Medium Design

I'm just going to paste the review I wrote for this Yale School of Architecture magazine because it's probably the most coherent version of my thoughts.

Halfway through Medium Design, Keller Easterling notes that, regrettably, "[new ideas] will not burst upon the scene, take hold, or sell books unless they are presented as the lone, leading idea standing atop the high-altitude peak." It’s a lament not only about the notion of the public intellectual, but the trap that she inevitably faces as an author. My instinct in drafting this review was to cast Easterling and her propositions for "knowing how to work on the world" in a visionary, singular light, using the kinds of words that show up on blurbs for Easterling’s past books. “Foremost.” “Extraordinary.” “Provocative.” All accurate descriptors, but in Medium Design beside the point.

Because one of Medium Design’s central arguments is a rejection of simplistic modernist narratives of iconoclastic thought leaders with singular provocative ideas. Whether those ideas are magic-bullet solutions to the planetary scale crises of the world or the most radical elegiac critique proving all potential solutions wrong, to Easterling both are simply ineffective in actually doing much in response to climate change, widening inequality, and rising fascist movements.

Ironically, by rejecting both the solutionist and the radical critic position, Easterling takes perhaps the most polarizing position available: being open to pretty much every tactic imaginable. In improv theater, this is called the “yes and” principle. It describes when performers affirmatively incorporate and expand upon ideas introduced by their scene partners, iteratively constructing a coherent narrative world. Actors use whatever they’re given–an accent, a detail, a contextual clue–and their own imaginations to further spin the story. Medium design isn’t exactly improv. As Easterling abstractly notes, it’s “not a thing” so much as "an ever-present approach to things." But it is imbued with a strong sense of “yes and”, of being a present and active participant in the milieu of the world, leveraging available resources in unconventional ways not merely to make things better, but to make something generative.

Of course, the stakes Easterling envisions for medium design’s interventions are much higher than an improv theater class. And this ever-present approach will probably not introduce permanent solutions to large-scale systemic crises. But medium design isn’t really about solutions–to the contrary, Easterling rejects even the binary of solution-problem. Among the book's crisp, Holzeresque chapter titles reflecting medium design’s core maxims are the directive that "Things Should Not Always Work" and “Problems Are Assets.” This isn’t an attempt to look on the bright side of living at the end of the world or a rapacious survey of the opportunities of disaster capitalism. It’s a practical recognition that conflict is an inevitable part of existence and that pretty much all well-intentioned systems can be gamed for abuse, which is why trying everything is necessary. There will always be problems, but Easterling’s proposed approach might be a path toward more interesting and worthy problems than the ones currently occupying our time, which are not merely tragic and horrific but extraordinarily boring.

There’s a resigned annoyance to Easterling’s outlining of the cycles of horror and outrage that have defined politics and planetary science for the last few decades: must we yet again outline the certainty of climate change, the willful ignorance and inaction of politicians and corporations, the cruelties enacted by demagogues? We’ve been through all this so many times before! This is, in part, why Easterling is weary of modern narrative: it’s so well-suited to keeping us in the loop of crisis, outrage, inaction, rinse, repeat. And while the right succeeds in wearing its enemies down through ideological inconsistency, the consistency so prized on the left can lend itself toward paralysis–what Joyful Militancy authors carla bergman and Nick Montgomery have described as “rigid radicalism.” Easterling is just as bored by the prospect of holding out for an intellectually correct revolution as she is by the crises that necessitate calls for revolution–one can almost hear her eyes rolling both times she mentions (both in italics) seizing the means of production. This isn't to say Easterling's approach is apolitical or seeking a centrist middle path–she’s open to the possibility of the seizing, she’s just not sure we should patiently wait for it to emerge. Yes, seize the means of production and manipulate capitalists to work against their own interests. If anything, medium design's adaptive, improvisational tendency calls to mind the late anarchist scholar David Graeber's definition of direct action as "the defiant insistence of acting as if one is already free."

While some of the book’s case studies (land redistribution schemes, proposals for multi-modal transit, literally Spartacus) may seem a bit optimistic to a generation of readers jaded by a lifetime of crisis and inaction or adverse reaction to it, that optimism is more calculating than naïve. A kind of ruthless optimism guides Easterling's arguments and lucid prose. She doesn’t believe things will simply work out for the best, she’s simply willing to use any means necessary to make them work for the better. The stakes are simply too high for too many to choose despair or its cynical counterpart of smug radical critique. Perhaps it's ruthless optimism–not hope, not platitudes or promises or manifestoes but a grounded determination to simply be in and make use of the world–that is most urgently needed for the future that lies ahead.