media studies | Chris Aldrich

Substack and Social News Platforms - My problem with Substack is that I can't use yesterdays version to wrap up my fish. —Chris Aldrich, DABC, 2024-12-14

Mr. Typewriter, a Royal 660 Electric Typewriter, as inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s HAL 9000?

Before we were introduced to the ominous HAL 9000, some knew his older, creepy, sexist cousin Mr. Typewriter, personified by a Royal 660 which appears in the 1966 short film/advertisement Successful Secretary presented by Royal Office Typewriters and directed by Carl A. Carbone.

While there is some heavily gendered blather juxtaposed with some entertaining and atmosphere filling late-1960s jazz, the star of the short film is Mr. Typewriter who incessantly “sells” him self to a contemporaneous mannequin secretary.

This commercial for a 1966 Royal 660 electric typewriter predates Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey by two years. But based on the scripting, pacing, composition, and even some of the character, it seems like Kubrick was heavily inspired by this short film.

HAL 9000’s tone in 2001 seems to have come straight from Mr. Typewriter and even some of the typewriter/computer personification particularly in the camera angles on the machines seems stark and heavily familiar. One can’t help but notice how Mr. Typewriter looms over the viewer at the 7 minute mark as it delivers it’s “helpful” advice.

“I think you’ll like the half sheet better. It is faster.” —Mr. Typewriter, [timestamp 6:59]

Litton Business Systems, Inc. was a subsidiary of Litton Industries, Inc., an American defense contractor that specialized in shipbuilding, aerospace, electronic components, and information technology. They had bought out Royal Typewriters and had created the electric Royal 660 (released in 1966) specifically to compete with the IBM Selectric (introduced July 1961). Given the time period Litton would have been a potentially more ominous corporate parent than IBM.

Movie buffs have often speculated that the letters of H.A.L.’s name were a one letter increment from I.B.M. Kubrick was known to have corresponded with IBM in relation to the film, but perhaps this was a macguffin to cover up the inspiration from Royal and Litton?

Stanley Kubrick was known to have used an IBM Model C electric typewriter which was manufactured between 1958 and 1967.

Here, Mr. Typewriter in a calm voice makes suggestions to a secretary about his usefulness while HAL does it for a male astronaut (a heroic figure of the space race in that time period). Suddenly the populace feels the more mysterious computer might be a bad actor compared to the typewriter which was slowly being supplanted.

With any luck, Mr. Typewriter wasn’t sexually harassing anyone in the office, but it’s highly unlikely any of the audience at the time was dwelling on such issues until Colin Higgins’ 9 to 5 (Twentieth Century Fox, 1980) which uncoincidentally featured a row of Royal electric typewriters in it’s trailer.

Intriguingly it bears mentioning that the voice over on the 9 to 5 trailer sounds like William Schallert, who portrayed the avuncular Professor Quigley in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (Walt Disney Productions, 1969), another film of the period which has something to say about personifying information systems and the coming era of artificial intelligence, though this time as embedded into the brain of a young Kurt Russell.

While the gendered roles portrayed at the time are atrocious (a male machine represented by a male voice is now directing the woman’s work in the office instead of her too-busy, jet-setting male boss), you have to love the techno-utopianism engendered by Successful Secretary:

“We’re living in an electric world, more speed and less effort.”—Mr. Typewriter

Thoughts about Robin Sloan’s Spring ’83 Experiment

I’ve been thinking about Robin Sloan‘s Spring ’83 Experiment on and off for a bit.

I too almost immediately thought of Fraidyc.at and its nudge at shifting the importance of content based on time and recency. I’d love to have a social reader with additional affordances for both this time shifting and Ton’s idea of reading based on social distance.

I’m struck by the seemingly related idea of Peter Hagen’s LindyLearn platform and annotations which focuses on taking some of the longer term interesting ideas as the basis for browsing and chewing on. Though even here, one needs some of the odd, the cutting edge, and the avant garde in their balanced internet diet. Would Spring ’83 provide some of this?

I’m also struck by some similarities this has with the idea of Derek Siver’s /now page movement. I see some updating regularly while others have let it slip by the wayside. Still the “board” of users exists, though one must click through a sea of mostly smiling and welcoming faces to get to it the individual pieces of content. (The smiling faces are more inviting and personal than the cacophony of yelling and chaos I see in models for Spring ’83.) This reminds me of Stanley Meyers’ frequent assertion that he attempted to design a certain “sense of quiet” into the early television show Dragnet to balance the seeming loudness of the everyday as well as the noise of other contemporaneous television programming.

The form reminds me a bit of the signature pages of one’s high school year book. But here, instead of the goal being timeless scribbles, one has the opportunity to change the message over time. Does the potential commercialization of the form (you know it will happen in a VC world crazed with surveillance capitalism) follow the same trajectory of the old college paper facebook? Next up, Yearbook.com!

Beyond the thing as a standard, I wondered what the actual form of Spring ’83 adds to a broader conversation? What does it add to the diversity of voices that we don’t already see in other spaces. How might it be abused? Would people come back to it regularly? What might be its emergent properties? This last is hard to know without experimenting at larger scales.

It definitely seems quirky and fun in and old school web sort of way, but it also stresses me out looking at the zany busyness of some of the examples of magazine stands. The general form reminds me of the bargain bins at book stores which have the promise of finding valuable hidden gems and at an excellent price, but often the ideas and quality of what I find usually isn’t worth the discounted price and the return on investment is rarely worth the effort. How might this get beyond these forms?

It also brings up the idea of what other online forms we may have had with this same sort of raw experimentation? How might the internet have looked if there had been a bigger rise of the wiki before that of the blog? What would the world be like if Webmention had existed before social media rose to prominence? Did we somehow miss some interesting digital animals because the web rose so quickly to prominence without more early experimentation before its “Cambrian explosion”?

I’ve been thinking about distilled note taking forms recently and what a network of atomic ideas on index cards look like and what emerges from them. What if the standard were digital index cards that linked and cross linked to each other, particularly in a world without adherence to time based orders and streams? What does a new story look like if I can pull out a card either at random or based on a single topic and only see it or perhaps some short linked chain of ideas (mine or others) which come along with it? Does the choice of a random “Markov monkey” change my thinking or perspective? What comes out of this jar of Pandora? Is it just a new form of cadavre exquis?

This standard has been out for a bit and presumably folks are experimenting with it. What do the early results look like? How are they using it? Do they like it? Does it need more scale? What do small changes make to the overall form?

For more on these related ideas and the experiment, see some of these threads of conversation I’m aware of:

Know of others? I’m happy to aggregate them here.

Featured image: Collection of 1990s 88×31 buttons by https://anlucas.neocities.org/88x31Buttons.html

Lois Weber’s film Where are My Children? (1916) and the history of Abortion in America

When we discuss the topic of the history of abortion and birth control in the United States, where are the mentions of Where are My Children? (Universal Studios, 1916)?

The movie was Universal’s top grossing film of 1916. It’s estimated to have grossed over $3 million at a time when ticket prices were less than 50¢ each.

Where are My Children? was written, produced, and directed by Lois Weber. The film was ultimately added to the National Film Registry in 1993.

Weber came from a devout middle class Christian family of Pennsylvania German ancestry. She left home & lived in poverty while working as a street-corner evangelist for two years with the evangelical Church Army Workers.

Her work with the Church Army Workers included preaching and singing hymns on street corners and singing and playing the organ in rescue missions in red-light districts in Pittsburgh and New York.

Meyer made the film at the height of her career when she was Universal’s top director. Her work and career was at (or perhaps above) the level of Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith, though it has largely been minimized subsequently because she was a woman.

Lois Weber was
– 1st woman accepted to Motion Picture Director’s Association, precursor of Director’s Guild
– on 1st directors committee of @TheAcademy
– Mayor of Universal City

Lois Weber was also one of highest paid and most influential directors of her time. She was also amongst the first directors to form her own production company.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_Weber

The Lost L.A. episode of Dream Factory (@KCET, 2017) covers portions of Weber’s career and provides clips from Where are My Children?
(@nathanmasters‘ entire series here is the real “California’s Gold”)
kcet.org/shows/lost-la/…

In addition to the site above, one can watch the @KCET episode of Lost LA: Dream Factory on YouTube:

I can’t wait to delve further in to the history and work of Weber by reading @StampShelley‘s book Lois Weber in Early Hollywood. University of California Press, May 2015. ISBN 9780520284463
amzn.to/3u7qzrO