Good evening, beloved -
It's not often I trip over a book which grabs me by the throat quite like Stephanie Wakefield's Anthropocene Back Loop: Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space (2020, available from the publisher as a free PDF here).
It's a trifle uneven, but for reasons that will become obvious, Back Loop is a book I wish dearly that I'd had ready to hand when I was writing Lifehouse. It’s both an overstuffed repository of tools and concepts and language, and a kind of Spinozan prophylaxis against the affects that drain us of so much of the power that could be ours to grasp and take hold of. So often, in the course of reading it, I realized that the feeling surging through me was the specific condition of being amped, and there's just not that many works of theory I can say that about.
Wakefield's central conceit is one she draws from Canadian ecologist C.S. Holling's work in the field of resilience: that if we have indeed moved together into an "Anthropocene" epoch, we can only be in the phase of it that Holling characterized as the back loop. This is a time of explosive disassembly and new possibility, and Wakefield's genius here is to take the former as a given, while attending closely to the latter.
So what was Holling's insight? Briefly, where it was once taken for granted that forests and other natural ecosystems grew steadily until they reached a steady state, a "climax," Holling saw that all ecosystems were invariably embedded in a longer-term dynamic. There was, yes, a growth phase, which functioned much as conventionally depicted: this was the "front loop." But for every ecosystem which grew in this way, there was always a corresponding point, however far down the line it might be, at which some catastrophic phase transition overtook it, and all of the resources so laboriously bound into static entities and relations during the growth phase would be liberated to seek new alignments and new productive configurations. This is the "back loop."
This is the metaphor Wakefield takes up as she builds her challenge to the received thinking about global heating and resilience. Against the unrelieved bleakness of an imaginary in which human possibility is reduced to grim acts of maintenance, repair and eked-out survival, it's those new alignments and productive configurations that Back Loop is all about. In her words, "The thing about stories we tell ourselves and the images we imagine them with is that they are a choice. They are also not without real world consequences. Are we truly just survivors? Is life beyond thresholds necessarily catastrophic?"
This, it hardly needs to be pointed out, is not what mainstream resilience discourse tends to sound like, even as articulated by those who are broadly understood (not least by themselves) to be politically progressive. We generally think of resilience as a system's capacity to bounce back to, and rapidly resume, its previous modes of operation in the wake of some disruptive event. And that's just what so much of the "smart," green-grey and blue infrastructure currently being funded, planned and deployed is intended to accomplish: maintenance of the familiar systems of everyday life within their "safe operating space," to the greatest degree achievable. The trouble with this, as we've discussed here before, is that the business-as-usual of fully globalized late capitalism isn't necessarily something all of us want to bounce back to. What Wakefield is brave or crazy enough to suggest is that we should simply...not do that, or bother to try. If we've left safe operating space behind anyway, why not accept the back loop's invitation to radically rethink our commitments and allocations of resource? Why settle for survival, in other words, when exaltation is at hand?
Wakefield isn't denying the sorrow, grief or anguish that comes with living in a time of rapid undoing, but she is attuned more than any writer I've come across to the explosive, even ecstatic possibilities of this moment, and the exceedingly rare chance it offers us to throw off the nomos, the transcendent and generally tacit order, of late modernity. The back loop not merely allows but demands experimentation, diversity, a loose grip and an unsentimental orientation toward that which is seen to work for here and for now — perversely, the kind of strategic risk-management portfolio of relatively low-commitment, fail-faster probes that contemporary venture capital has proven so good at incubating. "We live now in an unsafe operating space, not only because we have already passed so many planetary boundaries, but also because there are no guidebooks, no answers from on high, no guarantees and no assurances. In a back loop the only way forward is to create our own experiments, grounds, and answers — a process that can only begin from the real."
If you've read Lifehouse, you'll know that this is both a powerful confirmation of its arguments, but also in some sense an equally powerful challenge to them. I read Back Loop as, among many other things, an insistence that the lifesystems I sketched out in the book weren't nearly radical enough to suit the strange conditions in which they're supposed to function. They almost certainly still fold in all too many conventional front-loop assumptions about who we will be, what we will want and what we will be capable of achieving together. By contrast, Wakefield's thought forces us to reckon, in all its gnarly particulars, with a set of conditions where (as Holling has it) “uncertainty is high, control is weakened and confused, and unpredictability is great.” The extraordinary and terrifying gift of her work is the heretical suggestion that such a regime might conduce far more thoroughly to human flourishing than anything we know now.
§ And that brings me directly to the other thing I'd wanted to take up in today's dispatch, which is a taxonomy of power elites proposed by psephologist/ professional contrarian Nate Silver, in a new book I have not read and do not plan to.
Let me first say that I'm trying to train myself to pay redoubled attention whenever I start to notice myself resisting something that's been suggested to me, and most especially when that resistance takes the form of ad-hominem disgust for the bearers of that suggestion. I've come to believe that, even beyond furnishing me with a ready-made map to my own insecurities, the resistance itself conveys useful information, of a few different kinds. Given the visceral revulsion that overtakes me whenever I consider the communities and individuals Silver's writing about here, then — or even, for that matter, Silver himself — I think it's worth trying to step back and figure out what's going on.
So let me unpack that feeling of revulsion a little — here, in public, if you'll bear with me — and see if I can't retrieve some of that useful information I suspect is coiled up inside it.
Silver sees just about all the decisions of consequence to society being made by one of two assemblages he calls "the River" and "the Village." The Village we're familiar with: Silver characterizes it as “people who work in government, in much of the media, and in parts of academia (although perhaps excluding some of the more quantitative academic fields such as economics). It has distinctly left-of-center politics associated with the Democratic Party.” To me, of course, this sounds a whole lot like what would have been called "the Establishment" once upon a time, and its politics are "left of center" only in the way that, say, the worldview of a cosmopolitan, Yale-trained CIA analyst may sit a few notches to the left of one held by their counterpart at a fundamentally blue-collar LE organization like the FBI. But for the relative deweighting of the state-security apparatus in favor of groups whose power derives from their control of media, we're not a million miles away here from the "power elite" named as such by C. Wright Mills in 1956. Bottom line: we know these people, and we're comprehensively familiar with the ways in which they exert their will in the world. They’re comfortable with the front-loop consensus, to the degree that they may not even realize its situatedness and contingency.
Silver's River, though, is a whooooole different beast, and unless you've been paying attention to some of the odder corners of soi-disant "heterodox" or "dissident" right-wing thought these past seven-eight years, you won't be as familiar with the names and types whose access to power he's trying to develop an account of. He describes the River as "an ecosystem of people and ideas" composed of "hedge-funders who play poker, sports bettors who become entrepreneurs [and] crypto billionaires who pal around with Oxford philosophers that take a mathematical approach to studying the human condition," and I think it's fair to say that, as you read these words, this ecosystem is very much in its front loop.
Denizens of the River are markedly comfortable with risk and uncertainty, or more precisely, with the use of statistical and probabilistic techniques to buffer risk, prune back branching realities and encourage the coming to fruition of desired outcomes. Silver unhesitatingly locates the source of this Riverene superpower in the capacity for abstraction, which I think is just right. It's a rather cold, bloodless and clinical way of seeing things, and it seems unquestionable to me that it's likely to be far more congenial to those of certain neurocognitive predispositions than others, but once you see the propensity toward this kind of abstraction it is indeed all over the landscape of contemporary culture. These people are everywhere around us, from venture-capital scum like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel to the COVID-conspiracist (and hugely successful) poker players Alex Foxen and Kristen Bicknell. (Silver's identification of the poker community as an epicenter of Riverene thought puts me in mind of philosopher C. Thi Nguyen's notion that games are how we practice agency, though the commitment to wager tokens with real-world value would seem to make poker a form of play with teeth.)
It's certainly possible to overesteem the techniques the River relies upon. (Recall that the superyacht in which slithy tech VC Mike Lynch went to his watery grave — evidently, because the crew had failed to take even the most basic precautions against entirely predictable risk — was called Bayesian. Against irony the gods themselves contend in vain, etc.) But part of Silver's interest in understanding this worldview and framing it for public consumption is presumably that these techniques do appear to be effective, remarkably so. The River gets what the River wants, and what the River seems to want right now, like some awful, shoddy shanzhai Gaia, is to reorder the world in such a way as to produce the circumstances River people are most comfortable with.
As you can probably tell from my having characterized them as "slithy" and "scum," I don't much care for these people. No, let's be plain: I think these are some of the worst people in the world, and that Silver in particular is a smarmy, self-congratulatory fartsniffer who isn't nearly as clever as he thinks he is. (When he writes, admiringly , that "[p]eople in The River are trying to beat the market," you wonder if he's even capable any more of seeing how this validates the idea of the market, and naturalizes it to the point of invisibility.) But we know that disgust is often bound up in fear, and so it happens to be the case here. It's true! I fear the River! And my fear of the River is rooted in the suspicion that these ghouls might just be onto something.
Primarily because it naturalizes the claimed virtues of competition, all but invariably frames individual (and generally pecuniary) advancement as the sole metric by which acts should be judged, and believes above all that decision criteria can and should be purged of feelings or value judgements, I find this way of being in the world grotesquely shabby. But it's hard to argue that it doesn't seem to confer asymmetric advantage upon its adherents. Certainly it allows them to accumulate capital, which they are then free to spend on media platforms, conferences, knowledge production via the endowment of thinktanks and academic chairs and the salaries of "aligned" public intellectuals, and other material facts which further reinforce their worldview. In other words, they have found their way to a vibrantly positive feedback loop. (I can tell you from abundant lived experience that the left is, uh...not like that.)
What is it with these guys and their cod-Aesopian rubrics, anyway? Silver's binary of Village and River unavoidably calls to mind open-source software advocate (and avowed racist) Eric S. Raymond's Cathedral and Bazaar, as well as the use made of that framing by the still more-odious Curtis "Mencius Moldbug" Yarvin. You figure they must have some degree of descriptive or analytical utility, because, remember, the capacity for abstraction and analysis supposedly lies at the core of the Riverine worldview. Me, in my hopelessly Village-y, wordcelular way, find it unbearably oversimplifying and reductive, a wedge of pseudoanalysis that's shallow and self-congratulatory in the way I so often find Silver himself to be.
But what's still worse is that it's a false binary. Just like certain people you know will get you wedged into a corner at a party and insist to you that the ostensibly competitive Republicans and Democrats, or Labour and the Tories, really constitute the two lobes of a neoliberal "uniparty" who fundamentally agree on most questions of real import, neither Silver's River nor his Village are even remotely interested in any transformation of the world I believe in. The River certainly does seem to have the upper hand at the moment, but whoever wins, we all lose. (In fact, they're just like the Democrats and the Republicans, I suppose: one wants to stabilize things in their current state of utter crapness, and the other wants to make things even worse.)
I'm tempted to read this all as a rebuke of Wakefield's radical optimism, and a prophecy that the high-risk/high-reward experiments that succeed in the time of undoing are more likely to be the provenance of those who exit the Anthropocene's front loop well-furnished with capital and worldly power than they are of the multitude without. But just maybe that's a facile reading. It is just possibly the case that thriving amid uncertainty is a skill far more widely distributed in the world — which is to say the River is broader, and its flows and countercurrents more interesting — than poor Nate Silver is capable of imagining. And if this should turn out to be so, the back loop won't belong, after all, to the kind of quantbro that quivers toward jouissance at the thought of the network state smeared all over Costa Rica. It will be a time of true panic, rather, and wild gods aplenty.
That may not be the best-case scenario, exactly, but it sure is the one that feels truest to the lines of flight Wakefield is reaching to articulate. Will you and I have any room in their world, though, a place at their table? Well: I obviously can't speak for you. But me? Let's be real: probably not, right? I'm far too much a creature of the front loop; I'm not nearly queer enough, in any sense or register of that word; and however much energy they might have required at the time, my rebellions were trifling ones that left virtually every structure they were arrayed against fully intact. But that's OK. We should all look forward to our own going-under at the end of day, shouldn't we? Our going-under, and the reuse of our components by systems and structures that will blossom, bear fruit and in their time wither too. And maybe here can be found the deepest of all possible hedges against risk, one which reveals all the River's plans for wealth and control as the puny and shaming things they were all along. Here is the strength to say: it is this way, it can be no other way, and it is good.
§ At the moment, in addition to the Wakefield, I'm reading this sparkling interview with “agroforestry and product designer” Casey Tang, Kristin Ross's splendid The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life, and good old Eugene Thacker's Infinite Resignation, which has made me laff out loud more than any book since Lint; listening to, I dunno, a lot of Bong, a lot of Krallice, the new Sumac and the new Thou; greatly enjoying Neil Blevins' stonkingly megastructural concept art; and watching both Tarkovsky's Mirror and The End We Start From, a film about an apocalypse as British as the word "stonkingly," which ratchets up the tension in ways I could barely take (and which, in turn, have more than a little to do with having lived in British housing for the past decade of my life).
That's about it for now. Otherwise? I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are doing as I have always asked of you: 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. 131 of Sunday, 15 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. ◊