Winter Manifesto

I came across this pretty brilliant manifesto titled, KEEP IT DIRTY. It's written by two English professors, Samuel Jacobson and Eileen Joy. 

While there's no drought in upstate New York, I think the message is still appropriate as we enter that special time of the year when the streets and paths of Ithaca become a smutty mixture of sodium chloride, greasy soil, and snowmelt. 

Some highlights below. 

"KEEP IT DIRTY is asking everyone to stop washing their cars. As in, right now. Just don’t do it. It’s easy because you don’t have to do anything. It’s also dirty. It’s a new dirty geo-politics. Droughts are dusty, but you’re not dusty enough yet. And neither is your car."

KEEP IT DIRTY says you can do nothing, and it’s fabulous.

KEEP IT DIRTY embraces a practical negativity and inhumanism that refuses resignation.

KEEP IT DIRTY recognizes, with Mary Douglas, that purity is indeed next to danger, but we need to get closer to that danger. By getting dirtier. Fuck cleanliness boundaries.

KEEP IT DIRTY uses your laziness in the interest of a better California, a better world, and a better tomorrow.

KEEP IT DIRTY is not necessarily theirs, because it is yours, mine, and ours. KEEP IT DIRTY is an act of landscape architecture.

KEEP IT DIRTY writes a blank check for tomorrow. Scrawled in mud.

KEEP IT DIRTY says “you know what I mean.” And you say, “yeah, I won’t move a finger, then.”

KEEP IT DIRTY is inaction in action. 

KEEP IT DIRTY heard you mumble “ahhh … fuck it” and said coyly: “OK.” 

KEEP IT DIRTY answers the question: how can networks scale and retain utility, through aesthetics?