Creative Workspaces
17th April 2015
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 is 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.