The real prints its traces everywhere. Our revolt follows its lines.

 

American Catastrophe

The United States of America, 2017. The President is a reality television star—stupid and malicious—who keeps the country in the grips of his social media addiction. Every morning we wake and check Twitter to see who is the object of the day’s flailing wrath, which country with whom the odds say, more and more convincingly, we will soon be at war. We have been telling ourselves for a year that it couldn’t be possible, but here we are, having arrived at the crowning truth of the lie of politics. The fact of omnipresent ridicule changes nothing, for the state seems to have shed any need of appearing legitimate.

Society is riven by polarization not seen in decades. Dueling demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, clashes breaking out in the streets, all presided over by an unending congress of the useless. Liberalism is at a loss, unable to acknowledge the siege it contributes to by seeking compromise in everything, by piously believing the law should be upheld while it is so flagrantly transgressed by its opponents. Fascists are politely given platforms online as well as by liberal arts colleges and the ACLU, who put themselves through contortions in order to defend Nazis. “Free speech” means the KKK can take to the streets again with right-wing militias impersonating military personnel, hand-in-hand determined to bring back the Confederacy by way of Pepe memes and semi-automatics.

Following Trump’s election, many were taken off-guard by the speed with which aggressive social deterioration turned out to be possible. Now, added to the daily insane violence of American life—mass shootings and teen suicides, painkiller overdoses and police murders—is a new wave of politicized violence seeming to mark a state of outright social conflict. Recently there have even been a series of astonishing articles about the possibility of a second Civil War. The murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville brought this discourse to its peak, adding weight to the hypothesis of a decades-old “cold civil war” finally breaking into the open.

It’s true that the end brings out the worst. Everywhere are products of the same desperation and the same forces taking advantage of general disillusionment. Why exactly did a boring-ass accountant choose to become the US’s most deadly mass shooter? According to the bewildered FBI, the troubling answer behind Las Vegas seems to be for no reason at all. As old certainties crumble, as society wakes up to its own impossibility, it reacts chaotically. Latent nihilism gives rise to the sick outbursts of the far-right, fomenting the racial anxieties of their broken subjectivities. So they claim the sphere of anti-social violence as their latest terrain in an attempt to bring about the final ethno-conflict. Pathetic men who might have been school-shooters a decade ago now carry out their acts in the name of Vanguard America or ISIS.

Though he relishes in it, it’s not just Trump who bears responsibility. What’s happening won’t end with the fall of his regime, however that may come about. Our dispossession reaches much further back. We are at the tail-end of a long conflict spanning more than an election cycle or even the lifetime of a republic. It is not a question of political valence, of whichever party is in power, but of a failed politics and of an impoverished form of life. In fact, of a whole insane way of being in the world, in whose convulsions we seem to be stuck and whose consequences are finally becoming clear, even to its most dedicated adherents.

Take a glance at the organized poverty known as “the economy.” It doesn’t take another report from the Federal Reserve to remind us that we live in the shadow of the rich—quite literally in New York City, huddling as we do under the supertalls of Billionaire’s Row. For the rich set an agenda for us all. They have gotten organized in order to organize the lives of others. It’s considered the height of cleverness, the mark of the entrepreneur, to figure out new ways to threaten you with starvation unless you buy into their latest scheme.

The rest of us are left behind, anxious and indebted, crushed by the demands of an economy against which everything is measured and outside of which nothing is valued. Work made flexible, therefore precarious. The young left uncertain, the elderly obsolete. Whole areas are now considered redundant—the entire Rust Belt, for example—and turned into a floating surplus of disposable labor, needed less and less these days. There are places in this country where you can’t survive except by shopping at Walmart. Nowhere to work except the local privately-run prison. So now we’re expected to be grateful for an Amazon warehouse or Facebook datacenter moving into town!

We seem to grow worse off by the day. Pills for everything. Bodies treated as profitable mysteries with “living well” as the latest marketing campaign. Panic when our phones buzz and when they don’t. FOMO on things we wouldn’t enjoy anyway. Mental health crisis that ends either in the ER, the psych-ward, or by police shooting. A degree of sickness and distress in the populace as in the water supply. In Flint, still no clean water. In Philadelphia, playgrounds full of lead. Down south, between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, a petrochemical corridor so toxic it’s known as Cancer Alley. Engels called this social murder. We call it getting by.

It doesn’t help matters much that the ground is giving way beneath our feet. Hurricane Harvey drenched the Gulf Coast and put Houston, fourth largest city in the US and key to its oil refining capacity, underwater. As the area’s third “500-year” event in three years, we are quickly learning to speak in the numbing tone of the analysts. But recall one of many viral tweets as the storm approached, from the National Weather Service no less: “This event is unprecedented & all impacts are unknown & beyond anything experienced.” What could better express the consciousness of our age, knowing as we do that we are tipping irrevocably into the unknown?

Barely a week after Harvey, Hurricane Irma tore through the Caribbean. Even Richard Branson was stuck huddling in the wine cellar on his private island. Before landfall, the head of FEMA predicted that Irma would “devastate the United States.” Although the storm lost some of its force as it approached, it still underscored predictions for the eventual fate of South Florida. Despite every effort to transform Miami into a resilient metropolis capable of weathering the coming storms—all that white stucco and shimmering glass!—the city may well be the first to slip into the sea.

But none of this compares to the devastation in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, described in countless outlets as apocalyptic. The hurricane knocked out power to the entirety of the island, some parts of which aren’t expecting service to be restored for up to half a year. (By the way, did you see that Tesla has offered to restore electricity? Or that Google plans to deploy their crazy internet balloons?) The storm stranded containers of aid with no fuel for trucks nor interior roads to travel across, left hospitals without running water or medical supplies, and destroyed in a matter of hours 80% of the year’s worth of crops. On TV, the mayor of the capital could only say: “The San Juan that we knew yesterday is no longer there.”

Nor does it take an extreme storm bearing down to remind us that the world of today is not the one we grew up in, and that the world of tomorrow will not be the one of today. Consider those fishing villages in Louisiana and Alaska that are already sinking without the aid of another hurricane, destined to disappear in the coming decades. No one event is the culprit, but a changing climate, meaning warmer global temperatures, meaning melting ice, meaning rising seas, meaning eroding coasts, meaning goodbye everything you’ve known.

So goes the climate, so goes a way of life. A Yupik elder put it like this: “If our culture, our subsistence lifestyle, should disappear, we are no more and there shall not be another kind as we in the entire world.” What we stand to lose in our lifetimes is more than acres of shoreline, but entire modes of life dating back thousands of years. As coasts go under, our era could witness a series of collective dislocations equally spiritual as material, social, and geographic. An inner devastation equivalent to the collapse of the glaciers, cultures cut adrift like so much sea ice.

Why talk about the weather? Not just because it seems to be intruding constantly. But because to speak of it is to acknowledge what we share. Living under a cataclysmic sign is a sense more and more common to everyone today. Hence an ice shelf could become a familiar summer protagonist, Larsen C companion in the headlines to the week’s other celebrities. Hence an article about the precise ways in which the world would be rendered uninhabitable in a mere century could become New York Magazine‘s most popular article ever. Earth, planet of sadness!

Even among the most promising of futures on offer today, the failure that this civilization is can hardly be covered up. In the name of resiliency, for instance, they would have us gratefully living among piles of garbage. Freshkills, which some of us recently visited, was once the world’s largest landfill and is now being transformed into New York City’s signature sustainable park for the twenty-first century. This green, glittering oasis will be built not just on top of 200 feet of trash, but on the literal ruins of the modern—it’s where they disposed of the wreckage of the World Trade Center, irrecoverable remains included. This, I imagine, is what is meant by “adaptation.”

No, it’s not just Trump. More than anything, I’d characterize it like this: we stand at the end of a shipwrecked metaphysics. The historical product of centuries of Western governance, wherein a double movement not only posited a particularly debased vision of what life was supposed to be, but materially produced that same damaged form of life. A civilization founded on carving the world into subjects and objects, with Man always standing on one side as the great orderer of being. Master of everything around him, his conditions of existence carefully arranged and vigilantly managed, at the cost of a general separation from the world. The fierce irony of this slow cosmological displacement, wherein Man sought to place himself at the center of existence and consequently found himself to be nowhere, materializes as the dawning realization that soon he may no longer be able to live on the earth at all. 

Today this whole metaphysics looks like the bad joke it is, and its obvious deterioration brings us to the present moment.

Governing the End

Our time is one of confusion, days passed, as it were, inside a fog. The general disarray of living at the end. A sense of being unmoored, psychologically and emotionally, from everything essential. Narratives and platitudes of the past—whether of democracy, of progress, of a happy future—lie scattered, inert, at our feet. Events accumulate without any seeming relation. There are the familiar cycles of compulsively checking the news then swearing it off. The weeks-long despondency we can be thrown into by a single chyron. States of emergency correspond to our own inner panic.

The crisis extends in every direction. Although it is by now universally acknowledged, every attempt to “solve” it only perpetuates the disaster from within.  Another election, another prescription, another global accord, another pipeline, another “day of action,” another startup, another war. At times it seems like the only people with a hopeful vision for the future are the very ones already hurtling us towards oblivion.

Nowhere are hopes of saving the present order higher than in Silicon Valley. The disparate efforts of the ensemble of forces known as the “tech industry” cannot be reduced to the profit motive, although more than a few assholes are getting rich. Nor can it be explained away by some individual will to world domination on the part of megalomaniac tech moguls. Nor, for that matter, a will to convenience so readily apparent in the sorts of products, apps, and services they debut every few months.

What is happening today is far worse and runs far deeper. What if we began to take seriously the proposition that Amazon and Apple are as much our enemy as the Alt-Right? After all, just consider what is being normalized under the guise of “product development,” whether it’s the hilariously dystopian idea of workers implanted with microchips or the biometric wet-dream of millions of iPhones creating millions of detailed facial maps. No one is particularly shocked anymore by what these companies can get away with. What would have appeared like the most sinister scheme in science fiction fifty years ago is greeted today with a shrug reserved for the banal. (Admittedly, Apple may have crossed the line a bit with that last one. In response, the Chicago Tribune printed an opinion piece wonderfully titled “The iPhone X proves the Unabomber was right.”)

Nor, in this era of leaks and whistleblowers, is anyone surprised to hear about the predictably close relationship between these private corporations and whatever government has been elected. So when we learned Cambridge Analytica, one of the most savvy data analytics outfits around, was lending their “psychographic” voter-profiling tools to the two most noxious political campaigns of 2016—Trump and Brexit—what then? Or when it came out that Peter Thiel’s firm Palantir—named, by the way, after the “seeing stone” in Tolkien’s mythology—provides ICE with the software that runs their deportation machine, well, what else would you expect? The policing function of these technologies is only their most obvious characteristic.

There’s this great saying in cybernetics theory that the purpose of a system is what it does. And I think this rubric explains better than anything else the situation in which we find ourselves. The hard truth is that we already live in a system of their design, a particular ordering of things that has spread across the world in the course of a few decades. The effect of all those highways, powerlines, undersea internet cables, server farms, container ports, satellites, and so on has been to transform—I mean this literally—the earth into a globe. A process of expulsion as much as consolidation, whereby a plural series of overlapping worlds—with their heterogeneous histories and forms of life—were forcibly converted into one contiguous space, integrated into the same empty economy. Marx had already prophesied in the Manifesto that capital would batter down all walls in its pursuit of “a world after its own image,” however barren that image would turn out to be.

Coextensive with this material reconfiguration of the world, via a newly built technological layer, has been a reconfiguration of the logic of governance, via a novel set of techniques. If governing was once the management of bodies, however finely or crudely, today it is far more about the administration of systems, of which bodies are only one component. So the art of governing has moved, if you like, from the old logic of a directed sovereignty to that of a diffuse control. With the complete cyberneticization of society realized in the twenty-first century, the technical apparatus having insinuated itself into the most intimate spheres of life, we ought to begin speaking of technologically-organized governance being the rule of the day.

Here’s a frightening thought: the amount of control afforded by these technological systems over the material world is historically unsurpassed. No tyrant, no king, no nation, no military, in fact nothing at all has ever had a more immediate, direct ability to shape matter or energy. Technologically-organized governance has already become the most sophisticated method we’ve known to delimit possible ways of being in the world. A window is rapidly closing where it would be possible to say, anywhere, that one was outside its purview.

We can find in the Smart City a cipher for the future they are building, the ultimate cybernetic fantasy written in and through the material environment. A seamless realm where life and data perfectly coincide, a smoothly-functioning space for the uninterrupted flow of information and value. Where everyday life is totally mediated by a series of devices distributed throughout the quotidian environment. Where endless sensors mean nothing—no action, nor pattern of action—goes undetected, unmeasured, and unanalyzed. Where government as such has been made redundant by a more effective means of control that is coterminous with the city itself.

The premise of these urban experiments is that the complexity and vitality of the city can, should, be neatly documented, codified, represented, and that the cumulative behaviors of the metropolis will thereby become readable and adjustable – that is to say, governable. What should worry us today is that we are faced with a sophisticated technical apparatus—championed by technologists, urbanists, resiliency experts, and the like—that is materially constructing the world of information it seeks to find behind appearances. As we are increasingly tied into this technological ensemble, it may very well make of us the kinds of truncated beings that it was designed to operate on.

It’s the same debased metaphysics at work. What is now Man’s completely abstract relationship to the world becomes materially objectified in the latest Silicon Valley schemes, further ensconcing him in a whole complex of technological mediation and growing ever more remote from his conditions of existence. Tethered to apps, to fiber optics, to satellites, to code, he proudly governs reality via information, and swears he will be able to stave off the end, endlessly, courtesy of his technical prowess. Here is the bad faith of Silicon Valley: by seeking in our continued separation from the world the means of our salvation.

Real or Not Real?

“The crisis,” our friends have written, “is above all that of presence.” Perhaps the rich are, ironically, the furthest removed. What we witness in all their sad attempts to escape, or at least outlast, the conditions of earthly degradation they have created, is a general fleeing from reality. Whether they burrow in plutocratic bunkers, head off to colonize Mars, or just bury their heads under the proliferation of screens, it is a case of flatly denying the existence of what is there, the very fabric of our elemental existence and our ability to inhabit it. In its most extreme form, their evasion takes the form of complete denial—as when Elon Musk, in all sincerity, claims that the universe is just a computer simulation. Western civilization in a nutshell: what cannot be governed, cannot be real.

There are those who wish to preserve this civilization, despite the failure they know it is, despite the tragedy that it perpetually enacts. Those for whom there exists only Man, The Governed. Those who would like to keep us wrapped up in their insane artifice, permanently estranged, even at risk of dragging us deeper into the abyss. Then there are those getting organized to usher in a wholly different future from the one they would like us to have. The Anthropocene names the moment when this global, civilizational conflict is no longer possible to deny, but expressly announces itself as the ground of our epoch.

We must ask ourselves whether we will be stuck living out the current order’s fitful afterlife, or if we will find the courage to finally be done with it. One thing is for sure: none of the ongoing catastrophe, none of their designs on the world, have gone unopposed. Let’s remember a truth to which we have been wedded since 2011: we live in an era of mass revolt. No city, no country, is immune. Nowhere are people incapable of overthrowing, abruptly and judiciously, those who hold sway over them.

Only a few years ago, a contagious wave of revolts shook the foundations of a global order which had all the trappings of permanence. These were not scattered revolts but a wave of interconnected uprisings. Although everything was done to shutter the possibilities they disclosed, there remains the distinct prospect of imminent revolt in response to interminable crisis. Whether it goes by the name of a social movement like Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter, or whether it remains unassignable, there surges across America a potent undercurrent ready to erupt at a moment’s notice. As was made clear in a report released earlier this year known as the “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community,” insurrections are as much of our time as extreme weather.

This is why, at the same time that everything seems to be unravelling, as dark forces hound the door, thousands have spontaneously organized themselves in massive acts of defiance, discovering along the way their own collective power. Why every bastard cop killing someone for nothing, whether in St. Louis or at Georgia Tech, was met with the street’s violent reprisal. Why, in the generalized tactical intelligence of the new movements, people flocked to airports to oppose the Muslim Ban, not just in symbolic protest but in material blockade. Why the refrain of the heroic, if incomplete, Arab Spring—the people want the fall of the regime—was raised before Confederate monuments unceremoniously torn down in the anonymous dark of night. Why the injunction to “become ungovernable” appeared across the country from Berkeley to New York.

To become ungovernable is to become party to the war that’s already underway. Above all, it requires giving oneself the means to remain that way. And among the more sustained rhythms of contemporary struggle are the anti-infrastructure movements appearing around the continent. There have been sabotage actions by the dozens and even a few occupations, including ongoing ones at the Junexit blockade in Quebec, on unceded Miqmaq territory, and Split Rock Camp in New Jersey, on Ramapough territory. The most famous example, of course, is Standing Rock. For over a century, Lakota elders have spoken of the prophecy of the zuzeca sape, the black snake, coming across their land and heralding the end of their world. The struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline was never just an environmental campaign over access to clean water, but was understood by its participants as the continuation of a war over a way of being in the world and the essential conditions for it to flourish. “Water is life,” the protectors made clear.

Modern infrastructure projects, from pipelines to highways to shipping ports, are built with the purpose of making a certain kind of life possible. Strange then how fragile they turn out to be, and how much they seem to endanger us either by catastrophic failure or just during normal operations. Worse still, in conditioning one form of life they make impossible a multitude of others. All capitalism is extractive: resources taken from the land, beings separated from other beings, cultures cut off from their distinctive practices, peoples removed from their worlds. The whole infrastructural edifice of this insane civilization, to which we’re supposedly bound and to which we’re told we must cling if we want to survive—this material blackmail was existentially contested on the Sioux Nation plains. The battle between two wildly incompatible forms of life was dramatized so superbly by images of Warriors on horseback confronting the puffed-up military-grade police forces, who enlisted the services of private security firms to conduct some of the most sophisticated repressive measures deployed lately.

The same logic of taking responsibility for our collective existence, as was done in the camps of Standing Rock, also appears in fragmentary fashion in those self-organized relief efforts that follow every recent disaster, whether the hurricanes in Houston, Tampa, or San Juan, or the twin earthquakes rattling Mexico in September. Each instance saw people quickly leap into action and improvise to meet the needs of the moment. Bucket brigades carting away debris. Repurposing a mattress store as shelter. Veterans from the “Cajun Navy” rescuing stranded neighbors with their own boats. Neighborhoods and cities had unique forms of solidarity according to the particularities of life there, and their specific rhythms of cooperation. In Mexico, for instance, rescue work was carried out in collective silence to better hear the cries of the trapped.

A dignified response to the most trying of circumstances is nothing new. At their most plainly evident, these experiences simply demonstrate that we are capable of organizing ourselves. After the army showed up belatedly to stand around with rifles and interrupt community relief efforts, friends in Mexico wrote perceptively that “all the constituted powers could be seen, at last, as they are: unnecessary and impotent.” The terrible earthquake had the paradoxical effect of bringing to light an increasingly shared truth: everywhere government exists, it is by imposition; everywhere it operates, it does so as a hindrance. It is the rendering superfluous of governance as such, by virtue of communal presence, that gives these otherwise tragic experiences their flavor of the revolutionary.

Closely tied to these events, both the anti-infrastructure movements and self-organized relief efforts, is the sense that they are firmly embedded in the place where they occur, appealing to this somewhere as unique and worth defending, with the knowledge that our collective fate is bound to it. The ability to inhabit a specific place, with all the rhythms, practices, and relationships that entails, has been intentionally eroded over time. It was not possible for capitalism to take root except by uprooting every other mode of existence and progressively destroying the conditions for autonomy.

It’s possible in the present configuration of the world to spend an entire lifetime only ever passing through. It’s typically what we do. But as this peculiarly absent way of life becomes universal, turning everywhere into the same frictionless kind of placeless place, our connections to the land that sustains us can be re-energized and re-contested. 500 years of indigenous resistance in the Americas clearly sets the stage for a return to this way of thinking, that of contemporary struggles imbued with a sense of place to the point of being inseparable from it. The Zapatistas may be the most well-known but there are countless others, like the Mapuche fighting to reclaim the Wallmapu.

Others too, in myriad examples, are awakening to the possibilities and power afforded by reclaiming a sense of a shared world, which could be only where it is. So down in Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson takes up in an urban context the need to build autonomous infrastructure like cooperatives and community gardens, and organize along municipalist and horizontalist lines in the city they proudly call home. Or take the proliferation of networks of young farmers and permaculturists organizing around bioregions and watersheds, those who locate their being among the flows of energy woven throughout any place—the rich set of interconnections and interdependencies we call, for want of a more suitable word, life. These experiments in reinhabiting the world are only beginning to unfold, each along paths, as the Zapatistas say, made by walking.

If our time is marked by horrors of the end, then we know it also to be defined by countless efforts to break through the age, to lay claim to new possibilities of living. Everywhere new struggles explode, people unite in the search for ways out. All that we need is already at hand. From now on, every question can be answered differently.