View all notes
There is death in this. Twenge and Campbell are getting at something when they urge people to worry less about their identities and more about their lives. Between life and the self, there is a choice. This is implicit in the idea of an attention economy. The more compulsively we curate the self, the less we live. We may find it helpful to forget ourselves from time to time. We may need, that is, a form of ‘anti-identity’ politics, a resistance to all trends which force one to spend too much time on the self, or on a particularly narrow, depressing and ultimately coercive idea of what a person can be. It would treat all the labour spent on the self as wasted potential. It would cultivate forgetting and disconnection.
Post-democracy was well advanced in most of Europe and North America well before the digital platforms appeared. As the political scientist Colin Crouch defines it, a post-democratic society is one that retains the institutions of mass democracy, but where these have negligible effects on policymaking. It reduces elections to a spectacle of stage-managed debates and poll-driven simulations of ‘voter demand’. Whereas mass democracy means that popular desires and interests have to be taken seriously, post-democracies are in the business of population management. Like cybernetic systems, post-democracies are far less interested in consent than in moderating the behaviour of elements within the system. Like the algorithmic protocols of the digital platforms, they hit below the intellect, working underneath the surface of persuasion, building realities into our everyday experience. It doesn’t negotiate with our wants, it shapes what we are capable of wanting. And, as the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta once put it, ‘everything depends on what the people are capable of wanting.’
And this is where the story is not just about corporations and technologies. The Twittering Machine may be a horror story, but it is one that involves all of us as users. We are part of the machine, and we find our satisfactions in it, however destructive they may be. And this horror story is only possible in a society that is busily producing horrors. We are only up for addiction to mood-altering devices because our emotions seem to need managing, if not bludgeoning by relentless stimulus. We are only happy to drop into the dead-zone trance because of whatever is disappointing in the world of the living. Twitter toxicity is only endurable because it seems less worse than the alternatives. ‘No addiction’, as Francis Spufford has written, ‘is ever explained by examining the drug. The drug didn’t cause the need. A tour of a brewery won’t explain why somebody became an alcoholic.’
As always under capitalism, appearances are deceiving. Dismantling the globe-spanning processes of extraction, production, distribution, and finance would prove a bewilderingly complex task. These processes are mediated by technologies of transportation (containerization, intermodal transit) and computing (AI, machine learning, robotics); arranged in variegated economic geographies (corridors, gateways, clusters, special economic zones); structured by evolving inter- and intra-firm relationships (outsourcing, sub-contracting, vertical reintegration) and forms of market power (monopolies and monopsonies); and ultimately enabled by state authority, which furnishes the necessary logistical and regulatory infrastructure, and the repressive apparatus to defend the flow of goods at all costs. “Deglobalized capitalism” verges on an oxymoron. Since its dawn in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Indigenous dispossession, the profit logic exerts a centrifugal force; the drive to accumulation is a spatially totalizing one. Whatever might be possible in theory, actually existing capitalism has always relied on the globally uneven cheapening of labor and nature, the sacrifice of far-flung lives and ecosystems at the altar of relentless production, and the constant expulsion of populations alternately surplus and super-exploited.
Nationalist retreat is thus a fantasy. But fantasies can prove politically powerful: in practice, calls to “bring manufacturing back home” portend a grim world of even harsher policing of migrants and supply chains increasingly securitized by state violence. The task of the left today is to grasp the fundamental planetary scale of global capitalism—and the planetary horizons of our transformative projects. It is this planetary interdependency—its brutal reality and emancipatory possibility—that Martín Arboleda depicts with rigor and generosity in Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism (Verso Books, 2020). And, by doing so from the vantage point of the sprawling zones of extraction that stretch from Chile to China—mines, refineries, ports, ships, power plants, data processing centers, and entire cities that serve as capital’s logistical hubs—Arboleda not only centers the periphery but inverts our impoverished spatial vocabulary. The margins of the world system are far from backwards: they are sites of novel techniques of exploitation—and of the vanguard of subaltern futurisms.
love her
It is only in combination with labor, of course, that machines take on their lively powers. Since 1992, 400 million Chinese peasants have been forcefully “depeasantized” and put to work in industrial factories. On the other side of the Pacific, campesinos and Indigenous peoples are also being driven off their land. Marx dubbed this process “primitive accumulation”: the forcible separation of people from their means of subsistence, compelling them into wage labor and the cash nexus. These shifts in class structure aren’t unfolding in parallel; they are internally related. The reproduction of the Chinese working class hinges on the dispossession of Latin American peasants—and the deforestation, contamination, and cancer epidemics that rapacious extraction and mega-agriculture entail. Their shared domination is, for Arboleda, a clue to the shared conditions of their emancipation: Chinese and Chilean workers have more in common with one another than they do with their respective ruling classes. And, in a useful corrective to Sinophobic tropes, China shouldn’t be seen as a conniving, conspiring hegemon bent on world domination. Rather, riffing on Stuart Hall, imperialism is the modality through which global capitalism is lived. In this reading, the role of Chinese banks and firms in expanding the extractive frontier is an expression of a process that is global in scope.
cute
What is the ecosocialist alternative? Arboleda argues forcefully against nationalism in either politics or analysis. It’s convincing. Like the extractive circuits detailed in Planetary Mine, the supply chains for green technologies such as wind turbines and electric vehicles will, and must, cross borders: the resources to make them are unevenly deposited in the earth’s crust, and the left’s commitment should be to global access, which means prioritizing globally equitable distribution. Their far-flung networks of production are strategic nodes to exercise popular power in the twenty-first century. From Indigenous blockades of lithium extraction in Chile to labor organizing at Tesla factories in the United States, communities and workers resist nascent green capitalism and imagine alternative green futures. Such resistance is a necessary but insufficient condition for an ecosocialist transition: with a decade to avert the worst of the climate chaos, the state has the capacities to reorient economic activity in the here and now. Public investment, democratized finance, stringent regulations, public and worker ownership, and trade and industrial policy all have a role to play in building a democratic, low-carbon future. In the hands of social movements, labor unions, and allied state actors, these tools can fashion a new world out of the dying old one.
From the planetary mine to the global factory, the future organization of supply chains is up for grabs. Grassroots struggles alongside, against, and for state power will help shape the coming economic order.
The house passes a bailout for time. Every day
is shortened by two hours. It’s ratified
in the senate; the president, may he die, applauds.
They underpay workers to go around adjusting clocks
so the minute hands can keep up the pace. Watches
go on strike, then grandfather clocks, then phones. We go
back to sundials, and when it rains we hold each other’s
contacts up to our floor lamps (we have so many
floor lamps now) and wherever the spotlight falls
we wait until it turns green. No one assassinates
the president yet. Why depends on where
you’re reading this. There’s a law against spit now.
A city ordinance for limelight. All the op-ed pages
are in agreement about the uselessness of forms,
and in Alabama, we’re told a man had himself declared
legally miraculous. I disagree with the premise.
The alarm clocks have a picket line: they march
in figure eights around city hall, waking everyone up.
Young radicals get tattoos of the hours.
Nothing is done so much lately. There’s talk
of the rich being able to buy themselves another week.
The days are laid off. The seasons tighten their belts.
damn
In this scene and others, Zweig begins to question the implicit we of liberal intellectuals and artists as a group, while still unable to let go of the mythos—or to really consider that other members of his circle may not have been so “optimistic” (nor so self-serving) as him. He rues his rosy naiveté while waxing sentimental about the world that made his success possible. He seems to realize that his optimistic cosmopolitanism unwittingly fed into rising ethno-nationalism—not only because of the high-culture world’s belief in its own outsized effects on the political landscape, but simply because he, and others, took their ability to travel for granted.
Pan-European mobility a hundred years ago allowed for a filter bubble of sorts: an international community of like-minded, mostly white people, mostly of a certain class. Zweig never lived anywhere long enough to engage with local politics, and if things got tough, he could always leave. But nationalism, it turned out, could not be combatted through Zweig’s brand of internationalism. They had been flip sides of the same historical development.
In 2016, Zweig’s epiphany painfully paralleled my own incredulous reactions to Brexit and Trump. Because I did not share his before-the-fall optimism, I was surprised by my own shock—and saw that it was indicative of the problem. At the time of the election, I had been “based” in Berlin for several years; my people were the urban, international, and largely English-speaking art world, the self-aware target demographic for the cringeworthy “easyJet Generation” marketing campaign. Whenever we could afford it, we traveled to other cities, mostly to meet up with the same people we already knew.
We recognized that this kind of travel was wasteful, unsustainable, even counterproductive—we held many panel discussions critiquing globalization and marketization—but we didn’t stop. Our careers and value system were built on mobility, the principles behind it, and the sociopolitical formations that guaranteed it. We knew we were inside something, but we told each other that what we were doing inside would have effects outside. Occasional mainstream news reportage on insider art events, no matter how one-dimensional or misinterpreted, offered sporadic confirmation of our work’s relevance.
Berlin, where I lived for seven years, has long been ground zero for this we. As a prototypical hub for revolving artists (and now techies), the city’s brand exploits the fantasy of freedom and collaboration with minimal commitment or responsibility. As the story goes, nobody is really “from” Berlin; everyone gets by in English; the party never stops; you only need a part-time job. But these are myths, myths that exist to serve people like me—white, entitled, and in possession of a U.S. passport. In reality, plenty of people are from Berlin; plenty are from elsewhere but do not work in the arts or for a start-up; plenty do not come by choice; plenty can’t afford to live remotely close to the city center; and plenty speak no English (and maybe no German, either). Anyone aware of these truths probably noticed the resurgence of intense nationalistic, racist tendencies in Germany and across the hemisphere long before we did.
Menoret’s many drives through Riyadh neighborhoods allow him to introduce one of the other primary concerns of his book: the interplay of urban planning and political control, and the effects of suburbanization in particular. He describes the arrival of a powerful American oil company, which would come to be known as Aramco, in the 1930s. A few years after its first contract with the King, Aramco began constructing “California-style suburbs” for its American personnel in the Eastern Province, relegating “coolies”—Saudi laborers—to segregated, subpar living conditions.
The poor treatment of Saudi workers sparked numerous uprisings in the 1940s and 1950s, including strikes and a bus boycott, all of which were brutally suppressed. Rather than listen to the demands of workers, Saudi authorities deferred to Aramco’s housing model, building even more grid-like subdivisions that were “easy to police.” The municipality of Riyadh began as early as the 1940s to build subdivisions that mimicked “Aramco’s Levittown” in the east.
But Saudi oil infrastructure continued to fuel uneven development, and growing tensions over inequitable working conditions fomented further demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts. Alarmed, the Saudi government doubled down on city planning, commissioning European planners to help tame the growing urban population. Chief among these consultants was the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis, who touted a vision of superblocks and main streets that would “shield” residents from “toxic political ideas.”
bleak