The Olympics has a dirty history in every host city. Poor people get shipped out or thrown in jail, very often. “Stimulation” of the local economy usually does not result in a reduction of poverty after the games. New buildings usually do not provide public access or housing for the poor after the games.

The country where I work has never hosted the games, but an incredible amount of money is poured into its very successful football team. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be games or teams at all because they do a lot of good for some people, but they’re often taking money away from human rights protection and the basics of life; that’s not okay, I don’t think. In this same country where I work, the President hasn’t changed in 20 years, old-growth forests are being clear-cut, private British and American companies are making a killing providing terrible utilities services, and police routinely extort illegal payments from frightened poor people.

Even if you don’t work with a threatened, marginalized, or poor community, you do share a planet with everyone and it’s an ethical imperative that we act on the fact that we’re all in this together. To me, that means fostering knowledge, kindness, and generosity, which I understand and apply psychospiritually, micro-interactively, ecologically, and structurally/systematically. And THAT means, I think, speaking out against one or more of the injustices associated with the Olympics before getting to the fun of theorizing the Olympics. Read “Hope’s Edge” by Lappe and Lappe and “The Anti-Politics Machine” by Ferguson.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/july-dec08/athleteschina_08-14.html

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d5c43928-69a2-11dd-91bd-0000779fd18c.html

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080808.wgtolyonline0808/BNStory/Technology/home

Surely Chris Kelty wants to weigh in at this point…

Btw, Tim your links are cool.

The other thing that I haven’t seen get a lot of press is the issue of doping. On the one hand we have athletes who — I imagine — see their bodies in a very ‘Strathernian’ way: subject to endless work and modification by all sorts of people, chemicals, etc. etc. On the other hand we have rules which focus around ‘individual’ achievement and which makes using drugs to enhance performance seem unethical, because these substances somehow modify the body/subjectivity of the athlete in a way that compromises the idea that they are an autonomous, achieving actor.

Rex, you’re right. But I’m not sure that scaling occurs in coordinated systems between 200 and 2000. I’m not even sure that getting a million men with guns across the Yalu River encounters any scale thresholds. As long as each unit in the system has a trainable lockstep function and rigorously controlled inputs (the earpieces, which I suspect were just stage monitors so they could keep on their counts without losing time to sound difraction in that big space) the dynamic is merely additive.

Where you get scale effects is in networked systems subject to chaotic inputs. Those systems are based on a looser feedback model sensitive both to initial conditions and evolving fluxes. So the coordination dynamic is not merely additive because each new unit you plug in adds a variable. The coordination comes not from rigid task closure but the global mission definition within which the improvisations are occurring. There were no improvisations during that opening ceremony.

The famous macro-example of system coordination vs. network coordination is the blitzkrieg. The French were locked into a rigid command hierarchy and task closure based on a detailed but static definition of the situation. They were broken the moment the Germans, whose command model was more fluid, succeeded in changing the situation and exploiting its evolution.

At a micro-level I heard an interesting example of this from the Games. It turns out Michael Phelps is the kind of guy who thrives on routine. He has a procedure locked in and does the same thing every time. He’s the Maginot Line of swimming, and he’s formidable because the rules of the situation are locked in so that all of the variables can actually be pre-managed. In contrast, his closest competitor Ryan Lochte has no routine. He says he sees the water and visualizes going fast, then just does it. If the swimming was not happening in lanes he’d beat Phelps every time.

In Chinese cultural history this is like the difference between a Confucian (or better, a Legalist) and a Daoist, which brings me back to the original point that although the Chinese are indeed particularly good at large-scale systems coordination, because of their historical success in controlling input variables for long periods, they’ve also had some big shakeups; and like any culture that has coped with uncontrolled variables they also have resources of network coordination to call upon. Of course the same is true for the United States, which may default to network coordination but is perfectly capable of systems coordination when that’s what’s called for.

And when we start talking about arrays, we should expect to find interesting stuff from people studying data aesthetics:

http://teemingvoid.blogspot.com/2008/08/array-aesthetics-olympic-edition.html

And following the link in that post to another on modular mass production and the terracotta army leads to other thoughts that I don’t have the time to articulate…

For more human pixels see here:

http://maasmedia.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/unconventional-pixel-displays/

Then on the other hand… how much do you have to know about the country to find surprising the idea that it’s good at forms of governance that really excel in creating monumental performances/material culture through the mobilization of _tremendous tremendous amounts of people_?

Waste as index of meaning.

F-word, yes. I’ve been interested in the subtext about collectivization in the lavish praise of the opening ceremonies from people like Bob Costas. Can’t get over how the Chinese are able to get all those folks so perfectly coordinated. The admiration seems genuine and yet oddly orientalist. Have you never seen a marching band at a football half-time show, Bob? Or “Up With People?” Apparently doing the exact same thing with two thousand rather than two hundred changes the interpretive scale.

Does anyone have good links on how the opening ceremony presented Chinese history? There’s got to be tons written on it.