Last month I was sitting next to a lake with a college friend while the sun set. He's in grad school for biology, and he was telling me about studying with ecologists while the Amazon burns.

The most surprising part wasn't the pessimism he described in the heart of academic science. (By now I think most of us know that climate catastrophe is inevitable on some level.) But it was wild to hear what ecologists are doing about it, which apparently is building computer models to help them make a thousand different Sophie's Choices. Faced with limited time, scientists are scrambling to assign value to the "ecosystem services" that different species and habitats provide – so they can decide which natural resources humans should save while we still can.

To my friend, it feels like trying to save the planet using the very same system of knowledge that’s destroying it in the first place. Like using the spreadsheet a private equity firm would use to strip assets from some distressed company.

Mark Fisher was well-known for saying that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. This feels like a pretty literal example — where rather than dismantle an institutional structure that’s inadequate to the problem, we see well-meaning people use the tools of investors to usher in the end of some worlds before others.

The thing is, I can relate. I think a lot of people operate in a similar cognitive state, which you might call permanent triage, where you try to manage an obviously unmanageable number of demands on your attention with perverse rationality. The volume of emails and articles and bills and gigs never goes down, but there’s no way out of the situation. This is the economic logic of a time of information abundance and political austerity, where triage means managing tons of communications while rationing essentials like rent money and insulin. More and more I’m realizing that the most exciting political campaigns — Bernie, the Green New Deal, No New Jails — are the ones that reject the structure of pure accumulation.

Last month I reported on a redesign at Citizen, the peer-to-peer crime-spotting app. The company is trying to roll back the paranoia of the interface, but it turns out there are some bigger un-answered questions. Like what it means exactly when the head of product says, “we want to be known as a safety utility company from here on forward.”

You can read the full story at Eye on Design. (Thanks to Meg Miller for editing!)

I was very, very lucky to spend a week canoeing in the Boundary Waters last month. This newsletter isn’t supposed to be a travelogue, but the quality of attention required to navigate and paddle out there felt like a real release. It was a good way to reflect on some of the ideas I’ve been messing around with in this digital space.

In the spirit of trail reporting, here’s a map of our route: a roughly 40-mile loop along the Canadian border that took us about 6 days.

It’s funny that the aerial view is so intricate, because the view from the water is extremely similar from one lake to the next. Everything – landforms, wind, temperature, light – changes all the time by subtle gradations. Here’s another postcard:

More things I’m reading:

• How a Trump Tax Break to Help Poor Communities Became a Windfall for the Rich (NYT)

• This Logic mag interview with Tarek Loubani, a doctor 3D-printing medical devices in Gaza. A lot more intense than it maybe sounds.

• Going Home with Wendell Berry (New Yorker)

• An odd, virtuosic history book called Red Round Globe Hot Burning. I got it for the title, and because when I went to see the author talk, he got up on a table and delivered the protagonist’s gallows speech from memory. It’s full of poetic marginalia and 18th-century hot takes like this: The law locks up the man or woman / who steals the goose from off the common / but lets the greater villain loose / who steals the common from the goose.

Thanks for reading,

Leo

Hi friends,

Last time I mentioned I was reading How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. I'm still thinking about it on vacation on the West Coast. Like Odell's narrative, my family is strung along the California coastline, and many of us have some kind of creative eccentricity rooted in our experience there. One of the gifts of the book was its help in focusing on who and where I'm from.

Odell talks early on about conceptual artworks by John Cage and others. Rather than focusing on the idea of a piece like 4'33", she frames the composition as an exercise in a different quality of attention — an invitation to strengthen (or maybe exfoliate) our view of the relationships which produce the world around us.

Her discussion made me think of my father’s mother, Joyce, who started making art in San Diego in the 70s and created several conceptual installations about more-than-human ecology. She once proposed filling a local park with an enormous grid of deciduous trees, which she called The Museum of Seasonal Change. She also maintained a lifelong obsession with human and animal anatomy (her favorite necklace was made of deer vertebrae and her living room décor was a human skeleton). Early on, she used her drawings of pigeons to create an "alphabet of bones," in which she composed her own poetry and graphics.

Her most ambitious project from this period was a series of ice sculptures which were placed in front of public buildings and spelled out things like SURVIVAL and WE THE PEOPLE. The water that went into these word sculptures she painstakingly collected from fifty states and nations around the world; as the words melted, they evaporated back into the atmosphere together.

Over the years these stories have become so familiar to me that, like 4'33'', they can feel like one-liners. But How to Do Nothing suggests that the real power of the artworks lies beyond the "conceptual" part, in the realm of expanded perception. It makes sense that they took on the format of signs and symbols which direct attention outward. For Joyce, I think, alphabets and tree groves and water cycles and skeletal systems were naturally-occurring frameworks for contemplating relationships of cultural and ecological interconnection.

Here’s an image of Joyce installing the Namewall, which covered each tile of the LAX arrivals hallway with a different given name. I love how it moves from the care of the individual gesture to the infinitely multiplying field. That’s the whole idea, right?

How to Do Nothing ends in Santa Cruz County, in a tiny town called Corralitos and the nearby estuary of Elkhorn Slough. It just so happens that this is where my other grandmother, Mary, lived for many years. She was a very different artist, mostly working in landscape painting and printmaking, but she found a similarly sacred interconnection in the landscapes around her. The Slough sustained her spirit and framed her convictions, and in return she depicted and defended it with her full attention.

Her 80-year-old apple orchard, where I’m on vacation this week, is its own kind of museum of seasonal (and epochal) change. The second-growth pine forest is lush this summer, but you can still make out the stumps of old-growth firs. The mowed orchard is brushy in the heat and the gnarled fruit trees are heavy with Gravensteins and Pippins. It's an artificial landscape grafted onto a natural one, both marked by centuries of settler-colonial land use, both threatened by climate change, both requiring traditions of care and forms of knowledge that our youngest generation can hardly provide.

Here’s Mary (in the center) painting with animal and human friends at Elkhorn Slough

Mary's clapboard house is still brimming with art which not only represents the landscapes of the coast, but speaks in a language of feminist environmental mythology. One series of prints shows the entwined skeletons of a human child and bear cub, which were found buried together at an ancient archaeological site nearby. Another shows an abandoned pleasure boat, with carved swans on its aft and prow, left up in dry storage in the middle of a field. She brought these ready-made constructions — both the patrimony and the detritus of California’s cultural landscape — into the vibrating field of her images. I'm not sure Mary ever read Donna Haraway (though they lived and worked within an hour's drive of each other), but her works are rich with the language of "making kin" in a damaged world.

Anyway, I hope you read How to Do Nothing. Maybe Odell’s lines of thinking will lead you to new trails through familiar landscapes. Maybe it will help you trace the root system of your family history. I’m sure that everyone getting this email has some amazing matriarchs, and I would love to hear their stories, too.

Co-inhabiting,

Leo

Hello! I’ve been thinking lately about the ways that people externalize their learning.

This isn’t something that usually preoccupies me too much. I have my rituals, sure: I save articles to Instapaper, I make channels on Are.na, I take notes by hand. But I don’t really have a practice of consuming information and then representing it. Since I’ve been bookmarking interesting examples as I come across them, I thought I’d send you all a few.

Tom Critchlow wrote a post a couple weeks ago about blogchains, an idea that Venkatesh Rao coined to describe his writing on Ribbonfarm. It’s simple: he writes a series of short posts on one topic and links them together in a sequence.

Venkatesh’s blogchains (above) are ways of visualizing and extending his thinking about still-fuzzy ideas, like “domestic cozy.” They might meander in one direction and then another. They are a lightweight way of publishing a train of thought. Tom is also organizing some of his writing into blogchains, too. I suppose a lot of writing projects are blogchains without realizing it — like Hubert Horan’s unhinged 20-part series, which I linked to a few weeks back, called “Can Uber Ever Deliver?”

I like this idea because it’s not really a new tool or feature. It’s just an invitation to view your ideas in a certain way. It’s a frame that imposes structure in one sense, so that you can preserve openness in another.

I use Are.na for a related, but different type of visualization. I gather readings and other sources of information rather than snippets of my own expression. So instead of channels collecting my thoughts, it’s more that channels are my thoughts. Each one reflects what I’m synthesizing from the contents (which are often other people’s ideas).

You don’t have to use Are.na to get this effect. Édouard Urcades wrote a very nice post where he describes theprocess more generally as building “reading networks.”

While texts often build and maintain an internal and pre-set collection of references …, it’s a far more personal practice to form one’s own links in an inter-textual manner.

I’d like to think that building your own reading networks can foster a method of building personal abstractions, building personal relevance to any given topic, and improving the methods by which you consume others’ ideas and structures.

I love how Éd’s writing rhymes with the way Octavia Butler once described her own reading practices:

“I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don't relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I'll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.

So, I guess, in that way, I'm using a kind of primitive hypertext.”

One time someone commented that Are.na was like an incomplete version of the detective’s cork board from a crime show. You can lay out all your pieces of evidence, but there’s no red thread to map out the connections between them.

I still think about that comment all the time. I think it gets to the difference between a channel and a blogchain, and the different qualities of thought I’m looking to make space to inhabit online. If a channel is a map, you still need a way to make a journey. A trail, let’s say.

The map is structural, synoptic, and independent from time; the trail is intuitive, temporal, and constrained. A blogchain is one form of thinking trail, but there are many others.

The unfolding-through-time is I what like best about the idea of a trail. The imminence of thought taking concrete shape. In other words: “the road is made by walking.”

Or, as Laurel Schwulst writes:

“Snails (and other gastropods like slugs) excrete slime. They make this slime to move, so that their bodies don’t lose moisture to the rugged terrain beneath them. This slime is beautiful because it glimmers. It’s also beautiful because it’s a map of time recently spent by the snail. Where is the snail now? And where was it going in the first place?”

Another thing I like about the trail image is the wilderness (if we can call it that). When you make a trail you are charting a small path, moment by moment, through infinitude. You step here and not there. Even following an established trail means hewing to this original concession, which if you think about it, is a collective decision about how to spend our time.

Given the sheer volume of content that fills digital spaces, we might think about attention using metaphors of environmental stewardship: building trails, remediating damaged landscapes, prescribing burns, packing out our trash.

I only just started Jenny Odell’s book, How to Do Nothing, but it’s thick with this kind of attention to place. Laurel’s app Flight Simulator (an “ode to airplane mode”) also helps me get into this frame of mind, because its poetic devices play with time and space. First you choose your flight and then you fill that virtual journey with the trail of thinking you’ve set aside time to complete.

Craig Mod’s practice of walking, and the various experiments he’s published from the trail, are even more literal examples. Like this spring, when he texted one image per day to everyone who signed up — and then published a single book of their SMS responses.

He’s committed to the idea of walking because it’s already at the core of everyday life:

By even just using the word “hike,” folks drop off: Not young enough, not strong enough, not ready for the bugs. You can trick a person into hiking by calling it a walk. I’ve done so many times. And “walk” denotes a thing to be easily grabbed. A walk is there to be taken.

If I’m going to constrain my use of social media, or try to trace the thread of an idea to the exclusion of all the other noise in my head, I’d like to follow a process as simple and emergent as that. To walk and notice and think — and put the pieces together in a similar headspace.

I’ll leave you with an attempt to bridge the divide between the map and the journey: this little trail network diagram I made to document some of the ideas I’ve talked about so far on the newsletter. Some waypoints are actual emails, others are just curiosities for now. Making it brought back memories of thecomputer game Escape Velocity, where you have to plot your course between star systems. Who knows which paths will be taken, which will be constructed and which left to seed.

Happy trails,

Leo

For the past few weeks I’ve been reading about housing finance, which is weird because a) I’m allergic to quantitative reasoning and b) it can get extremely tedious. But I feel like lefty urbanists should know a little bit about how housing systems work if we’re going to make arguments about fixing them. Or, at the very least, ward off the worst elements of YIMBY twitter.

Housing politics in planetary perspective

I’m really enjoying a new book by Raquel Rolnik called Urban Warfare: Housing under the Empire of Finance. Rolnik is a Brazilian planner who served as the UN Special Rapporteur on housing from 2008 to 2013, and her narrative reads like a detective’s conspiracy board of everything wrong with global urbanism. The best part is how she draws on her experiences with tenants around the world, using the particularities of each place to build a global critique of multilateral policy.

The first half of the book digs into what neoliberalism actually looks like in terms of housing, and how it spread across the globe. After many Western countries stopped producing and sold off their social housing stock in the 1970s, Rolnik shows how World Bank policymakers essentially forced developing countries to transform themselves into receptacles for speculative investment. In order to receive loans, dozens of nations replaced traditional forms of tenure with formal property rights, slashed their public housing programs, and pumped subsidies into promoting mortgage markets.

Those markets ended up swelling the international housing bubble, leaving first-time borrowers in places like Chile and Kazakhstan homeless after the 2008 crash. (There’s a lot of regional variation and comparative history in the text.) While it sounds a lot like what we already know about the financial crisis, I think this story goes a long way toward helping us challenge the economic consensus on its own terms: after half a century of campaigns for “allowing markets to work,” Rolnik writes that “financialisation policies were more useful for the expansion of financial markets themselves than for increasing access to housing for the poorest and most vulnerable.”

The second part of the book highlights what happens when state capitalism collides with spaces of “informal urbanism,” like Brazil’s favelas and Indonesia’s kampung. I think Americans often exoticize these places in their imagination — so it was refreshing to read an account that pays attention to the complex patchworks of customary rights, communal traditions, and grassroots movements at play in urban peripheries around the world. Rolnik also makes structural connections between stories that have cycled in and out of the news cycle over the years. She shows how disasters, sea level rise, Olympic games, regime changes, and development aid have all fed the consensus of creating “cities without slums” – a campaign to turn informal settlements into investment vehicles.

Mortgaged Lives

In the last letter I mentioned the part in Carceral Capitalism where Jackie Wang talks about the disciplinary function of personal debt. She writes:

“…we are, from an early age, socialized into a form of financial citizenship that compels us to accept indebtedness as inevitable and to constantly engage in self-disciplinary acts that authorize and extend the debt economy.”

With that still rattling around my brain, I was glad to find an article by Melissa García-Lamarca and Maria Kaika that extends this line of thinking on the “biopolitics” of debt into the realm of housing. They focus on the experiences of Spanish borrowers who were hounded into deceptive mortgages during the construction boom of the early 2000s. Thanks to a Spanish law that requires borrowers to repay creditors even after losing their homes, many people found themselves indebted for the rest of their lives. The authors insist on foregrounding this daily nightmare as the true context of financialization:

“…mortgage contracts enrolled not only personal income, but also the practices of everyday life as well as community and family relations as cogwheels into the global speculative financial strategies that drive capitalist urbanisation.”

Just when you think the situation couldn’t get any worse, you learn that post-crisis rules aimed at reforming the banking system hurt debtors even more. In 2012, regulators at the European Central Bank required banks holding mortgage debt to shore up their balance sheets with less risky assets.

Banks thus came under strong pressure to reclassify said debt as non-performing and sell it off at a fraction of its nominal value to international distressed debt investors. For example, in July 2014, 112,000 residential mortgages worth €6.4 billion were sold to the multinational investment and advisory firm Blackstone at almost half their nominal value. This practice casts families into uncharted waters and leaves them facing an even more precarious and uncertain future as there is often no office they can physically approach to renegotiate or pressure for a solution to their debt.

It’s worth mentioning that the current mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, and her political organization, Barcelona en Comú, emerged directly from mass mobilizations against these practices. It’s partly because the scale of debt is so breathtaking in Spain that movements like 15M and the indignados and the Plattorm for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) came to prominence in the Spanish left. If you’re interested, you should check out Mortgaged Lives, the memoir/manifesto that Colau and her partner Adrià Alemany wrote about their movement. Their experiment in municipal government is only becoming more relevant to New York City as grassroots movements here start to take meaningful political power.

Resisting Blackstone

The private equity giant buying up borrowers’ debt has in recent years become the world’s largest landlord. And the company’s “aggressive asset management” strategy involves hiking rents, ignoring tenants, and packaging rental properties into financial securities (not unlike subprime mortgages). In some places it even enforces illegal lease terms, assuming that tenants don’t know any better.

So it was good news this month when the residents of a building in Barcelona’s historic immigrant district of the Raval (pictured above) successfully fought eviction by Blackstone and forced the company to make key improvements to the property. Their success followed on the heels of a rent strike against a Blackstone subsidiary in Madrid. If you follow along on Twitter, you can see that Barcelona’s neighborhoods are full of tenant activist groups who show up to stop their neighbors’ evictions.

One thing to take away from these mobilizations is that the “rules” of housing are not static and impartial; they are reshaped by politics from above and below. Blackstone maintains a business model of victimizing people because the legal order is tailored to their needs, and because there are no public repercussions for their actions. You rarely hear about rent strikes in New York, on the other hand, because they don’t square with the political culture of the neoliberal city. But they’ve happened hundreds of times during more militant moments — and they could happen again.

Global hedge funds like Blackstone and tech companies like Airbnb are also turning cities around the world into different sites of the same crisis. While tenants fight individual battles for their own neighborhoods, financial capital crosses borders and platforms. Seeing tenant unions win in Barcelona and the city municipalizing private apartments in Berlin is inspiring because it links the aspirations housing movements on different continents and expands the limit of what feels possible in any one context.

More reading:

Digital Jail: How Electronic Monitoring Drives Defendants Into Debt (ProPublica)

Their Family Bought Land One Generation After Slavery. The Reels Brothers Spent Eight Years in Jail for Refusing to Leave It. (ProPublica)

Citi Bike neglects poor NYC neighborhoods and communities of color (NYDN)

How Amazon and the Cops Set Up an Elaborate Sting Operation That Accomplished Nothing (Vice)

How to run a small social network site for your friends (Darius Kazemi)

The Problem With Community Land Trusts (Jacobin)

Til next time!

Leo

Twitter loves to dunk on Silicon Valley. It goes especially crazy when tech companies “invent” something that already exists – whether that thing is good or bad. Yesterday the bright idea was Google’s plan to build affordable housing on its property in the Bay Area, to which someone retorted, “You’re describing a company town.”

Previous versions of this meme format have followed similar lines.

For co-living: “IT’S CALLED ROOMMATES YOU INVENTED ROOMMATES“

For so-called ‘job mortgages’: “Congratulations, you invented taxes and public education“

For the automated bodega: “Congratulations! You “invented” vending machines.“

As much as I agree with the sentiment here, i.e. please fuck off with your platform capitalist solution to this social problem, I think it’s interesting how detached these responses are from reality. Let’s consider a meta-shitpost: 

Ok, yes this joke is extremely dumb, but it articulates something important. Platforms don’t just want to replace whatever dominant institution they resemble; they aspire to fundamentally remake the political economy of their sector, in addition to all the ways it intersects with public life.

The history of driving is actually a good example. The affordances of the car were completely at odds with the norms of public space, which meant early drivers killed lots of people and caused all kinds of problems. As local governments took up regulations to rein in this violence, the industry went on a lobbying campaign to transform the legal and spatial structure of the streetscape. They shamed pedestrians for carelessness and invented the crime of “jaywalking.” Auto dealers in the 1920s even sent mailers to their customers urging them to vote against speed regulations (sorta like Uber and Airbnb almost a century later). In short, they accommodated the world to the car rather than the other way around.

The parable of the auto industry suggests we should think about “disruption” not just as a pattern of competition, but almost as a terraforming process which brings forth a different material and political environment – one that’s hostile to existing social relations and hospitable to new ones orchestrated by centralized digital platforms.

The “congratulations” joke only works if you’re actively thinking about how to sabotage that process. If we don’t want to end up in dystopian co-living pods, we should be working to expand rent control and unwind the massive acquisition of housing stock by private equity. If we want equitable transportation, we’ll need proper funding for mass transit but also a complete transformation of the environment that gives ride-hailing platforms an artificial advantage.

Platforms are quite fragile during the process of “scaling,” which is partly why they spend so heavily to popularize their proprietary vision of the future. Uber is maybe the best example of a company that needs to burn billions of dollars to create its own reality. As Hubert Horan wrote recently on Naked Capitalism, “Much of the Uber/ridesharing story can be seen as a battle between perceptions based on the artificial, manufactured narratives that the media has embraced, and perceptions based on economic/financial evidence.” Its recent IPO flop shows just how far Uber will need to bend the rules of the market in order to become the so-called “Amazon of transportation” and actually turn a profit.

I don’t want to ramble on too long here, but I think it’s worth noting there’s a relationship between the debt that finances startup world-building and the debt which constrains the possibilities of ordinary people and governments. Here I’m thinking of the links Jackie Wang makes between finance, governance, and policing in her book Carceral Capitalism. When platforms disrupt existing industries, such as when Uber forces drivers into predatory leases and labor arrangements, they deepen what Wang calls “a form of financial citizenship that compels us to accept indebtedness as inevitable and to constantly engage in self-disciplinary acts that authorize and extend the debt economy.” They make premium lifestyles available to the already “creditworthy” while allowing predictive policing and to basically update redlining for the digital age. That’s a whole other topic, but I really recommend the book (you can read an excerpt on The New Inquiry). 

What else I’m reading right now:

• Sam Stein (author of Capital City) recaps what the tenant victory in Albanymeans for New York renters

• Kaitlyn Tiffany profiled the gun influencers of Instagram

• How Teach for America Evolved Into an Arm of the Charter School Movement(yikes)

• Jiayang Fan’s profile of Cixin Liu in this week’s New Yorker

• Casey Newton’s latest story on working conditions for Facebook moderators

• All hail Lord Rod and his yam car

Thanks for reading.

Jaywalking,

Leo

I’m writing from a shady patch of Fort Greene Park, where the city has entered those breezy, not-too-humid first weeks of summer. I have Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden in front of me and I’m watching the planes glide overhead toward LaGuardia. It’s a rare corner of green in New York: a funny spot to be reading about “technology and the pastoral ideal in America.”

I picked up the book because my brain is still on this kick with “internet prehistory.” If the metaphor of the network helps us make sense of today’s social world, I was curious how languages of landscape and industrial technology did the same in the early United States.

So far I’ve really enjoyed how Marx grounds his intellectual history in the physical environment. The garden in the title refers to what he calls the “pastoral ideal,” an image of rural harmony imported from European literary tradition that becomes the predominant symbol of American society. This scene had plenty of metaphorical expressions – linking the young Republic to the virtues of classical poetry, for example – but it was also a blueprint for the growth of the nation. “Beginning in Jefferson’s time,” he writes, “the cardinal image of American aspirations was a rural landscape, a well-ordered green garden magnified to continental size.”

George Inness, “The Lackawanna Valley”

Marx spends most of the book on the entry of the “machine” into this landscape. Instead of reacting with trauma, he shows how literary thinkers and politicians assimilated industrial technology into the pastoral scene by embracing narratives of progress. Romantics like Emerson and even Jefferson expressed unqualified excitement about industry’s potential to augment the exceptional gifts of the American setting. This is where the literal image of “the machine in the garden” looms large, in many cases showing the locomotive as a canonical element of an American Eden. The quasi-nostalgic set-up “brings the political and psychic dissonance associated with the onset of industrialism into a single pattern of meaning,” one which shifts the pastoral ideal toward a more symbolic role.

Does any of this sound familiar? I’m interested not only in how this encounter has repeated itself over time, but how the terms of the equation have changed as technology diffuses further into the environment. Instead of “the machine in the garden,” today we might talk about “the garden in the machine,” or even say that “the garden is the machine.”

Think about the Whole Earth Catalog, for example, and you can see some of these parts shifting around. In cybernetics and information theory we get a deep sense of identification between natural and artificial systems (one that builds on the Enlightenment model of the universe as a mechanism). From the countercultural milieu of Silicon Valley we get an update of the transcendental worldview for the Cold War era. Here the virtual landscape is emerging as a world unto itself, but we can still say of someone like Stewart Brand what Marx observes of Emerson: “What perplexes us here is [his] ability to join enthusiasm for technological progress with a ‘romantic’ love of nature and contempt for cities. The characteristic starting point of his thought is withdrawal from society in the direction of ‘nature’ - a pastoral impulse.”

This stuff feels trickier to pull apart in 2019, maybe because we occupy a virtual environment that’s pretty much co-extensive with the physical one. We still have a strong preoccupation with the urban-rural divide, but the pastoral ideal takes on new definitions as the metaphorical network becomes more pervasive.For some reason I’m totally fixated on the ways that social media creators wrestle with this question of autonomy in their lifestyle content. Starting around 2016, the online minimalism movement repackaged transcendentalism as a combination of limited consumption habits, a new concept of domestic space, and a priority on meaningful personal relationships and online content. Back-to-the-land culture is having also having an online revival among people like permaculture (a.k.a “permie”) youtubers and “modern homesteaders,” most of whom are more committed to actually farming than Jefferson ever was. Even a group as cosmopolitan as the “digital nomad” class fits into the pastoral ideal as Emerson described it, since its members aim to resolve independence and self-actualization with globalization. These “creators” resemble Emerson’s (highly elitist) vision of “the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole, — re-attaching even artificial things and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight.”

The phrase that I keep returning to is what Marx calls the “American moral geography.” He writes that “the contrast between ‘city’ and ‘country’” is best understood not as a spatial demarcation, but “as an analogue of psychic experience. It implies that we can remain human, which is to say, fully integrated beings, only when we follow some such course, back and forth, between our social and natural (animal) selves.” It’s in this sense, I think, that networked technology resembles the industrial order of the 19th century or the media ecology of the 20th. Not as an artifact from which we can distance ourselves, but as an environment in which we are thoroughly entangled with ideologies, with histories, and with living and non-living systems.

Here’s what else I’m consuming this week:

• A look back at graduate student organizing and burnout at Yale, by Alyssa Battistoni in n+1

• Airpods as a ubiquitous aural platform, by Drew Austin in Real Life Mag

• A profile of the tenant movement fighting to strengthen New York’s rent laws (which expire in 9 days! The legislature is on the verge of passing universal rent control, but things look tenuous.) 

• An op-ed on post-Amazon organizing in NYC by one of the co-directors of Make the Road

Thanks for reading!

In repose,
Leo

Did you read Taylor Lorenz on the “Tea Industrial Complex” last week? She did a great job picking apart a bizarre feud between makeup YouTubers as an object lesson in the big business of influencer drama. For the full effect, watch this videoof a full-time gossip pundit try to un-cancel one of the article’s subjects, only to yell, “I’m GREENLIGHTING A CANCELING” for someone else. Total witch hunt!

I’m not really a YouTube person, but the article made me feel self-conscious about how often I end up spectating the same type of conflict on Twitter. I spent more than five minutes of this beautiful spring morning clicking through a relationship feud between an elf costumer and a streamer witch. It continues to be a bummer that Twitter’s mechanics lead people into these vicious fights, which become attention-sucking black holes of quote tweets and side threads. I guess one cost of micro-celebrity is having your emotional life torn apart and fed into the personalized checkout-aisle magazine that is everyone else’s timeline.

It’s even more interesting and sad how this dynamic haunts communities who use social media platforms in service of an actual mission. I have a friend who volunteers at farm sanctuaries near NYC, and last week she told me that a sanctuary in New Jersey accused one of the more established ones, Woodstock Farm Sanctuary upstate, of helping two former employees sabotage its operations and steal its animals (!). The two are now in court, people have been fired, and Facebook/Instagram are full of dueling posts and “receipts” compilations. Because these organizations fundraise by cultivating enormous social media audiences, what likely started as a misunderstanding spilled over into their fan bases and then ballooned into a fight that forced hundreds of people to take sides.

In hindsight it seems like having its reputation destroyed by infighting was a risk that Woodstock should have considered before building a viral following. But opting out of social media isn’t really an option for non-profits and small businesses. Big accounts are like zeppelins full of flammable gas; they can keep you aloft as long as the content keeps coming, or they can explode at the slightest sign of conflict.

Here’s what else I’m paying attention to this week: 

Other great newsletters. If newsletters are the new blogs, I should really have a “blogroll” of the ones I’m always excited to open. In the meantime, a few faves:

• Gnamma: Lukas makes these beautiful connections between artistic practice and the material processes of the earth. Delivered with a degree of open self-reflection that makes you want to work on your own habits.

• dellsystem: Wendy is a lefty tech writer / worker publishing a short piece on politics and technology every day (😱) in 2019. The newsletter has the highlights, which are great.

• Notes from a small press: Opinionated and non-condescening explanations from Anne Trubek (of BELT publishing) of the ins-and-outs of making books.

• Meatspace: Great weekly roundup of internet news and viral silliness. You could ditch Twitter and still hear about the good memes by reading this.
  

• THE CITY & The NYC Thorn: Two really good local news roundups which you should read if you live here! The Thorn is from DSA, which, feel free to eye-roll, but did you know a law might pass in June that stabilizes your rent?

• All my stars: Short dispatches from Joanne Mcneil, who is an incredible writer and observer.

• Penny Fractions: Wonky newsletter by David Turner about Spotify and the music / audio / streaming industry. I don’t subscribe to a lot of super-nerd newsletters but I like this one.

• Kneeling Bus: Drew Austin’s writing on urbanism and technology. This one, filtering mobility platforms through the ideas of Ivan Illich, blew me away.

This new Citizen app. It’s a Waze-style aggregator for crime reports, which lets users add incidents and even upload video or comments. It also pulls in content from crime blotters and sends push notifications. Seems suspicious even before you learn it was originally named Vigilante! I think what’s most worrying is the way this and products like the Ring doorbell create a state of “total information awareness” for people with money, smart tech, and a lot of racial fear – a kind of fortified filter bubble for the Permit Pattys of the world that plugs directly into the surveillance state.

Uber stuff. Mike Isaac dissects the IPO disappointment for NYT. Matt Levine explains unicorn logic in normal person language for Bloomberg. Aaron Gordon explains why Uber’s hard line on contract workers actually makes it vulnerable to accusations of price-fixing.

The rise and fall of Philly’s tow-truck king. Just read the story, it’s wild.

“Trans-regional gentrification”? This NYT op-ed about abortion by a Brooklynite who decamped to New Orleans made me think about the broader politics of NYC yuppies moving to second-tier cities. Is there even a name for this? You see a lot of trend pieces about Portland and Denver getting more expensive, or places like Pittsburgh and Raleigh attracting millennials, but I’d like to read more about the big picture. Anyway, started an Are.na channel for more links. 

Thanks for reading! If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider suggesting it to a friend :)

Sipping tea,
Leo

The last newsletter was about the ways we pay for everything with our attention. This one is about freemasons and transcendentalists and P.T. Barnum. I think these things are related! The web these days is one long caravan of spectacles and scams, and so is the entire sweep of American history.

Maybe you’ve noticed how often we use metaphors drawn from 19th-century Americana to explain contemporary internet culture. We talk about platform monopolies ushering in a “new gilded age.” Crypto is either the new gold rush or the new Wild West, depending on who you ask. Even “fake news” recalls a time when media bent more willingly to the whims of the robber barons.

I think there’s something more than correspondence in these tropes, which is to say, I’m interested in how we might understand the internet differently if we pushed back the so-called “rise of the networked society” by a hundred years or more. Maybe if we paid closer attention to the socialities, spiritualities, movements, publications, and literary discourses of the 19th century, we’d find pre-digital networks that link up with our own.

An early 1800s camp meeting, lithograph of unknown origin

Grifters!

Anyone who read Tom Sawyer in grade school sensed that scamming is a deep-seated element of American psychology. People like Anna Delvey and Billy MacFarland and Elizabeth Holmes are merely the latest in a long tradition of hucksters and cheats who went on to become national sensations. As Jia Tolentino wrote in 2018: “Grifter season comes irregularly, but it comes often in America, which is built around mythologies of profit and reinvention and spectacular ascent.”

For Tolentino, who hones in on our sympathetic fascination with scammers, the hoax has a way of both deflating and reanimating that other quintessentially American myth – the up-by-your-bootstraps meritocracy our politicians and capitalists love to profess. On one hand, we can all see the system is rigged, so why not root for those with the gall to game it? On the other hand, aren’t all of us on social media basically scheming to capture other people’s attention?

Maybe the recurrence of grifter season follows the spooky pendulum of financial crisis. Maybe it’s astrological. For the New York Times critic Amanda Hess, grifter season is simply what you get when the Silicon Valley “entrepreneurial fetish” saturates an online economy built around immersive media and user engagement. “In this hyper-visual culture,” she writes, “constructing an image of something can feel like the most important step in conjuring the thing itself.” Reading that made me wish more people were situating today’s grifters in a longer window of cultural history and media ecology. You don’t have to look far for a sense of the similar hysteria which was pervasive in the postbellum United States. Mark Twain, for example, got famous with a hoax story, squandered millions on what today we’d call angel investments, and spent his later years traveling the world giving the equivalent of TED talks.

Last year I stumbled across a book called The Stammering Century, which does exactly this. Published in 1922, it’s a compilation of hot takes by a New York literary critic named Gilbert Seldes who spends 300 pages skewering the utopian fanatics and wheeler-dealers of the early U.S. Here’s how he sums it up:

“[This book’s] personages are fanatics, and radicals, and mountebanks. Its intention is to connect these secondary movements and figures with the primary forces of the century, and to supply a background in American history for the Prohibitionists and the Pente­costalists; the diet-faddists and the dealers in mail-order Personality; the play censors and the Fundamen­talists; the free-lovers and eugenists; the cranks and possibly the saints. Sects, cults, manias, movements, fads, religious excitements, and the relation of each of these to the others and to the orderly progress of America are the subject.”

I bring up this odd book because even though it reaches back to early days of the United States, it feels like it’s about today’s internet. Its interest in subcultural media reminds me of Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies. Its soapbox personalities spread the same kind of memes and moral panics that pop up on Buzzfeed. Seldes talks about religious revivalists the same way that Twitter pundits talk about Alex Jones. Everyone everywhere seems to be searching for meaning in the emergence of mass media, the boom and bust of industrial economy, and the growing pains of national institutions – the same kinds of destabilizations we turn to the social web to address in the Trump era.

Left: the replica of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond (photo byFlickr user Namlhots). Right: a Pinterest-ready reinterpretation in Pennsylvania.

New Transcendentalisms

A lot of the affective qualities of 19th-century spiritual and literary circles feel like they’re present today on YouTube, Instagram and Tumblr, where communities crop up easily around aesthetics, fandom, lifestyle, belief, and identity.

I almost want to call these groups “neo-transcendental” because they focus earnestly on recovering a spiritual connection with the self and the outside world. Like Thoreau’s Walden, much of their content is diaristic or instructional, and it ranges in scope from daily practices to broad philosophies. It often deals with the routines of inhabiting a body and making a home. Veganism, yoga, digital nomadism, minimalism, tiny houses, van life, nutrition, hygge, permaculture, and polyamory are all interest nodes for groups that communicate in this register around what it means to “live deliberately.”

There’s a connection to the commercial side of the Romantic world here, too. Content creators like vloggers need to monetize their audiences in much the same way that 19th-century spiritualists, reformers, and inventors sustained themselves through writings and appearances. This thread casting Thoreau as the perfect millennial gets at the similarity: “Participates in gig economy. Is an OK farmer for exactly one year. Most accurate job title is ‘Influencer’.”

The figure of the “influencer” implies a network of causation that’s traceable through a social graph. 19th-century literary and spiritual movements also spent a lot of effort trying to manifest this kind of impact. The Stammering Century is full of preachers and commune-builders who traversed lecture halls, newspapers, and other social spaces across the early United States making the case for their communities. Though they didn’t have digital communications tools, their astute marketing did give them a kind of virtual presence in popular culture – just like the real Fyre Fest wasn’t the event itself but the millions of people watching documentaries and snarking on the TL. I think this is something the Transcendentalists understood implicitly: utopian experiments like Brook Farm and Fruitlands were just as catastrophic, but did a lot to dramatize their image in popular literary culture.

“Fraternal” Organizations

Last week Venkatesh Rao tweeted, “We’re gonna see a new institutional underground of reimagined secret societies, lodges, fraternities, sororities etc.” Which makes sense! Trade unions, immigrant mutual aid groups, and other societies offered cohesion in the face of alienation. Though they sound musty and mysterious today, fraternal orders provided a highly coded social space where 19th-century men made professional connections, organized mutual aid, and conducted politics. (Some orders, like the Odd Fellows and their counterparts the Rebekahs, maintained separate affiliations for men and women). More formal than the so-called “third space” of cafe culture, this participatory structure outside the home is not unlike what the co-working industry provides for lonely freelancers.

It’s interesting to watch how this history flows into new contexts created by technology and real estate. Though Freemasonry was a global institution, it remained a quasi-private sphere largely outside the marketplace. Firms like WeWork and The Wing also build group identification through things like exclusivity, iconograpy, and networking, but the result is a subscription service rather than a social body. Their mechanisms of social reproduction are also public commodities.

With its “WeLive” spaces, the We Company is drawing on the even more integral experience of the commune (or kibbutz, in its Israeli founder’s words) to achieve a complete financialization of private life. The Wing’s #girlboss makeover of the fraternal institution shreds the historical separation between the public sphere and the feminized domestic one – though it also erases many of the more solidaristic structures in which women cooperated to influence public life since the era of “republican motherhood.” Even online white supremacists channel the history of secretive association left over from these groups – which were exclusively male spaces and overlapped in many places with terrorist vigilante groups like the Klan. This is all very crazy to me, and worth thinking more about.

History and metaphor

There are a lot more examples like the ones above. I’d argue the current turn toward astrology, wellness and self-care resonates deeply with the blurring of healing practices and spiritualism that took place alongside the formalization of medicine. On a darker note, the communicative register of the alt-right bears a direct connection to the violent white supremacy that spread virally throughout the 19th century and had its roots in even earlier forms of folk politics.

I think it makes sense to refer to institutions like the print newspaper, the fraternal organization, or the utopian commune as pre-digital network technologies which formed collective identity and coordinated both belief and action. To draw on Shannon Mattern’s history of the hardware store as a “social infrastructure,” these connective spaces “gave shape to the community” in ways that in ways remain familiar from our online interactions today. Sometimes even the terminology lines up: Methodist preachers in the West were known as “circuit riders” because the church dispatched them on horseback to rural communities, rerouting them dynamically across a vast territory like packets over a network.

But how do we dig into this kind of network history without simply bending the past to fit our present worldview? My friend Toph said recently in an interview, “it is striking how in the history of technology, in an age of hydraulics people see the body as regulated by fluid humors and the equilibrium among them. Or in an age of machines it gives you the gears and mechanical. And in our modern information age, we view it as code or computation or information processing. But from the broader historical perspective, when you see how every age projects its technological advancements onto its metaphors for itself, it’s not clear we’ve escaped those metaphors towards any kind of transcendent whole truth.”

In other words, to say “the Great Awakening was a social network” is to make one of those Gladwellian simplifications that’s more of a crutch than a thinking tool. When you look back in time you’re dealing not only with many kinds of “technologies” (each with their own lifespan and affordances), but also with ideologies, communities (imagined or otherwise), and discourses. These things are always influencing each other in unique and unpredictable ways.

I don’t really have a good answer for navigating all this, but I’ve found a good example in “Bunk” by Kevin Young, which traces “the rise of hoaxes, humbug, plagiarists, phonies, post-facts, and fake news” from Barnum’s circus through the Trump administration. Instead of playing a matching game between past and present, Young takes a multiply networked society as a given and digs into the interactions between new media and longstanding ideological formations like whiteness and scientific racism. He’ll zoom in on the cultural politics of individual deceptions, like spirit photography, but also pull way out to dissect broad cultural dynamics, like the Romantic mindset “in which pseudoscience and pseudospirituality got spliced together with the reactionary eugenics of Europe and America.” Throughout the text he pays close attention to the particular orientations of individuals, from Edgar Allen Poe to Rachel Dolezal.

I’m sure that fifty years from now our experience of the world will be mediated through new kinds of interfaces whose antecedents are only vaguely apparent to us now. I suppose what will create a useful sense of the past in the present is not a uniform set of historical references, but a quality of observation that remains alive to the multiplicities, consistencies, and contingencies in social experience. “Of hoaxes,” Young writes, “there’s never a shortage—but it’s also true that the weather of a particular time and place can influence what grows in a drought of facts. It is that weather the hoax measures.” 

Thanks for reading!

In infinite expectation of the dawn, 
Leo 

It’s not that I’m trying to pinpoint the chronology here. It doesn’t help much to know that our old friend Dr. Zizmor retired in 2016, or that Casper launched the subway advertising arms race that same year. Instead, I want to recall a slightly less sociopathic information ecology, and I want to use it as a point of comparison – something to hold up next to the augmented reality casino we currently inhabit. 

A lot of people are talking about the “attention economy” right now. They were talking about it years ago, too, but the term keeps getting bigger and heavier, like a mudslide absorbing everything in its path. The attention economy is A.I. and Fyre Fest and Trump and online fascism and internet addiction and the death of journalism all at once. It no longer makes sense to talk about daily life in terms of online or IRL. There are a lot of dense theorizations out there for this brave new world, but I think the subway car is just as good a place to start thinking. 

1. Direct to consumer

Why do people buy the stuff in the subway ads? Sometimes on a packed C train I try to picture the kind of person I would be with a sleek electric toothbrush and USB-equipped rolling luggage. These things aren’t necessities, and they definitely aren’t cheap, but they offer a glimpse of the kind of put-togetherness that’s always slipping through millennials’ fingers. Plus, they’re stupidly easy to buy. Time is money, and so is certainty: this is the disruptive promise of the consumer-facing startup.

The thing is, time has been feeling pretty weird lately and I’m less certain than ever. The kind of “frictionless” experiences that were supposed to simplify my life are instead giving me a strange momentum. Sometimes I grab my phone to check the weather and end up an hour later with my back in knots and my mind in a black hole. The scariest thing is actually ending up with room in my day for some “time well spent.” Even with a clear afternoon and no obligations, I feel my brain reaching for the comfort of my feeds, my messages, my role as a user.

If our habits are more plastic than we think, our attention itself is a finite resource. Demand for “mind share” among brands is rising while consumers’ attention spans (the “supply” in this case) are actually getting shorter. Casper hopped on the subway in 2016 because cheeky illustrations and discounts were cheap ways to generate interest at the time. Now that the market is more crowded, advertisers are burning truckloads of VC money to achieve the same return: Fiverr’s cruel jokes, Casper’s puzzle games, and Policygenius’ fake poems all point to the rising cost of eyeballs.

As easy as this is to grasp in the abstract, it’s not making life any less disorienting. Understanding the microeconomics of content marketing only goes so far when your brain is being used as an open pit mine. 

2. Millennial mind share

Becoming something more than a user means first untangling the web of power relationships that got us here. This is something Malcolm Harris does really well in his book Kids These Days, which describes how institutions at all scales have agreed to squeeze every drop of productive mental energy out of our generation. He breaks down the neoliberal political economy of attention into actual experiences: small children filling their hours with homework and testing, teens learning to medicate their distraction and depression, college grads building personal brands and juggling freelance jobs to pay down their debt. In Harris’ telling, the intellectual abstraction of a dwindling “attention supply” becomes a concrete political question with obvious stakes.

The contradictions of the attention market are right there in the train. The ads are selling states of mind we no longer have the time to achieve: meaningful rest, unblemished experiences of nature, a sense of domestic organization, and so on. But they’re fishing for our attention, too, and exacerbating the information overload they purport to solve. When read that “millennials are killing X,” we should keep in mind that millennials are spending every minute of life in a mode of uncompensated, entrepreneurial multitasking. Our consumption habits likely have more to do with how we allocate our maxed-out cognitive capacity, and how well businesses play to that reality, than they do with vague generational preferences.

It’s also worth reminding ourselves that capital will always try to sell us solutions to the problems it creates. Meditation apps advertise peace of mind. Screen time-tracking has become a selling point for the iPhone. In hailing consumers as solely responsible for our health, marketing puts the onus on us to correct psychological harms that we didn’t ourselves inflict. As Harris describes, there’s no way to opt out of participating in the new economy – only new ways to invest in ourselves as human capital. 

3. Cognition, public health, and “wellness”

One step toward breaking this cycle might just be spreading the idea that the attention economy is a public health crisis. I’m not a medical researcher, but it feels safe to say that the typical millennial’s productivity requires an immense amount of cognitive work. These uncompensated tasks are all sources of stress, which has a well-documented correlation with adverse health outcomes. We could acknowledge that by looking more closely at how networked labor increases “allostatic load,” which is the term health experts use to quantify a total stress burden from disparate experiences.

I think this framing gives us a way to recognize that the gig economy and the attention economy are not separate phenomena, but related features of a single, predatory economic system. The concept of a stress load also makes clear that different populations are variably affected. I may be at one level as a neurotic white guy doing freelance work, but my own privilege means I don’t face serious stressors like intergenerational poverty, housing insecurity, or environmental racism. Each of these oppressions is its own health crisis, never meaningfully addressed by public policy, which the attention economy exacerbates even as it adds new stressors. In a thread last year on what she called “black burnout,” poet and essayist Tiana Clark wrote: “Yes, we are all so damn tired & in debt, but that painful exploitation is stratified across various identities & to ignore that splintering is just as damaging as acknowledging that we all feel like commodities, which for black people wasn’t a simile, but a reality until 1865.”

The market response to attention-related stress is also difficult to resist. Tons of “wellness” or “mindfulness” businesses have bloomed in the last decade to treat attention-related burnout, from meditation to CBD and supplements. It’s not wrong by any means to take advantage of this stuff. But with its individual orientation and its discourse of self-care, the wellness sector essentially addresses the symptoms of cognitive stress while hiding its root causes. Meanwhile, the investors in “direct-to-consumer” startups are the same people profiting from every other element of the attention economy. Wellness capitalism isn’t designed to heal people and communities, but to maintain an optimal balance that keeps users (a.k.a. workers) in their most productive, precarious state.

Maybe we are starting to put more of these pieces together. I’m not sure I’ll be able to get through Shoshanna Zuboff’s 700-page “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” but she seems to comprehensively describe how platforms mine our private experiences in order to then manipulate our behavior. Even without restructuring the web, there are a lot of other stressors we can work to alleviate through the public sphere. There’s Medicare for All to pass, employment laws to defend for gig economy workers, and a housing package in Albany which could bring rent control to the whole state when the rent laws expire in June. People are working very hard to bring these goals to reality. More and more, the most important fight is to get people’s attention. 

A few related links:

• The Baffler reviewed Jenny Odell’s new book, “How to Do Nothing,” which I’m really excited to read. She also wrote a short piece last year for the series Are.na and The Creative Independent published on using the internet more mindfully.

• I just preordered This City Is Killing Me: Community Trauma and Toxic Stress in Urban America by a Chicago social worker named Jonathan Foiles. It’s from Belt Publishing, whose publisher Anne Trubek also writes a great behind-the-scenes newsletter about the book business.

• The Verge profiled the people who run Front Porch Forum, a low-tech community social network for towns across Vermont.

Thanks for reading! If you’re enjoying the newsletter, I’d really appreciate you sharing it with a friend.

Straphanging,

Leo

When life moves at a sane, Mediterranean pace, there’s a lot to notice between the coffee hour and the vermut hour. The trash cans all rotate on their stands, so sanitation workers can quickly dump out the contents. They have baby little garbage trucks to fit in the medieval alleyways. There are special paving stones to guide blind pedestrians to crosswalks and escalators.

Urban design as interface

I try not to let the phrase “design thinking” pass my lips, but I was really impressed by the consideration that goes into every part of the Barcelona streetscape. The chamfered blocks of the Eixample’s historic grid make room for neat clusters of recycling bins. Unobtrusive little bumps protect bike lanes from veering drivers. The aforementioned sanitation workers (of all ages) sweep the streets continuously with handheld brooms. There’s always somewhere to sit outside. The metro is clean and fast and ubiquitous.

The bus system is a good example of the overall approach. The city just rolled out a new network that reserves buses primarily for major arteries (so they can eventually pedestrianize 60% of streets). Within the more compact grid of Horizontal and Vertical routes, it’s easy to orient yourself alphanumerically like you would in a game of Battleship. Painted badges at major intersections direct pedestrians to nearby stops and destinations. Bus shelters display the same information in huge type, plus major stops along the route. Each one has a map of the closest bus and metro transfers.

I started paying attention to all this signage because my phone was useless without roaming data or WiFi. But as the week went on, I started thinking about the analog wayfinding as a “heads up display” of its own. I didn’t really need to reach for my phone, since the visual information posted in the street was usually a more convenient guide. It also helped me build a mental map of the city more quickly than I otherwise would have. It was nice to use a tool that helps you build cognitive capacity rather than outsourcing it to a device.

It feels important to think about urban design in terms of usability “features” because physical and digital environments increasingly function as related elements of a single system. The public transit “interface” includes these physical signs and bus shelters and pavers, not just apps and digital maps. As cloying as it is to talk about a city’s “user experience,” public servants now have to deliver services that work within the mixed reality of contemporary life. 

In BCN they say "reurbanization" instead of pedestrianization.

Municipalism and the limits of design

To a New Yorker, Barcelona is like a mirage of what a public-spirited city should look like. Around almost every corner is a park, a plaza, or a piece of street furniture. The city is quick to experiment with land use, and it has ambitious plans to cut car ownership and create new green spaces across the city. The whole experience makes you wonder, how do they make this happen? And then: who benefits?

As it turns out, Barcelona is an object lesson in the limits of design as a public policy framework. The city has long defined itself through its artful public spaces, boulevards, and buildings. The massive redevelopment undertaken for the 1992 Olympics — which sparked an economic boom in tourism — have fueled thirty-ish more years of continuous investment in transit and public works. But as in New York and many other world cities, the urban “placemaking” agenda in Barcelona has been both a miracle and a deal with the devil. (Not a metaphorical devil, but the global financial sector).

Without protections for affordability in place, the global financial crisis quickly eroded people’s savings and their right to the city. Evictions skyrocketed and investors swooped in to buy speculative properties. Airbnb and other rental platforms have contributed to rising rents. More and more hotels have sprouted up to serve a yearly tourist population the size of New York City, pricing out longtime residents and local businesses.

But the hopeful, and really interesting, part of this whole story is the municipalist political movement which has gained power in Barcelona in the last several years. In 2015 a network of housing activists formed a neighborhood-based movement called Barcelona en Comú, which put forward a progressive agenda and managed to elected a new mayor named Ada Colau. Her administration has since cracked down on Airbnb, fined banks for holding vacant properties, fought to expand social housing, and attempted to municipalize the city’s private water supplier. The group is now trying to balance its fierce opposition to institutional politics with a reelection campaign and the need to negotiate with regional and national powers.

What Barcelona en Comú has started in four years is a frank conversation about the political economy of urban design and development. Everyone wants to live in a place with reliable transit and beautiful public spaces. But Barcelona’s new leaders are genuinely asking, how does a feminist transit system work? How do you prevent new parks from displacing neighbors? And most importantly, how do you bring the structures of social movements into the space of formal government?

In New York at least, we’re stuck with a Barcelona ‘92 politics that empowers technocrats to build their own urban visions in order to enrich real estate investors. The municipalist movement offers a different way to think about design, in which aesthetics and “usability” serve the political reimagination of the city and not the other way around.

If you’re curious about the municipalist movement in Barcelona, I made an Are.na channel where you can find lots of the articles I’ve come across so far. Thanks for reading :) 

Venga, adéu!

Leo

While the urbanism on the far west side does seem like a nightmare, I’m finding myself thinking more about the political structures that produce this kind of mega-project. I’m especially interested in the ways that cultural programs justify development. With its brand-new museum, its connection to the High Line, and its roots in Bloomberg’s larger development visions, Hudson Yards seems like a good place to connect some dots between real estate politics and the arts. 

Culture and the “real estate state”

The Shed is the brand-new cultural center at the heart of the development. It’s a truly glaring example of institution-as-investment-cronyism: Bloomberg used $75 million in city funds to help build it, without any advance vision about the needs it might fill or who would visit. Hudson Yards master planner Dan Doctoroff, who directed nearly $6 billion in subsidies to the Related Companies for the rest of Hudson Yards, is now the Chairman of the Board. Everything about it seems designed to make the developer’s property more valuable rather than to actually offer a public amenity.

You’d think that giving so much money to a potemkin museum in a fake neighborhood might raise eyebrows in the art world, since plenty of other institutions are barely scraping by. (For context, $75 million is about 12 times the total assets of the Studio Museum in 2015.) But what’s slowly sinking in to me is that cultural affairs and gentrification are two sides of the policy agenda. This is at the heart of what planner Sam Stein calls the “real estate state.” As he argues in his very excellent new book, Capital City, planners and other city officials are explicitly tasked with raising land values in order to boost investment and property tax revenue. Cultural institutions have benefitted generously along the way, so it’s in their interest to play along.

The High Line is a perfect example of how these policies shape the fabric of the city on a larger scale. Sold to the public as a new park filled with free arts and culture, it was largely supported by billionaires like Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenburg, who stood to profit by owning adjacent property. The Bloomberg administration rezoned much of Chelsea in order to juice speculation even further and encourage the creation of an ultra-luxury tourist destination in the ashes of the meatpacking district. While the park’s founders have since apologized for alienating and displacing its low-income neighbors, the Whitney Museum got a prime propertyfrom the city and now enjoys a never-ending pipeline of swanky visitors.

The same story is repeating itself all over the city as Bloomberg-era plans come to fruition. The 2012 Olympics plan that anticipated Hudson Yards also acted as a blueprint for other transformations: the new Williamsburg waterfront, the new Yankee Stadium, the new towers in Long Island City, and so on. Each of these deals involved some kind of public amenity with a cultural dimension (the pricey new Hunters Point library by Steven Holl, the public “park” at the Domino Sugar site), but they also handed public land and other subsidies to developers like Related whose business is displacement.

Solidarity in the culture industry

In some ways, it feels like the right moment for pushback. The Amazon conflict has made it harder for politicians to defend a luxury playground built with public money. Having a criminal developer for a president is shedding light on what exactly goes on in the industry. And even if you don’t follow city politics or the art world, it’s easy to see how new kinds of cultural amenities are accelerating gentrification.

I think it’s even more important that cultural workers are building solidarity around their labor, since they’re in the uncomfortable position of helping create the spaces and marketing campaigns and monetized experiences that will indirectly price them out. Young people are especially sheepish about admitting our role in gentrification, both out of guilt and because we’ve learned to see every dimension of our economic life as an expression of individual identity. But if we had a better sense of our collective participation in structures that extract value from our cultural capital, maybe we’d be able to find a way out of the real-estate industrial complex.

I’m still super excited about the unionization campaign at the New Museum this winter because it drew this connection very boldly. New Museum Union organizer Lily Bartle told Jacobin that “while the museum is capable of raising a huge amount of money in a short amount of time, they’re only willing to do it for the sake of expansion, not for the sake of their employees.” In other words: as people put in longer hours for worse pay in order to make New York a cultural paradise, who’s reaping the benefits? Will anyone but millionaires still be around to enjoy it?

Jillian Steinhauer wrote a great story recently about how other institutions are also squeezing their employees so they can spend huge sums on property. MoMA’s $400 million renovation comes on the heels of public protests by its art handlers and office staff (not to mention the destruction of the much smaller, architecturally significant American Folk Art Museum next door). Steinhauer writes that “Just after the Vancouver Art Gallery revealed the final design for a new $350m building, almost 200 of its unionised employees went on strike over wages and working conditions.” I hope this same kind of energy spreads not only to museums all over the country, but to all kinds of creative and cultural workers whose livelihood presents such a double-edged sword.

This letter has rambled a bit but I want to end with a question that’s been rattling around my brain: What do we actually get when we buy into hegemonic cultural structures sustained by the creative industries, mainstream art institutions, and so on? These organizations are part of a cultural sphere whose politics not only exacerbate inequality, but work implicitly to exploit their own employees. It’s something to sit with as that reality becomes harder to ignore. 

More links:

• Mat Dryhurst on the possible futures of music scenes in the streaming economy

• Jia Tolentino dove into the rabbit hole of the Outdoor Voices brand universe

• Who Killed Tulum?

• Again, run don’t walk to your nearest indie bookstore and buy Capital City by Samuel Stein. It’s a concise, direct explanation of how planners and politicians have gentrified New York.
  

Please let me know if you have more thoughts on any of the above! If you’re enjoying the newsletter, you can always forward it to a friend.

With maximum floor-area-ratio, 
Leo

This week I’m thinking about the defeat (and possible resurrection) of the Amazon HQ2 deal in New York, plus the new wave of resistance to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto, and wondering how the fight over urban technology might change in shape.

Beating back the richest companies in the world feels like a victory for municipal self-determination – but also a sign of how bad things have gotten. Economic development officials are more than willing to give away billions to tech companies. Cities often don’t have their own vision for connected public services. Stopping the privatization of basic infrastructure is still an underdog effort.

As platforms aim for the bottom of the urban computing stack, I’m hoping that recent activism offers a way forward for tech justice at the scale of the city. 

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Fighting Amazon in New York required a broad group of movements to mobilize around tech’s involvement in labor, housing, policing, and other systemic issues. By campaigning as a coalition, they brought a lefty analysis of technology into the organizing umbrella that’s strengthened progressive power here since 2016. Coalition members successfully pressured elected officials by pointing to tech’s simultaneous roles in gentrification, deportation, and union-busting.The state’s attempt to bypass local oversight also highlighted New York City’s lack of a comprehensive, participatory planning process (caution ⚠️ that link is a very deep rabbit hole). In contesting the deal, activists made clear that the city needs a democratic decision-making structure for major projects – one that actually involves communities who are most vulnerable to change.Torontonians have also been denied a good-faith process over two years of “partnership” with Sidewalk Labs, the Alphabet subsidiary hoping to develop a wired neighborhood from the ground up. Sidewalk has created a quasi-public entity to negotiate with government while repeatedly gaslighting the public over privacy and other concerns. In closed-door sessions, the company has tried to assume responsibility for public infrastructure, land use, lots of personalized data, and even tax revenue. (It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the CEO of Sidewalk Labs is Dan Doctoroff, the Bloomberg consigliere whose sweetheart development deals paved the way for HQ2). As Bianca Wylie keeps writing, resistance is finding a foothold in Toronto by loudly pointing out Sidewalk’s attacks on the very idea of democracy.

Alphabet has integrated more layers of “urban intelligence” than maybe any other organization. Between hardware like the LinkNYC kiosks, interfaces like Google Maps, and political entities like Waterfront Toronto, the company has pretty much built an operating system for privatizing the city.But plenty of other companies have already reshaped our experience of urban space by slotting into existing patterns of behavior and commerce. By linking recommendations to social graphs and digital maps, tools like Foursquare have created new mechanics of gentrification. Amazon Prime and Seamless deliveries have become indispensable by exploiting existing groups of low-wage workers even more deeply.Last year Kevin Roose wrote that “the entire economy is MoviePass now,” meaning people depend intimately on these apps because venture capital has subsidized them so deeply. What we don’t see is how they coerce labor, drive up rents, and erode cities’ tax bases in the process. As users, we interact with seamless experiences designed to obscure the violence that enables them.To turn the built environment into a proprietary platform, tech companies need us to view the city as a set of problems that need solving. They have to normalize their monopoly position and do for space what gig economy platforms have done for work and social media has done for communication. This has already happened in a handful of sectors: think how often you hear people use “Seamless” or “Uber” as verbs. Unless activism provokes consumers into seeing platforms in a different light, like #DeleteUber did after the Muslim ban in 2017, this kind of thinking becomes second nature.If we want the city to keep existing as a diverse and poetic social body, we need to defend our imagination of the public sphere as a physical space where generations of people have coexisted, celebrated, eaten, danced, fought, prayed, and made common cause. This is something #NoAmazonNYC did over and over and an idea that Shannon Mattern sums up perfectly in the title of her wonderful essay, “A City is not a Computer.” (I think this should go on a billboard or a flag or something.) 

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From the vantage point of NYC, it feels like the best hope for protecting the public interest from urban tech lies with the kind of progressive activist networks which stepped up in Queens.At the same time, coalitions like this one don’t usually see much participation from the disciplines responsible for designing big tech. Those fields are whiter, wealthier, more educated, and far more male than the city as a whole, which gives their members very different stakes. They’re likely to see upsides where low-income people and communities of color see new layers of oppression.And there aren’t many forums where technologists and planners can reflect on the implications of their work. Instead we have organizations like Y Combinator, which wants urbanists and engineers to measure “KPIs” for cities, and Tech:NYC, which lobbied hard for Amazon HQ2 and took local politicians to task for opposing it.Two welcome exceptions are the Tech Workers Coalition (which just expanded to NYC, and which I’ve joined for a few meetings) and the DSA (feel free to eye-roll) Tech Action Working Group, which was part of the #NoAmazon coalition. I also had an amazing time at Code Ecologies at the School for Poetic Computation in December, and I’m lucky to know some of the incredibly smart and optimistic folks at Soft Surplus. I really hope to find myself in more of these space and conversations.For now it feels like we’re just characters in a game played by VCs and megacorps, but that could change faster than we might imagine. I’m looking forward to more opportunities for solidarity as the year goes on :)

More links

• Logic Magazine rules and Kevin Baker wrote about the sinister politics that inspired SimCity for the latest issue.

• Here’s a short post-mortem on the false promise of Amazon jobs by David Yee

• Chenoe Hart wrote about the future of automated, Amazon-style shipping and how it might change what it means to own stuff.

• The Intercept reported that Ring home video cameras share footage and customer data with police 😑

• Urban Computing and its Discontents, a 2007(!) pamphlet by Mark Shepard and Adam Greenfield (whose Radical Technologies is also a great read)

• Feel free to peruse the Are.na channel where I save articles like these

Feedback

How did this read? Too much info, too long? I’m not really sure what it will become, but I’d like to hear what you think.If you liked this letter, I’d really appreciate you forwarding it to a friend or sharing the subscribe link. If you have comments or thoughts on any of the above, let me know and I’d be happy to include them in the next email. Or you can dunk on me on Twitter at @warshawshaw.

With hope,

Leo