Cargo cult creation

With "Cargo Cult Science", Richard Feynman popularized the story of the eponymous primitive tribe's misguided stabs at technology:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he's the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

"Cargo cult" has since become a byword for mistaking form for function, in any field. You've probably heard the reference so many times that you're frustrated that I've wasted your time going over it again. It occurs to me that this is a better way to frame my usual point about the inseparability of effort and context. To wit: you want to become the next Steve Jobs? Okay, then: just time-travel back to the 1950s site of Silicon Valley, grow up hanging around Hewlett-Packard, have an abortive college experience to do with calligraphy and then befriend Steve Wozniak at the Homebrew Computer Club. In other words, you are scrüd.

As a goal, "Become the next Steve Jobs" is only meaningful for hopelessly vague values of "Steve Jobs", and even then it doesn't mean much. Those who don't feel like defining their aims with useful specificity tend to fall back on affectations based on their idols' most visible qualities. But one can no more effectively become Steve Jobs with round spectacles, a black turtleneck and exclamations like "insanely great" than Steve Jobs became Steve Jobs with round spectacles, a black turtleneck and exclamations like "insanely great." Nor can one become the next Hunter Thompson with a bucket hat, a cigarette holder and an uncontrollable drug habit. Nor can one become the next Michael Jackson with a grabbed crotch, white socks with black shoes and a monkey. Nor can one become the next Wes Anderson with British invasion singles, elaborate set dressing and the font Futura.

Describing my earliest aborted creative projects, I pinned the failures on an inability to recognize the importance of harnessing accident and the futility of reconstructing models. I still consider that a large part of the problem, but it's also describable in terms of the cargo cult. Wanting to write a funny story, I aped Douglas Adams' tone just as a cargo cultist would mount a bamboo antenna, not realizing that tone was simply the tip, and not a particularly important tip, of Adams' logic-gone-mad humor iceberg. Wanting to make an exciting computer game, I labored over dramatic, animated cut-scenes like the ones in my favorites, rarely implementing actual gameplay at all, just as a cargo cultist would gesture wildly to the empty sky with semaphore leaves. Wanting to draw an engaging comic, I would blow hours copying Hergé's distinctive line style and the odd, stilted sound of Tintin's translated dialogue just as a cargo cultist would spend an afternoon whittling coconut headphones. Result: some crappy, unfinished Douglas Adams pastiches; some crappy, unfinished cutscenes for games never conceived and some crappy, unfinished Tintin-y characters standing around on an otherwise blank sheet.

This tendency toward "cargo cult creation" plagued me for some time — to some extent, it still does — and I regularly see it plague others. I've seen few or no works that I consider to be failed that don't have at least a hint of the cargo cult about them. This is common to high-profile failures as well as low-profile failures, schlocky multimillion-dollar albums that don't work as well as maudlin, thrown-together garage songs that embarrass theircreators even twenty years later. Aren't the most humiliating things you did as a kid the ones that most obviously imitate the surface of other, better-known works? American Beauty has taken a lot of critical derision in hindsight, and hasn't it been drawn by the film's cargo-culty (yet eerily slick) imitation of the look, feel and sound of better "serious" society-criticizing films?

As hard as I come down on the term pretentious — and I maintain that it's used lazily or purely as a pose 99% of the time —I suspect that cargo cult creation has a lot to do with what someone who says it means to identify. It's less about pretending to be something other than it "really is" — psychic powers would be required to diagnose that — than simply misappropriating the qualities of something else. It's easy to imagine a sixteen-year-old penning their own cargo cult version of Catcher in the Rye, its misanthropic narrator repeatedly calling out adult society as "fake," which brings in accusations of pretentiousness like lightning to a rod.

One way to get around cargo cult creation could be to deliberately avoid including in your own work anything that might be construed as a formal or cosmetic similarity to the work you admire. Implementing this strategy would, for me, involve mercilessly cutting any and all, say, David Foster Wallace-style footnotes in what I write, Charlie Rose-style mid-response questions in what I broadcast, Brian Eno-style asynchronous tape loops in what I record and Werner Herzog-style ecstatic truths in what I shoot. The question to keep in mind at all times: "How similar can I make this thing to the thing I like, without them having any readily identifiable qualities in common?" Surely this would sacrifice some choice moves I could have made — footnotes come in handy — but the gain has to outweigh the loss.

To reiterate what's been written before: don't think what they thought, think how they thought. Don't do what it does, do it how it does it. Don't think of what it's about; think of how it's about it.

Comments

[differences between men and women]

It was highly contagious.
--It came on very suddenly and killed very quickly. It was said that
an infected person could be "dancing at nine o'clock and dead by
eleven."
--It was, as the name suggets, characterized by a high fever and sweating.
--It wasn't the plague, and it wasn't smallpox.