While many people in places like San Francisco are familiar with some futurists like Paul Saffo, Jamais Cascio, the good folks at the Institute for the Future, and old luminaries like Alvin Toffler, there are a wealth of other people who’ve thought about thinking about the future. Most are university types and in 2002, James Dator collected a lot of them in one place, the book, Advancing Futures. Here’s a few that stuck out to me:

• Wendell Bell, a Yale sociologist. He’s reached the lifetime recognition stage of his career, it seems, having authored a two-volume book, Foundations of Futures Studies, that is a major touchpoint for the field. He pioneered the study of the future as a respectable academic topic.
• W. Warran Wagar, SUNY Binghamton historian. Lover of science fiction and H.G. Wells, he died in 2004, but not before writing A Short History of the Future about imaginary events that were supposed to occur.
• Sam Cole, University of Buffalo. Trained as a theoretical physicist, he has developed new methodologies for futures work. He wrote Models of Doom, which critiqued The Limits to Growth.

Image: This came out of a book on Italian futurism that is somewhere in the Berkeley library. All other information about it has been scrubbed from my mind. It’s awesome though, right?

The tone is direct, gentlemanly. It begins: To the Japanese People. It ends: EVACUATE YOUR CITIES. In between, the language is firm but something like sporting. “This awful fact is one for you to ponder, and we solemnly assure you it is grimly accurate.”

Who wrote this? How did they do it? What model of “Surrender now!” text did they use?

After a little poking around, it appears that the Office of War Information’s forward office in Saipan was responsible for the text. It was written by guys like Jack Maki, a Japanese man adopted by a white Tacoma family under the command of Richard Hubert, a Canadian with a fourth grade education. Hubert happened to have worked in China and Japan, so he’d become fluent in the language and had been pressed into service by the military’s desire to find white guys who could speak the language.

The leaflets were printed on the island by the men themselves with the help of Japanese prisoners. General Thomas Farrell signed off on the final draft.

The key point here is that the men were regular guys. And here they had the responsibility of informing another nation of its imminent destruction.

As I read through their leaflet over and over, I began to wonder if the authors had unconsciously drawn on the literature of science fiction and alien invasion in composing the work. If a weapon that could destroy the world called to their minds something from out of this world.

Or perhaps these words have reverberated down through science fiction and I absorbed them through dozens of bad sci-fi novels. They mutated into the monologue the alien invaders make to bend earthlings to their will, not the real address of one nation to another.

After the jump, I recast the letter with just a few changes* as a letter from Martians to Earthlings. I don’t mean to make light of what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rather, I wonder if the changes that I’ve made to the letter reflect something about the cosmic register in which the original leaflet was written.

TO THE EARTH PEOPLE:

Mars asks that you take immediate heed of what we say on this leaflet.

We are in possession of the most destructive explosive ever devised by Martians. A single one of our newly developed bombs is actually the equivalent in explosive power to what two thousand of our giant craft can carry on a single mission. This awful fact is one for you to ponder, and we solemnly assure you it is grimly accurate.

We have just begun to use this weapon against your homeland. If you still have any doubt, make inquiry as to what happened to Hiroshima when just one bomb fell on that city.

Before using this bomb to destroy every resource of the military by which they are prolonging this useless war, we ask that you now petition the emperor to end the war. Our president has outlined for you the thirteen consequences of an honorable surrender. We urge that you accept these consequences and begin the work of building a new, better, and peace-loving Earth.

You should take steps now to cease military resistance. Otherwise, we shall resolutely employ this bomb and all our other superior weapons to promptly and forcefully end the war.

EVACUATE YOUR CITIES

*I’ve replaced Japan/ese with Earth, man with Martians, America with Mars. B-29s with craft, and deleted the word atomic.

“Today, flea markets are the only places where there is the remotest chance to obtain a radioactive device designed to purify the air, apply to the body, or add radon to drinking water,” wrote Paul Frame of Oak Ridge Associated Universities in an article on Radioactive Curative Devices and Spas from the late 80s.

It’s a fascinating article all-around, not least because there is a long history of trying to directly input energy into the body to ‘rejuvenate cells’ and such.

Civil War soldiers sat in petroleum seeps to ease their aching joints and drank crude, too, which acted as a mild “purgative.”

Turn-of-the-century Americans were far more likely to encounter electricity in “medical” form than as light in their own homes.

“The average citizen found that one of the first ‘practical’ uses of electricity was medical… Millions bought patent medicine cures or electrical disorders,” David Nye wrote in Electrifying America. “Edison patented one called Polyform in 1879, and sold it to promoters who kept it on the market for decades… By the middle 1890s magazines such as Popular Science Monthly carried articles asking ‘Is the Human Body a Storage Battery?’ So many believed the answer was yes that mass marketing of electrical devices became commercially attractive.”

So, it makes sense that the radioactive “cure” would have been commercialized along with the progressive revelation of atomic science. Sadly, last I checked there is no wind turbine patent medicine nor solar tonic. Perhaps we live in a more incredulous age, or maybe it’s just hard to bottle and sell the sun, no matter how necessary sunlight is for your health.

Images: 1. ORAU Radioactive Quack Cure Collection. 2. Vadscorner. 3. ORAU Radioactive Quack Cure Collection.

In poking around the Atomic Energy Commission’s technical reports archive, you come across some stupendous documents about how the world was going to deal with nuclear war. The marriage of the bureaucratic of the apocalyptic produces deranged offspring with very detailed models.

One 1960 Atomic Energy Commission report on a prospective 100-person post-apocalyptic “Group Shelter” is a case study of how to render an unthinkable future in the material language of the model railroad builder.

At one level, the report just describes a building that would have air intake and food and dining that could survive a series of nuclear blasts to provide shelter for a few weeks. At another level, it’s an insane fantasy of how to build an island of normalcy when the world has been destroyed. I’m reminded of BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography’s current project on Landscapes of Quarantine, which looks at the spaces that are used to contain prospectively dangerous people or things. Nuclear fallout structures invert the concept of quarantine: It’s not the world that needs to be protected from you but you that needs to be protected from the world. In effect, everything outside the space is disease.

Amidst the talk about withstanding blast pressure of 5000 pounds per square foot and reducing the radiation intensity relative to Out There by a factor of 10,000, we find little hints of the life that was expected to continue within.

The toilets permit “normal water flushing for maximum cleanliness.” Ah, just like home. “Facilities are provided for controlling and dispensing food and for heating soup, coffee, and baby bottles.” That line is about as close to a Hemingway six-word short story as it gets. (Fallout shelter with baby bottles. Used.) “The dining and recreation area is furnished with tables and benches, which may also be used for playing games of various kinds.” But no duck-duck-goose because “physical exertion would raise the body-heat output and increase the shelter temperature unnecessarily.” Thus, it makes sense to limit games to those “requiring little or no physical exertion” like bridge. Of course, “reading material and hobby craft can be utilized to occupy and relax the inhabitants.” Curling up with a book is pretty comforting, sometimes, right?

In the “Operating Manual” for the shelter, there are just the barest hints of the darkness that might encroach into the pinochle games.

As the people are admitted and the living community is organized, the group leader should consider the following sociological aspects affecting human behavior which may require action.

1. Weapons: During an extended period of living under the difficult conditions unavoidably present, there are likely to be psychological upsets among the occupants. Possession of weapons of any sort could be dangerous and perhaps disastrous.

Perhaps the understatement of the century? Living in a post nuclear America equals “difficult conditions”!

2. Beverages: Alcoholic beverages under some conditions are perhaps beneficial and unobjectionable. In the circumstances of living in close confines, care would certainly have to be exercised in the dispensing of alcoholic beverages…

3. Matches and Smoking: Again, the regulation of these items may depend in large degree upon the composition of the community.

In the event of nuclear holocaust, perhaps a smoke and a few dozen beers would be the rational human choices. At the very least, if you allow weapons into your shelter, you’d have to allow smokers a little nicotine.

4. Money and valuables: People entering the shelter can be expected to have brought whatever of their money and valuables they could salvage. Locked storages are provided in the shelter for use at the group leader’s discretion.

Looking back, it doesn’t seem like a serious enterprise to build models of fallout shelters complete with tiny little beds and lockers for diamond earrings and an astroturf covering. Yet we did it. Lee Clarke calls them “fantasy documents.” Because that’s the thing — these are not dystopian visions. In fact, they exclude just about everything that would actually happen in a nuclear war and focus (narrowly, narrowly) on the tiny little space that could still be controlled and normal. The building in the AEC report might not represent a perfect world, but relative to the world surrounding it, it would be an island of Eden.

Realistic? Nope. But what else were you going to do when faced with the possibility of the end of civilization but deal with it with the tools of bureaucratic normalcy. Hold conferences on designing for the nuclear city, have meetings on preparedness, build little high-tech hobbit holes where one could wait for better times. Faced with nuclear war, most people just wake up sweating and go check on their sleeping children. Within organizations, though, the questions lose their existential heft. They enter the hum-drum: It was someone’s job to imagine nuclear war and then design the best escape hatch and periscope for a post-apocalyptic shelter. Humans are amazing.

It’s in this context of the engineering of the post-holocaust that we have to consider nuclear power at this time. These bureaucratic visions of a world after nuclear war were the tamest expression of the fear of nuclear war. Studies came out about the effects of nuclear fear on schoolchildren. The kids said things like, “If I was in school when the bomb dropped and I hid under some wall or something, and I came out alive and came home and found my family was gone, disappeared with everything, who’d want to live anyway?”

The scientists who worked on the bomb project were well-aware that something new was upon the world as a result of their work. Oppenheimer was famously guilt-wracked. Others less so. Alvin Weinberg makes it clear, though, that his redemption went straight through atomic power. Talking about a (loss leader) price list that General Electric put out in 1964, he described his elation at the moral dimension of the commercialization of nuclear power.

I find it hard to convey to the reader the extraordinary psychological impact the GE economic breakthrough had on us. We had created this new source of energy, this horrible weapon: we had hoped that it would become a boon, not a burden. But economical power—something that would vindicate our hopes—this had seemed unlikely… [B]ecause we all wanted to believe that our bomb-tainted technology really provided humankind with practical, cheap, and inexhaustible energy we were more than willing to take the GE price list at face value.

Thus, the very people who might have been expected to rein in the corporate actors — GE and Westinghouse — from getting carried away with outlandishly low cost estimates were part of the same group. They really, really wanted nuclear power to work and on the cheap. How else to balance the apocalyptic visions that lay on the other side of the periscope?

Here we see a workshop from about 1910 in Mother Russia. What’s strange here is that most workshops of this time — complete with steam-era details like the pulleys running down from the ceiling — are photographed in black and white. Black and white photos distance us from the period in which they were taken.

Luckily, a pioneering Russian photographer managed to work out how to take pictures in color and then traveled around the Tsarist state from 1905-1915 snapping pictures of random stuff. We salute you, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. The Library of Congress purchased the collection in 1948 and put it online a few years ago.

Looking at the photos now, they seem uncanny, strange. It’s hard to see such old scenes in color. They disrupt our sense that things must have been so different back when people were in grayscale.

It’s easy enough for oil-drenched Americans to claim to rail against oil, but imagine if you really, really had no access to energy. No electricity and no liquid fuel. Just you, your muscles and whatever symbiotic organisms you could evolve to fit your needs. Welcome to being a living thing for all but the last 200 years.

I was reminded of this when I got a special missive from the secret book store that cannot be named on Mission and 20th in San Francisco. (I can’t tell you were it is, but if you find it, the password — seriously — is swordfish.) Anyhow, they send out emails on focused topics to their patrons. I happen to be on the “Oil, petroleum” list. And they sent me this incredible description of a record produced in Peking by the China Record Company.

Title:  Producing oil for the motherland/ Yao wei zuguo xian shiyou.
Place Published:  Peking
Publisher:  China Record Company
Date:  n.d.
Description:
33 1/3 RPM record, in plastic sleeve within pictorial album cover, the latter somewhat crinkled at the lower right corner. Record is in very good playable condition. Music and lyrics (in Chinese) are included in a two-leaf insert.

Late Cultural Revolution period album, with the following stirring anthems: The light of Chairman Mao shines on Taching — Oil workers are men of iron — Producing oil for the Motherland — A women’s oil drilling team — I put up silvery cables for the oil field — Let’s sing an ode to the Great Campaign — In industry learn from Taching — Battle song of the Takang oil workers — I love the oil fields of our Motherland — Faster runs my lorry with oil from Taching — Forward in the steps of the “Iron Man” — The oil workers march forever forward

To recap: a record was produced in Peking for the oilfield workers of Taching including the songs, “I Put Silvery Cables for the Oil Field,” “Faster Runs My Lorry with Oil from Taching,” and “I Love the Oil Fields of Our Motherland.”

Clearly this should be the basis for Andre 3000 and Big Boi’s next concept album. Or David Bowie’s. Or anybody’s really. Who wouldn’t want to cover, “The Light of Chairman Mao Shines on Taching”?

Second, energy independence — the talk of it, at least — has spanned the globe since the world oil market developed and swept aside any possibility of said independence.

Third, where the hell is Taching, and why was it so anthem worthy? Turns out that the Taching oil fields were the first major Chinese oil fields built without help from Westerners or Soviets. They were a major source of pride in early Mao-era China. An entire scholarly tome was written on them as a “Maoist model for economic development. A Marxist summary published the Peking Review of February 25, 1966 told it like this:

Five years ago, Taching was only a grassland. Today it is a modern oilfield, a rapidly rising enterprise which has contributed immensely to China’s self-sufficiency in oil for the first time in history.

But Taching, which has become a household word all over the country, means much more than a petroleum centre. Opened up entirely by Chinese workers, geologists and engineers, it is a landmark in the nation’s oil industry, an example of developing socialist industry by self-reliance, a pace-setter in building socialism the quickest way and with the maximum and best results.

Perhaps this is justified. An article from the 1974 China Quarterly (stuck behind JSTOR) relates that in 1949, China had 20 — 20! — petroleum engineers. “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that there was no pre-1949 base for the development of a modern petroleum industry,” Tatsu Kambara writes.

After Mao took over, the Russians helped develop China’s petroleum reserves, but after the Sino-Soviet split got publicly ugly in 1960, the Soviet engineers were sent packing. Luckily, the Taching — meaning Great Joy and now renamed Daqing — oil field, which was only discovered in 1959, turned out to be huge.

“This discovery thus made a period of self-reliance (in the sense of dependence on domestic crude) a realistic possibility,” Kambara writes. “The Chinese mobilized every effort in this field, and by 1963, preliminary production facilities were completed.”

The Peking Review called attention to the special, socialist science that went into the production of the field, writing, “When prospecting was started in 1960, the pioneers broke away from foreign stereotypes and taboos and adopted a method different from that commonly used abroad.” But Kambara notes that the new methods used by the Chinese were “not particularly novel.”

The point is, though, special methods or not, the Chinese suddenly had access to a lot more energy than they’d had before. Faster ran their lorries! And that wasn’t just some industrial factoid, it changed lives and set the country on the path to eating up energy that it remains on today.

We can look askance at their (and our) current unsustainable paths, but access to energy — in fossil or any other form — has long been a Great Joy to leftists and right-wingers alike. When you’ve only got human and animal power, all you really care about is the far right column below. That’s one reason that off-gridism and old-school conservationism are doomed to lose the war, even if they can win a battle here and there. Energy lets people do things — and people always want to do more things. That’s not the impulse I’d want to have to change to imagine a bright green future.

For more visual evidence of the importance of energy in Maoist propoganda, check out the rest of these incredible Maoist propoganda posters at Maopost.com. Way better than Rosie the Riveter.

In this passage, we see that old view of electricity — the demon, the angel — with the later, functional view of electricity. Clifford screams passionately! The old man just talks about the application, the telegraph, and its impacts on the social world of the day.

“Then there is electricity — the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence!” exclaimed Clifford. “Is that a humbug too? Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain instinct with intelligence! Or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!”

“If you mean the telegraph,” said the old gentleman, glancing his eye toward its wire, alongside the rail track, “it is an excellent thing — that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics don’t get possession of it. A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly as regards the detection of bank robbers and murderers.”

The Pyncheon family, by way of making them more interesting to you, were real, and kin to  Thomas Pynchon, the master of the paranoid tech novel.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables,

In William Faulkner’s supposedly racy and minor novel, Pylon, we read that the automobile was:

“expensive, complex, delicate, intrinsically useless, created for some obscure psychic need of the species if not the race, from the virgin resources of a continent, to be the indvidual muscles, bones and flesh of a new and legless kind.”

The car body. Atop which industrial consciousness emerges.

Image: flickr/rnair

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXyeTU3QucY]

I picked up a hilariously awesome and quite informative book, The Rise of American Oil, at a secretive bookseller on 17th and Mission. Through a locked gate and up three outdoor-carpeted flights of stairs, I found a smorgasbord of strange books including this 1948 paean to crude by Leonard M. Fanning. It’s blurbed by a bunch of midcentury oil company executives including Jake L. Hamon, an Ardmore, Pennsylvania oil baron apparently writing from beyond the grave as he’d been murdered in 1948. Hamon wrote, “You have been able to translate the story of oil into literature.”

And indeed, Fanning argued for the place of oil in literature, opening his introduction with a brief review of the appearances that petroleum had made in the world’s literature and myths. He glosses oil’s Roman appearances, the knowledge of the natives of Burma, the far East’s early oil-lit, and the burning oil springs of Baku in the Caucasus, but it’s this next line that caught my eye.

“In the Scriptures the word translated ’salt’ is used indiscriminately for common salt, niter, and bitumen or petroleum,” we read.

Leaving aside the veracity of this testimony about Hebrew scripture, this could lead to an incredible energy-focused rewrite of a classic Old Testament scene. You think of Lot’s wife, running from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah turning at the last second to see the destruction of the city visited upon it by archangels and — because she disobeyed God — turning into a pillar of salt or maybe Genesis 23-28 should read like this:

The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.

But his looked back from behind him, and she became a barrel of oil.

And Abraham gat up early in the morning to the place where he stood before the Lord: And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.

The weird thing is: the story actually makes more sense this way. God warns that if you look back, you’ll be “consumed” — and oil burns a lot better than salt. (Shortly, thereafter, you’ll recall, Lot’s daughters get him really drunk and then sleep with him. Which is neither here nor there, but part of the story anyway.)

Turns out, Fanning and I are not the only ones with such imagination. Zion Oil and Gas Inc’s founders believe that the Bible reveals the location of vast amounts of hydrocarbons reserved solely for Israel. Here’s a bit of teaser text from the video, which is required watching:

“At least one company believes that God not only has provided this natural resource for the land and people of Israel, but that it’s promise and discovery are actually predicted in the pages of Holy Scripture,” we hear, and that company is publicly-traded on the American Stock Exchange under the ticker, ZN. It’s got a market cap of about $67 million.

Zion Oil and Gas: A Special Company, With a Special Task, In a Special County

The syllabus is a brilliant resource for history of energy and industrialization fans. Here are the books are articles I culled from the list:

• The Social Shaping of Technology, edited by Milton Keynes and Judy Wajcman
  This appears to be very influential, cited over 800 times. Here’s a quick (in academic circles) overview of the research and literature surrounding the social shaping of technology [pdf].
• Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology 1880-1940, David Nye
  “Using Muncie, Indiana, as a touchstone, David Nye explores how electricity seeped into and redefined American culture.”
• Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture, Deborah Fitzgerald
  A bonus for this title — the first 40 or so pages in PDF courtesy of Yale University Press
• Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom by Brian Black
  “Against the background of the growing demand for petroleum throughout and immediately following the Civil War, Black describes Oil Creek Valley’s descent into environmental hell.”
• The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism, Adam Rome
  “the first scholarly history of efforts to reduce the environmental costs of suburban development in the United States”
• Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s, Daniel Horowitz
  “Through carefully selected documents that bring together the high-level White House decision-making process and the national conversation about energy, Daniel Horowitz helps students understand both the crises of the 1970s and the continuing relationship between American economic and foreign policy.”

And a special note on a text included in Shulman’s class, Corporate Futures: The Diffusion of the Culturally Sensitive Corporate Form, edited by George Marcus.

Perhaps you’re not aware of it, but Shell, Chevron, and the rest of the Big Oil companies put out scenarios about the future of energy that you can only call science fiction. They even give the divergent future worlds they describe catchy, one-word names — Scramble, Blueprint — as if they were a restaurant you might trek across town to visit after glimpsing it through the window of a cab on a foggy night. Shell’s latest visions come with videos and flash animations. One video, transcript here [doc], seems to be talking about our real world:

In the Scramble world, events outpace actions. Security of energy supply and fears of losing economic ground shape decision-making. For the next 10 years, people from all walks of life join in the debate about energy and climate change. But no one seems truly wedded to action on a large scale. Governments generally choose solutions that are politically straightforward, and local. They prefer to rely on indigenous energy sources.  So coal makes a big come-back in some regions, despite its higher emissions… Drivers stay with liquid fuels. With oil becoming harder to find and produce, biofuel use grows rapidly. In the Scramble world, no one is prepared to change the status quo. Dealing with today’s problem takes priority. By the 2020s, life has become volatile and uncertain.  Energy availability is often tight.  Severe weather events are blamed on a lack of previous action on climate change.

But there’s hope. We do not have to take that nasty path, which might end up with consumers getting angry about the whole Big Oil thing. Instead, we can manage and plan our way out of the energy mess. All we need is, is… a Blueprint. It’s improbable story sounds like Barack:

The world of Blueprints shows what can happen when actions outpace events. Groups of seemingly disconnected people in California – venture capitalists, farmers, politicians – collaborate around opportunities for profitable action on climate change.Publics put international pressure on governments for change.  Smart investments in modern facilities improve air pollution, energy efficiency, and greenhouse gas emissions all at the same time. This isn’t a sudden outbreak of altruism.  It’s a recognition of shared interests, new opportunities for profitable business, and the benefits of taking action before it’s forced by circumstances. In the world of Blueprints, local actions spread and join up – like the C40 megacities pact of mayors and others, experimenting and sharing good practices around carbon emissions, transport and energy efficiency.

And of course the good world is what Shell wants. Because what’s good for the world is good for Shell, and vice versa. Of course.

In any case, these scenarios have a long and fascinating history, requiring, as they do, the application of the principles of fiction. Here’s a chapter from Corporate Futures that deals with the writing and editing of a set of Shell scenarios [pdf]. It’s structured as a Q&A between Betty Sue Flowers, a former English professor (and now director of LBJ’s library) who wrote the 1992 scenarios, and Robbie Davis-Floyd, a cultural anthropologist at UT-Austin, who share a “mutual fascination with myth.”

Flowers described Shell’s reasoning for making up the future ahead of time:

And they said, well, it’s actually not only false to have straight-line forecasting, but it’s dangerous because you can be lulled into thinking you do know the future, that you have the story for the future, and that the future is the past, put into the future. So what they decided to do instead was to build self-conscious stories, that is, they would call them “stories,” and to build two of them, equally persuasive, based on the same statistical beginning point and statistically told, that is, told in economic language, for thirty years into the future. They would spend three years putting this together with a team of twenty or so from all over the world, and then they’d spend the next year disseminating them in workshops around the world, so that what you got was a common culture based on not a story about the future but two stories about the future.

Seems a bit like a stall tactic, huh? Or at the least a bit of Sophistry, even if it was sophisticated and filled with charts and tables and good faith. What’s really interesting about this is that Shell finally got around to picking a scenario for the first time this year.

Blueprint it is, from now on.

But it being a social media heavy world now, and all 2.0 and stuff, Chevron one-upped Shell and came out with Energyville, a SimCity game designed to teach you how hard it is to power the world. I’m sure a post-doc somewhere is out there analyzing it as literature, and rightly so.

Sometimes, when I went to get deep on something, I just open up the log-in screen and listen to the piano-and-string heavy musical loop over and over. The problem is that I see an important event — someone dying/living, a mother holding a baby for the first time, a son coming of age — and then the loop ends and the vision fades, sometimes before I even recognize the faces of the people.

The game is all part of Chevron’s advertising campaign: Will You Join Us? This morning, I saw a San Francisco bus idling, fully-encased in the slogan.