The Counterpublic Papers vol. 2 no. 26

You want to break your head on a fine Wednesday morning?

Wade through this.

(I’ll wait.)

….

Escape From New York; Predator 2: 1997

Soylent Green: 2022

Blade Runner: 2019

The four dystopic SF films above were all made within a span of about 18 years. Soylent Green was released in 1973. (When my kids were much younger I’d randomly answer their questions with “Soylent Green is people!!”) Predator 2 was released in 1990. The city serves as a central character in all four, with Escape From New York and Soylent Green set in New York City and Predator 2 and Blade Runner set in Los Angeles. 

(I called Blade Runner dystopic, but there’s this weird sort of hopefulness embedded in it. The film is released in 1982. In a scant 37 years we were expected to have colonized the stars and developed viable non-distinguishable-from-humans android life. If that isn’t hope, I’m not sure what is.)

These films all reflected the belief that our cities were failing miserably. In Escape From New York, Manhattan had somehow become so dysfunctional it’d been transformed into a high security prison. In Soylent Green, New York City was close to uninhabitable, due to over-population—its food sources so scant it relied on…well, again, sorry for the spoilers, but Soylent Green is PEOPLE! Los Angeles in Predator 2 was run by two feuding (black diasporic) drug gangs. 

Many of us think science fiction is about the future…no. Science fiction is about the present. About our contemporary fears, desires, ideas, interests, etc. It is interesting to think about how much people got right and wrong about what the future would look like—there’s nothing even close to Twitter on Blade Runner (although there is something close to a voice-controlled Photoshop) and the real-life Manhattan of 1997 was the exact opposite of a high security prison. 

I wonder what science fiction is going to make out of this present?  

….

Been listening to podcasts again. The Dig, now sponsored by Jacobin and hosted by Daniel Denvir has I think one of the best left takes on the current political moment. Although Mark Blythe is pretty blind when it comes to race, the episode with him alone is worth paying for. 

Picked up Future Thinkers from Warren Ellis. 

It’s a weird listen, because like SF it claims to be about the future but is really about the present. 

But their present reads a bit to me like our past. 

Here’s what I mean.

Remember Wired?

Published originally almost 24 years ago, no other print magazine captured what we thought the internet would be. I think it was the first print magazine pretty much designed with the web in mind, and although now their design tricks are fairly standard, I wouldn’t be surprised if they broke the bank making their pages look like they’d been ripped out of an IPad (which at that point was still 16 years away). The first magazine to list the email addresses of its authors, more than any other print magazine, it brought the idea of the Internet to the masses. But it also aggressively transmitted the idea that the Internet would end racism and sexism (the internet was literally color and gender blind) and media monopolies (because everyone would be able to publish their own work onto the internet) would significantly increase productivity (through increasing the pace of technological development) transform hot wars into cyber-enabled cold ones (through increasing the viability of disrupting a nation-state through cyber-wars), and would significantly increase political representation if not bypass it directly (through increasing direct internet-enabled democracy).

It got a few things right. And if not right, right and wrong (read this 1994 article about “e-money”). But the techno-utopia it promised didn’t quite come to fruition…not because computing capacity didn’t increase enough—folks at Wired were intimately familiar with Moore’s law but I don’t think they foresaw $80 2TB hard drives—but rather because their libertarian outlook clouded their brains. For them the state (and government in general) was about as out of date as the IBM 7090 Dorothy Vaughn programmed. This makes sense given the dotcom boom they predicted (and to an extent called into being). 

I hear the same type of techno-utopian outlook in the podcast. One of the episodes features a discussion with Volvo’s resident futurist about the future of the city.

(Yes. THAT Volvo. One of my best friends drives a station wagon Volvo…about as dependable as you can get…but given this Volvo is the absolute last car company I’d expect to have a resident futurist. But yes, that Volvo.) 

For the Volvo futurist, the first thing cities need to do is think more like corporations than cities. Then they need to reach out to the digital nomads—the population so deeply connected to the web that they can work from anywhere—to figure out how to attract more of them. Then they need to figure out how to monetize their data….then they need to turn more of their city services over to entities like Google so as to better optimize them…..

If you’re hearing pieces of Richard Florida’s “creative class” concept you wouldn’t be wrong. If you’re hearing pieces of the neoliberal turn, you wouldn’t be wrong (yep, Baltimore’s entire Gun Trace unit was indicted for racketeering and the thing we need cities to do is think more like corporations). 

I’m going to see if I can get them to interview someone who is as concerned and in some ways geeked out about the future as they are…but someone actually familiar with how states operate. 

(I don’t know if Jairus Grove reads this, but if he does, Yes Jairus. I’m looking at you.)

….

Someone contacted me from Oakland’s soon to open Museum of Capitalism. 

Yes, like Volvo futurists, apparently it’s a thing. 

They asked me to contribute an essay for an exhibit they’re working on. A chunk of my contribution below:

Liverpool. 1709. A modest 30-ton vessel sails for Africa. By the end of the century, Liverpool was one of the greatest slave trading ports in the modern world. Between 1783 and 1793 alone almost 900 ships left Liverpool for the Caribbean, carrying 303,737 soon-to-be-enslaved Africans, valued at over 15,000,000 pounds (3.2 billion 2015 US dollars according to historicalstatistics.org). 

Paris. 1791. The French Revolution begins, driven by political representatives made powerful by sugar revenues from Saint Domingue. 

Louisiana. 1803. Napoleon sells the territory of Louisiana to the United States for a pittance, in order to help pay for the costs incurred fighting against the Haitian Revolution. 

Liverpool. 1809. William Etwart Gladstone (four-time British Prime Minister) was born to a major slave owner. Among his administration’s accomplishments, the introduction of secret voting. 

Haiti. 1825. Haiti agrees to pay France the sum of 150 million francs (1.2 billion 2015 US dollars) in exchange for diplomatic recognition.  

Louisiana. 1827. The Louisiana State legislature creates a property bank (the Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana). The bank was among the first to bundle mortgages, in this case collateralized by slaves. The bank sold bonds in the US and across the Atlantic. Each bond gave the bondholder a “right” to a slave-sized amount of labor. Other states in the Deep South follow. (American Slave Coast)

Great Britain. 1847 Thomas Affleck creates the Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book, publishing an edition every year until the Civil War. The now standard practice of depreciation was among the innovations Affleck helped pioneer. 

1890. Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall is published. In it we see one of the first articulations of the now taken for granted supply and demand curve. Marshall discovers the concept studying the mid 19th century world cotton market—driven by American south slave labor. 

Some would argue there is racism over there and there is capitalism over here. Perhaps loosely connected at best—a colleague of mine noted “everyone’s a little racist” in reference to the Trump election as if racism were purely a matter of attitudes that can either be ignored or perhaps focus grouped away. On the other hand some argue there is capitalism (maybe kinder, maybe a bit gentler) and then perhaps there’s a racial variant of capitalism. Both takes are wrong. There is only capitalism. It, along with the institutions (and knowledges) that make it possible (and that it makes possible), is constitutively racial. 

    I’m giving a lecture tonight at Hood College, an expanded version of a piece I wrote here first, entitled Mo(u)rning in America. It’s at 7pm. If you’re around come. 

    And a shout out to the sisters choosing to withhold their labor today.