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The Baffler
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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
It is still common to hear of a division between absolute and relative poverty. But poverty is always both relative and absolute. In a monetized economy, an individual’s relative lack of income can result in absolute deprivation. ($1.90, whatever it is worth in sub-Saharan Africa, can’t purchase three meals in most other parts of the world.) This is not reflected by the World Bank’s poverty line, one reason why its numbers are so low. In 2016, the economist Robert Allen proposed in an independent report that the World Bank instead measure poverty based on the resources needed to purchase basic necessities of subsistence. In theory, this would make the Bank once again recognize poor people in Thailand, Turkey, and Romania—countries where, according to the $1.90 line, poverty has been entirely banished.
there you go!! been saying this
In July, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 30 million Americans don’t have enough to eat. The wealthiest large society on earth, built on perhaps its most favorable geography, is home to a mass of people living off tins of collected food. In the end, it is not the particularity of “Third World” poverty that matters, but the community of degradation the links the poor of the world’s periphery and of its developed metropolises. The Alston report is the most serious challenge yet to poverty triumphalism, to the political apologias that it has supported, and to the fiction that economies of massive inequality are destroying poverty rather than destroying the poor. The most dangerous effect of the happy talk about eradicating poverty is the complacency it encourages. It gives a blessing to the system that promises more of the same.
The island still collects no income tax, and abandoned mansions litter the coast. Having depleted their previous revenue streams, the Nauruan government is looking for a new way to make money—and, for sponsoring states, deep sea mining could mean quite a bit of money. But it also entails a certain amount of risk. The whole point of requiring a sponsoring state, rather than just allowing private companies to mine the sea at will, is that the state will be held co-responsible for any potential environmental damages, which could be staggering. Back when the Law of the Sea was first written, Matt Gianni says, “they thought these nodules were a renewable resource. That they would form as quickly or even more quickly than you can find them. A bit like Thomas Huxley, back in the 1800s, saying it’s impossible to overfish the ocean.”
Technically, the nodules are a renewable resource, but they take an incomprehensible amount of time to form. Ocean currents carry dissolved metals across the abyssal zone until they collect around a nucleus—a shark’s tooth, for example, or a fragment of whale bone—and coagulate in concentric circles. Dense, black rock slowly begins to appear. The nodules grow only a few centimeters every million years, and no one is totally sure how they remain perched atop the seabed, unobscured by falling sediment, which accretes much faster. Geologists suspect it has to do with the feeding patterns of starfish.
arghhh
When I ask Barron if he is planning on triggering the rule, he demurs. “Well, it’s not for us to trigger, it would be for the member state to trigger,” he says. “Do I think a drop dead date would be useful for the development of this industry? Yes, I do.” We talked about why Nauru had been chosen as a sponsor state to begin with. I wanted to know if it was because of the island nation’s general disarray—a 2018 report from the Lowry Institute for International Policy stated that “Nauru has recently lurched towards authoritarianism”—or if he was looking to avoid the kind of pushback that DeepGreen’s predecessor, Nautilus Minerals, got from the indigenous people of their sponsoring state, Papua New Guinea. Barron becomes uncomfortable. Everything with Nauru was completely transparent and aboveboard, he insists. “I just thought it would be an interesting story to have one of the smallest economies sponsoring one of the most ambitious ideas,” he says. “Because these small nations, you know, have a voice, but it doesn’t get heard.”
lol
But what is killing the state is not overdevelopment or lousy public planning or even climate change. It is the persistence of certain ghosts. If California-in-flames is at the forefront of the Anthropocene, which by one scholarly definition is the age in which “humans in their attempt to conquer nature have inadvertently become a major force in its destruction,” then the key word is not humans—because not all of us were involved in the attempt—but conquer. California is where Anglo-European settlement of the Americas came up against the hard edge of the continent. This is where the conquest ended, and where it bounces back.
Five years earlier, when organized groups of Anglo settlers first began to trickle in over the Sierra Nevada mountains, scholars estimate that fewer than four hundred “foreigners” were living in what was still the Mexican state of Alta California. The newcomers, who in the eyes of the Mexican authorities were illegal immigrants with no valid claims on the land, made their homes in a vast territory already inhabited by about eight thousand Californios, as the state’s Mexican citizens were known, and more than a hundred thousand Indians. They were not content to share it. In June 1846, unaware that President James K. Polk had already declared war on Mexico, a small band of settlers, supported by the dashing Army captain and genocidaire John C. Frémont, took up arms against the Mexican government. On arriving, Bryant promptly organized a company of volunteers and joined Frémont’s troop.
Land speculation, tamed into what we unironically call “real estate”—for what could be less real than an earth emptied of all but monetary value?—would remain one of the state’s dominant economic motors. It is not hard to draw a straight line from the settler hustles of early statehood to the inequities that map California today. James Irvine arrived in 1849 and figured out he could make more money selling goods to miners than by mining himself. He funneled his profits into San Francisco real estate and Mexican land grants in southern California, ultimately holding title to about one hundred thousand acres. In the late twentieth century much of that land, still owned by the Irvine Company, would be subdivided into “master-planned communities” throughout what had by then become suburban Orange County. The Irvine Company now owns sixty-five thousand apartments and forty shopping centers and has been a major financial supporter of groups organized to defend California’s Proposition 13, a 1978 ballot initiative that froze property taxes, hobbling the state’s ability to fund education, health care, and public housing. Legitimated by a century and a half of dedicated lawyers, legislators, and lobbyists, the grifts are subtler these days, but the results are the same: vast wealth remains in a few, very powerful hands.
pano bg - old money to marry into