Good afternoon, beloved -
The other night we went to see a screening organized by our friends Jenny and Andrew as part of a block party in their street in Hackney. Folks played music, there under the railway arch. They piled tables with pizzas and bottles of beer for people to grab, put on odd little performances involving LED masks and projections, screened experimental films folks in the road had made. It was how I always imagined culture would manifest itself in a better world — i.e. not the shitty slab of superhero IP at the mall multiplex, but friends and neighbors getting together to share the idiosyncratic, personal things they'd made for one another to enjoy, with kids running around, trains going by overhead and rainclouds blowing by like all of life.
It felt modestly utopian, it really did: a concrete reminder that the Revolution is there for us always, wherever and for however long we're able to grasp it. Being me, though, I couldn't help but wonder what enabling conditions would have to be in place for something like this to happen more often and in more places. Because, while I always assume there are things like favela-rooftop baile funk parties going on all over the planet, every night of every week, the sad thing is that I couldn't imagine anything like this event happening quite this way in too many neighborhoods in contemporary London.
That part of Hackney is able to draw upon a particularly dense and long-standing community of artists, and though the process is surely well-enough advanced, it's not yet entirely gentrified. Within these few surrounding streets, there are enough people whose daily practice involves making music or film or theater to support the transformation of a typical East London streetscape into a surprisingly well-appointed open-air venue. In each of the things they did, you could discern a subtle nous, a particular flavor of resourcefulness that struck me as being fundamentally rooted in craft — like, they'd shrouded the streetlamps in blackout hoods, and lined the inner curve of the railway arch with an appliqué of dressmakers' paper, which made an ideal surface to project films onto but was trivially removable the next day. By contrast, though there are surely hotspots here and there on the map, I'm not at all sure you could conjure up that kind of critical mass of people with long-term experience of the craft of expression elsewhere around town. And, really, it's the matter-of-fact everydayness of what we took in together that made it feel utopian to me. I'm not at all interested in such moments as the special preserve of "creative districts," any more than I believe there's any such thing as a "creative class."
I guess I still believe that we're all capable of producing culture, just like we're all capable of producing knowledge, and that the city streets furnish us with both a ready and a resonant venue for the expression of our own culture. When I thought of myself as working in the field of "design for networked cities and citizens" fifteen years ago, I used to insist that the city is here for you to use. But it was truer the other night in Beck Road, and in a richer and more deeply affirming way, than I would have let myself understand in those days, and I've been carried up by the force of that truth ever since.
§ All of that is a milllllllllion miles away, both geographically and in tenor, from Forest City, Malaysia — a "creepy" "ghost city" and duty-free port built more or less on spec by the Chinese developer Country Garden, to the tune of some $100 billion. Unfortunately, though, if pressed on the question I'd probably admit that what's going on in Forest City this month is likely a surer guide to Our Shit Future than that inspiring evening in Hackney.
What's going on in Forest City, then? Wired is reporting that my very favoritest punching bag, ancap flim-flam merchant Balaji Srinivasan, is holding a Network School there — naturally, a for-profit one — to fleece his coterie of weird-nerd punters, possibly even get them laid, and maybe incidentally school them in the arcane tenets of his thought.
Let me first say that there's nothing at all wrong with the idea of a political tendency standing up some sort of academy to train adherents in how best to propagate its beliefs, practices and lifeways — in fact, I think the political currents I feel the deepest connection with suffer badly from not doing something along those lines, for reasons that are perhaps obvious. But if the academy in question is something ginned up by the hapless Balaji? You know I'm honor-bound to dunk on it. It strikes me as verrrrrry on-brand for him to choose "the world's second most-useless megaproject" as the site of his Network School.
"[M]ainly funded by China and built to attract Chinese nationals," "seen by some as a new form of colonialism in Malaysia," Forest City is one of those segregated extraterritorial enclaves Keller Easterling characterized so richly in Enduring Innocence: simultaneously an inscription of Chinese soft power on Malaysian soil, like all the other Belt and Road projects, and a development project meant to extract value from a site and duct it swiftly offshore. But as then-Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad's move to forbid foreign nationals from buying property in Forest City suggests, it's also a standing contradiction of everything Srinivasan argues in The Network State: a concrete reminder that for better or worse, national sovereignty is still very much the determinant factor in shaping territorial affairs.
It occurs to me that you may not be familiar with this clown or his Network State, in which case I envy you. The thing is, as former CTO of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, he's both well-resourced and very well-connected, and he's been nothing but clear about what he wants to achieve. "What I'm really calling for" (and why not take him entirely at his word here?) "is something like tech Zionism — when a community forms online and then gathers in physical space to form a 'reverse diaspora.'" The "community" in question here is that of an aggrieved, overwhelmingly male minority who feel that contemporary life, even in states comprehensively captured by the neoliberal consensus, does not adequately accommodate their interests, values and desires (!). And the "physical space" he's talking about consists of a scattered global archipelago of private, extraterritorial "charter cities" stripped of all regulation, and managed on a for-profit basis by consortia of "aligned" investors. These special economic zones would sport their own blockchain-mediated institutions of citizenship, and ultimately, against the backdrop of a decadent and dying world of woke-normie states, they would nurture a virile, vigorously flourishing society of Risk-Takers and Doers, would-be protagonists every one.
In order to understand why this feels like a reasonable proposition to Balaji's not-inconsiderable number of followers, you need to know just a little bit about how the libertarian mind works, and the classic opposition of "voice" and "exit." This was the German economist Albert O. Hirschman's 1970 attempt to map the responses available to people when some product or service has fallen radically short of their expectations: either they can avail themselves of whatever expressive means are at hand to communicate their disgruntlement, and seek redress — this is "voice" — or they can exit the relationship. (Hirschman meant for voice and exit to characterize the choices available to consumers, but of course for the committed libertarian all things can and should be reduced to commercial relations between contractually-bound sovereign entities, even and perhaps especially citizenship.) Srinivasan and his audience are people who have contemplated the difficulties of getting along in an actual society, where they're confronted with the reality of others whose needs they experience as inconvenient, and concluded that the best strategy available to them is...to flounce.
Happily, from the perspective of this nimrod brohort, the cumulating financial crises of the post-2008 period — not least those stemming from the debt traps laid for unwary governments by both Chinese and Western lenders, invariably working with a pliable and infinitely corruptible local comprador class — have left the planet strewn with cash-strapped state polities willing to turn themselves out to any slick and superficially plausible monorail merchant. And so the steady cadence of stories now bubbling up to the mainstream media about almost cartoonishly clueless and arrogant cryptodudes, parachuting into some financially desperate tropical locale with plans to remake it from the ground up on the blockchain.
As a collector and connoisseur of these stories, I can tell you that they hit a few consistent beats. You have your comical levels of ignorance: the New York Times reports, for example, that the founders of one Puerto Rico-based private-city venture changed its name from "Puertopia" to "Sol" because some wag told them the former meant "eternal boy playground" in Latin. (It, uh, does not, although “boy place” is stingingly accurate enough to commend virtually any other name.) Cases of starry-eyed would-be saviors being taken, themselves, by some far cannier local operator. Physical premises that rival the Fyre Festival in the world championship of oversold-and-underdelivered, whose primary tenants generally appear to be lizards and mold. And as I pointed out in Radical Technologies as far back as 2017, always, always nasty financial disputes between these new-age titans of commerce, of a type that regularly seem bound for resolution in the very terrestrial courts blockchain-based smart contracts were supposed to render obsolete. Presented with such a bill of particulars, you hardly need to be a J.G. Ballard to know it'll all end in tears.
It's easy to surrender, when reading such tales, to the undoubted pleasures of schadenfreude. It's equally hard to shake the suspicion that our own communities are better off without these world-striding Randian supergeniuses, and that we might as well let them select themselves out of the mix if that's their stated preference. And there's no doubt at all that there's always something amusing about the kind of delusional Dunning-Krugeresque hubris that's de rigeur among the Balaji set, especially in its comeuppance. For all of that, though, I don't think we can afford to take our eye off the thing that's being unfolded underneath all the self-beclowning toolson buffoonery.
The notion that one should "never waste a good crisis" may not have been invented by the libertarian right, but as Naomi Klein observed in The Shock Doctrine, they're certainly the ones that refined the hell out of it as a mode of praxis, and spent decades building an institutional trellis to accomplish it. (The left accelerationism of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams frankly leaves me cold, but their Inventing the Future is very good on this as well.) The Network State might strike us now as a childish fantasy, but it's also a carefully expressed and consciously avowed blueprint for the kind of society some particularly well-connected and deep-pocketed men want (and want us) to live in. And we certainly do seem to be headed into the teeth of a crisis together, don't we? Given what history tells us about the ability of densely-interlinked douchebag elites to make use of such moments of rupture, to say nothing of the decades-long stasis of hegemonic closure that followed the last time they were able to pull this trick, I'm thinking we might want to pay close attention.
§ New Exuberance Watch! Time was, you wanted a bike helmet, you'd be limited to a relatively small number of options from a very few producers. Your options were sharply constrained by the materials available, the inherent conservatism of safety culture and the sheer expense involved in tooling up for the production of something that had to pass an alphabet soup of safety standards — ANSI, ASTM, CPSC, EN 1078 and so on. All of that has clearly begun to change, though, for reasons that epitomize my thinking about the signature proliferation of form I call the New Exuberance in material culture. Here are three entirely different approaches to the folding bicycle helmet, ranked here from most to least conventional.
These all strike me as being aimed at a relatively niche market segment — occasional riders who want the protection of a helmet on (especially) bikeshare journeys around town, but aren't consistent enough in their riding habits to have integrated carrying one into their lifestyle. They all seem, in other words, like something you're intended to stash in your totebag and whip out when the moment calls for an impromptu modal switch, and the very nicheness of the proposition is interesting in and of itself (at least if you're an urban-mobility dork like me). What's still more interesting is that none of these offerings emerges from the R&D labs of a more established concern; each is the product of a start-up that, so far as I am able to tell in a few minutes of desk research, was launched for that specific purpose. If you want to know why I think of the recent turn as "exuberant," well, multiply the ferment involved in this recent flowering of designs for head protection across every category of shaped object, and really the entire social field. It will certainly not be a dull or a drab world in which we choke on our effluvia, that's for sure.
§ At the moment, I'm reading Corsín Jiménez and Estalella on Free Culture and the City, mostly for my PhD but with some genuine pleasure as well; listening to whatever should happen to be on NTS at the moment, and if neither of the live streams grabs me then one of their “infinite mixtapes”; and watching a Venture Bros. movie I didn't even know came out. Love the Venture Bros.
That's about it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 132 of Tuesday, 24 September 2024, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊