about an hour and a half,” reports KETV in Omaha.
“Pottawattamie County Democratic Chairwoman Linda Nelson said the meeting was so private that everyone invited was asked to hand over their cellphones and cameras before taking part.”
The Clinton campaign has been trying to control Hillary’s campaign events as much as possible.
Privacy is imperative because political workspaces are radically different from those of writers. The chief requirement of any email server or device for example, is that it must be able to disappear. The primary tool that public figures use is what might be called the moveable stage. The moveable stage is designed to provide a highly controlled viewpoint of the celebrity to convey the intended effect. In place of a laptop computer sending data into the Cloud, politicians like Hillary have a portable movie set to broadcast messages to the media universe.
Like the peripatetic software developer who today works from Mexico and the day after tomorrow from Southern Italy, modern politicians now work on location, broadcasting their screeds from the Temple of Hercules or the Brandenberg Gate. They orate before fake styrofoam Greek pillars or from the Chipotle restaurant in the company of “plain folks”.
Plain folks are the only people who actually live in the real world. And they pay dearly for this misfortune. The degree to which the creators of memes and ideas now influence the world would have shocked Percy Shelley who extravagantly claimed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Never in his wildest dreams could he have foreseen that workers in the realms of “reason and imagination” could gain such power. Ben Rhodes, a speechwriter who majored in creative writing, is a deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration.
Perhaps this dangerous. Poetry and imagination were meant to give us a glimpse into possibilities but never to provide quotidian reality. Formerly we delved into books to visit castles in the air, but we walked out the door to go to work. It’s sad to think that crummy walk-up apartment in New York with a laptop on a mattress now should be essentially equivalent to a high windy tower in Italy, or the back of a garbage truck as a workplace. One hankers for the days when there were actual nymphs and spirits in the woods with whom we could talk and whose cellphones we didn’t confiscate. But perhaps those days are gone, and even the nymphs speak into their lapels. The world is the poorer for it.
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The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
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