The world is burning, but at least we have California landscape robots

Everything is falling apart. The senator is insider trading. The algorithm is mercilessly selling you the most tepid and tasteless version of your life. The last remaining industries are food delivery applications, "cloud software" and antiquated money laundering schemes. Your account has been charged, and you are only now hearing about it for the first time. We are vacillating between anger and weak nihilism. Although this biweekly column will not solve this problem, it will provide you with a little good thing to appreciate, even though it is all weird, valuable and beautiful. Recognition of something.

You may find yourself thinking about the end of the world.

Some fires burn with such ridiculous intensity that they have created their own weather system across interstate highways. The California drought drove desperate bears from the forest to the crowded beaches of Lake Tahoe to cool off in the water. All day long grumpy billionaires treat life as an abstract concept, like an infinite oasis-what does space travel teach me about being alive? – And the lives of the rest of us are just a ruthless, honed arithmetic – how much do I need to pay to survive? Moderate climate legislation is laughed at as naive, a child’s delusion, and then unforgettable by the senators. If you thank them for their generosity, they will be very grateful. The sports franchise is run by a former private equity psychiatrist with a terrible beard; the TV shows all feel like memes from six months ago. The cruelty of the word "fulfillment center", and everything that is now called such a thing, is polished by parasitic agencies with benevolent-sounding marketing language. Oil and pharmaceutical companies use such brazen methods to dodge lawsuits, you won't believe it, you will find someone to explain to you again. At the same time, the damp tyrant of Silicon Valley dreams of a civilized future: a video game where you go to a meeting.

The end of the world is irresistible, because it is ultimately a solution, the culmination of all this decay; if it is not an antidote, then at least a probation. But the asteroid will never come, and the flooded subway tunnel drains water. Instead, it is a social chore that requires you to be alive enough to buy a new fried chicken concept, but not prosperous enough. Only filthy landlords, mountains of e-mails, and cities that increasingly resemble airport bathrooms are left. They razed everything you like to the ground and built a juice bar on the rubble. The menu is all lowercase and the walls are artificial grass, because your current life is both "casual" and "exotic". It's actually not these things, not even close, but think of them as a podium. Imagine a startup co-founder named Mason telling you that your life can be a mess.

I suggest that you may be frustrated by all this and think the end of the world, because I have been there too, there, alternately obsessed with every new forensic detail about us breathing, plundering the earth, and hope I have never heard of them fundamental. I'm going crazy, that's what I want to say. The movie was paused for too long, the screen saver was activated, and I scrolled through my phone looking for things like "Monarchs who died in battle" and "The rarest figs". Like a Lamborghini, admire the kitchen counter that has just been cleaned. Look for things that will not save me but are still vital in an indestructible way. These are our pastimes, the little compassion in modern life.

It was in the past year, somewhere in doom and malaise, that I began to rely on California mountains, delivered to me by California landscape robots. The robot is a project conceived by Hunter Owens in 2019 and managed with the help of Logan Williams. Owens lives in California; Williams did not move to Europe until last year. The robot works by connecting itself to ALERT Wildfire, a network of hundreds of cameras that are fixed on cell phone towers high in the hills and mountains of California to monitor the wilderness for signs of fire. Cameras are everywhere. As far south as Aotai Mountain, about 20 miles from Tijuana, it has been up along the coast. At some points, the camera will swing and capture the Pacific Ocean, always extending behind the pine trees. They travel as far north as Washington and Oregon, just outside the border of Nevada, where the fodder is exploded at night by stars and land outlines that look like Mars. The recordings of each camera in the network are transmitted to an online observation center that anyone can access. The robot randomly selects a camera site approximately every 30 minutes and captures the latest frame at that moment. This is the image it sends us.

The synopsis of the robot seems to have to be carefully planned at first glance, and each scene feels perfectly arranged and important-ending the credit sequence; promoting to some powerful place. But when I asked Owens and Williams, they told me that there was hardly any curation. (In one example, Williams did increase the choice of robots, including a camera site where, after dark, a comet could be seen falling from the sky above San Joaquin Hill.) Williams even went from The prejudice against capturing sunrise and sunset is not implemented in the robot's schedule, as they have done in other similar projects. All we see is the absurd beauty of California synchronized with the robot's obedience to the record. Another Owens robot "traffic-west" extracts frames from the feed of traffic and weather cameras in the western United States. This project is also very gloomy, creepy loneliness on an empty road in a remote place, gas station on the edge, but usually just road construction signs and rain, 18-wheelers and dilapidated cars passing by the strip mall . The California landscape has never been missed.

The mountains in Monterey County look like missionaries, looking down at the clouds below. The sunrise in Los Angeles will break your heart. Sky of various colors, overripe mangoes and Pepto Bismol pink. Mount Whitney looks like a John Ford movie. The pine trees further north, in Butte County, are so uniform in height and density as if they were buzzing with hair clippers. A mansion close to the Hollywood hills. Dozens of neat rows of vines in Solano County. In the early morning, mist enveloped the valley, like a gun battle broke out in a salon in the west.

I asked Williams about California’s ability to constantly reveal something spectacular and new about itself in the pictures delivered by the robot.

He wrote: “For me, knowing that this is not actually a special image, but at this moment there are countless ridges and valleys with the same amazing scenery, which many people or cameras have not seen. This makes me It feels more oceanic." In an email. All this seemingly infinite but actually very fragile simultaneity is overwhelming, awesome, and untestable. "

The footage from each observation point will be archived for 12 hours before it disappears forever. Therefore, every scene that the robot stripped from these cameras was wonderful and a miracle, because it was the first of its kind, and then it went extinct. The way the sky finds that exact time segment. This does not solve the sultry madness of consciousness in 2021. We have no track other than erosion and exhaustion, but it is a gorgeous and ridiculous thing. It will temporarily stretch out its hand to pull you out of the abyss and say, look at this, Can you believe it?

Scrolling feeds, released in chronological order, there is an almost illusion effect, a taste of the old Internet, days after days only focusing on one thing, its muse, California is about to fall asleep and become active again, night vision The small white dot patterns of city lights are sometimes glimpses of things, picnic tables and observatories. This is a mix of montage and shrine, the original honesty of surveillance video, but with the romantic color of postcards. It maintains a long-distance relationship with California, and it sends you a picture of yourself by texting you one day. It is not a podcast advertisement for a gambling app, nor is it a notification bubble in a color gradient calculated specifically to hijack our brains. This is a moment where there seems to be no wifi. It's not entirely nature, but it's not indoors either. It won't go somewhere, but it won't get into trouble either. This is reliable. You can count on the mountains to be the thing.

Ironically, these cameras are not meant to be mosaics of California. They are the electrode pads of the electrocardiogram, and we must stick to its chest to track the exact speed at which we kill it. In the summer and early fall, the feed often catches the terrible flames erupting from the mountains, emitting black smoke throughout the landscape. In August 2020, a fire swept through Bonny Doon, a small town with about 3,000 people near Napa, where ALERT Wildfire cameras were installed. The last transmission of the network was when the camera stared at the flame screen under the cell phone tower, it looked like you were pressing the buzzing orange light bulb filament on your eyes. Since the robot is designed to retrieve the most recently recorded images, every time it loops to the Bonny Doon site, it pulls out and publishes the same scene, that is, the fire engulfed the camera, and over and over again, the forest follows you like a ghost, howling Call all eternity.

In the images of many cameras, there is an icon in the upper right corner of the screen that says "Image Courtesy of PG&E." This is the largest and most famous grotesque utility company in California, whose rampant negligence has caused many fires. Again, our doomsday predicament. The natural earth and every good particle on it were crushed by the fists of one catastrophic event or another, gluttonous companies gritted their teeth, orchestrated shameless public relations activities, and robots were only slightly malfunctioning.

All this seems to be undeniable. But what can you do? Millions of years ago, the earth hit itself so violently that the mountains broke from the surface. The Pacific Ocean once covered some valleys in California. Developers found ground-breaking whale skeletons on housing projects, and anthropologists believe they have swam through them. The spine and spine pulled out of the soil are completely intact. The whale has now disappeared, but we are in the same valley, you and me and all of us, behind the taxi, drifting on the Internet, hangovers trekking on the crosswalk, trying to do this. The mountains in the distance are silent and silent, a fragile but immortal planet, submerged but longer than a liar. I must believe this to be true. Watching them stand there.