Rich Moms, Poor Moms Rafia Zakaria With Samantha’s power and Melinda’s money, poor women will be saved.
What Makes Foreign Policy “Feminist”? Rafia Zakaria Germany’s leaders talk about a “feminist foreign policy” that requires more armaments.
Rich Moms, Poor Moms Rafia Zakaria With Samantha’s power and Melinda’s money, poor women will be saved.
What Makes Foreign Policy “Feminist”? Rafia Zakaria Germany’s leaders talk about a “feminist foreign policy” that requires more armaments.
Nevertheless, She Lifted Meghan Racklin In the late 1950s, Bonnie Prudden, a fitness instructor and researcher who played a key role in the establishment of the President’s Council on Youth Fitness, led an exercise program at a Westchester women’s prison. The program was advertised with posters in the prison cafeteria reading “Be Slim and Sophisticated” and “Your Secret Weapon: A Lovely, Lissome Figure.” The prison superintendent thought of exercise as a way to keep unruly women in line—she hoped the program would help prevent riots. Danielle Friedman’s new book Let’s Get Physical traces the recent history of women’s fitness in the United States, primarily through a series of biographical sketches of women who, like Prudden, have shaped that history. Each chapter centers on a woman, or several, who pioneered a major fitness trend in a given decade. The first chapter focuses on Prudden, detailing her research on children’s fitness, her many popular books promoting exercise for women, her prison program and its accompanying New York Times coverage, and her TV show. Later chapters focus on Lotte Berk, the originator of the barre workouts that emerged in the 1960s, and, of course, Jane Fonda’s ’80s aerobics. Friedman’s lively anecdotes about these women and their early followers are fun to read. The book presents a dynamic cast of characters, many of whom are little-known now, like Lisa Lyon, a bodybuilder who posed for Playboy and was profiled by Eve Babitz in Esquire (Babitz wrote that she had a “perfect little Bardot-Ronstadt face”); or Janice Darling, an instructor at Jane Fonda’s original workout studio who was one of the few Black fitness instructors of the era and who credited her fitness routine with helping her recover from an accident that broke both her legs and severed a muscle in one eye. It’s fun, too, to gawk at the now obviously ridiculous sexism many of them faced. Friedman writes, for instance, that for decades women were discouraged from exercising because it was believed that too much exercise could make their uteruses fall out. Friedman clearly views the telling of this history as a feminist project. As she writes, “American women’s fitness history is more than a series of misguided ‘crazes.’ It’s the story of how women have chosen to spend a collective billions of dollars and hours in pursuit of health and happiness. In many ways, it’s the story of what it has meant to be a woman over the past seven decades.” She is right that exercise is a significant concern for many women, and so there is a feminist stake in refusing to dismiss or overlook its history. But the fact that there is a compelling feminist argument for studying the history of women’s fitness does not make that history, in and of itself, feminist—something Friedman’s book struggles to grasp. NYPL Digital Collections While Prudden’s prison program seems like a clear indication that fitness has long been a tool to discipline and control women, Friedman takes a different view. She writes that “when women first began exercising en masse, they were participating in something subversive: the cultivation of physical strength and autonomy,” which, in her view, leads nearly inexorably to inner strength and autonomy. Let’s Get Physical presents an overwhelmingly positive picture of the role of fitness in women’s lives—the book’s main villains are barriers to women’s participation in exercise, in the form of racism, sexism, and, occasionally, capitalism. Friedman notes, for instance, that “many poor Americans were denied the leisure time, means, and space to exercise.” It was for this reason, she writes, that “fitness developed a reputation as a white person’s pursuit,” and that for decades, fitness clubs refused admittance to Black prospective members. Friedman does mention the unattainable standards of physical perfection pushed on women by America’s fitness culture, but more often than not she offers exercise itself as an antidote. The idea that women start working out because they want to change their bodies but keep exercising because they love how it makes them feel—their hang-ups falling away as they dance and run and pelvic tilt—recurs over and over again throughout the book. In the introduction, Friedman recounts her own experience taking Pure Barre classes. She was drawn there, initially, by the promise of a body like a prototypical ballerina’s, but, after several classes, she found something else: A few pages later, this personal anecdote transforms into an organizing principle. She argues that “Like my experience with Pure Barre, many women start exercising to change their appearance, but they stick with it after discovering more meaningful rewards. For some, becoming strong helps them overcome the desire to shape their body for anyone else’s pleasure.” While she acknowledges that women’s fitness is “far from universally empowering,” her focus on the women who see their body image issues disappear before the fitness-studio mirror leads her to neglect the experiences of those who exercise despite it failing to fix their insecurities, or indeed, those who keep exercising (at least in part) because of them. This may be a consequence of both Friedman’s personal experience and her focus on the pioneers of new fitness movements. The women she interviews who were not pioneers themselves are all acolytes of one or another of Friedman’s fitness trailblazers. She’s speaking only to evangelists and the converted. Women with more complicated feelings—women who exercise even though they’ve never found salvation in it, or for whom it has been an unhealthy obsession—are not the focus here. Friedman’s closing chapter uses Jessamyn Stanley, a Black, queer, fat yoga practitioner who works to make yoga more accessible, as proof that the present day is a turning point in fitness history, toward something more inclusive and joyful. But she neglects to seriously grapple with the ways in which Instagram—Stanley’s primary platform and, in Friedman’s telling, a central force in creating a more democratic fitness culture—has exacerbated women’s and girls’ body image issues. While it only became public knowledge that Facebook’s own internal research demonstrated that Instagram contributes to eating disorders in teenagers, and that the app actively promoted eating disorder content to teenage girls, it’s been clear to many that Instagram promotes an unhealthy physical ideal for years. Friedman briefly notes that “Instagram also perpetuates unrealistic and often toxic beauty standards, and the platform abounds with self-proclaimed fitness experts whose only qualification is their lack of visible body fat” but ultimately concludes that it’s been a crucial tool for expanding the range of what kinds of body types are accepted within fitness culture. She writes that in that regard, Instagram’s power “cannot be overstated.” In positioning Stanley as the one to watch in the fitness space, Friedman also neglects to mention that Stanley’s Instagram following trails behind the likes of Kayla “Bikini Body Guide” Itsines and dozens of other conventionally attractive, predominantly white fitness influencers who use vaguely feminist captions to sell PDF guides to getting a bigger ass and a smaller waist. She mentions that “Stanley’s activism is part of a growing movement of radical body love. . . . she has been joined by scores of other fitness professionals—some of whom look like fit pros have looked for decades, some of whom don’t—who are working to undo decades of cultural programming about how a woman’s body ‘should’ look.” But she ignores the way in which many of the fitness influencers who do “look like fit pros have looked for decades” use the language of self-love to promote the same punishing physical standards Stanley hopes to challenge, pairing “empowering” slogans with weight-loss transformation photos. Friedman’s impulse to focus on the positive is understandable—as Elle Woods reminds us in one of the book’s two epigraphs, “Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy.”—but in its service, the book glosses over or rushes past the darker side of women’s fitness often enough that the rosy picture it paints feels woefully incomplete. To Friedman’s credit, Let’s Get Physical does contain an undercurrent that pushes against the book’s main thesis that exercise helps women disregard the pressure to conform to a narrow physical ideal—a counter-narrative about how each time women have flocked to a new form of movement, the nature of the practice has eventually shifted to reinforce rigid bodily ideals and undercut whatever other benefits or freedoms it may have offered. Jazz dance becomes about weight loss rather than fun; weightlifting becomes about shapeliness rather than power; yoga becomes about litheness rather than calm. This adds some much-needed complexity, suggesting a halting if consistent forward progress. But even this counter-narrative is often over-simplified, ignoring the ways in which the pursuit of thinness was always at the heart of so many of the fitness trends chronicled, at least in their American iterations. For instance, Friedman details how Indra Devi, who she credits with bringing yoga to America, sold the practice as a way to become beautiful, and that this sales pitch is what enabled yoga to take off in the United States. Pages later, she argues that yoga became more focused on outward appearance only as its popularity grew, and that this shift in focus “reinforce[d] some of the very same pressures women were trying to escape” in their yoga practice. NYPL Digital Collections The book has the energy of a cardio dance class; it’s most comfortable in motion, and her story is patterned on a kind of two-steps-forward, one-step-back choreography. She has trouble staying in a place where positive and negative influences sit alongside one another in tension. This is unfortunate, because there is a deeper, richer meaning to be mined in those tense places—for instance, in writing about those early fitness television shows, Friedman notes that even as they encouraged women to lose weight and develop curves, they fostered an intimacy that enabled women to talk about other concerns, like aging parents, alcoholism, and depression. Early in Let’s Get Physical, Friedman writes about how Bonnie Prudden found that women couldn’t fathom taking time to exercise for themselves; she could only convince them to do it by marketing it as a wifely duty to keep one’s “honeymoon figure.” Friedman frames this as a clever way of getting women to prioritize their own needs, writing that getting women to exercise meant something “profound: taking time out of their day to care for themselves, when nearly every social institution stressed that a woman’s sole purpose in life was to care for others.” While she acknowledges that this approach had “mixed consequences,” she doesn’t consider the failure of the frame—are women really “taking time out of their day to care for themselves” at all if they’re doing it to keep a man? Today, it often feels like the formula has flipped: many women can still only conceive of exercise as a way to mold their bodies to fit a demanding ideal that hasn’t really gone away, but it now has to be marketed as empowering—as a feminist reclamation of strength, as “self-care,” as “for you”—for us to justify it. Friedman tends to dismiss the ugliness concealed in this new formula, painting the history of women’s fitness as one of more or less straightforward feminist progress. Tellingly, the pandemic is mentioned as something that brought many women “a newfound appreciation for what their bodies could do, beyond how their bodies looked,” and a time when “the opportunity to be physically active provided many women with an indispensable form of self-care.” There is no mention of the many others who embarked on quests for “quarantine abs” or fretted over the “quarantine fifteen,” despite those concerns’ ubiquity on the early-pandemic internet. Reviews of Friedman’s book have emphasized how fun it is, calling it “bouncy,” “energetic,” “zippy.” And indeed, the book goes down like Diet Coke, another product whose sales are driven by body panic. It tastes better than the real thing.
Nevertheless, She Lifted Meghan Racklin In the late 1950s, Bonnie Prudden, a fitness instructor and researcher who played a key role in the establishment of the President’s Council on Youth Fitness, led an exercise program at a Westchester women’s prison. The program was advertised with posters in the prison cafeteria reading “Be Slim and Sophisticated” and “Your Secret Weapon: A Lovely, Lissome Figure.” The prison superintendent thought of exercise as a way to keep unruly women in line—she hoped the program would help prevent riots. Danielle Friedman’s new book Let’s Get Physical traces the recent history of women’s fitness in the United States, primarily through a series of biographical sketches of women who, like Prudden, have shaped that history. Each chapter centers on a woman, or several, who pioneered a major fitness trend in a given decade. The first chapter focuses on Prudden, detailing her research on children’s fitness, her many popular books promoting exercise for women, her prison program and its accompanying New York Times coverage, and her TV show. Later chapters focus on Lotte Berk, the originator of the barre workouts that emerged in the 1960s, and, of course, Jane Fonda’s ’80s aerobics. Friedman’s lively anecdotes about these women and their early followers are fun to read. The book presents a dynamic cast of characters, many of whom are little-known now, like Lisa Lyon, a bodybuilder who posed for Playboy and was profiled by Eve Babitz in Esquire (Babitz wrote that she had a “perfect little Bardot-Ronstadt face”); or Janice Darling, an instructor at Jane Fonda’s original workout studio who was one of the few Black fitness instructors of the era and who credited her fitness routine with helping her recover from an accident that broke both her legs and severed a muscle in one eye. It’s fun, too, to gawk at the now obviously ridiculous sexism many of them faced. Friedman writes, for instance, that for decades women were discouraged from exercising because it was believed that too much exercise could make their uteruses fall out. Friedman clearly views the telling of this history as a feminist project. As she writes, “American women’s fitness history is more than a series of misguided ‘crazes.’ It’s the story of how women have chosen to spend a collective billions of dollars and hours in pursuit of health and happiness. In many ways, it’s the story of what it has meant to be a woman over the past seven decades.” She is right that exercise is a significant concern for many women, and so there is a feminist stake in refusing to dismiss or overlook its history. But the fact that there is a compelling feminist argument for studying the history of women’s fitness does not make that history, in and of itself, feminist—something Friedman’s book struggles to grasp. NYPL Digital Collections While Prudden’s prison program seems like a clear indication that fitness has long been a tool to discipline and control women, Friedman takes a different view. She writes that “when women first began exercising en masse, they were participating in something subversive: the cultivation of physical strength and autonomy,” which, in her view, leads nearly inexorably to inner strength and autonomy. Let’s Get Physical presents an overwhelmingly positive picture of the role of fitness in women’s lives—the book’s main villains are barriers to women’s participation in exercise, in the form of racism, sexism, and, occasionally, capitalism. Friedman notes, for instance, that “many poor Americans were denied the leisure time, means, and space to exercise.” It was for this reason, she writes, that “fitness developed a reputation as a white person’s pursuit,” and that for decades, fitness clubs refused admittance to Black prospective members. Friedman does mention the unattainable standards of physical perfection pushed on women by America’s fitness culture, but more often than not she offers exercise itself as an antidote. The idea that women start working out because they want to change their bodies but keep exercising because they love how it makes them feel—their hang-ups falling away as they dance and run and pelvic tilt—recurs over and over again throughout the book. In the introduction, Friedman recounts her own experience taking Pure Barre classes. She was drawn there, initially, by the promise of a body like a prototypical ballerina’s, but, after several classes, she found something else: A few pages later, this personal anecdote transforms into an organizing principle. She argues that “Like my experience with Pure Barre, many women start exercising to change their appearance, but they stick with it after discovering more meaningful rewards. For some, becoming strong helps them overcome the desire to shape their body for anyone else’s pleasure.” While she acknowledges that women’s fitness is “far from universally empowering,” her focus on the women who see their body image issues disappear before the fitness-studio mirror leads her to neglect the experiences of those who exercise despite it failing to fix their insecurities, or indeed, those who keep exercising (at least in part) because of them. This may be a consequence of both Friedman’s personal experience and her focus on the pioneers of new fitness movements. The women she interviews who were not pioneers themselves are all acolytes of one or another of Friedman’s fitness trailblazers. She’s speaking only to evangelists and the converted. Women with more complicated feelings—women who exercise even though they’ve never found salvation in it, or for whom it has been an unhealthy obsession—are not the focus here. Friedman’s closing chapter uses Jessamyn Stanley, a Black, queer, fat yoga practitioner who works to make yoga more accessible, as proof that the present day is a turning point in fitness history, toward something more inclusive and joyful. But she neglects to seriously grapple with the ways in which Instagram—Stanley’s primary platform and, in Friedman’s telling, a central force in creating a more democratic fitness culture—has exacerbated women’s and girls’ body image issues. While it only became public knowledge that Facebook’s own internal research demonstrated that Instagram contributes to eating disorders in teenagers, and that the app actively promoted eating disorder content to teenage girls, it’s been clear to many that Instagram promotes an unhealthy physical ideal for years. Friedman briefly notes that “Instagram also perpetuates unrealistic and often toxic beauty standards, and the platform abounds with self-proclaimed fitness experts whose only qualification is their lack of visible body fat” but ultimately concludes that it’s been a crucial tool for expanding the range of what kinds of body types are accepted within fitness culture. She writes that in that regard, Instagram’s power “cannot be overstated.” In positioning Stanley as the one to watch in the fitness space, Friedman also neglects to mention that Stanley’s Instagram following trails behind the likes of Kayla “Bikini Body Guide” Itsines and dozens of other conventionally attractive, predominantly white fitness influencers who use vaguely feminist captions to sell PDF guides to getting a bigger ass and a smaller waist. She mentions that “Stanley’s activism is part of a growing movement of radical body love. . . . she has been joined by scores of other fitness professionals—some of whom look like fit pros have looked for decades, some of whom don’t—who are working to undo decades of cultural programming about how a woman’s body ‘should’ look.” But she ignores the way in which many of the fitness influencers who do “look like fit pros have looked for decades” use the language of self-love to promote the same punishing physical standards Stanley hopes to challenge, pairing “empowering” slogans with weight-loss transformation photos. Friedman’s impulse to focus on the positive is understandable—as Elle Woods reminds us in one of the book’s two epigraphs, “Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy.”—but in its service, the book glosses over or rushes past the darker side of women’s fitness often enough that the rosy picture it paints feels woefully incomplete. To Friedman’s credit, Let’s Get Physical does contain an undercurrent that pushes against the book’s main thesis that exercise helps women disregard the pressure to conform to a narrow physical ideal—a counter-narrative about how each time women have flocked to a new form of movement, the nature of the practice has eventually shifted to reinforce rigid bodily ideals and undercut whatever other benefits or freedoms it may have offered. Jazz dance becomes about weight loss rather than fun; weightlifting becomes about shapeliness rather than power; yoga becomes about litheness rather than calm. This adds some much-needed complexity, suggesting a halting if consistent forward progress. But even this counter-narrative is often over-simplified, ignoring the ways in which the pursuit of thinness was always at the heart of so many of the fitness trends chronicled, at least in their American iterations. For instance, Friedman details how Indra Devi, who she credits with bringing yoga to America, sold the practice as a way to become beautiful, and that this sales pitch is what enabled yoga to take off in the United States. Pages later, she argues that yoga became more focused on outward appearance only as its popularity grew, and that this shift in focus “reinforce[d] some of the very same pressures women were trying to escape” in their yoga practice. NYPL Digital Collections The book has the energy of a cardio dance class; it’s most comfortable in motion, and her story is patterned on a kind of two-steps-forward, one-step-back choreography. She has trouble staying in a place where positive and negative influences sit alongside one another in tension. This is unfortunate, because there is a deeper, richer meaning to be mined in those tense places—for instance, in writing about those early fitness television shows, Friedman notes that even as they encouraged women to lose weight and develop curves, they fostered an intimacy that enabled women to talk about other concerns, like aging parents, alcoholism, and depression. Early in Let’s Get Physical, Friedman writes about how Bonnie Prudden found that women couldn’t fathom taking time to exercise for themselves; she could only convince them to do it by marketing it as a wifely duty to keep one’s “honeymoon figure.” Friedman frames this as a clever way of getting women to prioritize their own needs, writing that getting women to exercise meant something “profound: taking time out of their day to care for themselves, when nearly every social institution stressed that a woman’s sole purpose in life was to care for others.” While she acknowledges that this approach had “mixed consequences,” she doesn’t consider the failure of the frame—are women really “taking time out of their day to care for themselves” at all if they’re doing it to keep a man? Today, it often feels like the formula has flipped: many women can still only conceive of exercise as a way to mold their bodies to fit a demanding ideal that hasn’t really gone away, but it now has to be marketed as empowering—as a feminist reclamation of strength, as “self-care,” as “for you”—for us to justify it. Friedman tends to dismiss the ugliness concealed in this new formula, painting the history of women’s fitness as one of more or less straightforward feminist progress. Tellingly, the pandemic is mentioned as something that brought many women “a newfound appreciation for what their bodies could do, beyond how their bodies looked,” and a time when “the opportunity to be physically active provided many women with an indispensable form of self-care.” There is no mention of the many others who embarked on quests for “quarantine abs” or fretted over the “quarantine fifteen,” despite those concerns’ ubiquity on the early-pandemic internet. Reviews of Friedman’s book have emphasized how fun it is, calling it “bouncy,” “energetic,” “zippy.” And indeed, the book goes down like Diet Coke, another product whose sales are driven by body panic. It tastes better than the real thing.
Popular and Known to No One Amna Muhammad Abu Safat With ravenous eyesI devoured what others thought I was nourishing.This is how I overindulged,with glances thatare never returned.A few days ago the little one cried.She lifted her head to the sky,tears fell from her eyes,a sob filled her throat.In silence I watched,ignoring what was happening around me.This is my life;it teaches me how riddles are composedand how, from truth, mysteries are woven.When I speak of myself,others think I am alluding to them. I want a flower on my neck,specifically on the back of it,on the spot that’s known for renewing energy.And let it be an olive blossom,stunningand modest, popularand known to no one.Last year I saw the blossoms up closeas if for the first time,the wind scattering themacross the land and over the walls.I want the flower that could speak on my behalfto be tattooed on the part of methat is difficult to see.I want it to identify me if I leave,to adorn me and to speakof my need for decoration. This time I’ll dissolve.I’ll enter love as a womanand leave it as oil or kindling.spilling over if I must,blocking out the sun if you want,delaying the light.My love, I’ve tried something safer than callousness,more established and longer lasting.My voice softens whenever I remember you.I hunch overto protect my heart. My heart is calmand my eyes are astonished.I point to the fertility of the soil,to augurs in the heavens.to the sighs in caressesand loneliness in gazes.Everything speaks its own languageand my mind is clear, attuned, tireless.I call to things,to the unreachable fruit to quietto the burning sun, to forgiveness,to love that vacillates in its excess,to transform me into steam or ice.The earth is my motherand I am three quarters water. Let’s return to where we came from,if this journey promisesany possible return, as dustor particles,just as people ageand return as storks or wolves,and despair overwhelms them,or the way distance grants thema longing to reignite despair.I was horrified that love could end,that its bright gaze could dim.This morning, I went out lookingfor my house and sharedmy breakfast with a hungry animal. Everything near the fireplaceis aflame.Faces and hemsand on the horizon, to the tune playing on my radio,the trees bend and sway.The wind knows me,and the living do.All that exists is for me.My eyes have traveled the windows that look out onto what I want. My blood type is AB+.They say it is a miserly typetaking from all and giving to no one.This is why I’ve avoided using it as a term of endearmentfor you, worried that it contains some insult.Whenever I sit for a while,my elbow digging into my thigh, my head in my hands,I retract the past.I say: maybe he is my blood,his absence anesthetizes meand his arrival makes me tremble. Let’s finish what we startedin the desolate night,sitting before our strange life,persevering as others do.We are god’s parched earth—we drink everything and thrive on neglect.Come let’s strike this deal of oursnear the riverso that the fish whose eyes never close,the tree that never thirsts,the soil that never dries,the stones that do not scrape,the sound of the river that speaks of farewell,so that unbeknownst to them,free birds and creaturescontent in their burrows,will be our good witnesses. —Nablus Read more from our series by Palestinian poets.
Crucifixes of Beit Sahour Amna Muhammad Abu Safat The serenity I knowresides in my bones.I learned this through the most submissive actions.In the hand that greets,the foot that stands,and the shoulder that carries.Tell it like a storyor an anecdoteor a tragedy,it doesn’t matter.The story maker never becomes a strangerand that is your consolation.Say that a womanrefrained from greetings and standing upbecause, for her, isolation was a greater trialthan loss or abandonmentand because her boneshoused her quiet.Though she did go out on Sundays to dispel it,hammering nails in Beit Sahourfor oakwood crucifixes. —Nablus Read more from our series by Palestinian poets.
Weak at the Knees James Wham “Ahed’s Knee” has little to say about the gravest crimes of the state it sets out to criticize.
The Man and His Girlfriend Who Argued All of Last Night and Now Stand at a Pharmacy in R City to Buy Medication for Headaches Dalia Taha Look.Over there.The sea isn’t visible yet,though we’ve been driving for two hours.Though we’ve begun to feel its hot moist air.Though our clothes are sticking to our bodies. In the car we eat grapes and don’t talk,as if the sweat oozing from our bodiesis how we communicate now,how our souls trade words or strikes. We’re on Highway 6,I’m on the phone making sure we didn’t take the wrong exit,you’re asking me to pass you something.And with the same headsthat crossed the checkpoint,the same neutral expressions that waited while the soldierlooked over our papers,we turn to take in the empty hills.Completely empty. There’s nothing that speaks of the Arab villagesI note and younod your beautiful head. Even the silence that envelopes the scene after a massacreand never leaves it, the silencethat clings to rocks and treesand is released by the soil like fumes,that particular kind of heavy silence,you know what I mean.You sense it when you visit the hills of Rwanda or Bosnia,you feel it instantly—you don’t understand howit happens, exactly, but you move backwardsas though you aren’t stepping on grassbut on the gasps of the dead. As if what extends from the treesaren’t branches but the dead’s last wordsstanding upright, crows alighting on them.They tried to get rid of the silencewith highways and the thrum of moving cars.They tried skillfully to remove everythingthen they tossed their white gloves on the grass. I feel like I’m performing,like nothing about what I’m doing is real.As if what I’m wearing underneath my clothesisn’t a bathing suitbut a ghost.No one can returnthose villages to the hillside,it’s over forever,this is a fixed truth.I realize this on the way to the seaand a strange grief fills me,the sea that isn’t visible yet,as if it, too, knows and has disappeared,and nothing but the sweat oozing from our bodiestells us it’s there. And because words between us have cometo an end, without saying it out loud,together, we long to meet it,while the white gloves on the hillsslowly growinto poison flowers. —Ramallah Read more from our series by Palestinian poets.
The Man Who Writes Newspaper Articles While The Trees Disappear And No One Listens Dalia Taha For several daysmy grandfather cried.In the end he admitted he was alone,as though he didn’t have seven sonswho had given him twenty-five grandchildren. My grandmother at home,a basket of figs between her feet,is daydreaming as she carefully peelsand feeds them to my grandfather like he’s her child.This now is the shape of their kiss: her fingerson his lips. Around them, everything is a memento of forgetting.No dust in this housetheir flesh covers everythingeven the cushions.They’ve stopped sleeping over at other people’s homes.They are residents of their own bodies and their homeis collapsing over them while their fleshgrows over their flesh. In the same basketbeneath the good fruitmy grandmother finds small heartsthat belong to us, her twenty-five grandchildrenscattered across this earth,incapable of love.She’ll consider them just like she considersall the figsthe ones ripe enoughand the ones that won’t do for anythingother than making jam.The cold jam in the refrigeratoris our corpsesand it’s all they consumesince they lost their teeth. —Ramallah Read more from our series by Palestinian poets.
Popular and Known to No One Amna Muhammad Abu Safat With ravenous eyesI devoured what others thought I was nourishing.This is how I overindulged,with glances thatare never returned.A few days ago the little one cried.She lifted her head to the sky,tears fell from her eyes,a sob filled her throat.In silence I watched,ignoring what was happening around me.This is my life;it teaches me how riddles are composedand how, from truth, mysteries are woven.When I speak of myself,others think I am alluding to them. I want a flower on my neck,specifically on the back of it,on the spot that’s known for renewing energy.And let it be an olive blossom,stunningand modest, popularand known to no one.Last year I saw the blossoms up closeas if for the first time,the wind scattering themacross the land and over the walls.I want the flower that could speak on my behalfto be tattooed on the part of methat is difficult to see.I want it to identify me if I leave,to adorn me and to speakof my need for decoration. This time I’ll dissolve.I’ll enter love as a womanand leave it as oil or kindling.spilling over if I must,blocking out the sun if you want,delaying the light.My love, I’ve tried something safer than callousness,more established and longer lasting.My voice softens whenever I remember you.I hunch overto protect my heart. My heart is calmand my eyes are astonished.I point to the fertility of the soil,to augurs in the heavens.to the sighs in caressesand loneliness in gazes.Everything speaks its own languageand my mind is clear, attuned, tireless.I call to things,to the unreachable fruit to quietto the burning sun, to forgiveness,to love that vacillates in its excess,to transform me into steam or ice.The earth is my motherand I am three quarters water. Let’s return to where we came from,if this journey promisesany possible return, as dustor particles,just as people ageand return as storks or wolves,and despair overwhelms them,or the way distance grants thema longing to reignite despair.I was horrified that love could end,that its bright gaze could dim.This morning, I went out lookingfor my house and sharedmy breakfast with a hungry animal. Everything near the fireplaceis aflame.Faces and hemsand on the horizon, to the tune playing on my radio,the trees bend and sway.The wind knows me,and the living do.All that exists is for me.My eyes have traveled the windows that look out onto what I want. My blood type is AB+.They say it is a miserly typetaking from all and giving to no one.This is why I’ve avoided using it as a term of endearmentfor you, worried that it contains some insult.Whenever I sit for a while,my elbow digging into my thigh, my head in my hands,I retract the past.I say: maybe he is my blood,his absence anesthetizes meand his arrival makes me tremble. Let’s finish what we startedin the desolate night,sitting before our strange life,persevering as others do.We are god’s parched earth—we drink everything and thrive on neglect.Come let’s strike this deal of oursnear the riverso that the fish whose eyes never close,the tree that never thirsts,the soil that never dries,the stones that do not scrape,the sound of the river that speaks of farewell,so that unbeknownst to them,free birds and creaturescontent in their burrows,will be our good witnesses. —Nablus Read more from our series by Palestinian poets.
Crucifixes of Beit Sahour Amna Muhammad Abu Safat The serenity I knowresides in my bones.I learned this through the most submissive actions.In the hand that greets,the foot that stands,and the shoulder that carries.Tell it like a storyor an anecdoteor a tragedy,it doesn’t matter.The story maker never becomes a strangerand that is your consolation.Say that a womanrefrained from greetings and standing upbecause, for her, isolation was a greater trialthan loss or abandonmentand because her boneshoused her quiet.Though she did go out on Sundays to dispel it,hammering nails in Beit Sahourfor oakwood crucifixes. —Nablus Read more from our series by Palestinian poets.
Weak at the Knees James Wham “Ahed’s Knee” has little to say about the gravest crimes of the state it sets out to criticize.
The Man and His Girlfriend Who Argued All of Last Night and Now Stand at a Pharmacy in R City to Buy Medication for Headaches Dalia Taha Look.Over there.The sea isn’t visible yet,though we’ve been driving for two hours.Though we’ve begun to feel its hot moist air.Though our clothes are sticking to our bodies. In the car we eat grapes and don’t talk,as if the sweat oozing from our bodiesis how we communicate now,how our souls trade words or strikes. We’re on Highway 6,I’m on the phone making sure we didn’t take the wrong exit,you’re asking me to pass you something.And with the same headsthat crossed the checkpoint,the same neutral expressions that waited while the soldierlooked over our papers,we turn to take in the empty hills.Completely empty. There’s nothing that speaks of the Arab villagesI note and younod your beautiful head. Even the silence that envelopes the scene after a massacreand never leaves it, the silencethat clings to rocks and treesand is released by the soil like fumes,that particular kind of heavy silence,you know what I mean.You sense it when you visit the hills of Rwanda or Bosnia,you feel it instantly—you don’t understand howit happens, exactly, but you move backwardsas though you aren’t stepping on grassbut on the gasps of the dead. As if what extends from the treesaren’t branches but the dead’s last wordsstanding upright, crows alighting on them.They tried to get rid of the silencewith highways and the thrum of moving cars.They tried skillfully to remove everythingthen they tossed their white gloves on the grass. I feel like I’m performing,like nothing about what I’m doing is real.As if what I’m wearing underneath my clothesisn’t a bathing suitbut a ghost.No one can returnthose villages to the hillside,it’s over forever,this is a fixed truth.I realize this on the way to the seaand a strange grief fills me,the sea that isn’t visible yet,as if it, too, knows and has disappeared,and nothing but the sweat oozing from our bodiestells us it’s there. And because words between us have cometo an end, without saying it out loud,together, we long to meet it,while the white gloves on the hillsslowly growinto poison flowers. —Ramallah Read more from our series by Palestinian poets.
The Man Who Writes Newspaper Articles While The Trees Disappear And No One Listens Dalia Taha For several daysmy grandfather cried.In the end he admitted he was alone,as though he didn’t have seven sonswho had given him twenty-five grandchildren. My grandmother at home,a basket of figs between her feet,is daydreaming as she carefully peelsand feeds them to my grandfather like he’s her child.This now is the shape of their kiss: her fingerson his lips. Around them, everything is a memento of forgetting.No dust in this housetheir flesh covers everythingeven the cushions.They’ve stopped sleeping over at other people’s homes.They are residents of their own bodies and their homeis collapsing over them while their fleshgrows over their flesh. In the same basketbeneath the good fruitmy grandmother finds small heartsthat belong to us, her twenty-five grandchildrenscattered across this earth,incapable of love.She’ll consider them just like she considersall the figsthe ones ripe enoughand the ones that won’t do for anythingother than making jam.The cold jam in the refrigeratoris our corpsesand it’s all they consumesince they lost their teeth. —Ramallah Read more from our series by Palestinian poets.
Burdened by Books Robert Zaretsky Teaching the Great Books today means confronting futility and absurdity.
Burdened by Books Robert Zaretsky Teaching the Great Books today means confronting futility and absurdity.
End of the World-Building John Kazior The silver-bullet fantasies of starchitects are a nightmare for the rest of us.
Cut-Rate Eden Jessica Fletcher Passing by the Jacob Riis Houses of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the summer of 1966, an observer would have seen not the empty concrete plaza and fenced off patches of green lawn common to public housing projects, but a vibrant adventure playground populated with gaggles of children. A New York Times reporter visiting the project found children clambering over stepped timbers, digging in sand, leaping from rung to rung of curved steel climbing frames set in heaped mounds, and dipping their feet, arms, and even school uniform ties in wading pools and fountains that streamed over a nearby amphitheater’s steps. Students from a local Catholic school played alongside those from neighborhood public schools, and residents of the Riis Houses mixed with non-residents. A teacher remarked, “You know, children play differently here. It’s not just that they have less fights—they know it’s beautiful.” Puncturing this sentimental reading of the space, the Times reporter observed young boys playing “Hot Peas and Butter,” a game in which one child hid a belt in the sand, the others searched for it, and whoever found it first then hit another player with the belt before burying it again. This boisterous play took place alongside aesthetic appreciation, indicating the varied ways that people occupied the new public space. Opened in May of that year, the playground was one of a series of experiments undertaken by recently elected Mayor John V. Lindsay’s administration to enrich and expand the city’s public space, with a particular eye to increasing access to places of recreation in working-class neighborhoods that were then becoming majority Black and Puerto Rican. Mariana Mogilevich’s meticulously researched book The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York explores how such spaces were seen as a vital way to stave off urban crisis. Using a number of case studies, Mogilevich uncovers a forgotten slice of history that complicates our understanding of the post-war urban crisis, showing how municipal officials and landscape architects tried to revitalize the city by renovating and expanding its public spaces during the 1960s and 1970s. The specter of urban crisis shaped the mayoral campaign and tenure of Lindsay. Elected as a reform candidate whose Republican affiliation gave him distance from the Democratic track record, he nonetheless had shown that he supported Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs when he served in Congress, particularly civil rights legislation. Hailing from an upper middle-class family, Lindsay was well-connected, and he cannily used media outlets to position himself as a savior to an ailing city. In January 1965, the New York Herald Tribune—which was owned by one of Lindsay’s top financial backers, John Hay Whitney—began a four-month-long series of articles dedicated to New York’s urban crisis. Beginning with the line, “New York is the greatest city in the world—and everything is wrong with it,” the articles went on to detail how middle-class families were leaving the city in droves, how hospitals and schools were deteriorating, and how everything from air pollution to poverty was ruining the experience of city life. Lindsay was quoted approvingly throughout the series and framed as a potential balm to New York’s extensive troubles. While the Herald Tribune’s reports were sensationalist in their assessments of the challenges of city life, they nonetheless identified many acute issues facing New York and other American cities in the postwar period. Single family homes in the suburbs had become much less expensive thanks to real estate development companies such as Levitt & Sons, which cut costs by applying assembly-line ideas to construction and employing non-union labor to build entire towns. At the same time, racially discriminatory lending practices characterized both private and federal mortgages, so while many white families moved to these newly affordable suburbs, people of color largely remained in the city and were prey to expensive rents and absentee landlords who barely maintained their buildings. Within the city itself, residential segregation had also become increasingly stark—often exacerbated by urban renewal projects—and non-white neighborhoods became particularly dilapidated. Lindsay campaigned on his ability to stop New York from becoming “a second-class city,” and Mogilevich traces how he foregrounded the role that planners and designers would play in his administration. Always adept at political stunts, he chartered a helicopter and flew over the city with architect Philip Johnson and landscape architect Robert Zion, declaring that they were “depressed at what we saw, but excited by the potential.” His campaign released white papers that declared “cities are for people,” and as mayor he hired young urbanists who wanted to encourage citizen participation and create a city with well-distributed public goods. Crucially, these planners were disaffected with the Robert Moses model, as was much of the general public. Moses had become a metonym for top-down planning that purported to be rational and functional, but which was often deeply dysfunctional in practice. His plans prioritized cars over pedestrians (as in his infamous attempt to carve a road through Washington Square Park), took bulldozers to the city’s existing rich fabric of dense streets, frequently targeted the residences of communities of color for demolition, and disdained community input. Urban designers increasingly looked to alternate models of planning and envisaged cities that would nourish civic participation. Sparks of Recreation Lindsay’s administration focused attention on open spaces and sought to create a more equitable system of public spaces devoted to pleasure, play, and gathering that were meant to strengthen New Yorkers’ ties to their city. Though this was in part motivated by genuine concern for neglected communities, it also stemmed from political expediency: fearing racial uprisings, particularly following those in Harlem in the summer of 1964, politicians calculated that increasing access to recreation would “cool” the neighborhoods. The Invention of Public Space attends to public housing plazas, neighborhood playgrounds, pedestrian streets, and waterfront parks to assess how these aims played out in practice. It’s worth noting that Mogilevich is interested in a broad notion of public space, in part because she places herself in conversation with designers and urbanists who used the term expansively. Many of the spaces under discussion were not purely publicly funded, reflecting the straitened city budgets of the period, but all fit within “a broad category of urban space designed and maintained for the express purpose of democratic, inclusive sociability and the cultivation of individual freedom,” as Mogilevich puts it. The renovation of Jacob Riis Houses Plaza typified how a younger generation of designers sought to remedy arid postwar urbanism and bring new ideas about childhood and play to bear on the built environment. Formed of nineteen austere brick towers, the Jacob Riis Houses, originally constructed in 1949, were characteristic New York City Housing Authority designs. Influenced by the French architect Le Corbusier’s model of “towers in the park,” NYCHA planned high-rise residential buildings surrounded by concrete plazas and lawns. These projects were sited on superblocks—areas that broke with the city’s grid, exceeded the standard block size, and didn’t allow through traffic—that separated them visually and physically from the surrounding neighborhood. Housing reformers who had identified density and lack of access to light and air as key flaws of working-class tenements proclaimed that the new public housing solved these issues. However, as residents and multiple critics—Jane Jacobs being one of the most well-known—pointed out, these new projects destroyed the dynamic street life of tenement districts and looked forbidding and austere when set against the surrounding urban fabric. The NYCHA exacerbated these shortcomings in its authoritarian approach to open space in the projects. As Mogilevich notes, the organization purchased fifty thousand feet of chain link fencing annually to keep residents off the green lawns. Tenants, who were increasingly Black and Puerto Rican as the white immigrant populations who had first lived in public housing moved out of the city, lacked basic agency over their everyday environment. Pointing to increasing discontent, the housing reformer Ira S. Robbins, who served on the NYCHA board, convinced private foundations to pay to upgrade open spaces in the projects. The Vincent Astor Foundation funded a series of experiments in reviving the dead spaces, and the young landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg won multiple commissions, including at the Riis Houses, to redesign these areas. Friedberg rejected functionalist urbanism and aimed to create “a playful, permissive, and participatory urban environment” in the Riis Houses Plaza, focusing particularly on how kids experienced the space. A key part of the plan was found in the northern end of the plaza, which housed the first adventure playground in New York. Though the design of a playground might seem straightforward, Mogilevich shows how Friedberg’s choices indicated broader ideological shifts surrounding childhood and play. Traditional playgrounds contain some configuration of the “four S’s”: swing, seesaw, sandbox, and slide set in isolation. But critics beginning in the 1930s began to suggest that such standardized layouts rationalized play and made it a predictable and repetitive task that didn’t engage children’s imagination. The Danish landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen, who watched kids playing in junkyards and observed how they made their own landscapes for games out of scrap materials, began to advocate in the 1930s and 1940s for playgrounds that would encourage such non-directed play. English advocates, such as Lady Allen of Hurtwood, took up adventure playgrounds after seeing children find ways to play in bomb sites. Friedberg wrote that his experiments in playground design were inspired by watching his own and other children and noticing that they preferred to leap and climb at will. He dubbed this “linked play” and sought to design a landscape that would be conducive to their impulses. At Riis Plaza, Friedberg provided a varied terrain of granite pyramids and mounds surrounded by sand, connected by a network of steel climbing frames and punctuated by timbers of different heights for children to climb over, so that kids could be in constant motion and chart their own path through the playground. As Mogilevich writes, “The play environment created physical space for human agency. As a microcosm of the larger urban environment, it offered a model for an ideal city that might be analogously participatory.” But, as she also notes, as with many of these projects, participation was metaphorically invoked without users being materially included in the planning process. Nonetheless, the playground was hugely successful; families came from around the city after reading about the experiment, and it led to adventure playgrounds across the city, including the enduring popular examples in Central Park. Beyond the playground, Friedberg transformed the rest of the plaza into a series of spaces for residents of all ages that again were meant to encourage visitors’ agency. Friedberg remarked of previous NYCHA designs that “one was directed to a place to sit, a place to play, a place to walk, a place to run, and a place to congregate—places for automaton behavior. . . . In this atmosphere, trees, flowers, and lawn were properly manicured and cared for . . . only the people withered.” In the Riis Houses grounds, he removed the chain-link fences and sought to welcome residents by creating four “outdoor rooms” that alternated between quiet and active space. Elderly residents had shaded brick alcoves in which to sit and take their leisure, while children had a series of play areas. Friedberg carefully planned the landscape to rise and fall, and he replanted the London plane trees of the original project to emerge at varied heights throughout to create visual interest. Anchoring the space in the center was a thousand-seat amphitheater that doubled as a spray pool in summer. The amphitheater was the site of plays and musical performances by local groups, including Latin and soul acts, which made space for different cultural tastes. But as Mogilevich points out, it was also “part of a broader municipal cultural and recreation strategy to keep problematic parts of the city ‘cool’ in the long, hot summer.” Thus, the vision of a permissive and participatory space was still circumscribed in the kinds of activities that it encouraged. Cultural appreciation and children’s play were envisaged as ideals: not protest or political rallies. Diluted Remedies In 1965 the city continued the open space experiments with a program that turned vacant lots in working-class Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods into “vest-pocket parks,” yet another part of the city’s “cooling” strategy toward racial strife. Neighborhoods such as Bedford Stuyvesant, the Lower East Side, Harlem, and the South Bronx had suffered disinvestment for years and were pockmarked with disused spaces and dilapidated abandoned buildings thanks to absentee landlords and municipal neglect. The city saw a cheap opportunity to improve these neighborhoods by creating temporary small parks in empty lots. Mogilevich points out that this was fueled in part by an enduring dislike on the part of middle-class professionals of children playing in the street. Since the Progressive Era, reformers had carved out small parks in dense immigrant neighborhoods to provide a healthier urban landscape and a safe place for children to play. But by the 1960s, such concerns were overlaid with fears of racial uprisings. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—convened by Johnson in 1967 to assess the causes of urban rebellions—identified parks and playgrounds as the most visible part of the public scene and the quickest to (at least be seen to) improve. There was a real recreation deficit in poor, increasingly Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, and the city sought to address this inequity, but vest-pocket parks were also a cut-rate means to avoid racial protests without addressing many of the root causes of social inequities. These parks also did little to mitigate some of the key markers of environmental racism, such as neighborhoods having sparse tree cover; because the parks were only temporary, the Parks Department did not plant new trees or shrubs. Intended to function as visible signs that under Lindsay the municipal government cared for poor neighborhoods, these new parks again raised questions of what role city officials, designers, and residents ought to play in planning public space. Throughout The Invention of Public Space, Mogilevich traces the wave of self-questioning that rippled through the professions of urban planning and landscape architecture throughout the 1960s. Many were unsure of whether their expertise should take precedence over community knowledge. These new parks were an opportunity to experiment with community planning: as Mogilevich shows, they were meant to function not merely as beautification projects but had the potential to serve as “a testing ground for new forms of political organization that privileged community knowledge and action over municipal direction.” The first park to open, located across three vacant lots in Bedford Stuyvesant, was shaped by community participation. The Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council, a local organization, spearheaded the project; they chose the site and toured parks and playgrounds in the city before attending design meetings with the architect Friedberg. Friedberg had neighborhood children play on equipment as it was installed and give their feedback. Much like at Riis Park, he sought to provide a space where kids could clamber, jump, and run without having to line up for prescribed activities. Unemployed men from the neighborhood were paid to build the park, and they used reclaimed materials to construct timber clusters and a tree house. But as the city extended the program to ten more locations, community participation became more limited. Friedberg created equipment that could be combined in various ways: each park opened with easily dismantled steel or wood pergolas with benches at entrances, then was strewn with timber or concrete modular play equipment, and often decorated with brightly colored murals. While Friedberg focused on innovative design, residents were more concerned with maintenance, security, and greenery. The Parks Department ignored their misgivings. Though many parks began well enough, the department didn’t have the budget for proper maintenance of this increasingly large and dispersed system, and many ended up in the same dilapidated condition they had been supposed to remedy. Some sites were surrendered by the city, while others were taken up by local community groups and turned into community gardens. Though the city had attempted to provide a space for civic engagement, limited funds and lack of communication with residents stymied these hopes. Public Space, Privatized Good Mogilevich astutely shows that while public space is often spoken about as a good in and of itself, this masks the power relations embedded in the design, construction, and use of public spaces. In an epilogue reflecting on the years since Lindsay’s administration, she points out that the often-specious conflation of public space with the public good has intensified in the intervening decades, most notably in the rise of privately owned public spaces and business improvement districts. This was particularly evident in New York during the Bloomberg years: though there were many public space initiatives, they predominantly benefited the upper middle class and tourists. As she puts it, “The persistence of that naturalized association between public space, diversity, inclusion, and participation would serve countless urban developments that made the city less and less democratic.” Such associations sustain contemporary developments in public space, including the recently opened Little Island in the Hudson River, designed by Heatherwick Studio. Known for the critically reviled and physically perilous Vessel in Hudson Yards, and for squandering public funds on a since-cancelled “Garden Bridge” project in London enabled by then-mayor Boris Johnson’s cronyism, the Teflon-like firm worked with Barry Diller and the Hudson River Park Trust to create this new so-called public park. Sited on the affluent fringe of the gentrified Meatpacking District and nearby Chelsea Market, it adds another spectacular tourist attraction to the city rather than comprising a meaningful improvement to New York’s park system. As the architecture critic Alexandra Lange has noted, there are many more restrictions in this vanity project than in the city’s other public parks—no biking, skateboarding, scooting, rollerblading, or playing music—and while this park’s maintenance is sustained by Diller’s fortune, parks in poorer neighborhoods run off volunteer assistance. Many other initiatives over the past decade also conform to the more conservative strands of Mogilevich’s account of New York’s public spaces. The most high-profile renovation of NYCHA’s open spaces during Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty has been the widely criticized installation of bright flood lights intended to reduce illegal activities. Typifying Oscar Newman’s theory of defensible space, rather than the hopes of landscape architects like Friedberg to provide a playful and permissive public realm for working-class New Yorkers, these lights have had little material effect on crime while implicitly criminalizing public housing residents, and have diminished the quality of life in NYCHA towers. Last October, the NYCHA released an Open Space Masterplan report outlining less punitive plans to improve public spaces across its projects and included participatory design as a key part of the process. The report found that many of the issues afflicting public housing in the postwar period remained, and it emphasized the need for better maintenance, less fenced-off space, and community gardens where tenants could decide what to plant. Yet the masterplan also notes that the ideal upgrades would require more money than current public budgets allow and forecasts that the agency will have to partner with nonprofit organizations and private foundations in order to be able to carry out such improvements—much like they had to for the Riis Plaza redesign—indicating the persistent underfunding of New York’s public realm. The Invention of Public Space deftly denaturalizes associations between public space and the public good that continue to linger to this day. By assessing a rich array of case studies, Mogilevich prompts readers to consider who is invited to enjoy the city’s open spaces and on what terms. Her account of the problems of many Lindsay-era experiments in urban design highlights the limitations of improving access to recreation without substantively addressing housing or school inequalities, the need for decent maintenance budgets to sustain interventions in low-income areas, and the vital importance of community participation in design. Yet these flawed attempts also point toward paths forward. What emerges from the pages of this history is the enduring vitality of a political project that starts amid the public housing towers and tenement-lined streets of working-class New York neighborhoods and creates more equitable and more playful public spaces, taking as its motto that all city dwellers have a right to fun.
Bricked and Mortared Kevin Rogan New York City is often spoken of as if it were a week from collapse or a year from becoming a new Zion. It depends on who’s talking. New York governor Kathy Hochul recently declared her intention to “not only rebuild from the pandemic, but also to unlock New York’s incredible potential.” In this vision, the trash-strewn canyons of Midtown will soon thrum once more with the clamour of the Le Pain Quotidien lunch crowd, the awed whispers of tourists in the Times Square M&M’s World, the whirrs of electric scooters carrying tech workers to their offices. But there is a desperation in claims like Hochul’s, suggesting that something isn’t right—forces still threaten to upend the fantasy of a City Ascendent in all its techno-Bloombergian finery. What if this crisis was the last one? What if New York is slouching toward the charnel house, waiting to be consigned, block by block, to ruin? The fatalists seem to have the upper hand at the moment. The past year has seen all manner of grim forecasts of oncoming dilapidation, from headlines like “Retail Chains Abandon Manhattan: ‘It’s Unsustainable’” to a viral sad-sack blog post by the former hedge-funder and concerned ex-resident James Altucher, who claimed that the pandemic had cratered the city’s commercial real estate, which would lead to a lethal “deflationary spiral.” That this has not happened is beside the point. There is an arresting logic to the millenarian accounts, especially when the utopian position contents itself with proferring idle technocrat dreams. Both sides recognize the severity of retail and office vacancies, which function as a barometer of the city’s “vibrancy.” There is nothing sadder to both the undertaker and the wonk than an empty storefront: one sees the hollowness of the end, the other a “sticky” roadblock. For the uninitiated, the vacancy is highly legible, serving as a readily understood, over-aestheticized tableau for the disaster porn genre. This ultra-visibility is further magnified by the blight’s persistence in even the most venerated Manhattan enclaves, like Soho and Midtown, where retail vacancy rates have hovered around an unprecedented 30 percent. At the same time, nearly 11 percent of retail leases across the city were delinquent as of November, to the tune of $7 billion, according to Newmark. Economic watchers muttered promises of a pent-up reserve of consumption, or “revenge shopping,” which was primed to burst free after the pandemic had ended. This has not occurred. Following one significant spike in March of last year—on account of stimulus checks—national retail sales quickly mellowed and have remained largely flat, stifled by inflation and supply chain disruptions. In another domain, only about 8 percent of white-collar workers were back in their Manhattan offices full time in November—while 54 percent remained fully remote—and hotel occupancy remains significantly lower than what it was prepandemic, according to the Partnership for New York City. The prayed-for explosion of vibrancy, the dream of New York City revitalized, the “end of the pandemic,” have all failed to materialize. But even a joyous return to the streets and the office will not save New York. Vornado Alley Online sales have never accounted for more than 16 percent of total retail sales nationally, but there persists a narrative of online shopping devastating “brick and mortar” retail. In fact, the percentage of online sales with respect to the overall retail market have actually fallen to 13.3 percent since peaking at 15.7 percent earlier last year. But Manhattan is not just any retail market—it is the retail market, host to the world-renowned locations of Saks Fifth Avenue, FAO Schwarz, and Macy’s, which limp along even as old stalwarts like Neiman Marcus, Century 21, and Lord & Taylor have fallen. However, to blame these deaths entirely on the internet or even the pandemic is a lie. Retail is changing in character, as evidenced by the mystifying ascendance of immersive “retail experiences” like the CAMP “family experience store” in Hudson Yards and the Harry Potter store on Broadway, where shoppers can sample butterbeer and take selfies in the “Atrium of Awe.” As CBRE noted in its November 2021 Real Estate Market Outlook, these “new retail concepts” will “capitalize on opportunistic market conditions” and “absorb some of the vacancies left by failed retailers.” “Opportunistic” here is a euphemism; a more accurate word would be monopolistic. We are in the depths of an extended process of winnowing, and the bankrupting of legacy department stores is simply one overt facet. According to the St. Louis Fed, an estimated two hundred thousand businesses, many of them retail stores and restaurants, closed over the course of the pandemic. As Trepp noted in December 2020, the economic conditions of Covid-19 “led to the creation of clear retail ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’ as evidenced by the undeniable growth of the likes of Amazon and Walmart”—particularly the former, which saw its share price nearly double since late 2019, at a time when most of its local competitors found themselves underwater. Concomitant with the consolidation of retailers is the monopolization of retail square footage. Manhattan’s largest owner of street retail, the Real Estate Investment Trust Vornado Realty, owns 2.6 million square feet, or about sixteen hundred Starbucks’ worth, of retail space in the borough. We are not talking about a mythical mom-and-pop landlord, who might be labeled either an avaricious leech or kindly benefactor. Vornado is what David Harvey and Lata Chatterjee call a “professional landlord” who administers properties via “professional management techniques, and is very sensitive to profits, losses and the rate of return on capital.” At its scale, Vornado need not rush to fill spaces with tenants like a smaller landlord, for whom losing a month of rent on a single property may be lethal. Profitability for Vornado is a calculation considered across their entire asset pool—valued at $17.5 billion—with the effect that one empty storefront means relatively little. If the rent Vornado asks is high for most, there is almost no force that can compel it downwards. Vornado can absorb short-term losses—by either waiting for a willing (and equally massive) tenant or by selling the property to another real estate investor, who will then similarly hold it waiting for a dream client or sell it in their time. In any given space along any given street, the monopolist landlord meets the monopolist proprietor like tectonic plates along a fault line. Small landlords and retail tenants thus find themselves in a hostile environment, dominated by ur-predators who do what they do but better. The titanic scale of the players and the amount of money moving around makes human lives disappear. This process, accelerated but by no means set in motion by the pandemic, is now fully coming to bear along the avenues of Manhattan: demand is down and unlikely to recover. There are simply fewer retailers seeking square footage than previously. Nevertheless, professional landlords like Vornado, SL Green, and Related Companies hold an effective monopoly on retail space, concentrated in the borough’s historically high-performing retail corridors, meaning they may charge whatever they deem fit to access these locations. The “cultural” standing of a “major corridor” such as Fifth Avenue, along with the promise of heavy foot traffic, works to make an astronomical price per square foot palatable. That asking rents there are down 14.2 percent since this time last year is a grim portent. It indicates a fall in demand to which landlords are responding by reducing rents that ordinarily preserve their holdings for only the wealthiest tenants. Even so, these properties remain utterly out of reach for most—a decrease of this magnitude leaves the average across the sixteen major corridors tracked by CBRE at a whopping $615 per square foot. Thus, storefronts remain empty because supply has been artificially limited to a level that more or less matches the constrained demand. The supply of square footage in the form of buildings may be physically high, but landlords, functioning as the wardens of rentable space, prevent these from being actually used. These vacancies constitute a reserve of capital which languishes not in warehouses or stockyards, but lies dead upon the street, yet deployable at any time. This initial supply glut poses a problem that does not go away, due to the fundamental obduracy of stone and steel. A building may stand, and be rentable, for a century or longer. At the same time, more space continues to enter the market: over twelve thousand new commercial construction projects began in the city in the first half of 2021 alone. The construction industry must, of course, keep building: supply must ever be pumped into even the most oversaturated markets. The ostensible ephemerality of capital in real estate finds itself tethered to a maddeningly unpliable host in the physical stability of urban space. Landlords respond to this perennial crisis the only way they can—by artificially constricting properties on the market. But the only real solution to the problem of the empty storefront is, well, a bulldozer. Capital City This overt tension between proprietors (or would-be proprietors) and landlords has taken on the quality of a morality play. The former, who perceive every abandoned Pret A Manger as a phantom limb, inveigh against the latter, accusing them of “killing” New York City with vacancies. Each side has undertaken campaigns to score a decisive victory over the other, with initiative usually lying with the proprietors. The Small Business Jobs Survival Act, which would enshrine a negotiation process on lease terms, or the Commercial Rent Control bill, which would modulate rent increases on commercial properties in a way analogous to residential rent stablization, have both been floated from time to time, only to be denied by the landlord cabal known as the Real Estate Board of New York. However, this is a proxy war in more ways than one, with the pipsqueak players—the small proprietors and landlords with meager portfolios—bickering in the shadow of the titanomachic struggle among the Vornados and the Amazons. This petty fighting proceeds block by block, vacated corner by vacated corner. Purportedly battles for the “soul of the neighborhood,” undertaken to preserve “community character” or some such shit, these are ultimately waged between types of capitalists who have found themselves at loggerheads. There will be no resolution because this is not the true conflict. There is a higher power both sides answer to—the vicious pursuit of profit above all. Marx likens competition between capitalists to the squabbling of “hostile brothers,” who fight over a hoard of spoils for the greatest fraction. Yet the brothers are twins, and they fight over profits they originally stole together. This is the crucial detail. As they alternately bicker and cooperate, the fallout elsewhere is devastating. The thought-patterns generated by this interminable war have come to define the social existence of cities, especially New York. This is not to say that all citizens and residents unconsciously serve higher masters, but that arguments made in good faith are ultimately whipped into a form where they provide ammunition to one or other faction of capital. We are all stammering in their vernacular. Do you want to preserve a neighborhood’s character? Well, if you want more shops—even local ones!—you’ll need to favor the proprietor capitalists. If you want a modicum of change, you’ll need to work with or against the landlords. Want to build new housing? Then you’re likely arguing that capitalist-developers be allowed to work unfettered to the expense of landlords. Want more public transit? Be prepared to secure private capital investment or have contractors bid for the job, and potentially to fight landlord(s) for the land to build it on, above, or under. Bike lanes? Plenty of studies show the benefits of cycling bear out on the balance sheet. The urban capitalist bloc—which may be composed of figures in city government, wonks, the save-our-storefronts types, the developmentalists, or even those who truly believe that a city may be made more functional—present themselves as avatars either of “cities for people” progressivism or common-sense urban traditionalism. Cultural power may be theirs, but landlords retain the final say, ever exploiting their monopoly over their particular scrap of the earth. The city is theirs, undisputedly. We have been inside of these capitalist factions’ mutual creation for so long, we cannot help but think like them, in their terms, and to speak with their voices. There is, by design, no space in the urban debate for anyone else, for any other perspectives—and all shouted invective is modulated to serve them. Indicative of this is the faux-universal belief in urban “vibrancy,” a bottom-up type of ineffable community character, ill-defined enough to apply anywhere. It is often treated as the sacred measure of a city or urban area’s “health.” But more often than not, this vibrancy is velocity—of capital, transactions, purchases, customers per day—and a vacancy interrupts the divine flow. But a vacancy is not actually a vacancy at all: capital is the true inhabitant. Whether this takes the form of a tenancy or not is ultimately irrelevant. “Urban vibrancy” is then a rather cruel thing to pretend to monitor, like declaring a cancer patient cured because their heartbeat is stable. Even if every storefront in New York City ends up a hollowed-out ruin, this would not necessarily stop the capitalist class from extracting profit. It may actually be part of a project to maximize profits elsewhere—for example, Vornado also owns properties in Chicago and San Fransisco. Any building, any block, no matter how beautiful and vibrant, ultimately has a price set upon it, and there are market scenarios in which anything may be extirpated. All is marrow to be sucked from the bone. There is no chance for a resolution within the capitalist market for space—not building more, not castrating landlord power, not any market sleight of hand. The problem dwells in the form of capitalist, “financialized” private property itself: where the physical world meets the market. There is, however, a distant star of hope. Buildings, however sturdy, do not last forever. Old New York serves as a case study par excellence in the decaying urban environment, from buildings to subways to sewer pipes. As this infrastructure degrades apace, year after year, one-hundred-year storm after one-hundred-year storm, there will come a moment, or rather a litany of moments, in which the loss from repairs outweighs the profit gained in holding a piece of property. A simple calculuation—is my net operating income positive?—governs our cities. There will be a reckoning in which the longevity of Manhattan’s built environment slowly comes undone. The city and its buildings last too long for capital to make efficient use of it, but they don’t last forever.
End of the World-Building John Kazior The silver-bullet fantasies of starchitects are a nightmare for the rest of us.
Cut-Rate Eden Jessica Fletcher Passing by the Jacob Riis Houses of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the summer of 1966, an observer would have seen not the empty concrete plaza and fenced off patches of green lawn common to public housing projects, but a vibrant adventure playground populated with gaggles of children. A New York Times reporter visiting the project found children clambering over stepped timbers, digging in sand, leaping from rung to rung of curved steel climbing frames set in heaped mounds, and dipping their feet, arms, and even school uniform ties in wading pools and fountains that streamed over a nearby amphitheater’s steps. Students from a local Catholic school played alongside those from neighborhood public schools, and residents of the Riis Houses mixed with non-residents. A teacher remarked, “You know, children play differently here. It’s not just that they have less fights—they know it’s beautiful.” Puncturing this sentimental reading of the space, the Times reporter observed young boys playing “Hot Peas and Butter,” a game in which one child hid a belt in the sand, the others searched for it, and whoever found it first then hit another player with the belt before burying it again. This boisterous play took place alongside aesthetic appreciation, indicating the varied ways that people occupied the new public space. Opened in May of that year, the playground was one of a series of experiments undertaken by recently elected Mayor John V. Lindsay’s administration to enrich and expand the city’s public space, with a particular eye to increasing access to places of recreation in working-class neighborhoods that were then becoming majority Black and Puerto Rican. Mariana Mogilevich’s meticulously researched book The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York explores how such spaces were seen as a vital way to stave off urban crisis. Using a number of case studies, Mogilevich uncovers a forgotten slice of history that complicates our understanding of the post-war urban crisis, showing how municipal officials and landscape architects tried to revitalize the city by renovating and expanding its public spaces during the 1960s and 1970s. The specter of urban crisis shaped the mayoral campaign and tenure of Lindsay. Elected as a reform candidate whose Republican affiliation gave him distance from the Democratic track record, he nonetheless had shown that he supported Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs when he served in Congress, particularly civil rights legislation. Hailing from an upper middle-class family, Lindsay was well-connected, and he cannily used media outlets to position himself as a savior to an ailing city. In January 1965, the New York Herald Tribune—which was owned by one of Lindsay’s top financial backers, John Hay Whitney—began a four-month-long series of articles dedicated to New York’s urban crisis. Beginning with the line, “New York is the greatest city in the world—and everything is wrong with it,” the articles went on to detail how middle-class families were leaving the city in droves, how hospitals and schools were deteriorating, and how everything from air pollution to poverty was ruining the experience of city life. Lindsay was quoted approvingly throughout the series and framed as a potential balm to New York’s extensive troubles. While the Herald Tribune’s reports were sensationalist in their assessments of the challenges of city life, they nonetheless identified many acute issues facing New York and other American cities in the postwar period. Single family homes in the suburbs had become much less expensive thanks to real estate development companies such as Levitt & Sons, which cut costs by applying assembly-line ideas to construction and employing non-union labor to build entire towns. At the same time, racially discriminatory lending practices characterized both private and federal mortgages, so while many white families moved to these newly affordable suburbs, people of color largely remained in the city and were prey to expensive rents and absentee landlords who barely maintained their buildings. Within the city itself, residential segregation had also become increasingly stark—often exacerbated by urban renewal projects—and non-white neighborhoods became particularly dilapidated. Lindsay campaigned on his ability to stop New York from becoming “a second-class city,” and Mogilevich traces how he foregrounded the role that planners and designers would play in his administration. Always adept at political stunts, he chartered a helicopter and flew over the city with architect Philip Johnson and landscape architect Robert Zion, declaring that they were “depressed at what we saw, but excited by the potential.” His campaign released white papers that declared “cities are for people,” and as mayor he hired young urbanists who wanted to encourage citizen participation and create a city with well-distributed public goods. Crucially, these planners were disaffected with the Robert Moses model, as was much of the general public. Moses had become a metonym for top-down planning that purported to be rational and functional, but which was often deeply dysfunctional in practice. His plans prioritized cars over pedestrians (as in his infamous attempt to carve a road through Washington Square Park), took bulldozers to the city’s existing rich fabric of dense streets, frequently targeted the residences of communities of color for demolition, and disdained community input. Urban designers increasingly looked to alternate models of planning and envisaged cities that would nourish civic participation. Sparks of Recreation Lindsay’s administration focused attention on open spaces and sought to create a more equitable system of public spaces devoted to pleasure, play, and gathering that were meant to strengthen New Yorkers’ ties to their city. Though this was in part motivated by genuine concern for neglected communities, it also stemmed from political expediency: fearing racial uprisings, particularly following those in Harlem in the summer of 1964, politicians calculated that increasing access to recreation would “cool” the neighborhoods. The Invention of Public Space attends to public housing plazas, neighborhood playgrounds, pedestrian streets, and waterfront parks to assess how these aims played out in practice. It’s worth noting that Mogilevich is interested in a broad notion of public space, in part because she places herself in conversation with designers and urbanists who used the term expansively. Many of the spaces under discussion were not purely publicly funded, reflecting the straitened city budgets of the period, but all fit within “a broad category of urban space designed and maintained for the express purpose of democratic, inclusive sociability and the cultivation of individual freedom,” as Mogilevich puts it. The renovation of Jacob Riis Houses Plaza typified how a younger generation of designers sought to remedy arid postwar urbanism and bring new ideas about childhood and play to bear on the built environment. Formed of nineteen austere brick towers, the Jacob Riis Houses, originally constructed in 1949, were characteristic New York City Housing Authority designs. Influenced by the French architect Le Corbusier’s model of “towers in the park,” NYCHA planned high-rise residential buildings surrounded by concrete plazas and lawns. These projects were sited on superblocks—areas that broke with the city’s grid, exceeded the standard block size, and didn’t allow through traffic—that separated them visually and physically from the surrounding neighborhood. Housing reformers who had identified density and lack of access to light and air as key flaws of working-class tenements proclaimed that the new public housing solved these issues. However, as residents and multiple critics—Jane Jacobs being one of the most well-known—pointed out, these new projects destroyed the dynamic street life of tenement districts and looked forbidding and austere when set against the surrounding urban fabric. The NYCHA exacerbated these shortcomings in its authoritarian approach to open space in the projects. As Mogilevich notes, the organization purchased fifty thousand feet of chain link fencing annually to keep residents off the green lawns. Tenants, who were increasingly Black and Puerto Rican as the white immigrant populations who had first lived in public housing moved out of the city, lacked basic agency over their everyday environment. Pointing to increasing discontent, the housing reformer Ira S. Robbins, who served on the NYCHA board, convinced private foundations to pay to upgrade open spaces in the projects. The Vincent Astor Foundation funded a series of experiments in reviving the dead spaces, and the young landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg won multiple commissions, including at the Riis Houses, to redesign these areas. Friedberg rejected functionalist urbanism and aimed to create “a playful, permissive, and participatory urban environment” in the Riis Houses Plaza, focusing particularly on how kids experienced the space. A key part of the plan was found in the northern end of the plaza, which housed the first adventure playground in New York. Though the design of a playground might seem straightforward, Mogilevich shows how Friedberg’s choices indicated broader ideological shifts surrounding childhood and play. Traditional playgrounds contain some configuration of the “four S’s”: swing, seesaw, sandbox, and slide set in isolation. But critics beginning in the 1930s began to suggest that such standardized layouts rationalized play and made it a predictable and repetitive task that didn’t engage children’s imagination. The Danish landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen, who watched kids playing in junkyards and observed how they made their own landscapes for games out of scrap materials, began to advocate in the 1930s and 1940s for playgrounds that would encourage such non-directed play. English advocates, such as Lady Allen of Hurtwood, took up adventure playgrounds after seeing children find ways to play in bomb sites. Friedberg wrote that his experiments in playground design were inspired by watching his own and other children and noticing that they preferred to leap and climb at will. He dubbed this “linked play” and sought to design a landscape that would be conducive to their impulses. At Riis Plaza, Friedberg provided a varied terrain of granite pyramids and mounds surrounded by sand, connected by a network of steel climbing frames and punctuated by timbers of different heights for children to climb over, so that kids could be in constant motion and chart their own path through the playground. As Mogilevich writes, “The play environment created physical space for human agency. As a microcosm of the larger urban environment, it offered a model for an ideal city that might be analogously participatory.” But, as she also notes, as with many of these projects, participation was metaphorically invoked without users being materially included in the planning process. Nonetheless, the playground was hugely successful; families came from around the city after reading about the experiment, and it led to adventure playgrounds across the city, including the enduring popular examples in Central Park. Beyond the playground, Friedberg transformed the rest of the plaza into a series of spaces for residents of all ages that again were meant to encourage visitors’ agency. Friedberg remarked of previous NYCHA designs that “one was directed to a place to sit, a place to play, a place to walk, a place to run, and a place to congregate—places for automaton behavior. . . . In this atmosphere, trees, flowers, and lawn were properly manicured and cared for . . . only the people withered.” In the Riis Houses grounds, he removed the chain-link fences and sought to welcome residents by creating four “outdoor rooms” that alternated between quiet and active space. Elderly residents had shaded brick alcoves in which to sit and take their leisure, while children had a series of play areas. Friedberg carefully planned the landscape to rise and fall, and he replanted the London plane trees of the original project to emerge at varied heights throughout to create visual interest. Anchoring the space in the center was a thousand-seat amphitheater that doubled as a spray pool in summer. The amphitheater was the site of plays and musical performances by local groups, including Latin and soul acts, which made space for different cultural tastes. But as Mogilevich points out, it was also “part of a broader municipal cultural and recreation strategy to keep problematic parts of the city ‘cool’ in the long, hot summer.” Thus, the vision of a permissive and participatory space was still circumscribed in the kinds of activities that it encouraged. Cultural appreciation and children’s play were envisaged as ideals: not protest or political rallies. Diluted Remedies In 1965 the city continued the open space experiments with a program that turned vacant lots in working-class Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods into “vest-pocket parks,” yet another part of the city’s “cooling” strategy toward racial strife. Neighborhoods such as Bedford Stuyvesant, the Lower East Side, Harlem, and the South Bronx had suffered disinvestment for years and were pockmarked with disused spaces and dilapidated abandoned buildings thanks to absentee landlords and municipal neglect. The city saw a cheap opportunity to improve these neighborhoods by creating temporary small parks in empty lots. Mogilevich points out that this was fueled in part by an enduring dislike on the part of middle-class professionals of children playing in the street. Since the Progressive Era, reformers had carved out small parks in dense immigrant neighborhoods to provide a healthier urban landscape and a safe place for children to play. But by the 1960s, such concerns were overlaid with fears of racial uprisings. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—convened by Johnson in 1967 to assess the causes of urban rebellions—identified parks and playgrounds as the most visible part of the public scene and the quickest to (at least be seen to) improve. There was a real recreation deficit in poor, increasingly Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, and the city sought to address this inequity, but vest-pocket parks were also a cut-rate means to avoid racial protests without addressing many of the root causes of social inequities. These parks also did little to mitigate some of the key markers of environmental racism, such as neighborhoods having sparse tree cover; because the parks were only temporary, the Parks Department did not plant new trees or shrubs. Intended to function as visible signs that under Lindsay the municipal government cared for poor neighborhoods, these new parks again raised questions of what role city officials, designers, and residents ought to play in planning public space. Throughout The Invention of Public Space, Mogilevich traces the wave of self-questioning that rippled through the professions of urban planning and landscape architecture throughout the 1960s. Many were unsure of whether their expertise should take precedence over community knowledge. These new parks were an opportunity to experiment with community planning: as Mogilevich shows, they were meant to function not merely as beautification projects but had the potential to serve as “a testing ground for new forms of political organization that privileged community knowledge and action over municipal direction.” The first park to open, located across three vacant lots in Bedford Stuyvesant, was shaped by community participation. The Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council, a local organization, spearheaded the project; they chose the site and toured parks and playgrounds in the city before attending design meetings with the architect Friedberg. Friedberg had neighborhood children play on equipment as it was installed and give their feedback. Much like at Riis Park, he sought to provide a space where kids could clamber, jump, and run without having to line up for prescribed activities. Unemployed men from the neighborhood were paid to build the park, and they used reclaimed materials to construct timber clusters and a tree house. But as the city extended the program to ten more locations, community participation became more limited. Friedberg created equipment that could be combined in various ways: each park opened with easily dismantled steel or wood pergolas with benches at entrances, then was strewn with timber or concrete modular play equipment, and often decorated with brightly colored murals. While Friedberg focused on innovative design, residents were more concerned with maintenance, security, and greenery. The Parks Department ignored their misgivings. Though many parks began well enough, the department didn’t have the budget for proper maintenance of this increasingly large and dispersed system, and many ended up in the same dilapidated condition they had been supposed to remedy. Some sites were surrendered by the city, while others were taken up by local community groups and turned into community gardens. Though the city had attempted to provide a space for civic engagement, limited funds and lack of communication with residents stymied these hopes. Public Space, Privatized Good Mogilevich astutely shows that while public space is often spoken about as a good in and of itself, this masks the power relations embedded in the design, construction, and use of public spaces. In an epilogue reflecting on the years since Lindsay’s administration, she points out that the often-specious conflation of public space with the public good has intensified in the intervening decades, most notably in the rise of privately owned public spaces and business improvement districts. This was particularly evident in New York during the Bloomberg years: though there were many public space initiatives, they predominantly benefited the upper middle class and tourists. As she puts it, “The persistence of that naturalized association between public space, diversity, inclusion, and participation would serve countless urban developments that made the city less and less democratic.” Such associations sustain contemporary developments in public space, including the recently opened Little Island in the Hudson River, designed by Heatherwick Studio. Known for the critically reviled and physically perilous Vessel in Hudson Yards, and for squandering public funds on a since-cancelled “Garden Bridge” project in London enabled by then-mayor Boris Johnson’s cronyism, the Teflon-like firm worked with Barry Diller and the Hudson River Park Trust to create this new so-called public park. Sited on the affluent fringe of the gentrified Meatpacking District and nearby Chelsea Market, it adds another spectacular tourist attraction to the city rather than comprising a meaningful improvement to New York’s park system. As the architecture critic Alexandra Lange has noted, there are many more restrictions in this vanity project than in the city’s other public parks—no biking, skateboarding, scooting, rollerblading, or playing music—and while this park’s maintenance is sustained by Diller’s fortune, parks in poorer neighborhoods run off volunteer assistance. Many other initiatives over the past decade also conform to the more conservative strands of Mogilevich’s account of New York’s public spaces. The most high-profile renovation of NYCHA’s open spaces during Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty has been the widely criticized installation of bright flood lights intended to reduce illegal activities. Typifying Oscar Newman’s theory of defensible space, rather than the hopes of landscape architects like Friedberg to provide a playful and permissive public realm for working-class New Yorkers, these lights have had little material effect on crime while implicitly criminalizing public housing residents, and have diminished the quality of life in NYCHA towers. Last October, the NYCHA released an Open Space Masterplan report outlining less punitive plans to improve public spaces across its projects and included participatory design as a key part of the process. The report found that many of the issues afflicting public housing in the postwar period remained, and it emphasized the need for better maintenance, less fenced-off space, and community gardens where tenants could decide what to plant. Yet the masterplan also notes that the ideal upgrades would require more money than current public budgets allow and forecasts that the agency will have to partner with nonprofit organizations and private foundations in order to be able to carry out such improvements—much like they had to for the Riis Plaza redesign—indicating the persistent underfunding of New York’s public realm. The Invention of Public Space deftly denaturalizes associations between public space and the public good that continue to linger to this day. By assessing a rich array of case studies, Mogilevich prompts readers to consider who is invited to enjoy the city’s open spaces and on what terms. Her account of the problems of many Lindsay-era experiments in urban design highlights the limitations of improving access to recreation without substantively addressing housing or school inequalities, the need for decent maintenance budgets to sustain interventions in low-income areas, and the vital importance of community participation in design. Yet these flawed attempts also point toward paths forward. What emerges from the pages of this history is the enduring vitality of a political project that starts amid the public housing towers and tenement-lined streets of working-class New York neighborhoods and creates more equitable and more playful public spaces, taking as its motto that all city dwellers have a right to fun.
Bricked and Mortared Kevin Rogan New York City is often spoken of as if it were a week from collapse or a year from becoming a new Zion. It depends on who’s talking. New York governor Kathy Hochul recently declared her intention to “not only rebuild from the pandemic, but also to unlock New York’s incredible potential.” In this vision, the trash-strewn canyons of Midtown will soon thrum once more with the clamour of the Le Pain Quotidien lunch crowd, the awed whispers of tourists in the Times Square M&M’s World, the whirrs of electric scooters carrying tech workers to their offices. But there is a desperation in claims like Hochul’s, suggesting that something isn’t right—forces still threaten to upend the fantasy of a City Ascendent in all its techno-Bloombergian finery. What if this crisis was the last one? What if New York is slouching toward the charnel house, waiting to be consigned, block by block, to ruin? The fatalists seem to have the upper hand at the moment. The past year has seen all manner of grim forecasts of oncoming dilapidation, from headlines like “Retail Chains Abandon Manhattan: ‘It’s Unsustainable’” to a viral sad-sack blog post by the former hedge-funder and concerned ex-resident James Altucher, who claimed that the pandemic had cratered the city’s commercial real estate, which would lead to a lethal “deflationary spiral.” That this has not happened is beside the point. There is an arresting logic to the millenarian accounts, especially when the utopian position contents itself with proferring idle technocrat dreams. Both sides recognize the severity of retail and office vacancies, which function as a barometer of the city’s “vibrancy.” There is nothing sadder to both the undertaker and the wonk than an empty storefront: one sees the hollowness of the end, the other a “sticky” roadblock. For the uninitiated, the vacancy is highly legible, serving as a readily understood, over-aestheticized tableau for the disaster porn genre. This ultra-visibility is further magnified by the blight’s persistence in even the most venerated Manhattan enclaves, like Soho and Midtown, where retail vacancy rates have hovered around an unprecedented 30 percent. At the same time, nearly 11 percent of retail leases across the city were delinquent as of November, to the tune of $7 billion, according to Newmark. Economic watchers muttered promises of a pent-up reserve of consumption, or “revenge shopping,” which was primed to burst free after the pandemic had ended. This has not occurred. Following one significant spike in March of last year—on account of stimulus checks—national retail sales quickly mellowed and have remained largely flat, stifled by inflation and supply chain disruptions. In another domain, only about 8 percent of white-collar workers were back in their Manhattan offices full time in November—while 54 percent remained fully remote—and hotel occupancy remains significantly lower than what it was prepandemic, according to the Partnership for New York City. The prayed-for explosion of vibrancy, the dream of New York City revitalized, the “end of the pandemic,” have all failed to materialize. But even a joyous return to the streets and the office will not save New York. Vornado Alley Online sales have never accounted for more than 16 percent of total retail sales nationally, but there persists a narrative of online shopping devastating “brick and mortar” retail. In fact, the percentage of online sales with respect to the overall retail market have actually fallen to 13.3 percent since peaking at 15.7 percent earlier last year. But Manhattan is not just any retail market—it is the retail market, host to the world-renowned locations of Saks Fifth Avenue, FAO Schwarz, and Macy’s, which limp along even as old stalwarts like Neiman Marcus, Century 21, and Lord & Taylor have fallen. However, to blame these deaths entirely on the internet or even the pandemic is a lie. Retail is changing in character, as evidenced by the mystifying ascendance of immersive “retail experiences” like the CAMP “family experience store” in Hudson Yards and the Harry Potter store on Broadway, where shoppers can sample butterbeer and take selfies in the “Atrium of Awe.” As CBRE noted in its November 2021 Real Estate Market Outlook, these “new retail concepts” will “capitalize on opportunistic market conditions” and “absorb some of the vacancies left by failed retailers.” “Opportunistic” here is a euphemism; a more accurate word would be monopolistic. We are in the depths of an extended process of winnowing, and the bankrupting of legacy department stores is simply one overt facet. According to the St. Louis Fed, an estimated two hundred thousand businesses, many of them retail stores and restaurants, closed over the course of the pandemic. As Trepp noted in December 2020, the economic conditions of Covid-19 “led to the creation of clear retail ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’ as evidenced by the undeniable growth of the likes of Amazon and Walmart”—particularly the former, which saw its share price nearly double since late 2019, at a time when most of its local competitors found themselves underwater. Concomitant with the consolidation of retailers is the monopolization of retail square footage. Manhattan’s largest owner of street retail, the Real Estate Investment Trust Vornado Realty, owns 2.6 million square feet, or about sixteen hundred Starbucks’ worth, of retail space in the borough. We are not talking about a mythical mom-and-pop landlord, who might be labeled either an avaricious leech or kindly benefactor. Vornado is what David Harvey and Lata Chatterjee call a “professional landlord” who administers properties via “professional management techniques, and is very sensitive to profits, losses and the rate of return on capital.” At its scale, Vornado need not rush to fill spaces with tenants like a smaller landlord, for whom losing a month of rent on a single property may be lethal. Profitability for Vornado is a calculation considered across their entire asset pool—valued at $17.5 billion—with the effect that one empty storefront means relatively little. If the rent Vornado asks is high for most, there is almost no force that can compel it downwards. Vornado can absorb short-term losses—by either waiting for a willing (and equally massive) tenant or by selling the property to another real estate investor, who will then similarly hold it waiting for a dream client or sell it in their time. In any given space along any given street, the monopolist landlord meets the monopolist proprietor like tectonic plates along a fault line. Small landlords and retail tenants thus find themselves in a hostile environment, dominated by ur-predators who do what they do but better. The titanic scale of the players and the amount of money moving around makes human lives disappear. This process, accelerated but by no means set in motion by the pandemic, is now fully coming to bear along the avenues of Manhattan: demand is down and unlikely to recover. There are simply fewer retailers seeking square footage than previously. Nevertheless, professional landlords like Vornado, SL Green, and Related Companies hold an effective monopoly on retail space, concentrated in the borough’s historically high-performing retail corridors, meaning they may charge whatever they deem fit to access these locations. The “cultural” standing of a “major corridor” such as Fifth Avenue, along with the promise of heavy foot traffic, works to make an astronomical price per square foot palatable. That asking rents there are down 14.2 percent since this time last year is a grim portent. It indicates a fall in demand to which landlords are responding by reducing rents that ordinarily preserve their holdings for only the wealthiest tenants. Even so, these properties remain utterly out of reach for most—a decrease of this magnitude leaves the average across the sixteen major corridors tracked by CBRE at a whopping $615 per square foot. Thus, storefronts remain empty because supply has been artificially limited to a level that more or less matches the constrained demand. The supply of square footage in the form of buildings may be physically high, but landlords, functioning as the wardens of rentable space, prevent these from being actually used. These vacancies constitute a reserve of capital which languishes not in warehouses or stockyards, but lies dead upon the street, yet deployable at any time. This initial supply glut poses a problem that does not go away, due to the fundamental obduracy of stone and steel. A building may stand, and be rentable, for a century or longer. At the same time, more space continues to enter the market: over twelve thousand new commercial construction projects began in the city in the first half of 2021 alone. The construction industry must, of course, keep building: supply must ever be pumped into even the most oversaturated markets. The ostensible ephemerality of capital in real estate finds itself tethered to a maddeningly unpliable host in the physical stability of urban space. Landlords respond to this perennial crisis the only way they can—by artificially constricting properties on the market. But the only real solution to the problem of the empty storefront is, well, a bulldozer. Capital City This overt tension between proprietors (or would-be proprietors) and landlords has taken on the quality of a morality play. The former, who perceive every abandoned Pret A Manger as a phantom limb, inveigh against the latter, accusing them of “killing” New York City with vacancies. Each side has undertaken campaigns to score a decisive victory over the other, with initiative usually lying with the proprietors. The Small Business Jobs Survival Act, which would enshrine a negotiation process on lease terms, or the Commercial Rent Control bill, which would modulate rent increases on commercial properties in a way analogous to residential rent stablization, have both been floated from time to time, only to be denied by the landlord cabal known as the Real Estate Board of New York. However, this is a proxy war in more ways than one, with the pipsqueak players—the small proprietors and landlords with meager portfolios—bickering in the shadow of the titanomachic struggle among the Vornados and the Amazons. This petty fighting proceeds block by block, vacated corner by vacated corner. Purportedly battles for the “soul of the neighborhood,” undertaken to preserve “community character” or some such shit, these are ultimately waged between types of capitalists who have found themselves at loggerheads. There will be no resolution because this is not the true conflict. There is a higher power both sides answer to—the vicious pursuit of profit above all. Marx likens competition between capitalists to the squabbling of “hostile brothers,” who fight over a hoard of spoils for the greatest fraction. Yet the brothers are twins, and they fight over profits they originally stole together. This is the crucial detail. As they alternately bicker and cooperate, the fallout elsewhere is devastating. The thought-patterns generated by this interminable war have come to define the social existence of cities, especially New York. This is not to say that all citizens and residents unconsciously serve higher masters, but that arguments made in good faith are ultimately whipped into a form where they provide ammunition to one or other faction of capital. We are all stammering in their vernacular. Do you want to preserve a neighborhood’s character? Well, if you want more shops—even local ones!—you’ll need to favor the proprietor capitalists. If you want a modicum of change, you’ll need to work with or against the landlords. Want to build new housing? Then you’re likely arguing that capitalist-developers be allowed to work unfettered to the expense of landlords. Want more public transit? Be prepared to secure private capital investment or have contractors bid for the job, and potentially to fight landlord(s) for the land to build it on, above, or under. Bike lanes? Plenty of studies show the benefits of cycling bear out on the balance sheet. The urban capitalist bloc—which may be composed of figures in city government, wonks, the save-our-storefronts types, the developmentalists, or even those who truly believe that a city may be made more functional—present themselves as avatars either of “cities for people” progressivism or common-sense urban traditionalism. Cultural power may be theirs, but landlords retain the final say, ever exploiting their monopoly over their particular scrap of the earth. The city is theirs, undisputedly. We have been inside of these capitalist factions’ mutual creation for so long, we cannot help but think like them, in their terms, and to speak with their voices. There is, by design, no space in the urban debate for anyone else, for any other perspectives—and all shouted invective is modulated to serve them. Indicative of this is the faux-universal belief in urban “vibrancy,” a bottom-up type of ineffable community character, ill-defined enough to apply anywhere. It is often treated as the sacred measure of a city or urban area’s “health.” But more often than not, this vibrancy is velocity—of capital, transactions, purchases, customers per day—and a vacancy interrupts the divine flow. But a vacancy is not actually a vacancy at all: capital is the true inhabitant. Whether this takes the form of a tenancy or not is ultimately irrelevant. “Urban vibrancy” is then a rather cruel thing to pretend to monitor, like declaring a cancer patient cured because their heartbeat is stable. Even if every storefront in New York City ends up a hollowed-out ruin, this would not necessarily stop the capitalist class from extracting profit. It may actually be part of a project to maximize profits elsewhere—for example, Vornado also owns properties in Chicago and San Fransisco. Any building, any block, no matter how beautiful and vibrant, ultimately has a price set upon it, and there are market scenarios in which anything may be extirpated. All is marrow to be sucked from the bone. There is no chance for a resolution within the capitalist market for space—not building more, not castrating landlord power, not any market sleight of hand. The problem dwells in the form of capitalist, “financialized” private property itself: where the physical world meets the market. There is, however, a distant star of hope. Buildings, however sturdy, do not last forever. Old New York serves as a case study par excellence in the decaying urban environment, from buildings to subways to sewer pipes. As this infrastructure degrades apace, year after year, one-hundred-year storm after one-hundred-year storm, there will come a moment, or rather a litany of moments, in which the loss from repairs outweighs the profit gained in holding a piece of property. A simple calculuation—is my net operating income positive?—governs our cities. There will be a reckoning in which the longevity of Manhattan’s built environment slowly comes undone. The city and its buildings last too long for capital to make efficient use of it, but they don’t last forever.
The View from Warsaw Joy Neumeyer After decades of conflict, Poland stands in solidarity with Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Appeal Rafia Zakaria Zelensky's speech to Congress asked the United States to save his country.
Inside Russia’s War on Dissent Katie Marie Davies From the streets to social media, speaking out is criminalized.
Not-So-Great Powers Rafia Zakaria A military power moves in to subjugate a smaller country—when have we seen that before?
The View from Warsaw Joy Neumeyer After decades of conflict, Poland stands in solidarity with Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Appeal Rafia Zakaria Zelensky's speech to Congress asked the United States to save his country.
Inside Russia’s War on Dissent Katie Marie Davies From the streets to social media, speaking out is criminalized.
Not-So-Great Powers Rafia Zakaria A military power moves in to subjugate a smaller country—when have we seen that before?
The Automation Myth Clinton Williamson To what degree can we blame automation for deindustrialization and class decomposition?
The Automation Myth Clinton Williamson To what degree can we blame automation for deindustrialization and class decomposition?
Ask Dr. Mueller Jeremy Lybarger A downtown icon and John Waters muse, Cookie Mueller was devoted to beauty and pleasure.
Age of Iron Bongani Kona What led the adversaries in apartheid South Africa to seek a negotiated settlement instead of a fight to the finish?
Ask Dr. Mueller Jeremy Lybarger A downtown icon and John Waters muse, Cookie Mueller was devoted to beauty and pleasure.
Age of Iron Bongani Kona What led the adversaries in apartheid South Africa to seek a negotiated settlement instead of a fight to the finish?
The World Was Just an Address A. S. Hamrah The Oscars are the abandoned auto show of the movie industry.
Get Thee to a Nunnery Kit Duckworth We’re unsure, at first, whether to take her as a fraud, a mesmeric storyteller, or a woman improvising to survive. The nun writes that her faithless parents, loath to forfeit a costly dowry for an unloved love child, coerced her into God’s service. It’s eighteenth-century France, where Christ is a cheaper but more binding bridegroom than mortal man. Now, after years languishing in a convent, she desires freedom, a benevolent intercessor, and would the Marquis de Croismare be so kind? A memoir of restive captivity unfurls across her letters. To stoke the reader’s pathos, she casts herself as an ingénue, though she remains canny enough to convince, refining her artlessness into art on the page. Like every good Christian woman since Eve, she must elude sin without seeming to recognize it. Such a balancing act ensures flubs on behalf of the performer. The woman stays forever young and, more absurdly, laments her Mother Superior’s advances while purporting to be naive of sex. Her efforts to appear true cancel out whatever truth she is telling. Of course, if a story stirs you, why fret the inconsistencies? For the polymath Denis Diderot, who penned this sham correspondence in order to lure his absent friend back to Paris, fiction outlived fact. The Marquis de Croismare replied decorously through the mail but didn’t budge from Normandy; sans costar, the nun ran out of lines. No matter: Diderot retread the character for the rest of his days, polishing the prank into a magazine serial and then a novel proper. In 1796, The Nun was published to a post-revolutionary public so primed for its tale of narrow systems and spurned self-rule that defenders and detractors alike handled it as gingerly as a white-hot polemic. The zeitgeisty book was twice-banned by the restored Bourbons; in the next century, Jacques Rivette’s 1966 film adaptation drew ire from the Gaullist government until the New Wave fashioned it into a cause célèbre. Satire, heresy, structural game, schmaltz—everyone could see what they wanted to see in its pages. Somehow, the nun’s fake account coils in on itself, becoming more compelling as it sheds any pretense of authenticity. So notes Diderot’s “preface” to the novel, comprising backstory and edited forms of the original text, which is appended like a wink after the narrative: In other words: Which do you prefer, reality or illusion? To know or to feel? And does knowing attenuate what we feel to be true, namely, our faith? These are questions that animate the work of Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, who, like Diderot, veneers subversion with the visceral pleasures of popular storytelling. For structure, he routinely plunders genre cinema—science fiction, thriller, musical, period piece, action, adventure—sourcing prefab templates and stock iconographies that are ready to be scrambled, rearranged. Diderot himself pilfered the trendy epistolary mode of The Nun from Samuel Richardson’s provocative, then-best-selling novel Clarissa, which Elizabeth Hardwick dissected as “a fabric of surfaces, a mask . . . self-justifying.” Letters, like films, address an audience. Both aim to please. Ever the consummate showman, Verhoeven gluts viewers on what they want and some of what they don’t, or else wouldn’t confess to wanting: a car chase, a gunfight, shit, sacrilege, prodigal blood, gyrating bodies in flagrante, the push-pull of Eros and Thanatos. “In fact, he loves clichés,” remarked Rivette in a Senses of Cinema interview, meaning to praise. “I loved it,” said Verhoeven, jarringly, in a Film Comment interview, meaning the juvenile thrills of World War II. Loving clichés, war worst of all, is risky: you can lose your bearings amid the bombed-out refuse. But how do horrors happen unless a critical mass of perpetrators loves something: a credo, a common myth, mastery? Hence Verhoeven will flourish a trope like “heroism” and then linger on a prolonged shot of someone heedlessly stepping over a lifeless bystander who our hero had just used as a human shield, prompting us to wonder: Is this what we want to believe in? Yet his films thrum along to their satisfying finale. The protagonist prevails. Yes, Verhoeven impishly vexes our beliefs, but he stops short of renouncing their manifest charms. On the contrary, he revels in them, blurring blasphemy and devotion, camp and careful taste. I almost want to term it escapist realism, which doesn’t make sense, until I remember that’s what faith resembles to the nonbeliever. Faith fuses form and content in Verhoeven’s latest, Benedetta (2021), about a nun who, like Diderot’s, might be a sincere fake, a pious pragmatist, an applause-addicted actress—or a saint. Box-Office Busts Verhoeven might be a saint, too, if a saint is someone who suffers fitful spells of bliss and ostracism. His first success was Turkish Delight (1973), an anti-romance whose outré swain proclaims, as Benedetta could but shrewdly doesn’t, that he “fucks better than God.” A few controversial, accoladed features followed, screeching to a halt with Spetters (1980), a blue-collar dirt-bike flick that revved up a widespread furor. “In lieu of producing either a social commentary or a gleefully hedonistic joyride,” writes Adam Nayman of the film in his agile apologia, It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls, “Verhoeven did both.” A recurrent refrain went that his misplaced sympathies tempted cinemagoers into mistakenly savoring sin. Semi-exiled, Verhoeven defected from the Netherlands and, after assimilating Reagan-era America, directed RoboCop (1987), in which a mechanized policeman extrajudicially executes suspects in a derelict Detroit. Calling the shots is a corporation that’s implicated in the rising crime rate, as it pushes for more punitive laws and a privatized security state. So-called excessive violence, especially a scene of another mechanofficer gunning down a layman, was restricted by the MPAA, though not by U.S. law enforcement. The film raked in enough ($53.4 million) to spawn sequels that misconstrued cops as the solution rather than the symptom. After a string of stateside hits, Verhoeven’s career cleaved anew with Showgirls (1995). The backstage musical found itself pilloried by audiences, late-night talk-show hosts, and the Razzies—where Verhoeven gamefully took his licks, marching back and forth to the podium seven times to receive his “worst” awards—simply for being a profusive, skin-deep, exceedingly plausible fable about how, in the cutthroat free market of show business, sex equals money. When Starship Troopers landed two years later, critics had forsaken him. The saga of blithe high school grads—who after being shipped off to decimate a foreign race and its rumored weapons of mass destruction, sour into haggard, expendable veterans in an endless, ill-defined military engagement—overstates its “gung-ho patriotism,” per Janet Maslin, though it “provides a flaming catharsis.” The more despised the film, the greater its potential to be retrojected as prophecy. Misinterpretation, however, underpins the films’ very design, an extratextual incarnation of cinema’s slippery visual medium. Just because we can see something doesn’t mean we know what it means, that we’re even capable of knowing. Watching Verhoeven’s oeuvre, spanning seventeen theatrical releases across fifty years, I often feel benignly gaslighted: don’t worry that you’re muddling symbols, doubting your senses, perplexed by people and their mazy motives; so is everyone. Consider Basic Instinct (1992), from his Hollywood heyday. Its most indelible image is of Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), glacial and aloof in a white minidress, uncrossing two tan legs to bare her privates at a police inquiry—but in that scene, she reveals nothing. Audacity is her alibi. She has adopted an alias (a classic Verhoeven tactic) to author pulp paperbacks about crimes that afterward transpire tantalizingly within her orbit. She robes and disrobes impassively in view of an enthralled detective-cum-lover who tries to go deeper, that is, beneath the skin. If ultimately the probing camera crystallizes her guilt, we alone notice. Uncovering herself serves to cover up more intimate privacies. Nowhere is this method more apparent than in Total Recall (1990), where walls crumble and the matte-painted backdrops signal a cardboard unreality. Depending on your angle, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays either a disaffected construction worker whose memories as a double agent (a classic Verhoeven archetype) on airless Mars were expunged by a sinister monopoly, or the same, except he’s been willfully implanted with synthetic, self-aggrandizing memories by a company suggestively called Rekall, which touts mental vacations to Mars that guarantee “your brain will not know the difference.” Neither do we. Our suspicions flare when one Dr. Edgemar arrives on the planet to impugn the “bullshit” diegesis: not only is our protagonist still strapped to an earthbound operating chair, the doctor contends, but while his brain hemorrhages, his mind is stuck unspooling the intricate reverie we have been witnessing—to wit, the movie. But then Edgemar drips sweat: too bodily, perhaps, to be disembodied. It’s all the proof Schwarzenegger needs to resolutely assume the role of spy. Uncertainty isn’t so much resolved as dispatched. And really, who, given the chance, wouldn’t choose the identity of savior over victim, actor over dissatisfied customer, the champion who redistributes oxygen to Mars instead of the duped nobody? Yet a pose too meticulously struck can become the role of a lifetime. In Verhoeven’s Dutch homecoming, Black Book (2006), masquerades multiply and muddle personhood. Across its runtime, the protagonist, a Jewish woman weathering wartime Netherlands, either is or passes herself off as a cabaret singer, a Christian convert, a typhus-infected corpse, a peroxided typist screwing her gestapo boss, a collaborator, an avenging angel, and a kibbutz matriarch. Endurance justifies her pretense: “While there’s life, there’s hope,” she says, applying blood-red lipstick at Hitler’s birthday party, where she shares a microphone with the Obersturmführer who killed her family. Fighting alongside her, meanwhile, is a Resistance gunman who actually funnels loot from slain Jews to a German officer, but who, unexposed, the crowd cheers come peacetime. One scene, fraught in retrospect, has the traitor don stolen Nazi attire to spring his imprisoned compatriots, a disguise of a disguise of a disguise. Dissimulation dissolves at last into truth. Situations shift, and everyone behaves their best to impress the victors. “Winner takes all,” declare two different women, both mid-coitus, in different Verhoeven films. Invariably, his characters nimbly imitate whoever survives—or conquers. In Showgirls, a wannabe dancer waiting in the wings avidly mirrors the onstage moves of a nudie-revue idol who she will someday supersede. Eager to entice her future fiancé, a princess eavesdrops on her maid trysting with a soldier in Flesh+Blood (1985). Soon, she reappropriates this sideways education when a band of mercenaries kidnaps her and threatens rape. Dutifully replicating the moans she’d overheard, she rebuffs further violation by seducing their leader and securing his fond protection. The most studious mimic, however, is Starship Troopers’ Johnny Rico, scolded during class for regurgitating the textbook’s “exact words.” In due course an ascendant infantryman who has learned nothing, Rico swallows and spits out the grim battle cries of his superior, also his former schoolteacher, whose command in the intergalactic conflict he inherits by default: “Come on, you apes! Do you want to live forever?” Rehearsing their scripts again and again, people hazard disappearing within their diligent facades. Performances can implode, splintering selfhood, inflecting illusion into full-scale delusion. Mid-performance finds the eponymous nun of Benedetta first experiencing ecstasy. Portraying the Madonna, Benedetta (Virginie Efira, who was the prim, complicit Catholic wife of a sexual sadist in 2016’s Elle) is conveyed heavenward on a pulleyed bier. Jesus is a woman with a beard. Verhoeven cuts behind the curtain, stressing the conspicuous stagecraft. Impatient for her divine spouse’s embrace or else dazzled in the limelight, Benedetta beholds him among a far-off flock and hastens ahead, her twitchy feet breaking character in front of the seventeenth-century convent’s assembled audience. “I saw Jesus,” she states frankly. The Christ of this and her ensuing visions is hunky, gallant, and materializes as if on cue to behead CGI snakes, sneak a kiss, or strike down would-be ravishers astride a white horse—in short, he’s a marquee hero, a pseudo-Schwarzenegger. Yes, it’s all riotously funny, but it’s deadly serious, too. The sincere, baroque tenor of her fancies reminds me of how Susan Sontag, in her oft-cited essay on “camp,” describes that capacious, tenuous, queer-adjacent style as “a tender feeling” that “identifies with what it is enjoying.” Benedetta enjoys her tender mysticism with gusto. Hitherto we have no reason to doubt her. Maybe she really is a star. Jesus, Etc. Enter from off-screen Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), pursued by straying sheep and her lecherous father, from whom she seeks sanctuary inside the convent. Noviceship has a price, however, chides Mother Felicita (Charlotte Rampling), and the men haggle over what crude number the shepherdess merits. Bartolomea is not Church-bred but filthy, bruised, and accustomed to ill-use, as feral and guiltless as an animal. Her principal request is for somewhere to defecate, a ceremony that she discharges beside Benedetta, laughing at a fart which ruptures the claustral silence. Less a character than a phantom of carnality, à la Sister Ruth from Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947), Bartolomea’s gaze simmers and sparks. She’s also an abused woman whose sole lexicon of loyalty is sex, and, when Benedetta proves solicitous, she fingers her during choir or gawps at her breasts through their shared cell, bordered only by a gauzy curtain. But Benedetta resists reciprocation; she even punishes Bartolomea by demanding she thrust the hand that penetrated her into boiling water. Benedetta’s subsequent visions sublimate this longing into theological incident: Jesus bestows on her a bigger, chest-swelling heart, which Benedetta blissfully begs Bartolomea to caress. In another, a crucified Christ commands Benedetta to remove the loincloth separating them—“Where I am, there can be no shame”—beneath which he’s dickless, as if his anatomy is unimaginable to the virgin mind or else inferred from her own sapphic predilections. From this dead-of-night dream, Benedetta ostensibly receives the stigmata, and because it’s good press, the Church elects her to be abbess, thus granting her a private chamber where she and Bartolomea can, for a time, commune undetected. Eventually, the jilted ex-abbess Felicita snoops on their candlelit romps and alerts the papal nuncio, who instigates an investigation and trial, not for visions that could be heresy but for a visionary desire. The arc of Benedetta is loosely limned from Immodest Acts, Judith C. Brown’s 1986 academic curio biographing the actual Benedetta Carlini—a nun tried twice, stripped of status, and imprisoned for life—and her inamorata-then-Judas, Bartolomea. The initial twenty pages of the slim book are a frothing catalogue of premodern theologians’ baffled obsession, nearing a fetish, with which sorts of illicit sex warranted precisely which punishments and, in particular, whether women could commit sodomy, a putative male crime and a capital offense. (Answer: only insofar as they resembled men.) The sheer volume of this writing testifies to the dreaded indeterminacy of these transgressions. The Church was (is) fixated on the body, especially the feminine one, as a site of corruptive pleasure and redemptive suffering. Nuns underwent routine self-mortification with the scourge and welcomed ailments as dignifying reinscriptions of Christ’s torment. Just outside Pescia, Tuscany, where Benedetta Carlini’s convent resided, the bubonic plague was havocking and rupturing the flesh, making all manner of contact dangerous. When Verhoeven’s Benedetta is first committed to the convent, she must quit all personal possessions, including a wooden statuette of the Virgin Mary, gifted by her mother, and corral herself in coarse cloth intended to stave off sensual comfort: “Your worst enemy is your body,” an older nun explains. By way of example, she recounts how her severed finger had years ago been replaced with a carved wooden copy. She wishes the rest of her, like the ship of Theseus, could be transfigured piece by piece into wood, endless substitutions creating something new, purer. Later, however, her wish is strangely articulated by Bartolomea, who whittles the bottom half of the Virgin Mary that Benedetta once treasured into a dildo that will allow her to penetrate deeper. The spiritual and carnal sides of the dildo seem to represent the two halves—pleasure and belief—of Benedetta’s being. If its existence seems a far-fetched deviation from the real Carlini, Brown’s book testifies to its plausibility with reports of nuns burned at the stake for “using material instruments.” Bartolomea’s almost pagan sensuality, her enthusiastic consent, are welcome in this kind of environment. To call Benedetta “nunsploitation” is a feint, disregarding the posterior of that portmanteau. Kinky fare like Norifumi Suzuki’s The Transgressor (1974) or Jesús Franco’s Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1977) draw on the convent’s repressed atmosphere to stage elaborate erotic set pieces. Benedetta, despite or perhaps because of its enthusiastic eros, hews more toward Church-sanctioned stories about the tribulations of female mystics—and the ecclesiastical authorities’ efforts to yoke something so nebulous as faith to doctrinal logic. Consider the countless cinematic renditions of Joan of Arc, whose most heinous crime, other than leading effectively, was cross-dressing; or even Henry King’s saccharine The Song of Bernadette (1943), in which an adolescent girl glimpses the Madonna in a grotto where villagers dump their garbage. “She’s showing off,” her cynical father grouses, in words that suit Benedetta. “Makes up a story to feel important.” Bernadette, unlike Benedetta, in time was canonized, but at the cost of her freedom: the Church’s tenacious suspicion pressures her into guarding her purity, so she swears her solemn vows, forsaking secular love and confining herself in a cloister away from her pilgrims and their ungovernable admiration. Benedetta’s theological lineage traces most closely to Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), another film about trying to reconcile religion with sexuality. The protagonist, Father Grandier (Oliver Reed), flouts clerical celibacy with frivolous, bourgeois women, impregnating and abandoning one. But he falls in love with a woman who, before they have sex, asks for his justification for why it wouldn’t be a sin. He responds by officiating their own marriage. Ironically, Grandier’s desire to be a good man for her brings him closer to God, even as it becomes part of what condemns him to be burned at the stake after he is caught up in a power struggle between Catholics and Protestants, local autonomy and kingly tyranny. In Russell’s film, the Church corrupts, but Benedetta at least may believe her unorthodox actions are endorsed by God. Benedetta’s physical relationship with Bartolomea could be simply one element of her potential hypocrisy, a conduit that gives her adequate reason to defy church strictures. Or it could be a radical embrace of physical pleasure, a celebration of the body and love for the individual as a means to reach Christ. Either way, it literalizes the arguments of the film—surfaces versus soul, body versus spirit—and Benedetta’s scenes with Bartolomea are joyous and consensual: “Through it, I show my love to the universe,” she tells the scornful nuncio. In fact, the only nonconsensual insertion in Benedetta is perpetrated by the Church, during a torture sequence that mirrors the supposed sacrilege of the dildo and an almost identical, climactic scene in The Devils. Both make us query which is worse: blasphemous pleasure or sanctioned rape. A Voice in the Wilderness Benedetta’s sexual ambiguity is one facet of her Janus-faced character, which Verhoeven slowly burdens with doubts that leave us in a state of suspension. In his films, signs are singular, but their interpretations are illimitable, even as the evidence for any pet theory is always visible. In Flesh+Blood, a cardinal despairs over a mercenary leader’s imprecation and prays for assurance from God that he is right to follow him. Before long, in the flare of battle, the mercenary is auspiciously enhaloed by an enflamed wagon wheel. The believers of Benedetta are forever grasping for guidance in a world without waymarks, and they often believe whatever exegesis confirms their biases: a comet blazing red above the convent could be the cosmic condemnation of God or the tongue-in-cheek manifestation of Benedetta’s blazing orgasm. Meanwhile, Benedetta herself insists that the broken glass found each time in her stigmata wounds isn’t a smoking gun but mere evidence that God channels worldly tools toward divine ends. Some of the signature features of religion—ritualized spectacle, interpretive fervor, unselfconscious excess, an ardent disregard for rationality—are the signature features of Verhoeven’s films. (His movie project about the historical Christ has been long-deferred. For research, Verhoeven joined the Jesus Seminar, a defunct consortium of biblical scholars and laity and in 2008 produced the speculative nonfiction Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait.) Christianity, like any system of sense-making, seeks to splice our fragmental reality into one continuous reel of affective experience, a totalizing image. In a 2011 interview with The Believer magazine, Verhoeven extolled Jesus as an “innovator of ethics” who amassed “things that happened on Earth” and “put those in a narrative,” specifically the parables. For Verhoeven, the parables raise a formal quandary: How does a director depict a storyteller so persuasive, so sweeping in his scope, that his tales have become gospel, a word that magnifies “truth”? Through Benedetta, Verhoeven has accomplished a slanted portrait of that Jesus, of a person who is, as Brown writes, “deceiver and deceived in her own self-created drama.” Some would call this Method acting, others faith: both are ecstatic embodiments demanding our suspension of disbelief. What fascinates Verhoeven is how that faith ripples outward and permeates whole communities, transfiguring intangible ideas into matter and history. That is, after all, the artist’s way: idea becomes object. Whether con artist or artful mystic, Benedetta seems nothing so much as an avatar of Verhoeven himself, who time and again, despite derision or exile, has returned to preside in his house of worship, where the congregants glimpse pictures, like stained glass, tricked from flickering light. “The great man,” Diderot wrote, “is no longer the one who creates truth; he is the one who knows how best to reconcile falsehood with truth.” The great artist is the one who tells such a good story, we want to believe.
The World Was Just an Address A. S. Hamrah The Oscars are the abandoned auto show of the movie industry.
Get Thee to a Nunnery Kit Duckworth We’re unsure, at first, whether to take her as a fraud, a mesmeric storyteller, or a woman improvising to survive. The nun writes that her faithless parents, loath to forfeit a costly dowry for an unloved love child, coerced her into God’s service. It’s eighteenth-century France, where Christ is a cheaper but more binding bridegroom than mortal man. Now, after years languishing in a convent, she desires freedom, a benevolent intercessor, and would the Marquis de Croismare be so kind? A memoir of restive captivity unfurls across her letters. To stoke the reader’s pathos, she casts herself as an ingénue, though she remains canny enough to convince, refining her artlessness into art on the page. Like every good Christian woman since Eve, she must elude sin without seeming to recognize it. Such a balancing act ensures flubs on behalf of the performer. The woman stays forever young and, more absurdly, laments her Mother Superior’s advances while purporting to be naive of sex. Her efforts to appear true cancel out whatever truth she is telling. Of course, if a story stirs you, why fret the inconsistencies? For the polymath Denis Diderot, who penned this sham correspondence in order to lure his absent friend back to Paris, fiction outlived fact. The Marquis de Croismare replied decorously through the mail but didn’t budge from Normandy; sans costar, the nun ran out of lines. No matter: Diderot retread the character for the rest of his days, polishing the prank into a magazine serial and then a novel proper. In 1796, The Nun was published to a post-revolutionary public so primed for its tale of narrow systems and spurned self-rule that defenders and detractors alike handled it as gingerly as a white-hot polemic. The zeitgeisty book was twice-banned by the restored Bourbons; in the next century, Jacques Rivette’s 1966 film adaptation drew ire from the Gaullist government until the New Wave fashioned it into a cause célèbre. Satire, heresy, structural game, schmaltz—everyone could see what they wanted to see in its pages. Somehow, the nun’s fake account coils in on itself, becoming more compelling as it sheds any pretense of authenticity. So notes Diderot’s “preface” to the novel, comprising backstory and edited forms of the original text, which is appended like a wink after the narrative: In other words: Which do you prefer, reality or illusion? To know or to feel? And does knowing attenuate what we feel to be true, namely, our faith? These are questions that animate the work of Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, who, like Diderot, veneers subversion with the visceral pleasures of popular storytelling. For structure, he routinely plunders genre cinema—science fiction, thriller, musical, period piece, action, adventure—sourcing prefab templates and stock iconographies that are ready to be scrambled, rearranged. Diderot himself pilfered the trendy epistolary mode of The Nun from Samuel Richardson’s provocative, then-best-selling novel Clarissa, which Elizabeth Hardwick dissected as “a fabric of surfaces, a mask . . . self-justifying.” Letters, like films, address an audience. Both aim to please. Ever the consummate showman, Verhoeven gluts viewers on what they want and some of what they don’t, or else wouldn’t confess to wanting: a car chase, a gunfight, shit, sacrilege, prodigal blood, gyrating bodies in flagrante, the push-pull of Eros and Thanatos. “In fact, he loves clichés,” remarked Rivette in a Senses of Cinema interview, meaning to praise. “I loved it,” said Verhoeven, jarringly, in a Film Comment interview, meaning the juvenile thrills of World War II. Loving clichés, war worst of all, is risky: you can lose your bearings amid the bombed-out refuse. But how do horrors happen unless a critical mass of perpetrators loves something: a credo, a common myth, mastery? Hence Verhoeven will flourish a trope like “heroism” and then linger on a prolonged shot of someone heedlessly stepping over a lifeless bystander who our hero had just used as a human shield, prompting us to wonder: Is this what we want to believe in? Yet his films thrum along to their satisfying finale. The protagonist prevails. Yes, Verhoeven impishly vexes our beliefs, but he stops short of renouncing their manifest charms. On the contrary, he revels in them, blurring blasphemy and devotion, camp and careful taste. I almost want to term it escapist realism, which doesn’t make sense, until I remember that’s what faith resembles to the nonbeliever. Faith fuses form and content in Verhoeven’s latest, Benedetta (2021), about a nun who, like Diderot’s, might be a sincere fake, a pious pragmatist, an applause-addicted actress—or a saint. Box-Office Busts Verhoeven might be a saint, too, if a saint is someone who suffers fitful spells of bliss and ostracism. His first success was Turkish Delight (1973), an anti-romance whose outré swain proclaims, as Benedetta could but shrewdly doesn’t, that he “fucks better than God.” A few controversial, accoladed features followed, screeching to a halt with Spetters (1980), a blue-collar dirt-bike flick that revved up a widespread furor. “In lieu of producing either a social commentary or a gleefully hedonistic joyride,” writes Adam Nayman of the film in his agile apologia, It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls, “Verhoeven did both.” A recurrent refrain went that his misplaced sympathies tempted cinemagoers into mistakenly savoring sin. Semi-exiled, Verhoeven defected from the Netherlands and, after assimilating Reagan-era America, directed RoboCop (1987), in which a mechanized policeman extrajudicially executes suspects in a derelict Detroit. Calling the shots is a corporation that’s implicated in the rising crime rate, as it pushes for more punitive laws and a privatized security state. So-called excessive violence, especially a scene of another mechanofficer gunning down a layman, was restricted by the MPAA, though not by U.S. law enforcement. The film raked in enough ($53.4 million) to spawn sequels that misconstrued cops as the solution rather than the symptom. After a string of stateside hits, Verhoeven’s career cleaved anew with Showgirls (1995). The backstage musical found itself pilloried by audiences, late-night talk-show hosts, and the Razzies—where Verhoeven gamefully took his licks, marching back and forth to the podium seven times to receive his “worst” awards—simply for being a profusive, skin-deep, exceedingly plausible fable about how, in the cutthroat free market of show business, sex equals money. When Starship Troopers landed two years later, critics had forsaken him. The saga of blithe high school grads—who after being shipped off to decimate a foreign race and its rumored weapons of mass destruction, sour into haggard, expendable veterans in an endless, ill-defined military engagement—overstates its “gung-ho patriotism,” per Janet Maslin, though it “provides a flaming catharsis.” The more despised the film, the greater its potential to be retrojected as prophecy. Misinterpretation, however, underpins the films’ very design, an extratextual incarnation of cinema’s slippery visual medium. Just because we can see something doesn’t mean we know what it means, that we’re even capable of knowing. Watching Verhoeven’s oeuvre, spanning seventeen theatrical releases across fifty years, I often feel benignly gaslighted: don’t worry that you’re muddling symbols, doubting your senses, perplexed by people and their mazy motives; so is everyone. Consider Basic Instinct (1992), from his Hollywood heyday. Its most indelible image is of Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), glacial and aloof in a white minidress, uncrossing two tan legs to bare her privates at a police inquiry—but in that scene, she reveals nothing. Audacity is her alibi. She has adopted an alias (a classic Verhoeven tactic) to author pulp paperbacks about crimes that afterward transpire tantalizingly within her orbit. She robes and disrobes impassively in view of an enthralled detective-cum-lover who tries to go deeper, that is, beneath the skin. If ultimately the probing camera crystallizes her guilt, we alone notice. Uncovering herself serves to cover up more intimate privacies. Nowhere is this method more apparent than in Total Recall (1990), where walls crumble and the matte-painted backdrops signal a cardboard unreality. Depending on your angle, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays either a disaffected construction worker whose memories as a double agent (a classic Verhoeven archetype) on airless Mars were expunged by a sinister monopoly, or the same, except he’s been willfully implanted with synthetic, self-aggrandizing memories by a company suggestively called Rekall, which touts mental vacations to Mars that guarantee “your brain will not know the difference.” Neither do we. Our suspicions flare when one Dr. Edgemar arrives on the planet to impugn the “bullshit” diegesis: not only is our protagonist still strapped to an earthbound operating chair, the doctor contends, but while his brain hemorrhages, his mind is stuck unspooling the intricate reverie we have been witnessing—to wit, the movie. But then Edgemar drips sweat: too bodily, perhaps, to be disembodied. It’s all the proof Schwarzenegger needs to resolutely assume the role of spy. Uncertainty isn’t so much resolved as dispatched. And really, who, given the chance, wouldn’t choose the identity of savior over victim, actor over dissatisfied customer, the champion who redistributes oxygen to Mars instead of the duped nobody? Yet a pose too meticulously struck can become the role of a lifetime. In Verhoeven’s Dutch homecoming, Black Book (2006), masquerades multiply and muddle personhood. Across its runtime, the protagonist, a Jewish woman weathering wartime Netherlands, either is or passes herself off as a cabaret singer, a Christian convert, a typhus-infected corpse, a peroxided typist screwing her gestapo boss, a collaborator, an avenging angel, and a kibbutz matriarch. Endurance justifies her pretense: “While there’s life, there’s hope,” she says, applying blood-red lipstick at Hitler’s birthday party, where she shares a microphone with the Obersturmführer who killed her family. Fighting alongside her, meanwhile, is a Resistance gunman who actually funnels loot from slain Jews to a German officer, but who, unexposed, the crowd cheers come peacetime. One scene, fraught in retrospect, has the traitor don stolen Nazi attire to spring his imprisoned compatriots, a disguise of a disguise of a disguise. Dissimulation dissolves at last into truth. Situations shift, and everyone behaves their best to impress the victors. “Winner takes all,” declare two different women, both mid-coitus, in different Verhoeven films. Invariably, his characters nimbly imitate whoever survives—or conquers. In Showgirls, a wannabe dancer waiting in the wings avidly mirrors the onstage moves of a nudie-revue idol who she will someday supersede. Eager to entice her future fiancé, a princess eavesdrops on her maid trysting with a soldier in Flesh+Blood (1985). Soon, she reappropriates this sideways education when a band of mercenaries kidnaps her and threatens rape. Dutifully replicating the moans she’d overheard, she rebuffs further violation by seducing their leader and securing his fond protection. The most studious mimic, however, is Starship Troopers’ Johnny Rico, scolded during class for regurgitating the textbook’s “exact words.” In due course an ascendant infantryman who has learned nothing, Rico swallows and spits out the grim battle cries of his superior, also his former schoolteacher, whose command in the intergalactic conflict he inherits by default: “Come on, you apes! Do you want to live forever?” Rehearsing their scripts again and again, people hazard disappearing within their diligent facades. Performances can implode, splintering selfhood, inflecting illusion into full-scale delusion. Mid-performance finds the eponymous nun of Benedetta first experiencing ecstasy. Portraying the Madonna, Benedetta (Virginie Efira, who was the prim, complicit Catholic wife of a sexual sadist in 2016’s Elle) is conveyed heavenward on a pulleyed bier. Jesus is a woman with a beard. Verhoeven cuts behind the curtain, stressing the conspicuous stagecraft. Impatient for her divine spouse’s embrace or else dazzled in the limelight, Benedetta beholds him among a far-off flock and hastens ahead, her twitchy feet breaking character in front of the seventeenth-century convent’s assembled audience. “I saw Jesus,” she states frankly. The Christ of this and her ensuing visions is hunky, gallant, and materializes as if on cue to behead CGI snakes, sneak a kiss, or strike down would-be ravishers astride a white horse—in short, he’s a marquee hero, a pseudo-Schwarzenegger. Yes, it’s all riotously funny, but it’s deadly serious, too. The sincere, baroque tenor of her fancies reminds me of how Susan Sontag, in her oft-cited essay on “camp,” describes that capacious, tenuous, queer-adjacent style as “a tender feeling” that “identifies with what it is enjoying.” Benedetta enjoys her tender mysticism with gusto. Hitherto we have no reason to doubt her. Maybe she really is a star. Jesus, Etc. Enter from off-screen Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), pursued by straying sheep and her lecherous father, from whom she seeks sanctuary inside the convent. Noviceship has a price, however, chides Mother Felicita (Charlotte Rampling), and the men haggle over what crude number the shepherdess merits. Bartolomea is not Church-bred but filthy, bruised, and accustomed to ill-use, as feral and guiltless as an animal. Her principal request is for somewhere to defecate, a ceremony that she discharges beside Benedetta, laughing at a fart which ruptures the claustral silence. Less a character than a phantom of carnality, à la Sister Ruth from Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947), Bartolomea’s gaze simmers and sparks. She’s also an abused woman whose sole lexicon of loyalty is sex, and, when Benedetta proves solicitous, she fingers her during choir or gawps at her breasts through their shared cell, bordered only by a gauzy curtain. But Benedetta resists reciprocation; she even punishes Bartolomea by demanding she thrust the hand that penetrated her into boiling water. Benedetta’s subsequent visions sublimate this longing into theological incident: Jesus bestows on her a bigger, chest-swelling heart, which Benedetta blissfully begs Bartolomea to caress. In another, a crucified Christ commands Benedetta to remove the loincloth separating them—“Where I am, there can be no shame”—beneath which he’s dickless, as if his anatomy is unimaginable to the virgin mind or else inferred from her own sapphic predilections. From this dead-of-night dream, Benedetta ostensibly receives the stigmata, and because it’s good press, the Church elects her to be abbess, thus granting her a private chamber where she and Bartolomea can, for a time, commune undetected. Eventually, the jilted ex-abbess Felicita snoops on their candlelit romps and alerts the papal nuncio, who instigates an investigation and trial, not for visions that could be heresy but for a visionary desire. The arc of Benedetta is loosely limned from Immodest Acts, Judith C. Brown’s 1986 academic curio biographing the actual Benedetta Carlini—a nun tried twice, stripped of status, and imprisoned for life—and her inamorata-then-Judas, Bartolomea. The initial twenty pages of the slim book are a frothing catalogue of premodern theologians’ baffled obsession, nearing a fetish, with which sorts of illicit sex warranted precisely which punishments and, in particular, whether women could commit sodomy, a putative male crime and a capital offense. (Answer: only insofar as they resembled men.) The sheer volume of this writing testifies to the dreaded indeterminacy of these transgressions. The Church was (is) fixated on the body, especially the feminine one, as a site of corruptive pleasure and redemptive suffering. Nuns underwent routine self-mortification with the scourge and welcomed ailments as dignifying reinscriptions of Christ’s torment. Just outside Pescia, Tuscany, where Benedetta Carlini’s convent resided, the bubonic plague was havocking and rupturing the flesh, making all manner of contact dangerous. When Verhoeven’s Benedetta is first committed to the convent, she must quit all personal possessions, including a wooden statuette of the Virgin Mary, gifted by her mother, and corral herself in coarse cloth intended to stave off sensual comfort: “Your worst enemy is your body,” an older nun explains. By way of example, she recounts how her severed finger had years ago been replaced with a carved wooden copy. She wishes the rest of her, like the ship of Theseus, could be transfigured piece by piece into wood, endless substitutions creating something new, purer. Later, however, her wish is strangely articulated by Bartolomea, who whittles the bottom half of the Virgin Mary that Benedetta once treasured into a dildo that will allow her to penetrate deeper. The spiritual and carnal sides of the dildo seem to represent the two halves—pleasure and belief—of Benedetta’s being. If its existence seems a far-fetched deviation from the real Carlini, Brown’s book testifies to its plausibility with reports of nuns burned at the stake for “using material instruments.” Bartolomea’s almost pagan sensuality, her enthusiastic consent, are welcome in this kind of environment. To call Benedetta “nunsploitation” is a feint, disregarding the posterior of that portmanteau. Kinky fare like Norifumi Suzuki’s The Transgressor (1974) or Jesús Franco’s Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1977) draw on the convent’s repressed atmosphere to stage elaborate erotic set pieces. Benedetta, despite or perhaps because of its enthusiastic eros, hews more toward Church-sanctioned stories about the tribulations of female mystics—and the ecclesiastical authorities’ efforts to yoke something so nebulous as faith to doctrinal logic. Consider the countless cinematic renditions of Joan of Arc, whose most heinous crime, other than leading effectively, was cross-dressing; or even Henry King’s saccharine The Song of Bernadette (1943), in which an adolescent girl glimpses the Madonna in a grotto where villagers dump their garbage. “She’s showing off,” her cynical father grouses, in words that suit Benedetta. “Makes up a story to feel important.” Bernadette, unlike Benedetta, in time was canonized, but at the cost of her freedom: the Church’s tenacious suspicion pressures her into guarding her purity, so she swears her solemn vows, forsaking secular love and confining herself in a cloister away from her pilgrims and their ungovernable admiration. Benedetta’s theological lineage traces most closely to Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), another film about trying to reconcile religion with sexuality. The protagonist, Father Grandier (Oliver Reed), flouts clerical celibacy with frivolous, bourgeois women, impregnating and abandoning one. But he falls in love with a woman who, before they have sex, asks for his justification for why it wouldn’t be a sin. He responds by officiating their own marriage. Ironically, Grandier’s desire to be a good man for her brings him closer to God, even as it becomes part of what condemns him to be burned at the stake after he is caught up in a power struggle between Catholics and Protestants, local autonomy and kingly tyranny. In Russell’s film, the Church corrupts, but Benedetta at least may believe her unorthodox actions are endorsed by God. Benedetta’s physical relationship with Bartolomea could be simply one element of her potential hypocrisy, a conduit that gives her adequate reason to defy church strictures. Or it could be a radical embrace of physical pleasure, a celebration of the body and love for the individual as a means to reach Christ. Either way, it literalizes the arguments of the film—surfaces versus soul, body versus spirit—and Benedetta’s scenes with Bartolomea are joyous and consensual: “Through it, I show my love to the universe,” she tells the scornful nuncio. In fact, the only nonconsensual insertion in Benedetta is perpetrated by the Church, during a torture sequence that mirrors the supposed sacrilege of the dildo and an almost identical, climactic scene in The Devils. Both make us query which is worse: blasphemous pleasure or sanctioned rape. A Voice in the Wilderness Benedetta’s sexual ambiguity is one facet of her Janus-faced character, which Verhoeven slowly burdens with doubts that leave us in a state of suspension. In his films, signs are singular, but their interpretations are illimitable, even as the evidence for any pet theory is always visible. In Flesh+Blood, a cardinal despairs over a mercenary leader’s imprecation and prays for assurance from God that he is right to follow him. Before long, in the flare of battle, the mercenary is auspiciously enhaloed by an enflamed wagon wheel. The believers of Benedetta are forever grasping for guidance in a world without waymarks, and they often believe whatever exegesis confirms their biases: a comet blazing red above the convent could be the cosmic condemnation of God or the tongue-in-cheek manifestation of Benedetta’s blazing orgasm. Meanwhile, Benedetta herself insists that the broken glass found each time in her stigmata wounds isn’t a smoking gun but mere evidence that God channels worldly tools toward divine ends. Some of the signature features of religion—ritualized spectacle, interpretive fervor, unselfconscious excess, an ardent disregard for rationality—are the signature features of Verhoeven’s films. (His movie project about the historical Christ has been long-deferred. For research, Verhoeven joined the Jesus Seminar, a defunct consortium of biblical scholars and laity and in 2008 produced the speculative nonfiction Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait.) Christianity, like any system of sense-making, seeks to splice our fragmental reality into one continuous reel of affective experience, a totalizing image. In a 2011 interview with The Believer magazine, Verhoeven extolled Jesus as an “innovator of ethics” who amassed “things that happened on Earth” and “put those in a narrative,” specifically the parables. For Verhoeven, the parables raise a formal quandary: How does a director depict a storyteller so persuasive, so sweeping in his scope, that his tales have become gospel, a word that magnifies “truth”? Through Benedetta, Verhoeven has accomplished a slanted portrait of that Jesus, of a person who is, as Brown writes, “deceiver and deceived in her own self-created drama.” Some would call this Method acting, others faith: both are ecstatic embodiments demanding our suspension of disbelief. What fascinates Verhoeven is how that faith ripples outward and permeates whole communities, transfiguring intangible ideas into matter and history. That is, after all, the artist’s way: idea becomes object. Whether con artist or artful mystic, Benedetta seems nothing so much as an avatar of Verhoeven himself, who time and again, despite derision or exile, has returned to preside in his house of worship, where the congregants glimpse pictures, like stained glass, tricked from flickering light. “The great man,” Diderot wrote, “is no longer the one who creates truth; he is the one who knows how best to reconcile falsehood with truth.” The great artist is the one who tells such a good story, we want to believe.
Everywhere in Blockchains Patrick McGinty When the global investment bank Bear Stearns went broke in March of 2008, I was a college senior on spring break in Florida. My two friends and I had one simple rule—free housing, no matter what—which is how Kelly and I wound up eating a burnt scramble one morning while our friend Ryan and his grandfather obsessed over CNBC in the living room. Bear Stearns was the topic, every segment. The firm was in deep trouble. Ryan and his grandfather argued, the elder championing the indestructibility of the country, the younger soon-to-be banker predicting a nationwide ripple effect. Kelly and I ate at the kitchen counter, debating whether the food and the beds would be better or worse at the next stop. What happened next happened fast. I graduated without a job, eventually secured a temp position in a financial aid office, then spent several months in a basement processing the endless machinations required for several thousand international students to pay tuition at Carnegie Mellon University. In reality, I spent my days reading the internet, wounding myself with an alternating cocktail of dire financial reportage about Lehman Brothers, then David Foster Wallace remembrances. An embarrassing thing I wrote in a journal: “Being a writer is dangerous. Being a worker is, too.” One fall morning, my coworkers opened envelopes containing their retirement statements, then I watched as several cried into the receivers of corded desk phones. October 15 was my first day at a PR firm that was convinced it could help clients navigate the unfolding subprime mortgage crisis; the firm closed its Pittsburgh office several months later, and the tears lasted longer this time. Days after Obama’s inauguration, I joined a team of unemployed adults tasked with opening the Pittsburgh census office, and we became a small part of the decennial national project. I moved to Portland, Oregon, for graduate school, and every day while biking home, I stopped at Occupy Portland, hoping that some speaker might string together the various personal and social failures of my early twenties into some clarifying theory. My fellow spring-breaker Kelly would text me from Zuccotti Park; her updates on Occupy Wall Street were both more substantive and cooler than mine. Got hip, got radicalized—call it what you want, but like many young people in the era of the subprime mortgage crisis, I got it. I was transformed from someone only hazily aware of what CNBC announced in the background of a cramped Florida condo into someone driven to understand the perverse complexity of my nation’s financial system. This era launched one of the most intense and ongoing readerly journeys of my life, a project that probably represents my most genuine act of patriotism, i.e., it proves that I have, at times, cared deeply enough about national concerns to construct a self-made disaster syllabus seeking to answer the question: What the hell just happened to me, my generation, and my country? It’s Complicated I learned things in the early stages of this journey—not necessarily about finance, but about which genres of financial discourse would best help me answer my guiding question. I quickly discovered that 99 percent of academic writing was written for people who were not me. I whipsawed hard from academics to Occupy, and though I often left the Portland encampment feeling some generic version of “good,” I rarely left feeling informed. Kids had smartphones; documentarians had cameras and mics; it felt as though technological devices were leeching out the relevant moments and displacing them in a petri dish where, later, we would all reflect and find the answers, much too late. My overall experience of Occupy Portland synched quite closely with the one Jon Raymond described in his Tin House essay “The Broadway Gang”: I eventually landed on straightforward nonfiction as the best readerly route. Seemingly every week in the post-crisis years, I opened a new journalistic work whose book jacket claimed that in my hands lay a blueprint outlining the true genesis of the financial crisis. I did form a rough thesis about the financial crisis from reading these nonfiction books . . . but not the one the writers intended. Whereas I wanted in-depth assessments of synthetic credit debt obligations of asset-backed securities, I encountered writers more interested in retaining the reader’s attention than engaging seriously with the financial mechanics that had propelled me through six jobs in two-and-a-half years. These reported books promised to unveil the secret world of so-called financial wizards, yet the writers habitually settled on calling Wall Street’s operations “complex” before shoving the narrative onward. I am not exaggerating about the ubiquity of the word complex. Take Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia. (I am hereby eliding all mention of these books’ ridiculously long subtitles; just think of each as I Alone Know the Origins of the Financial Crisis.) Taibbi repeatedly writes things like “This sounds complicated.” He treats his own unwillingness to get technical as a cause worthy of joking about: “Stuff that’s fiendishly complicated and that if ingested too quickly can feature a truly toxic boredom factor.” An overreliance on complex wasn’t the real problem, though. The problem was figurative language. It was everywhere in Taibbi’s book. It had learned to clone itself (“a kind of labyrinthine financial sewage system,” “unseen labyrinths of the Grifter Archipelago,” “immensely complex, labyrinthine political system”). Figurative language was a central characteristic of every financial book I read, most notably Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold. I first heard of Tett in a footnote within The Big Short, where Michael Lewis, loath to get too technical about the housing crisis, promised that “the story of how and why they did this has been painstakingly told by Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett.” Yet what I found in Fool’s Gold was the pinnacle of figurative financial language. To hear Tett tell it, credit derivatives and CDOs were like a spiderweb of deals. And also buckets under a waterfall. They were like calculating the percentage of rotten apples in a bushel. Cut some pizza slices and voilà: you just CDO’d. Russian dolls, a small retail store—the analogies for the financial system were endless in Fool’s Gold, and the more books I read, the more analogies I found. This widespread use of figurative financial language ensured that the public had no idea how the financial sector actually operated. The writers didn’t seem to fully know either. In many books, even the central players didn’t know how to explain themselves. The years of 2008–2009 were, to date, the most significant of my life, the kinds of years where I can still remember every single day—what I was worrying about, which coworker was crying in which office, many of the details backed by embarrassing journal entries—and in trying to learn about those daily upheavals, I kept reading that the inciting incidents were complicated. Actually, these books seemed to say to me, your daily experience as an economic participant in the United States is best explained by something else entirely. We’re in the Money One thing I knew even without wading through the post-crisis literature was that banks—and financial companies that acted like banks—had come a long way from the staid, heavily regulated lenders of yore. Yet there was no refuge in the easy conclusion that banking had gone mad. Soon I was confronted with a new phenomenon to make our financial heads spin: the rise of a money-system operating beyond the reach of the banks and regulators. In a chapter of the collection Regulating Blockchain entitled “Old Utopias, New Tax Havens: The Politics of Bitcoin in Historical Perspective,” political theorist Stefan Eich makes the connection between then and now: “It was only in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that conflicting demands for either the depoliticization or the democratization of money resurfaced. This was the concrete context for the emergence of cryptocurrencies that promised to remove money from both the state and banks.” Eich outlines how, from the 1970s to 2008, there was little to no sustained public discussion seeking to demystify and debate money. The housing crisis changed this—suddenly, without an accessible recent discourse. Referring to the process as the “re-politicization of money,” Eich notes that “the newly visible agency of central banks uncomfortably raised the possibility of political choices in a system that was supposedly without alternatives.” As a result—and with discomfiting immediacy—“the crisis revealed the widely held belief of money as neutral as an illusion.” It makes sense, then, that our language was lacking if we think of the financial meltdown as the country shaking itself from a trance. It’s hard to wake from a nap and revise an entire financial system before your eyes adjust. As our vision and language continue to recalibrate, it’s clear that certain corners of our once sleepy populace have become bug-eyed about the financial alternatives that cryptocurrencies seem to offer. It feels as if there’s now a book-length work of crypto nonfiction published every few weeks, and as a genre, these works share traits with their forerunner, the housing crisis book. Both genres love the word complexity. Ditto figurative language—Swiss Army knife analogies appear in multiple crypto books, and “mining” is the central metaphor, this despite bookkeeping being far more accurate. (Why mining? Because for an idea to spread, it must use words that appeal to a preteen boy.) But these new crypto books are often humming at a level of technical ingenuity that overshadows any accomplishment by their predecessors, which is saying something because the challenges these crypto books must overcome are not few. The protagonists and conflicts are not centralized on Wall Street; like the technology, they are disparate and decentralized. The writers must construct narratives around technologies that are still evolving, ones that often lack clear-cut collapses and origins. The books must also perform some high-grade linguistic cartography, differentiating blockchain from Bitcoin and assets from currencies. These books are game for this particular challenge, often embracing it to absurd degrees. In Blockchain: The Next Everything, Stephen P. Williams privileges clarity to the point where a single line will occupy an entire page. (“Blockchain is software. It’s as simple as that.”) In The Age of Cryptocurrency, journalists Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey do not simply calculate whether cryptocurrencies meet the prerequisites to be a currency; they outline the camps invested in treating it as such. There are libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, “who want government to get its greedy mitts out of the money supply.” Other supporters think of cryptocurrencies as more of a payments protocol than a currency, “including a cross section of techies and businessmen who see a chance to disrupt the bank-centric payments system.” These individuals “are less concerned about its appeal as an intrinsically valuable thing and more with the underlying computer network’s capacity to rearrange the rules of trust around which society manages exchanges of value.” If money boils down to settling and recording debts, this latter camp believes that computers can perform this function more cheaply and efficiently than banks and governments, and Vigna and Casey treat their claim seriously. To demonstrate what a slog our contemporary transactions are, they track the journey of a credit card purchase across two massive paragraphs, bolding terms like “front-end processor,” “acquiring bank,” then “Clearing House Payments Co.” By the end, it’s hard to say you’re uninterested in hearing more about Bitcoin, whose “ongoing community expansion represents nothing less than a currency’s endeavoring to become money.” This is not simple stuff. Financial crisis writing did not need to explain why a dollar wanted to become a dollar. Crypto writing must often explicate the philosophies and mechanisms underlying our current system while also explicating those of a dubious future one. Helpfully, whenever the crypto writer feels their sentences are becoming mired in overly technical language, they have a secret weapon: crypto’s proselytizers, who have been trying to convince, oh, every single person in their life about the untold power of some blockchain-related project. In his Bitcoin-specific Digital Gold, Nathaniel Popper shares a Google engineer’s bullet points with his family, imploring them to consider how “no government can shut it down . . . the miners . . . have incentives to keep mining . . . [and] everything is defined by its source code.” The crypto writer often has an additional and effective, if controversial, source: themselves. Many of these writers have firsthand experience with the technologies they report on, like Camila Russo, who opens Infinite Machine in Argentina in 2013, where she was not just reporting on double-digit inflation, “[she] was also living it.” Russo was converting her journalism paychecks from pesos into dollars as soon as she was paid, “until one day the president woke up and said, Nope! You can’t do that anymore.” Russo scopes out the situation, and “sure enough, the option to exchange pesos from my local currency account into dollars to deposit in my foreign currency account was nowhere to be found.” Argentines soon inform Russo that Bitcoin is the easiest way for her to circumnavigate the country’s populist policies: “They understood right away how significant it was to be able to buy a currency that’s not controlled by anyone and, therefore, can’t be stopped or seized.” This scene—a financial journalist hearing about financial technology from laymen—is impossible in a book about subprime mortgages. Michael Lewis does not have a section in which he writes, “So there I was, trying to trade a subprime mortgage with a bogus AAA-rating.” Whereas the reportage of the financial crisis took the form of retroactive genesis-extraction and ramification logging, these crypto books often capture a real-time experience of the technology’s spread. And yes, it’s notable that Russo is cagey about whether she actually used Bitcoin in the above scene (we go rather swiftly from “Where could I turn?” to “I decided to write about it” without ever really addressing the whole paycheck issue). I am someone who has concerns about journalists using and holding the assets they cover; I am also someone who slogged through countless 2008 crisis books, and it’s clear that the familiarity these writers have with cryptocurrencies results in books that are far better at describing and engaging with complex financial topics than their antecedents. It’s not much of a debate, honestly, which is why I have gravitated toward a thornier question: Is “better at confronting complex financial topics” a meaningful descriptor for a literary genre? What about a financial system? Moth to the Flame Laura Shin opens The Cryptopians where my own readerly journey began: the financial crisis. “In the end,” Shin writes, “it took only seven weeks to trigger the slow-motion toppling of global finance and, though no one saw it then, begin upending the centuries-old method for establishing societal trust.” This was the opening I had been pining for in a crypto book. With a simple statement—“On September 15, 2008, the 158-year-old investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in history”—I felt that Shin was about to present cryptocurrency in the way I had come to understand it: as the logical outgrowth of the big bank-driven financial crisis. Cryptocurrency—just like my own political self!—was born out of the crisis. We shared an origin story. It’s probably obvious by now that I became briefly enchanted by all of this stuff. In my defense: in the decade and a half since the financial crisis, which response or movement or idea has accumulated more cultural space without retreat than crypto? What entity has dug deeper roots? Bernie couldn’t make it to a general election. What, then? Which economic idea has gobbled up more ideological real estate post-Occupy? That ancient, idea-less fact allergy now called Trumpism? The only Bidenism one encounters is a meek defense: “well, Biden is . . . um . . .” Obama seems like a very good dad. Cryptocurrency has filled the post-Occupy space. Because of course code filled the space. Of course the idea of digital currency metastasized during the pandemic, when physical was supplanted by digital interaction more so than any other time in human history. I’d love to single out something more tactile. As a union member who marched with pride on a rainy picket line, I’d love to point to the organizing efforts and teachers’ strikes and mutual aid organizations that have sprung up, but cryptocurrency has, as of this writing, over a two trillion-dollar market cap. It is a sector now large enough to lure even vaguely interested Luddite moths like myself, which is why I’m hesitant to criticize crypto’s adherents too severely. I know the medication routine well. Feeling morose from your thousandth Covid-case chart? Here’s a crypto chart traveling the same trajectory, but you’re profiting. Is your state education system slashing staff and combining universities all while your mother’s state retirement system is experiencing some, shall we say, light corruption? Crypto is at least as trustworthy as all those silly institutions you put your faith in. Are your friends losing money and gaining anxiety thanks to the opacity of the unemployment system or the academic promotion process (or both)? Tell them about crypto, which operates transparently; it’s simple, and there’s a merry horde on Twitter that’s happy to explain, no need for the figurative language of the financial crisis: Do you like your white paper with Twitter thread or meme? The Real Thing The thing about The Cryptopians, though, is that it is longer than those opening lines about the financial crisis. And in the same way that the absence of rigorous financial explication in financial crisis books revealed something to me about the nature of American finance, the absence of any further discussion of the crisis in the remainder of The Cryptopians’s four-hundred-some pages revealed something to me about Wall Street’s would-be conqueror. This is because the 2008 crisis doesn’t seem to strike literally any of The Cryptopians’s characters as all that big of a deal. Shin is a ruthlessly detailed reporter, unearthing countless hyper-personal texts and chat logs, but nowhere, not once, does any source express much interest in or lingering rage about the financial crisis. None of the inventors of these technologies appear to have lost homes, pensions, or careers. Few seem to derive their ideology or motivation from it. And suffice to say that their interest in technology is not driven by a desire to rectify global inequality. Take Gavin Wood, whose PhD project entailed writing “software that would turn music into ‘vaguely pretty’ pictures,” which he then “sold to a few London nightclubs.” Another individual sought to improve the human condition via “remotely controlled videoconferencing robots that roll on a Segway.” Then there’s poor Griff, who, “during the financial crisis . . . had experienced his own disaster: the sale of the Seattle SuperSonics basketball team and its transformation into the Oklahoma City Thunder.” For Griff, the Sonics had been a team which, “if they ever lost, he would be in mourning the next day,” and in his grief he embarked on a colonialist “short-lived stint trying to become ‘the Bitcoin guy for Ecuador.’” These anecdotes about tech men are unsurprising, but I need to keep going, as punishment. One man asks, “Who would mind being hated for $20 million?” Another: “Before making any decision, and no matter what decision you will make, we are, combined—you and us—in a position to make a significant, if not historic, market manipulation.” The original Ethereum team was comprised of the money man who “craved a return on his investment,” plus Amir, the “Bitcoin-rich man-about-town from Israel,” who, according to one colleague, contributes “astoundingly little to the project.” The skipper on this digital boat is played by Charles, self-proclaimed CEO, and who Shin often flanks with parenthetical digressions: “(There is no restraining order by her against him. After one interview, Charles did not respond to further queries.)” Shin’s book does not simply rope off women into parentheticals, as so many financial books do. Her signature achievement is her nuanced reporting on Ming Chan, the former executive director of the Ethereum Foundation. There are numerous gendered characterizations of Chan that make a reader empathize with her (a colleague describes Chan as “a mother hen”), yet there are others where Chan does seem to be a tone-deaf tech baroness (“She brought her sister in as legal counsel, raising questions about conflicts”). Chan’s portrayal vacillates between “this person is treated unfairly” and “this person seems awful”; she is destined to become a central character in some streaming-service drama about Ethereum, and this show will not do the character justice because it will probably be written by white guys as opposed to Shin, who, as a Korean-American woman, is an ideal writer to disentangle the crypto sector’s treatment of women and Asian women, specifically. There are parts of The Cryptopians where it seems as though the only prerequisites for working in crypto are: (1) being named Gavin, (2) having a thing for hiring and/or dating Asian women, and (3) being an Asian woman who knows a person named Gavin. Shin does not let these uncomfortable tendencies pass without comment. She writes of a new hire that “some observers, many of whom liked Aya, could not help but point out that she did have a qualification that one wouldn’t necessarily find on a resume: she was an Asian woman.” Women of all ethnicities hated working at ConsenSys for Joseph Lubin, who is framed quite reprehensibly in Shin’s reporting. Lubin “protected an executive whom multiple female employees had found abusive,” and at an ensuing women’s council on a company retreat, “female employees were crying about sexual harassment they had experienced.” According to its website, ConsenSys is a “software engineering leader of the blockchain space,” although Shin’s sources portray it as a “smoke-and-mirrors company” led by an executive who “masked his old-school, power-hungry, dominate-and-crush ways with a ‘love and light story of decentralization and mutual empowerment.’” Lubin is just Don Draper selling Coca-Cola to hippies, and upon reading the above line about his empty peddling of mutual empowerment, I thought: my pandemic-induced anxieties have quieted my usual tech skepticism to the point that I have been studying the intricacies of this new tech flavor without fully realizing that it has the same Wall Street taste. The Crypto-Keeper’s Apprentice Shin’s insider reporting in The Cryptopians helped wake me, with finality, from my crypto illusions. Other works had been waving smelling salts, like David Gerard’s enjoyably combative Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. When answering “who wants smart contracts anyway,” Gerard rifles off a cheeky list: “computer programmers who don’t have an aptitude for social or legal conventions,” “businesses who want to automate away dealing with customers, but still take their money,” and, the kicker, “innovative entrepreneurs who have come into conflict with the traditional legal system previously, and would like something deterministic enough that they can take your money and escape through the cracks.” Aaron Lammer’s podcast Exit Scam provided me a test case for one such innovative entrepreneur: Gerald Cotten, who did (or didn’t?) die and whose cryptocurrency exchange, QuadrigaCX, did (and . . . definitely did) mysteriously lose track of $190 million after his death. Gradually, I came to agree with practically every single thing David Golumbia wrote or said, most notably in The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism. My overall Golumbian takeaway: despite loudly championing the so-called democratic principles of cryptocurrency, its apostles sure do lose it when there’s any sort of democratically elected oversight of this supposedly democratic technology, to the point that you really do have to wonder whether they misunderstand democratic principles or they simply don’t want any government involvement whatsoever in cryptocurrency, the latter option, of course, not being a terribly democratic one. As Eich observes, “The attempt to remove money from political control is itself a supremely political act that raises profound questions of legitimacy.” But whereas these writers disabused me from crypto in intellectual ways, Shin’s book did so in a more visceral fashion. If I were to travel back in time and hand myself any crypto book at Occupy Portland, The Cryptopians would’ve had the largest effect on me. I would have read about these men of the near future, noted their similarity to what was currently being protested on Wall Street—the misogyny and greed, the complete unfamiliarity with the pain felt by the lower and middle classes—and I might have fought for some speaking time at the gathering near the Plaza Blocks. I may well have wrapped a kilt around a devil stick, lit it, and convinced a group of protesters to traverse the globe and sabotage the spot, “set amid the bucolic Swiss hills in Baar,” where Ethereum would establish its headquarters, a “modern, three-story, taupe-colored bulwark they nicknamed the Spaceship.” No doubt, the crypto apostles would tell me I’m soft-brained, I don’t get it, Web3 will usher in content made by users and distributed to users on user-controlled platforms, you’re NGMI, or “not gonna make it,” to which I reply: of course I’m not going to make it! I’m an adjunct novelist! I entered the workforce in 2008! My deep and abiding sense that I and my generation are NGMI is why I wound up interested in crypto in the first place, and yet the drivers of my own interest in cryptocurrency—the corruption and regulatory oversights that wrought the housing crisis—are often as absent in crypto’s daily discourse as it is in The Cryptopians. The absence of a maturated political ideology was particularly apparent during the crypto sector’s lobbying efforts this past summer against the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Much of the furor was aimed at a provision known as the “Information Reporting for Brokers and Digital Assets,” which would require wallet developers and miners to abide by more rigorous tax reporting. Online mobilization efforts against the provision were swift. Day after day, I saw the crypto community congratulating itself for figuring out how to call senators and sign petitions, many of them kicking around the idea of becoming single-issue crypto voters, and as I watched various accounts retweet a crypto-positive speech by Ted Cruz, I thought: wow, these folks do not have their representative’s number in their phone from the “Repeal Obamacare” wars, or the Dakota Access Pipeline fight, or any other issue from the past decade. It truly does seem like their political awakening is being driven by a fervent interest in tax avoidance and blocking regulatory oversight as it relates to an emerging technology, which: lame. I know certain crypto supporters—some of whom I can confirm did attend Occupy events—who would dispute the above depiction. But to dive into that is a surefire way to never arrive at this essay’s end. I have eighty-three tweets bookmarked that I intended to respectfully interrogate, and I’m overwhelmed by the prospect of appropriately framing and engaging with a single one of them. There’s simply too much crypto discourse from too many angles. Are energy concerns over- or under-hyped? What’s up with El Salvador? Is China’s crypto crackdown less significant than the last crackdown or way less significant? I found many corners of Crypto Twitter to be quite approachable on these topics, but when the topic in question is not merely an idea but an asset, one that has and may well continue to enrich average citizens, every speaker starts to feel as though they’re holding either a bag of cash or a match. In The Cryptopians, Shin quotes her own writing in Forbes, where she reported that These sorts of descriptions could apply to any online community, but the difference is that most communities are not advocating for more of the human experience—finance and art, the energy we expend both literally and metaphorically—to exist online. The figures in The Cryptopians offer the n-millionth piece of evidence that perhaps a life lived relentlessly online has detrimental effects on a person. Shin quotes Ming Chan: “I’m not supposed to post in [this] internal channel when I haven’t slept for thirty, forty, or fifty hours. You’ll know when I’m sleep deprived because there will be ‘removed’ posts (when I can’t stop myself from posting).” Multiple people on multiple projects are encouraged to step back from the internet and reassess their behaviors. Then there’s dear Christoph Jentzsch, a cofounder of slock.it and the individual I identify with most from The Cryptopians. Jentzsch begins to realize that his cryptocurrency project “would hang over his whole life and might one day become something he hated.” He thinks of his life in terms of the Goethe poem, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” from which Disney’s Fantasia derives its Mickey vs. Brooms plot. Jentzsch views the poem as being “about starting something small that gets bigger and bigger until you no longer have control over it.” To exemplify Jentzsch’s thinking, Shin quotes from one of Goethe’s closing lines: “Spirits I have conjured, no longer pay me heed.” The Goethe translation Shin selects is rather transactional, as though he’s calling in with a support ticket: the software is “no longer pay[ing] me heed.” I’m partial to translations of Goethe that ascribe more blame to the apprentice, readings where the spirits “whom I’ve careless raised, / are spellbound to my power not.” “Wrong I was in calling” these spirits, another translation starts, “For I find them galling, / Cannot rule them now.” It is very tempting to end here, to note that by choosing a smoother translation, Shin is unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally) portraying how tech’s acolytes so often fail to take blame for the ramifications their inventions impose on us. But I am not thinking only of Jentzsch when I read these lines about a careless person summoning galling spirits. I am thinking of myself, eager to conjure more open financial discourse in the wake of the housing crisis. Thanks to cryptocurrency (and social media), digital brooms with blue wings now deliver me more language than I could ever parse. I made a wish back in those formative, uncertain days of 2008 and 2009—more language, more specific language—and not only was this stupid wish granted, I was given months of downtime to stuff myself full. My habit of reading widely and ravenously now strikes me as less a credit than a crutch with each passing year that introduces some new technology surrounded by complex language designed to enrich a small conversant few and bar the majority from the conversation. I am someone who is eager to narrate the moments across my adult life in which I have advocated for labor—your principles get a good stress test when striking means you’ll lose health care for your eight-and-a-half-months-pregnant wife—yet increasingly, these winning tales strike me as tainted by my nerdy desire to fully understand the complexities of the forces that press down upon labor. I ask sincerely: How productive is it to have one foot on the picket line and one in the enemy’s section of the library? There’s a more damning analogy I’m loath to share—often, it feels like I hypocritically want one hand on a picket sign and another reaching for a safety net made of whatever new technology is currently filling the space, a way of ensuring I “make it” financially when my political aims inevitably fail. (My safety nets are more like poorly stuffed throw pillows; at present, I hold 2.42714 of ETH and 0.04486611 of BTC.) If this pivot to “labor vs. crypto” feels late and jarring, a reminder: it’s where I started this. It’s certainly where I should have started my readerly journey into crypto—not with “how effective is the writing around it” but “how effectively does it salve the pain experienced by my coworkers in the fall of 2008.” At the financial aid office, my coworkers’ retirements were upturned by the housing crisis, and a central question on my crypto reading journey should have been: Wouldn’t a financial system that sought to eliminate so-called administrative waste via crypto-aided transactions not simply eliminate my coworkers’ retirements but eliminate their actual jobs as well? Multiple articles and projects have suggested that the blockchain could improve and cheapen census operations, yet 635,000 citizens worked on the 2010 census. What job program fills that decennial hole? My officemates were poets and nuns, activists and school board members, many of them economically adrift but quite politically focused, and I should have gone into some of these crypto books asking: Doesn’t a streamlined “Blockchain Census 2030” project only worsen their economic opportunities? If I did know some magical sorcerer who could cast me back in time, it would not be to the outset of any readerly journey. I would slip back to 2008, then my bedroom, and into that sentimental spiral notebook, home to “Being a writer is dangerous. Being a worker is, too.” I wouldn’t need some fancy wand or sorcery or blockchain bullshit. A pen would do. I’d cross out the two sentences then reconstitute the line: “Obsessing over writers more than workers is dangerous.”
Dawn of the Space Lords Corey Pein They called it a “Sputnik moment.” In October, the Financial Times reported that over the summer of 2021, the Chinese government tested a new missile. It was reported to have been fired from a so-called hypersonic glide vehicle that circled the planet at speeds exceeding Mach 5 before landing within twenty-five miles of its target. The strategic implications were overblown, but the Sputnik comparison was apt in that a rival power—a communist one no less—had outperformed the United States in space. U.S. military and intelligence officials feared the test vehicle could allow China to launch an unstoppable nuclear first strike. Chinese officials claimed it was not a weapon, but a peaceful spacecraft—part of a flourishing national program that recently launched a probe to Mars, landed the first robotic spacecraft on the dark side of the Moon, and commenced orbital assembly of a space station, just as the funded lifetime of the U.S.-backed International Space Station (ISS) nears an end. Meanwhile, American capitalism carved its own venturesome path into the final frontier. In November, a capsule made by SpaceX, the company owned by PayPal lottery winner and Tesla head Elon Musk, returned four astronauts to Earth from the ISS. But, as Tesla owners have come to expect, there was a problem with Musk’s design. A toilet seal broke, spilling pools of urine below the floorboards. Fortunately, the structure wasn’t compromised, but the snafu forced the crew to resort to diapers for twenty hours during descent, which the pilot called “suboptimal.” Call that a “SpaceX moment.” What does it say about the U.S. space program—once the envy of the world—that while its generals were figuratively pissing themselves over a Chinese rocket, its astronauts were literally pissing themselves because a profit-hungry contractor screwed up? Red Scares, Blue Origins, and Little Green Men Yes indeed, there’s a new space race on. The stakes are the expansion of military, economic, and political dominion. As in the Cold War, this contest is ideological as well as technological. China has replaced Russia as America’s cosmic bogeyman. But nations are no longer the only leading actors. A new class of spacefaring oligarchs, most notably Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whose space company is called Blue Origin, have been granted a kind of royal charter by Congress, the White House, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The personality cults around these billionaire space lords make the nationalistic spectacle of the Apollo program seem stodgy. More significantly, an endeavor once led by rule-bound bureaucrats now champions the dubious values of Silicon Valley: cost-cutting, disruption, disdain for regulations, and boundless monopoly. It’s too soon to say whether decades of unchecked privatization have blunted the U.S. edge in space, or whether corporations, given generous subsidy, can surpass the achievements of the 1960s. But it is clear the objectives of the civilian space program have already shifted. The pursuit of profit has subsumed the pursuit of knowledge. It is no accident that the two men who perennially compete for the title of world’s wealthiest have chosen to funnel their fortunes into rockets, satellites, space stations, and plans for off-world colonies. That’s how they expect to keep winning at capitalism and, eventually, to appropriate the powers of government. Many scientists still advocate for “peaceful cooperation” among nations to better understand our universe, a program of the kind that President John F. Kennedy pitched in his final address to the United Nations in 1963. But it’s billionaires who are driving policy, and what they offer is a gloomier future of all-powerful corporations that cement their dominance on Earth by laying claim to the heavens. Such is the mission we’re asked to cheer, and to finance. Most of the hype around SpaceX and Blue Origin, along with Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, has served these companies’ principal marketing strategy: space tourism. Having “The Right Stuff” now means having the cash to buy a ticket ($250,000 at the low end, running up to tens of millions of dollars for a first-class experience). Because there’s very little to actually do during a few minutes of weightlessness in the upper atmosphere, these companies are really selling bragging rights, as well as a chance at a rare experience called the overview effect, an epiphany said to affect those who behold Mother Gaia from above. But there are no guarantees! When Star Trek icon William Shatner returned from a jaunt in a Blue Origin rocket in October, he was “overwhelmed” with emotion. As Shatner struggled to articulate the vision of life and death he’d experienced while beholding Earth against the void, Bezos, relishing his PR victory, cut in calling for champagne. So much for higher realities. If it was only about charter flights for wealthy seekers, all this fuss might seem frivolous. And in many ways it is. But the space lords see tourism as a stepping stone. Many business and political leaders have embraced the notion that private space exploration—or rather, exploitation—will transform the economy much as globalization did, promoting corporate consolidation and even higher levels of inequality. And that’s supposed to be a good thing. “I predict the first trillionaire will be made in space,” Texas senator Ted Cruz, who was weaned on the science fiction of Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, told Politico in 2018. During his tenure leading the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, Cruz authored the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, signed by Barack Obama, which permits Americans to keep what they find in space. Cruz also affirmed that the most critical American task in space was sending humans to Mars, a goal Donald Trump endorsed and Joe Biden has not reversed. Musk thinks he can get there before Russia, China, or NASA. The billionaire’s plan entails an unprecedented allocation of resources toward an unconscionably risky enterprise with no discernible upside for the typical earthling. Musk pictures a fleet of one-thousand-plus spaceships lurking in orbit until the arrival of a favorable launch window, whereupon “the Mars colonial fleet would depart en masse,” ferrying eighty thousand people per year on a brisk eighty-day journey to the Red Planet. After a period of forty to one hundred years, he figures a million humans would live and work there (for Musk presumably, doing whatever he wants). Bezos has other ideas. He thinks moving people to Mars is neither feasible nor desirable. “I say, ‘Do me a favor, go live on the top of Mount Everest for a year first, and see if you like it—because it’s a garden paradise compared to Mars,’” he once told an interviewer. Bezos maintains that, being closer to Earth, space stations would prove more economical. He wants to build orbital colonies “miles on end,” each holding a million people or more, and an expansive Moon base to supply raw materials. Musk calls Bezos the unrealistic one, saying his space colonies “would be like trying to build the U.S.A. in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean!” Both are right about the other’s faults. Sniping aside, their fundamental goal is the same: to dictate the course of evolution. Musk hopes “to make life multi-planetary” in order to “preserve the light of consciousness” should Earth go bust. Bezos, to cleanse the Earth, wants the bulk of humanity to leave it forever. “The solar system can easily support a trillion humans,” he said in 2018, and then “we would have a thousand Einsteins, and a thousand Mozarts.” Never mind that a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts no doubt already live on this planet in obscurity, crushed by capitalism. We don’t lack geniuses; rather, most geniuses lack the security that would allow them to flourish. These schemes are unabashedly derived from science fiction. Musk has credited Asimov’s Foundation series, the saga of a far-future galactic empire, as one of his inspirations, and stashed a digital copy of the books aboard one SpaceX rocket. Bezos, a Trekkie and a fan of Iain M. Banks’s Culture series (another utopian space opera), draws his plans from the nonfictional but fantastical work of late Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill. His namesake “O’Neill Cylinders” refer to pairs of ginormous solar-powered habitats that would produce artificial gravity through rotation. Prompted by NASA, the professor cooked up this idea in the 1970s with the help of some freshman undergrads and financing from Stewart Brand, the California “post-libertarian” futurist of Whole Earth Catalog fame. Considering the fanciful nature of the enterprise, it’s fair to wonder whether the private-sector space race is merely a very expensive hobby for nerdy oligarchs. They can’t possibly be serious about space colonies. Can they? I’m afraid that they are serious, and they’re not alone. In November, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius hosted an event at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., titled “Our Future in Space.” Bezos shared the stage with the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines; NASA Administrator Bill Nelson; Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, and other fancy folk. The discussion provided a window into establishment thinking. Bezos wowed the crowd with descriptions of the bounty awaiting future generations born on his O’Neill Cylinders. “These colonies will not be like the International Space Station. They’ll have rivers and forests and wildlife,” he said. Amazon Prime will be built in, he added, with “hypersonic delivery.” That got a laugh, but considering his place in the space program today, such pronouncements are tantamount to national policy. Loeb, more modestly, advocated for space exploration via computerized probes, but the professor has only raised $2 million toward that end. Blue Origin holds government contracts worth more than $275 million in the current fiscal year. If Bezos and Musk are the Don Quixotes of space, the U.S. government is full of Sancho Panzas. Entrepreneurs involved with the Chinese space program, who rely more on regional rather than central government support, are reportedly jealous of the close ties Musk and Bezos enjoy with their government. As one Chinese space researcher lamented to China Daily, “The rapid rise of SpaceX can’t be copied in China because NASA has granted it an unprecedented level of support, ranging from infrastructure and technology to experience.” Even America’s communist rival sees state-sponsored corporate conquest as a more audacious model than their system can manage. Failure to Launch How likely is it that the space lords can deliver? Even a casual observer could note that private space companies have a long record of blown deadlines and spectacular failures. At least seven SpaceX Starship rockets have exploded in the past two years, per a Space.com highlight reel. Such setbacks may come with the territory. Nevertheless, rocketry is the lowest of many hurdles standing between the billionaire colonizers and their off-world imperium. Some of the daunting engineering challenges they face are described in a two-year study NASA commissioned in 2017 from the Institute for Defense Analyses. NASA’s roadmap calls for the construction of a station called Gateway in lunar orbit beginning in 2024; it will serve as a staging ground for manned missions to Mars. But it’s all a bit theoretical. The Gateway requires technologies that “have not been previously demonstrated at the scale required”; the same caveat goes for the tech needed to fly to Mars. The perilous human health risks remain poorly understood. Very few people have spent more than a month in space. The IDA projects NASA’s Mars mission to take 1,100 days round trip, and that’s without touching down. (In contrast to Musk’s braggadocio, NASA isn’t confident about being able to land cargo on Mars because of the thin atmosphere.) The dangers multiply the more time people spend in the vacuum, locked inside a can with finite provisions and oxygen. A task so mundane as doing the laundry produces lingering airborne particles. Foods with a year-plus shelf life may prove insufficiently nutritious—so astronauts could starve. Then there’s cosmic radiation. Now imagine another toilet springs a leak. I expect that if Musk ever executes his Mars mission, everyone on the trip will meet a horrifying, untimely end. Musk acknowledges this risk: “A bunch of people probably will die,” he has said. Of course, he’d prefer they be valorized as pioneers, not remembered as sacrifices to the madness of a corner-cutting billionaire. Ah, yes, the bottom line. The IDA reckons the cost to reach the first successful orbital Mars mission will reach $121 billion, with a launch in 2037 at the earliest. Musk boasts he can land humans on the planet by 2026 for only $10 billion. In a 2017 talk later removed from SpaceX’s website, Musk said he planned to launch cargo missions to Mars as early as 2022—which is clearly not going to happen. Call it overconfidence or sheer hucksterism, but it’s no mystery why the overseers of the U.S. space program would favor smaller numbers and shorter deadlines. Both Bezos and Musk aim to dramatically reduce the cost of spaceflight. This, they believe, is the key to unlocking our multi-planetary future. They’ve undeniably made advances with reusable rockets. But I’m skeptical that an obsession with the bottom line can produce the momentous advances required to, say, build a self-contained floating city for a million people. Can space colonization be done on the cheap? Only with an increased tolerance for sacrifice. The IDA study addressed the question thusly: “Commercial launch vehicles [like those made by SpaceX and Blue Origin] may be less reliable than launch vehicles built under traditional cost-plus contracting and mission assurance approaches, but the lower costs may more than make up for the increased risk of failure.” In other words: So what if Musk’s rockets blow up? They’re cheaper. Given past performance, the odds are that neither Musk nor Bezos will live to see their dreams become reality. It would be a mistake, however, to laugh off these difficult tasks as impossible. For all the limits of current technology, the vast distances involved, and the hostility of off-world environments, the space lords have a number of factors working in their favor. First, as Cruz noted, they benefit from a bipartisan commitment to privatization. The die was cast as early as JFK’s 1962 “we choose to go to the Moon” speech, in which he extolled the “great number of new companies, and tens of thousands of new jobs” created by the space program. NASA further embraced outsourcing in the 1970s, and the 1984 Commercial Space Launch Act opened the door to private launches. But it’s only recently that, despite discouraging language in longstanding international treaties, U.S. companies have been invited to claim ownership over the heavens. In April 2020, Trump signed an executive order proclaiming that “Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space.” Despite recent growth, private investment remains far below what the space lords require. Until they can prove that fortunes can be made, not only burned, in zero gravity, Bezos and Musk will be financing their ambitions out of pocket, abetted by whatever funds they can wring from the U.S. Treasury. That said, it’s entirely possible public resources will provide ample subsidy for incremental advances that can eventually take Musk and Bezos where they want to go. They’re counting on it. Certainly, few in government question the space privateers divine right to profit. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders would be an exception. In a November floor speech, he called a $10 billion handout to Blue Origin in the Pentagon budget bill “beyond laughable,” adding, “It is not acceptable that the two wealthiest people in this country—Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos—take control over our space efforts to return to the Moon and maybe even the extraordinary accomplishment of getting to Mars.” Raising the billionaires’ taxes, as Sanders wants, would also help bring the space program back under public control. Musk calls Sanders “a taker, not a maker” and tweeted at the Senator, “I keep forgetting that you’re still alive.” Let’s give that man a planet! And while present activities like space tourism seem a lark, they do provide a corporate foothold. Blue Origin has partnered with companies, including Boeing, and universities, led by Arizona State, to build a “mixed use business park” in space. Called Orbital Reef, this suburban-sounding outpost is supposed to be operational by the end of the decade. But thus far, the most lucrative niche in space has been commercial satellites. Musk has moved aggressively in this area, with the goal of funding his Mars mission. Since 2019, SpaceX has launched more than sixteen hundred “Starlink” internet-relay satellites into orbit, spoiling the view for astronomers and sparking debate about who has the right to alter the night sky. As it happens, the proliferation of commercial satellites exacerbates a problem that threatens future development in space: debris. What’s more, the technologies needed to intercept, capture, and dispose of this space junk are similar to those needed to mine asteroids—a prospect that makes space entrepreneurs giddy. One of the largest asteroid mining concerns to date, Planetary Resources, raised more than $50 million from the likes of Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, plus the government of Luxembourg, which is bullish on space privatization. The company quickly fizzled out; in 2018 it was acquired by a blockchain company that sold off its assets. Despite such a high-profile recent failure, the multi-billion and even trillion-dollar valuations expected for asteroids containing platinum or rare earth minerals may prove irresistible. According to a 2020 paper authored by Andrew Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University, and cosigned by nineteen other academics and NASA scientists, “it is only a matter of time” until a well-funded asteroid mining concern takes off, “either as part of an effort to develop a market or in anticipation of one.” Finally, there is always the chance of an unexpected breakthrough. As discussed at the National Cathedral event and publicized just about everywhere, the Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have affirmed the reality of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena—objects witnessed by trained observers and verified by advanced sensors, which travel with shocking speed and maneuverability, seemingly impervious to gravity and inertia. Feats deemed impossible may actually be demonstrated in our own atmosphere. It sounds far-out, but perhaps, with government support, scientists will figure out how these objects work. Then maybe the trip to Mars no longer takes two hundred days. Maybe it takes a week. Or a blink. What then? Do we let Musk and Bezos simply purchase sovereignty over the stars? All Your Space Are Belong to Us Capital is staking unprecedented claims. In Genesis, God said to “fill the Earth and subdue it”; no such instructions apply to celestial bodies. Astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz, who organized a 2018 conference on “Decolonizing Mars,” says Musk’s plan would mean giving up on discovering the history of Earth’s neighbor. If there is life on other planets, human settlement could easily destroy it. But who cares about some lousy extraterrestrial microbes? The privatized space race is all about control. Predictably, the space lords’ colonies would be governed as fiefdoms dressed up as libertarian paradises. An O’Neill Cylinder or an uninhabited planet might seem to satisfy the colonial fantasy of a blank canvas for economic and political expression. But no. The easel, the palette, the pigments, and the brushes will belong to the space lords, not to mention royalties in perpetuity from any intellectual property created using their space technologies. Musk, audaciously, says existing laws won’t apply in his Martian sandbox. The terms of service for SpaceX’s Starlink specify that “the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.” Musk says he favors “direct democracy” on Mars. Sure, OK. No democracy can exist where one company controls the life support systems. Vote against the boss? No rations for you. Labor unrest? Try striking without oxygen. Musk claims Mars will be “the planet of opportunity,” promising “an explosion of entrepreneurial activity, because Mars will need everything from iron foundries to pizza joints.” Like many awful bosses, Musk imagines intolerable working conditions can be smoothed over with pizza on Fridays. Bezos, likewise, casts himself as a beneficent facilitator of off-world commerce. Once his space colonies are established, he wants the entire Earth to be zoned for “light industry,” with polluting activities moving off our home planet. It sounds unpracticable, but let’s roll with his idea. Earth would become a nature park, overseen by enlightened caretakers. The prospect of global zoning restrictions might appeal to environmentalists. But this proposal is coming from a rapacious capitalist who made his fortune burning fossil fuels. What he wants is a global mandate for anyone engaged in “heavy” manufacturing to pay him a hefty tax. Consider: Bezos would own the means of access to space (his rockets), as well as the infrastructure required to do business there (his colonies). At that point, his control over planetary logistics would make Amazon’s chokehold on e-commerce seem quaint—and establish Blue Origin as a universal monopoly. The mind travels to some dark places imagining life for the space lords’ subjects. Their record as employers does not inspire confidence. Amazon systematically inflicts physical injury on warehouse workers and psychological damage on office staff. In September, a group of twenty-one current and former Blue Origin employees published an open letter decrying the company’s “toxic,” sexist, and abusive environment; dissent was stifled and safety concerns ignored, driving some to suicidal thoughts. “One directive held out SpaceX as a model, in that ‘burnout was part of their labor strategy,’” the letter noted. And indeed, Musk’s tyrannical tendencies are notorious. As I reported in my 2018 book on Silicon Valley, SpaceX had a revealing nickname among some employees: SlaveX. Press reports depict workers subjected to grueling twelve-hour shifts and impromptu 1 a.m. meetings, all to ensure that Musk’s Starship factory operates around the clock—this despite findings by Congress that overly demanding schedules “directly contributed” to the 1986 Challenger disaster. Musk brags about demanding personal approval via email over the smallest production issues. How would that work when it takes a radio signal up to twenty minutes to travel between planets? On Musk’s Mars, there would be literally no escape from his maniacal, absolute authority. He says enlisting to work there would be voluntary. What if someone wants to quit? Would they have to buy their way home? I’m doubtful Musk will find enough people eager to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a one-way ticket to guaranteed isolation and likely death on a freezing rock. It seems more likely he’ll adopt a proven model, indentured servitude, and front travel costs for those who sign away their rights. There are many arguments about what laws should apply to people in space. In my view, it’s all academic until somebody builds a sustainable off-world habitat. Existing treaties may proscribe an East India Company scenario on Mars. But if Musk gets there first with the blessing of the U.S. government, who’ll stop him? How much influence could any terrestrial government wield over activities tens of millions of miles away? And why would any nation be inclined to assert such authority when its economy and security have grown inextricable from the fortunes of private space companies? Both Bezos and Musk are clear about how they see the role of government: to make amenable laws, to buy their rockets, and to foot the bill for research and development. Asked at the National Cathedral whether people should be comfortable with the growing role of the private sector in space, Bezos said yes, of course, and laid out a task for vestigial civic institutions: “Government will still have a role to play,” he said, “but they should be doing the really hard things.” For instance, he went on, developing “hyperspace point-to-point travel” is best left to the public sector. And if hyperspace travel proves impossible, hey, at least it wasn’t his money burned. Witness the space lord mindset. The richest man in the world, who pays almost no taxes, thinks public money should underwrite his conquest of the universe. While he hoards glory and power like a budding Baron Harkonnen, zipping between the stars and enjoying the fruits of a renewed Eden, we plebes do the “the really hard things”—toiling to grow his fortune, breathing recycled air, eating space paste, and slowly forgetting how luxurious it was to inhabit a self-sustaining ecosystem that wasn’t owned by one strange bald man. Best case, life in a Bezos colony sounds like being trapped in an airport. At least there’s Mozart! Musk might be even more deranged. In 2015, he went on Stephen Colbert’s CBS late-night show and talked about his plans to terraform Mars. Colbert asked how. Musk explained the fastest way to warm the Martian climate would be to “drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles.” Colbert replied by calling Musk a supervillain. (Correct. Specifically, he’s setting himself up as the antagonist in Total Recall.) Scientists noted that Musk’s plan wouldn’t work. It raised other practical questions, too, namely: Where would Musk get a nuke? If the day comes when the space lords control nuclear arsenals, you’ll know there’s been a regime change. Space privatization is a recipe for corporate totalitarianism, and not only inside the hypothetical off-world colonies. The costs involved are so great, and the stakes so high, that moving forward with such plans necessitates a de facto capture of the public sector by private interests. Any show of accountability for a company that claims dominion over an entire planet would be just that—a show. Humanity would be wise to imagine a different future. It’s not that there couldn’t be good reasons to move people into space. But militaries and corporations must not call the shots. In 1963, JFK proposed a joint lunar mission with the Soviet Union. That now sounds like a radically different way of thinking. If we were able to envision international partnerships, Congress might repeal the 2011 Wolf Amendment that forbids NASA from cooperating with China. And if we were willing to tax the space lords back down to Earth, their ill-gotten fortunes could be plowed into public, international scientific efforts. The United States could then ratify the 1979 Moon Treaty, which bans private ownership over extraterrestrial real estate and establishes space resources as the “common heritage of mankind.” Once all that’s done, there will still be roles for space entrepreneurs. Maybe they can deliver pizza.
Becoming Martian Chanda Prescod-Weinstein The first Black woman in space, Dr. Mae Jemison, told poet Nikki Giovanni in a 1993 Essence magazine interview, “The Third World will be the ultimate beneficiary of space technology because we’re moving away from infrastructures.” Giovanni, who like Jemison has Alabama roots, was thrilled. This Afrofuturist techno-optimism is my favorite kind, even if as a Black feminist theoretical physicist, I have become quite cynical. Like Giovanni, I am a Star Trek fanatic. I believe in the Vulcan philosophy of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations” even as I rail against what I call the diversity-and-inclusion racket here on Earth. My own experiences as a Black scientist have led me to believe the night sky is every person’s ancestral heritage and that connecting with the sky is part of what makes us human. Only recently did I learn that two of my heroes were discussing these very ideas in a Black women’s magazine around the same time I, a ten-year-old Black girl, was deciding to become a theoretical physicist. Describing the items that she took into space with her, Dr. Jemison told Giovanni, “I wanted everyone to know that space belongs to all of us.” I love this statement, though I worry about the connotation of the verb belongs. In the context of this colonizer language, English, I often think of Adrienne Rich’s poem “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children,” and in particular the line, “This is the oppressor’s language / yet I need it to talk to you.” As members of the Black Atlantic, descendants of Africans who were kidnapped from their homes and forced to survive the Middle Passage and slavery, Jemison, Giovanni, and I share a linguistic displacement. We speak the language of our ancestors’ kidnappers and owners; we are socialized into their capitalist relationship to land—and now space. When Jemison says “belongs,” does she mean it in the sense of “owned”? When I speak of an “ancestral heritage,” do I mean something more than a capital inheritance? This is not simply metaphysical speculation. These questions are, for me, matters of actual physics. They have been, for close to a century now, material issues of national security for rich nation-states. And as we enter the 2020s, they are understood to be of enormous economic significance. Meanwhile, low-Earth orbit is more and more crammed with tiny satellites launched by SpaceX, which is led by South African billionaire Elon Musk. The company tells us that these facilities are on a humanitarian mission to provide internet to rural communities; I simply cannot imagine these are their only intentions, and as a member of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Dark Matter Working Group, I am keenly aware that these satellites have materially damaged our ability to observe the night sky. I am angry about this, but I must reckon with the fact that my mother and stepfather, who recently moved to a rural area to escape the incapacitating smoke of California’s persistent fires, are among the beneficiaries of satellite internet. Musk is one of three billionaires to have launched a space company that claims to be rooted in humanitarian impulses yet looks, for all the evidence, like a power-hungry vanity project. He’s even easier to pick on than Richard Branson, who had the gall to echo Mae Jemison’s words about space belonging to us all while adamantly refusing to pay what many of us would agree are his fair share of taxes. Nobody likes Jeff Bezos, who has not only gutted small businesses but also is a bit of a bore. Musk, on the other hand, has given his youngest child a completely ridiculous, technoscience-inflected name, X Æ A-12. The Black African diaspora collectively giggled when rapper Azealia Banks referred to Musk, the child of a rich white investor in a Zambian emerald mine, as “Apartheid Clyde.” Indeed, Musk has an extraordinary amount of undemocratically allotted power. He claims that he is planning to take humanity to Mars. Back in reality, our global ecosystem’s ability to sustain life is collapsing under the weight of centuries of white supremacist, capitalist colonialism—the exact structures that allow Musk to be anything more than an engineer with a Twitter account. People murmur about how these billionaires are planning to escape and leave the rest of us behind on a catastrophically warmed planet. And it is easy in this context to transition from Star Trek fanatic to hostile, anti-space luddite. How can we imagine leaving Earth’s surface and making a livable home elsewhere when we can’t even get it right here? Becoming Earthian The idea that we can abandon Earth and just move on and not meet the same fate somewhere else is silly. Our problems travel into space with us, as exhibited by the history of exclusion from space faced by Black and disabled people, and anyone else who isn’t an abled hetcis white man. Without the protection of Earth’s atmosphere and the stabilizing influence of the Earth’s gravitational pull, life is hard. As science studies and disability studies scholar Ashley Shew likes to remind people, we haven’t even totally worked out poop in space. Read any account by astronauts about life in space, and inevitably you get to amusing notes about floating poop. There are a lot of diapers involved. And for some people, life in diapers is normal and necessary. I once shared a panel with Shew where she patiently explained why colostomy bag users are more ideal astronauts than those of us who use toilets to defecate. Conjuring the ideal spacefaring body requires a different kind of imagination. We should also stretch ourselves past the easy binary that governs our discussions about space and resource distribution here on the ground. Too many people believe that we must choose between living in better relations with our ecosystems (and each other) and going to space. People see the price tag associated with going to space—a number with a lot of zeros after it—and think we can’t afford it. The reality is, NASA has gotten multiple robots to Mars on a relatively light budget. What we spend on going to space is a tiny fraction of the annual defense (or major studio filmmaking) budget alone, though much of that money does ultimately end up in the hands of defense contractors who assist in designing the launch facilities. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. We can afford to do more than be space curmudgeons, and we can go to space without relying on a weaponized military-industrial complex. I have to make this argument all the time, sometimes to myself. And the thing is, people are thrilled about going to space for non-military reasons. Nikki Giovanni is excited about going to Mars. In her collection Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose, Mars is a persistent refrain. That is where the Black child can escape to. Mars is a canvas for her Black freedom dreams. Sometimes I struggle to remember that this can be so, because our modern nationalist and capitalist space race cynically co-opts humanist visions of journeys into space. But then I think about Giovanni telling fellow Black Southerner and writer Kiese Laymon about growing okra—a staple of African and Black Atlantic diets—on Mars, and I remember, no, she is talking about a very different universe of possibilities. In her poem “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars),” Giovanni declares that “the trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.” She’s referring to the Middle Passage: the ancestors who survived that journey, she imagines, know the patience required for a difficult journey and understand how to start anew after a treacherous experience. This is an uncomfortable thought for me. The distance is almost incomprehensibly enormous between a chosen journey into space and a kidnapping and compulsory transatlantic journey with insufficient food, lying in one’s own waste and the waste of others, sometimes alongside people who have died or are dying. The comparison feels foul, even as I understand that she means that our ancestors made the decision to make something of their journey, to be human anyway, in all of the ways available to them. Giovanni’s poem argues that NASA needs “to ask us: How did you calm your fears . . . How / were you able to decide you were human even when everything / said you were not . . . ?” The comparison is apt in the sense that the Middle Passage produced the possibility of fantastical journeys for others; so it is with our current arrangement in space travel. Both Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have recently lifted off from the Earth’s surface and flown at least to the edge of the atmosphere, if not really to space. The economic resources that made these journeys possible find their origins in the Middle Passage and similar violent, colonial nightmares, as well as the near-sweatshop labor conditions propagated by Bezos at Amazon. What’s more, the technological materials needed for spaceflight rely on the violently colonial global mining industry. In Brazil, where the real Amazon—a necessary part of our global ecosystem—is being burned to the ground, Black Brazilians known as quilombolas are displaced from their land in order to expand a spaceport in Alcântara. In Indonesia, the indigenous Abrauw Clan of Biak Island are facing the same fate. Meanwhile, peoples around the world are experiencing mass displacement, famine, and other tragedies because of the man-made technological advancements that drive climate change. As a former NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow, I am aware that spacefaring organized by government organizations is not necessarily better. The next-generation iteration of the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s JWST, has, as of this writing, a planned December 2021 launch from a place called the European Spaceport. Coincidentally, the spaceport is nowhere near Europe but is in the Latin American region known as French Guiana, which as an overseas department is not technically a French colony, but it sure isn’t an independent country. Stuck with the Worst of Us This colonialism seems inescapable. So maybe I, too, want to lift off to Mars, to start over, to escape somehow. But part of the problem with being the kind of scientist I am is knowing how improbable this is—not just now but ever. After the sun, the next nearest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri. This means that the nearest planets to us outside of our solar system are Proxima Centauri b (first observed in 2016) and Proxima Centauri c (first observed in 2020). These planets are 4.2 light years away, and because the number involved is close to zero, you might think, “Well that’s not far.” But to understand what this distance entails, let’s recall that a light year is the distance light travels in the course of a year. Light, everybody knows, goes the fastest that anything can go in the universe: in a vacuum, it travels at 6.7 x 10^8 miles per hour, which is to say that it travels one million times faster than the speed limit on most American freeways. This means that to travel to Proxima Centauri in under five years, we would need to travel a million times faster than I do on my commute. The fastest people have ever gone in space is about twenty-five thousand miles per hour. At that speed, we could get to Proxima Centauri in 114,080 years. It’s hard to go much faster than this, the speed of light notwithstanding. People necessarily go more slowly than light because the more massive an object is, the more energy required to give it speed. The 2019 Chinese film The Wandering Earth, adapted from Liu Ciuxin’s short story of the same name, imagines that when our sun enters a red giant phase (which will genuinely happen in about 4.5 billion years), the people of Earth can collectively work together to rocket the planet to a safer location in another solar system. Though the premise of the film is intriguing, the idea of developing the type of energy source needed to move the Earth out of orbit like that is deeply unrealistic—though ultimately still more likely than traveling at the speed of light. The energy required to make anything more massive than a photon travel at the speed of light is, in our current theories of physics, infinite. In other words, without a radical new understanding of spacetime physics, we won’t be going anywhere much further than Mars. And our current technological capacity means that it will be a long, long while before we can sustain comfortable, habitable lifestyles there. We are apparently stuck here together, Apartheid Clyde and I. If our species somehow managed to get ourselves to Proxima Centauri b, which is in that solar system’s habitable zone, we’d also almost certainly verify what we know already from observations: it likely has no atmosphere. We would not even be in a situation where the air had the wrong composition. We’d have to populate the atmosphere from scratch, and our ability to do so would depend on getting the necessary chemicals in place, the right gravitational conditions (a massive enough planet to hold the atmosphere in place), and the right radiative environment (wherein radiation from the star wouldn’t catastrophically damage the atmosphere we installed). We still don’t understand our own atmosphere. It’s hard to imagine we’ll be building a new one any time soon. But if we develop the capacity to do so, we should use that knowledge to rebuild our home. I hate to say “rebuild” because our home has not completely burned to the ground—yet. Well, not everyone’s. Global warming-induced fires have already destroyed so much. Californians like me are keenly aware of this. The entire West Coast has undergone a shift in the last few years, with “fire season” taking on a new meaning. Whole towns have been destroyed, lives lost, lives permanently altered. Meanwhile, the Global South—including the poorest and often Blackest parts of the American South—has been experiencing these kinds of violent, catastrophic transformations for a while. To Boldly Go Yet for all my cynicism, I remain a dark matter theorist who loves to share images from the Hubble Space Telescope with anyone who will listen. I write a monthly column about particle physics and astrophysics specifically because I believe in humanity’s powerful connection with space. Our species evolved under the night sky, and the Black feminist philosopher of science Sylvia Wynter has proclaimed us to be homo narrans, a storytelling species. One of our first sites of storytelling is the night sky. This is how I, the cosmologist, the cosmic storyteller, am made. In my own work as a Black person who is a dark matter expert, I take great pains to make clear for people that Black people are in fact not dark matter but the same kind of “normal” matter that white people are made of. I like to highlight the irony that the kind of matter that comprises both humans and stars is really a minor component of what’s out there. Dark matter dominates gravitating matter. We are the cosmic weirdos, I love telling people. I think there is nothing inconsistent with this worldview in saying that I think Nikki Giovanni is a Martian. I don’t mean she was born on Mars. But she has declared so many times her intent to go to Mars that she has written herself into the geography that I imagine for it. This reflects one of the great aspects of our traditions here in the Black Atlantic: we are always coming up with new ways to be people, and we have always known that even in terrible circumstances, the people could fly. And so I delight in Giovanni’s hypothetical to Krista Tippett in an episode of On Being: Giovanni is asking us to imagine Black pleasure in space, to imagine something other than a capitalist catastrophe. “All my people have ever done is go forward,” she goes on to tell Tippett. Maybe Black liberation thought can get us to space in a different way. The story goes that Star Trek (the original series) was the only show that Martin Luther King would let his children stay up late to watch. “You are reflecting what we are fighting for,” he told Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, the Enterprise’s communications officer. Nichols went on to become an advocate for NASA, playing an active role in the program that recruited the first generation of American men and women of color who flew to space, including a physician named Mae Jemison. When she eventually lifted off, Dr. Jemison carried with her Blackass markers of her life and world in Chicago and beyond: “An Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater poster, an Alpha Kappa Alpha banner, a flag that had flown over the Organization of African Unity, and proclamations from Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History and the Chicago public school system.” Jemison told Giovanni that the first thing she saw from space was Chicago, but that eventually she noted Somalia, too. Seeing the globe in its totality, it was still both Black and contextualized by what her journey did and did not mean to the Black diaspora. “I’m not the first or the only African American woman who had the skills and the talent to become an astronaut. I had the opportunity. All people have produced scientists and astronomers,” she told Giovanni. This was part of Jemison’s version of something all astronauts are said to experience, the overview effect: a shift in how they see the world and the universe because of their firsthand experience seeing what Carl Sagan called our “pale blue dot” from the heavens. In other words, to touch space might well be transformative—if the experience can be democratized. But this requires that we look at power differently and acknowledge its deeply uneven distribution in our globalized world. The only ethical way to space is through practices that sanctify life, rather than stand on the backs of others, which is what billionaire space cowboys are doing when they refuse to care for the environment, or to pay their workers fair wages, or to pay their fair share of taxes. Regardless of their aspirations, Musk and Bezos and Branson should be remembered for the environmental destruction wrought by the corporations they have helmed. They should also be remembered for hanging onto their riches, rather than making this potentially transformative money available to public trusts that are tasked with responding to the climate disaster. Instead of saving Earth, these men dream of escaping it, and they hope that other space geeks like me will join them in the delusion. But Swiss astronomer Didier Queloz was right when he said in his 2019 Nobel Prize lecture that rather than trying to resettle elsewhere in space, we should endeavor to find a way to live in equilibrium with our home planet. Queloz might seem like the best person to comment on this, since he won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to the discovery of the first of what are now nearly five thousand confirmed exoplanets, 51 Pegasi b. 51 Pegasi b is about fifty lightyears away, even more impossibly out of reach than Proxima Centauri b. And it’s easy to point to the impossibility of making the physics work out as the reason that we have to “settle” for Earth. But we have yet to seriously consider what it would mean for us, psychologically and socially, to permanently detach from the planet that birthed us. Ultimately, we will be better positioned to succeed in our journeys far beyond our familiar star if we learn how to succeed in our journey here on Earth. Without the capacity and the will to live in good relations with our local ecosystems and each other, wherever we are, we will be on a suicide mission.
Princes of Infinite Space Kyle Paoletta In the spring of 2016, with most of the United States suffering through a protracted nervous breakdown brought on by that year’s presidential primaries, the billionaire venture capitalist Yuri Milner called a press conference near the top of One World Trade Center in hopes of turning the nation’s attention skyward. “It is time to launch the next great leap in human history,” Milner proclaimed from behind a podium branded with the name of his new initiative, Breakthrough Starshot. While covering the over twenty-five trillion miles that separate the Earth from Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our own, would take over a hundred thousand years with existing technology, Milner explained, a microchip attached to a light sail could theoretically be propelled across that distance in just two decades with a sufficiently powerful laser. This, Milner boasted, was the “Silicon Valley approach to spaceflight.” To back up his harebrained scheme to laser a kite through interstellar space, Milner assembled an attention-grabbing collection of scholars in front of his PowerPoint. Stephen Hawking was the headliner, and he was joined on the dais by two former NASA bigwigs, the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, and Ann Druyen, a writer best known as the collaborator and wife of Carl Sagan, America’s original celebrity scientist. Rounding out the group was Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist known for his research on black holes who harbored his own quiet aspirations of joining the ranks of Sagan’s contemporary imitators. After the panel received a credulous question about whether there was any precedent for a device the size of Milner’s so-called StarChip traveling at the speeds Breakthrough Starshot called for, Loeb piped up with a little provocative speculation about intelligent life projecting itself across the universe using similar technology. “You might wonder whether there is a possibility that such things are flying near us from other civilizations,” he answered, unable to stifle an excited grin. Two years later, Loeb was arguing that evidence had been found that a probe from an alien civilization had indeed made it to our solar system, and that the device in question just so happened to use the same light sail technology planned for Breakthrough Starshot. The interstellar object was discovered by an observatory on Maui and dubbed ‘Oumuamua, meaning “messenger from far away who arrives first” in Hawaiian, in recognition of it being the first interstellar object confirmed to have entered the solar system. After it was first sighted in the fall of 2017, astronomers around the world turned as many instruments as they could to the object, recording all manner of physical attributes that added up to a puzzling picture. ‘Oumuamua behaved like a comet, though it did not appear to be expelling hydrogen gas. It was about ten times as long as it was wide, an extreme dimensional ratio. The object was also extraordinarily reflective and, strangely, sped up as it exited our solar system. While his scientific peers offered various hypotheses for how a naturally occurring object could behave in this way, Loeb argued that the field of astronomy was too disdainful of the search for alien life to accept the simplest explanation: ‘Oumuamua was not naturally occurring at all. Last year, Loeb spelled out his theory at length in a new book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. In a chapter running through and then dismissing the various conventional explanations for ‘Oumuamua’s behavior, he argues that the idea that the object took the form of a large, incredibly thin pancake seemed more persuasive than an earlier suggestion that it was shaped like a cigar, even as a piece of space rock being so thin yet so wide seemed implausible. “Is there a simpler way to achieve the required surface-to-volume ratio for a pancake-shaped object?” Loeb writes. “Yes, there is. You could build a thin, sturdy piece of equipment capable of deviating due to the effects of solar-radiation pressure to exactly such specifications.” If ‘Oumuamua was indeed a messenger, it could only have been dispatched by aliens. Exo Exo Gossip Planet If the astrophysicists are to be believed, there are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. Of these, some 4.1 billion are said to have the same qualities as the Sun. Based on the 4,575 potentially habitable exoplanets that have already been discovered and confirmed by NASA—those rocky worlds whose atmosphere and temperature suggest conditions similar to what’s found on Earth—it is now estimated that there are anywhere between 300 million and 3.6 billion solar systems in our corner of the universe that include a planet that could potentially harbor life. Bearing all this in mind, it’s reasonable to suggest that humans are very, very unlikely to be the only technologically sophisticated lifeform in the galaxy. None of which is the same as saying that we can be certain that there is intelligent life out there, or that it in any way resembles what’s found on Earth. To argue otherwise is to make an unscientific about-face from an estimate formed through dutiful calculation to pure conjecture. Taking that step is a lot more exciting than actual science tends to be, and it’s a move we’re often nudged to make when science gets filtered through the Discovery+ infotainment complex. What’s really surprising, though, is when this sort of conjecture is embraced not by a layman who hasn’t picked up a graphing calculator since high school, but by no less an eminence than the then-chair of the Harvard Department of Astronomy. That Loeb should wager all the credibility his high-flying position affords him on as dubious a proposition as ‘Oumuamua being proof of concept for Breakthrough Starshot is a striking example of the deep allure that fame has to the scientist who has accomplished all he can in the academic realm but finds himself gazing out across the quad and wanting more. Since he first arrived at Harvard in the early 1990s, Loeb has described the early formation of the universe after the Big Bang, predicted the behavior of black holes, and developed a technique for identifying exoplanets. These discoveries led to a short profile in the New York Times and numerous mentions in Smithsonian and Time but weren’t enough for him to become a true scientific celebrity in an age that seems to be minting a new one every few months. For cognitive science, there’s David Eagleman and Steven Pinker; for evolutionary history, Yuval Noah Harari and Richard Dawkins. Physics is the most crowded field of all: there are the string theory hustlers Brian Greene and Leonard Susskind, the futurist Michio Kaku, and the grand poohbah of the whole bunch, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has spent the past twenty years carefully patterning his career off Carl Sagan’s. None of these princes of the sciences has made nearly as great a contribution to their field as they have to the public awareness of it. They are less researchers than ambassadors, but ambassadors who position themselves as the focus of attention by operating as translators between the unimaginable sophistication of academic discourse and the simple ways of the average American. Even the most basic scientific facts are treated as revolutionary by the scientific nobility, particularly if those facts bolster the sense of the audience as having a blinkered understanding of reality that needs expanding by the genius in their midst. In the opening pages of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind—16 million copies sold and counting—Yuval Noah Harari puts on a masterclass in intellectual negging. He describes the fact that Homo sapiens belong to a biological family that includes chimpanzees and gorillas as “one of history’s most closely guarded secrets,” never mind that the basics of Linnaean taxonomy are taught in middle school, if not before. The conspiratorial turn has only just begun. “Homo sapiens has kept hidden an even more disturbing secret,” he continues. “Not only do we possess an abundance of uncivilized cousins, once upon a time we had quite a few brothers and sisters as well.” Believe it or not, folks, there used to be other members of the genus homo. That one of these species, Neanderthals, was first described in 1864 and has so thoroughly permeated pop culture that Ben Stiller once sprayed a group of them with a fire extinguisher goes unmentioned. Such an acknowledgment might undercut Harari’s attempt to style himself as not only a scientific expert but the sort of bold truth-teller who demands a committed following. There’s a Buzz in Your Vest As Extraterrestrial makes clear, Avi Loeb has carefully studied the playbook for promoting oneself as a sage in possession of rare knowledge. “Only a thin line separates philosophy, theology, and science,” he writes, reframing science as an esoteric intellectual and spiritual pursuit rather than a fundamental component of general knowledge. Given that the reader is surely confounded by the strange ways of the astronomist, Loeb generously offers to demystify the field. That is, so long as the reader makes peace with their own stupidity. “When we struggle to make sense of the universe,” Loeb writes, “the fault is in our comprehension, not in the facts or the laws of nature.” In 2015, David Eagleman, a Stanford neuroscientist known for his bestselling book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain and for hosting a PBS miniseries on cognition took the stage at a TED conference and launched into his own version of the same hustle. “We are built out of very small stuff, and we are embedded in a very large cosmos,” he says in a video of the event, keeping things nice and dumbed down. “We are not very good at understanding reality at either of those scales, and that’s because our brains haven’t evolved to understand the world at that scale. Instead, we’re trapped on this very thin slice of perception right in the middle.” Both Eagleman and Loeb tell their audience that they don’t know anything, but do so in a way that makes that lack of knowledge palatable, even normal. Their pronouncements on humanity’s ignorance fall into a grand tradition in popular science, one that harkens back to Cosmos, the landmark 1980 documentary series that turned Carl Sagan into a household name. In the opening moments of the first episode, the camera fades from deep space into crashing waves and then to a wide shot of the cliffs above, before zooming in on Sagan as he intones, “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” Once Sagan’s face and signature tousled hair are finally filling the frame, he continues, “The size and age of the cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding; lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home, the Earth.” Once the audience has been placed into a subordinate role, they are primed to bear witness to a great man’s knowledge. “As a neuroscientist,” Eagleman says in his TED Talk, “I’m interested in the way that technology might expand our umwelt, and how that’s going to change the experience of being human.” It turns out that telling the audience all the ways in which they were deficient was not done in service of granting them new understanding, but rather to debut a product: a vest that Eagleman says has shown some promise in bolstering the perception of the deaf by converting sounds into pulses that can be felt on the skin. Midway through his presentation, Eagleman strips off his shirt to reveal the vest—as well as his perfectly toned arms. “As I’m speaking, the sound is getting translated into dynamic patterns of vibration,” he says, turning around for the audience to see the vest light up with LEDs, prompting applause. Six years later, the product has shrunk from a vest to the Buzz, a Fitbit-like wristband that is marketed not to people who are hard of hearing, but anyone who merely wants to feel sound for the low, low price of $799. Eagleman has completed the leap from famous brain scientist to a man making bank off brain science, all thanks to a little venture capital from his friends. The DeGrasse High Avarice is hardly the only temptation that lures members of the scientific priesthood away from their stated values. Celebrity in its own right is more often the motivating factor, as is evident in the career of Neil DeGrasse Tyson, whose accomplishments as an astrophysicist have always been overshadowed by his skills as a showman. Tyson established himself as a public figure soon after his 1996 appointment to lead the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History by persuading monied Manhattanites to fork over $210 million for the facility’s reconstruction. From there, Tyson went national, serving on a presidential commission, authoring a memoir, and then hosting a PBS miniseries. By the late aughts, he was appearing on the Colbert Report and interviewing Joan Rivers on his podcast. All of this culminated in the big budget 2014 revival of Cosmos on Fox, its debut episode featuring Tyson standing on the very same cliff that Sagan had surmounted a generation before. By this point, five years had passed since the last time Tyson had been published in a scientific journal, but no matter—the man who had once merely theorized starstuff was now shimmering with it. The elaborate edifice of Tyson’s fame came crashing down in 2018 when one woman accused him of rape and several others said he had made inappropriate sexual advances, including a production assistant on Cosmos. Tyson dismissed the claims in a rambling Facebook post, writing, “I see myself as a loving husband and as a public servant—a scientist and educator who serves at the will of the public.” It’s telling that the most famous scientist in America would also turn out to be the sort of man who wielded the power of his station in a way akin to a Harvey Weinstein or a Matt Lauer. Fame does not necessarily turn someone into a monster, but it may just be that you need to start out monstrous to hunger so ravenously for celebrity. It should also be no surprise that, even as his public profile has lessened since the accusations, Tyson has hardly been canceled into anonymity. He retained the top job at the Hayden Planetarium and has published three more books, with another on the way. It’s impossible to imagine Tyson’s station in life proving so durable if he didn’t enjoy such a robust Q Score. While none of his fellows in the scientific aristocracy are necessarily looking to behave as Tyson did once he became a celebrity, it’s hard to believe his career represents much of a cautionary tale, either—especially after his fall from grace created a cold, starless vacuum for the role of America’s most famous scientist. Frontal Loeb Whether or not Loeb theorizing that ‘Oumuamua was a piece of alien technology represented a calculated attempt to become famous, it certainly had that effect. In Extraterrestrial, Loeb writes that, mere hours after his first paper on ‘Oumuamua was picked up by the press, four television crews were vying for space in his office in Cambridge: “I tried to field their questions while simultaneously responding to a steady stream of phone calls and e-mails from newspaper reporters.” While much of that attention came from journalists merely chasing an undeniably buzzy story—what editor would resist the opportunity to put “Harvard” and “alien probe” together in a single headline?—there were also plenty of reporters who quickly picked up on the fact that Loeb was basically saying that ‘Oumuamua used the same technology he was in the process of developing with Milner. In his book, Loeb recounts one German journalist saying to him, “According to the proverb, whoever has only a hammer will see nothing but nails.” While he acknowledges that his ideas were certainly influenced by his work on Breakthrough Starshot, Loeb sniffs at the suggestion that the faculties of a scientist of his stature could be compromised in this way, writing that “the problem with the proverb was that it focused attention on the hammer rather than the person wielding it. Not only do skilled carpenters most definitely not see nails everywhere, but they are trained to differentiate among those they do observe.” Self-aggrandizement is a typical mode for the celebrity scientist (Tyson, for example, quotes himself in the epigraph to his book Astrophysics for People in a Hurry), and it is one Loeb has embraced as his public profile has risen in tandem with his vociferous arguments about ‘Oumuamua. He implicitly compares himself to Galileo in the book, equating the scientific consensus that ‘Oumuamua was naturally occurring to the Catholic Church’s refusal to accept heliocentrism. “Unfortunately, the humility accompanying our never-ending learning experience is, as in the case of ‘Oumuamua, sometimes forgotten out of hubris,” Loeb writes, “whether exercised by ecclesiastical authorities, secular authorities, or, sometimes, scientists who declare victory prematurely and assume a line of inquiry has reached its end.” A little over a month after Extraterrestrial made the New York Times bestseller list, the broader scientific inquiry into ‘Oumuamua was indeed taking a turn for the end credits, thanks to the release of a study by two astronomers at Arizona State University arguing that much of the object’s strange behavior would make sense if it was a piece of a Pluto-like rock that had been sent spiraling into space by an asteroid impact. Briefly, ‘Oumuamua’s shape could be explained by the effect of cosmic rays on a round object over the course of a half billion years of interstellar travel, its shininess by the presence of nitrogen ice (naturally occurring on Pluto and one of Neptune’s moons), and its acceleration around the sun by the evaporation of that nitrogen ice, which would cause a rocket effect. Humility be damned, Loeb has only redoubled his efforts since then. Though he claims in Extraterrestrial that he “neither sought the limelight nor particularly enjoyed it,” in the year since the book’s publication Loeb has received numerous magazine profiles and appeared on every American cable news channel, as well as Britain’s Channel 4 and ILTV in his native Israel. The public push seems to be having the desired effect, with Loeb now becoming well-known enough that he can feature as part of a clue on Jeopardy! All of this led up to the launch of a new initiative at Harvard in July, the Galileo Project for the Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts. The Galileo Project’s goal is to move the search for extraterrestrial life “from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated, and systematic scientific research.” Though Yuri Milner remains focused on his own space-based vanity project, Loeb has secured financial support for the new scheme from a different billionaire patron, Frank Laukien. Even better, Loeb told Scientific American that Laukien’s money comes with “no strings attached.” So what if the core reasoning that animates Loeb’s neo-SETI start-up has been utterly disproven by the very scientific method the astrophysicist pledges fealty to throughout Extraterrestrial? Being the alien guy has gotten him this far, there’s no reason to stop now. The Galileo Project, like Breakthrough Starshot, is unlikely to produce much of anything beyond a warm sense of innovation in the hearts of all its board members. Who cares? Getting to the point in your career where you can rustle up enough money from rich doofuses to establish a program as blatantly self-serving as the Galileo Project is as good as it gets for an academic lusting after fame. One small step for Avi Loeb, one giant leap for celebrity scientists everywhere.
Spoiling the Last Frontier Matthew King This past October, while scrolling through social media one Wednesday morning, I reluctantly clicked into a livestream of yet another billionaire joyride to the lower limits of outer space. It had been a summer of first launches, overhyped PR events intended to jump-start a long-anticipated second space race. In July, licensing megalomaniac Richard Branson flew fifty-three miles above Earth in his Virgin Galactic rocket plane, just a few weeks before supply-chain zealot Jeff Bezos rode his Blue Origin rocket some thirteen miles higher for a whopping ten-minute journey through zero gravity before landing back in the West Texas desert. In September, the Mars-obsessed emerald heir Elon Musk had the surprising decency to stay home while his company SpaceX sent an all-civilian crew—the tickets purchased by a fellow billionaire, the e-payments tycoon Jared Isaacman—on a multiday mission around Earth, now memorialized in a five-part Netflix documentary series. For these modern robber barons, the dawn of commercial space activity marks nothing less than a new chapter for humanity. Branson’s self-proclaimed dream is to “make space accessible to all,” a prospect that inspires little faith given his defunct rail service and bankrupt airline. For Bezos, space seems to represent limitless capacity, the potential to move “all polluting industry off of Earth,” and create floating colonies that house “a trillion humans . . . a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts.” Musk sees himself as some cosmic guardian, helping to preserve the “light of consciousness” by making humans a “multi-planetary species.” Despite this grandiose rhetoric, these launches accomplished something much more prosaic in the short-term; they opened the lucrative market for civilian spaceflight. No matter how flush their war chests of cash and equity, these billionaires know the success of their sci-fi fantasies relies on a succession of practical businesses that can keep the grand delusion afloat for decades to come. Space tourism is one of those big bets, and on that autumn day, as I watched Blue Origin host its second civilian launch, the sight had already become somewhat familiar. The concept had been tested, the price point verified (roughly $250,000 to $500,000 per seat, which might seem outrageous but is not much higher than what the 1 percent already spends on private air travel in one business quarter). Now the industry just needed to drum up demand. As such, the livestream I watched was not just a silent feed but a feverish infomercial. Bezos trotted around the launch site in his blue jumpsuit and cowboy hat, inspiring jokes that he might join the flight at the last moment. The crew this time around included William Shatner, the legendary Star Trek captain who looked terrified standing beside the real-life, plutocrat-funded pleasure craft. Two ecstatic hosts provided play-by-play narration of the press conference and behind-the-scenes footage, like Monday Night Football commentators. The segues between scenes showcased the all-inclusive Blue Origin experience: luxury Airstream trailers, cozy outdoor bonfires, blue specialty cocktails. It was a Marriott-ized vision of space travel reminiscent of James Gray’s film Ad Astra (2019), in which a near-future moon base resembles an even bleaker version of New York’s Penn Station, with the same windowless passageways and grimy fast-food franchises. All three of the billionaire-backed companies discussed above plan to launch dozens, if not hundreds, of civilian flights each year. And tourism represents just one corner of the booming market for skyward expansion, which raised a record $8.7 billion in venture capital funding over the past year, nearly double pre-pandemic levels. Perhaps the even bigger play is the tens of thousands of satellites they plan to launch into low Earth orbit (LEO) in the coming years. These mega-constellations, dubbed Starlink, OneWeb, and Project Kuiper, aim to “connect the world” by beaming high-speed subscription internet to every corner of Earth. The influx of capital and talent into this sector has spawned a growing industry of partners, suppliers, and competitors—early-stage ventures and public companies alike who want to make it easier and cheaper to launch more things into space more frequently. In the near term, that almost exclusively involves satellites, but someday it could encompass materials for research or manufacturing. Today, companies can already rent space in a cargo rocket to lift payloads into orbit, or even buy their own single-use DIY launch site that can fit inside a single shipping container. From a scientific perspective, these projects of course represent no great leaps forward for mankind. Humans have been flying rockets and satellites and astronauts into space for over sixty years. Government space programs pioneered low-gravity research decades ago. If anything, these latest ventures mark an inflection point for space as it evolves from a realm of national ambition to one of commercial exploitation. The brave new world unfolding before our eyes is no endless frontier of renewed exploration, but an uncontrolled experiment of epic proportions. How crowded and neglected can Earth’s orbital lanes become before catastrophe ensues? Rotten in the Stars The flip side of space exploration is the same trail of garbage that seems to follow wherever humanity ventures. But in this case, the consequences are potentially dire—and on a planetary scale. Much as our oceans have filled with soup-like swirls of plastic flotsam, decades of space activity have turned Earth’s orbits into a junkyard of metal debris. By this point, you’ve likely seen a news article or TV segment with diagrams of Earth blanketed by a thick swarm of dots, representing thousands of spent satellites, rockets, and upper-stage boosters, as well as the occasional glove or tool kit that slipped from an astronaut’s grasp. Left off these diagrams is the even more sprawling universe of objects too small to track: half a million marble-sized pieces, from stray nuts and bolts to paint chips; tens if not hundreds of millions of shrapnel bits from accidental collisions or intentional missile tests; and more than 100 trillion micro-objects smaller than one-hundred-thousandth of an inch, any one of which could pose a lethal threat when traveling about ten times faster than a bullet. Scientists have worried about orbital debris since the dawn of space travel. When the Sputnik launch sparked the first space race in 1957, it left behind its four-ton, final-stage rocket launcher in orbit. Eventually, gravitational forces should pull such discarded objects into a fiery doom through Earth’s upper atmosphere. This “self-cleaning” mechanism helps diminish the danger of collision—with other objects in space or onto a populated area down below. But depending on the object’s altitude, that natural process of deorbiting can take decades, if not centuries. Meanwhile, the mess accumulates, other objects collide, and roughly once every week, a large piece of debris survives reentry and crash-lands into Earth. The unique danger of space debris is its replicability. As zombie objects collide, they produce many more pieces of smaller debris and shrapnel, which become even harder to detect but remain dangerous; those offspring pieces then collide into other debris, and the reaction repeats, ad infinitum. Such explosive potential became a reality on February 10, 2009, when a defunct Russian Cosmos-2251 military satellite slammed into an active Iridium 33 commercial satellite. The incident—the first major accidental collision—defied every detection system and risk indicator; within weeks, it single-handedly doubled the total number of debris objects in orbit. Today, combatting space junk has already become a routine nuisance for satellites and astronauts; both rely on propulsion systems to dodge objects throughout their missions. The U.S. Space Command now issues more than one hundred thousand collision warnings every day. Last year, the International Space Station conducted multiple debris-avoidance maneuvers, including one in which the onboard crew had to evade a piece of debris spawned by a Chinese antisatellite test in 2007. For years, untracked pieces of space junk have chipped the ISS’s windows and punctured robotic limbs, informing new spacecraft designs specially outfitted with deflection shields. As more spacefaring companies plan a busy launch calendar, ideal dates and flight paths are as likely to be determined by openings in the shifting clouds of debris as they are by wind or rainy weather conditions. Despite these copious warning signs, the second space race barrels ahead. The number of active satellites in LEO is set to explode from a few thousand to more than one hundred thousand by the end of the decade, a ten-fold increase largely attributed to those mega-constellations of internet-beaming satellites. Musk’s Starlink has already launched over seventeen hundred units, accounting for nearly 40 percent of all active satellites in orbit; eventually, his fleet will number over forty thousand. OneWeb—which Branson backed for years until his relationship with the company exploded in classically disastrous fashion—has launched half of its planned 648 satellites, and Bezos’s Project Kuiper will begin launching the first of its own three thousand next year. This flood of new objects has scarcely begun, and already these satellites are increasing collision risk and curtailing the work of astronomers and climate observers. Even SpaceX’s revised, sun-shaded satellites are prone to photobombing long-exposure shots of the deep galaxy, wasting researchers’ limited time on digital tinkering to remove their glaring, anomalous streaks. Similar to how pieces of plastic marine pollution may eclipse the fish population within decades, astronomers predict that satellites will soon outnumber stars visible to the naked eye—another stark benchmark in our Anthropocene era. Some believe we’re already witnessing a worst-case scenario unfold, as the addition of new debris far outpaces the deorbiting of existing space junk. In 1978, NASA scientist Donald Kessler prophesied a scenario now known as “Kessler’s syndrome,” in which high orbital densities trigger a massive chain reaction rendering LEO unusable. “It has already started,” Kessler recently told Scientific American, an escalation of his stance in 2015, which still presumed the problem could be mitigated by retrieving the largest few hundred pieces of debris. “There is now agreement within the community that the debris environment has reached a ‘tipping point’ where debris would continue to increase even if all launches were stopped. It takes an Iridium-Cosmos type collision to get everyone’s attention. That’s what it boils down to . . . and we’re overdue for something like that to happen.” In Kessler’s view, all it might take are a few collisions between large objects to trigger a potentially cataclysmic reaction, turning LEO into a thick smog of atomized debris. Such a catastrophe would jeopardize not only billionaire vanity projects but the cosmic infrastructure underlying much of our technological lives. The blue GPS dot on your phone, emergency weather monitoring services, and digital financial transactions are just a few of the essential services that rely on satellites in LEO or deep, geostationary orbit, the two realms most cluttered with debris. As the European Space Agency director of operations, Rolf Densing, bluntly put it in 2017, “You might as well move into a museum if all the satellites are switched off.” You could argue it’s encouraging that space junk has become something of a cause célèbre. Debris is a staple of the sci-fi genre, in films like Wall-E (2008) and Gravity (2013), and most recently, the South Korean blockbuster Space Sweepers (2021), about a ragtag group of celestial scavengers in a future where Earth is nearly uninhabitable. The cosmic plight of debris has become a frequent subject of primetime news programs and special committees organized by the United Nations and World Economic Forum. Greta Thunberg hasn’t yet decried its sins, but we can expect it on her agenda soon. I was amused to find during my research that The Economist has reported on space junk incessantly for more than a decade, providing a real-time account of the journey from initial curiosity to mounting despair, in plain sight and full knowledge of its audience, our supposedly pragmatic powerbrokers. As seen with the pet cause of plastic marine pollution, the celebrity attention afforded to a collective problem can backfire. Rather than inspire the difficult work of forging new rules or frameworks, or committing to responsible disposal guidelines, the specter of an environmental crisis can spur an unproductive focus on private choices and silver-bullet solutions. There’s nothing our deep-pocketed monopolists love more than to find new reasons for throwing technology at social problems. In the fast-devolving context of our second space race and worsening orbital debris densities, we’re now seeing the industry’s most shameless hucksters, who have already made a buck polluting the high skies, spin up new schemes to make another buck pretending to clean up their own mess. After the Gold Rush There is a long and complex list of reasons for why “cleaning up” space debris is impractical. For starters, the task of capturing or deorbiting a perpetually spinning object traveling at thousands of miles per hour is arguably more technologically daunting than landing a person on the moon. And for a reactive, rather than preventative, approach to succeed, you’d have to repeat the task tens of thousands of times, while somehow not generating any new debris from your celestial garbage truck. If that doesn’t already sound like a deal-breaker, consider another lesser-known truth: the vast majority of debris is too small to track, and there is little consensus among space observers about how to accurately track the path of those larger objects we can detect. Space junk doesn’t travel in perfect ellipses but rather highly variable paths that never arrive in the same place twice. State-of-the-art databases like ASTRIAGraph show that U.S. and Russian tracking systems sometimes contain two entirely different orbits for the same object. In a sense, the 2009 Iridium-Cosmos crash that ignited global concerns about space debris was a technological wake-up call, revealing the limits of our detective powers. As David Finkleman wrote in American Scientist: “The possibility [of the Cosmos-Iridium collision] was recognized, but the calculated probabilities were actually much lower than for other possible encounters during the same period.” While these efforts are continually getting better and more sophisticated, they are still many factors away from being truly actionable. Nevertheless, debris tracking has become a massive, multi-billion-dollar business. Companies like LeoLabs, Northstar, and Lockheed Martin offer radar-based monitoring subscriptions that can cost between $10 million to $100 million per year. Like every enterprise software product, these companies increasingly tout black-box artificial intelligence that supposedly achieves marginal increases in accuracy regarding object placement or collision risk. Recently, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak revealed a new startup investment that aims to create “the Google Maps of space,” purportedly by launching hundreds of satellites into space to study debris and layering a glossy UI over other publicly available data. If nothing else, I suppose these services provide some small peace of mind, perhaps fulfilling a minimum compliance threshold. Although we can’t yet agree on how to accurately and reliably track space junk, there is already a burgeoning market for clean-up technologies. Early-stage ventures have raised eight- and nine-figure sums to produce working prototypes of retrieval magnets (Astroscale), harpoons (RemoveDEBRIS), and a massive robotic claw (ClearSpace); these missions are undergoing proof-of-concept tests that will last at least until 2025. Then there are the countless pipedreams still awaiting development: giant foam balls, debris-deflecting laser guns, even a weaponized hot-air balloon which Raytheon envisions using to push debris into deorbit—a plan as nuanced as Trump’s idea to attack hurricanes with nukes. Of all the harebrained policies floated about space debris on the global lecture circuit, perhaps the most egregious is the idea of a launch tax, or “bottle deposit scheme.” This progressive-sounding idea would collect fees for a general clean-up fund, to support a technological solution that doesn’t yet exist, and even if it did, would be grossly outmatched in scale. It’s an almost perfectly inane program designed to generate a bureaucratic talking point while doing nothing to address the actual problem. In addition to being unproven, exorbitantly expensive, and scientifically suspect, clean-up efforts in space also court disaster; a failed attempt can result in a crash and detonate a fresh “bomb” of new debris. And even if you pull off a small miracle and successfully retrieve a piece of space junk, it’s not entirely clear you’ll be legally permitted to dispose of it. According to the only signed international space law on the books—the 1967 Outer Space Treaty—a defunct object in space belongs in perpetuity to the host country from which it launched. As your hypothetical garbage truck awaits your command on how to handle its retrieved junk, your breakthrough environmental mission may also be misconstrued as a covert threat, triggering a military response from another country. Spacecrafts that can retrieve a defunct satellite can also be used to disarm an active one. For all these reasons and more, the only chance we have to overcome space debris is to immediately limit new launches and agree on sustainability standards across the board. Every satellite, booster rocket, and other detachable module should be equipped with deorbiting sails or fins to steer it toward incineration, or in some cases, propellers to lift it into a far-out “graveyard” orbit. But today, there are no mandatory end-of-life plans for spacecraft. The scant informal guidelines set by the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee recommend lowering satellites into deorbit within twenty-five years; and even then, only about half of all missions have met this minimum request. Rather than bowing to the gospel of tech and innovation, governments need to stimulate more robust discussion about the economic development of space and which projects are indeed worthy of licensing for the public good. The ideal window for shaping this rollout would’ve been years ago, before the floodgates of capital were opened. One of the basic mandates of the Outer Space Treaty is to avoid harmful contamination of space. But over the past two decades, the converging interests of big tech and military-industrial stalwarts have steadily eroded this provision. In the United States, the administrations of both presidents Bush and Obama became prominent cheerleaders for the cause, directing NASA to transition ISS resupply missions to private contractors and giving startups like SpaceX critical injections of early cash flows. Casey Dreier, a nonprofit adviser on space policy, said that the biggest legacy of the Obama administration “was fully embracing the potential of commercial launch capabilities . . . and fighting for it against a lot of opposition from Congress.” In the home stretch of his final term, with hardly a mention in mainstream news media, Obama signed the SPACE Act of 2015, a lobbyist-backed bill that unilaterally opened the celestial orbits to U.S. citizens and corporations to “engage in commercial exploration for and commercial recovery of space resources free from harmful interference.” If commercialization means harm, as we’ve seen so clearly in the issue of space debris—as well as the space industry’s ballooning carbon footprint and possible ozone depletion—then the United States became the first country to violate the spirit of the OST, while patting ourselves on the back for our brave, adventurous spirit. At first, the only other nations to join our exile were tax-haven Luxembourg and the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, both of whom are eager to oblige the ultra-wealthy fetish for all things space. But last summer, Japan passed similar legislation, and it’s all but certain that other governments will soon follow. Is there any doubt that Obama himself, who vacationed on Richard Branson’s private island in the Caribbean just weeks after leaving the White House, will be riding a Virgin Galactic spacecraft in the next twelve to eighteen months? Space Jam With so few reasons for optimism these days, I sometimes feel like a grouch for questioning all this renewed interest in space. While reading journalist Allegra Hobbs’ dispatch from Blue Origin’s first launch for Texas Monthly, I was humbled by the scene of local residents gathered along Highway 54 to watch, people who still see this work as hopeful. “This is a pinnacle moment in history,” one man tells her. “You watch movies like Star Trek—who’s to say this isn’t the beginning?” And surely there are possibilities in zero gravity for novel scientific and biological research. While living in Boston, I was reminded many times walking through Logan Airport, by its prominent JFK exhibit, about the technologies that sprung from the original space program: everything from LASIK eye surgeries and CAT scans to freeze-dried foods and memory foam. But in looking at the cosmic tragedy of our second space race, it’s hard not to see a damning indictment of our own fecklessness. For decades, the world’s industrialized countries have attempted to unwind centuries of plunder and pollution on Earth, cleaning rivers and oceans of the toxic byproducts from heavy industry. And all throughout this supposed reckoning, we have repeated the same mistakes in yet another domain, this one above our heads and arguably the last unravaged by human intervention. Has there ever been more unassailable proof that we have learned nothing? Over the past year, we’ve already seen a glimpse of how the skies might come tumbling down without any meaningful regulation. Last April, an out-of-control rocket stage from SpaceX’s Falcon 9 crashed into a farm in Washington. In May, space enthusiasts and amateur stargazers tracked for days the uncontrolled fall of debris from the Chinese Long March 5B rocket, which crashed into the Indian Ocean, near the Maldives; citizen-observers in Israel and Oman shared their sightings of the passing debris on social media. In August, we learned that the mysterious disintegration of a Chinese satellite months earlier was in fact the result of a collision with a piece of a defunct Russian rocket launched in 1996—arguably the most notable debris-producing incident since the 2009 Iridium-Cosmos crash. In October, another failed Russian military spacecraft streaked through the night skies like a passing comet over Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana before burning up on its descent. I’ve been particularly baffled by the persistent lack of concern about debris among the industry’s most ardent boosters, even when presented with stories of such close encounters. In an October interview with Science, one former Starlink team member described the tunnel vision of his team’s agenda: “There was a lot of talk about how, financially, we could possibly make this happen . . . There was very little talk about it as a moral or ethical or even just a collision problem.” His last point reveals a stunning lack of competence on the part of those perceived to be our era’s most brilliant operators. By impatiently flooding the skies with their cold imitations of the universe, lusting tycoons like Musk and Bezos are accelerating their own defeat, creating a dense barrier of garbage between them and their boyhood dreams. While the hypothetical onset of Kessler’s syndrome sounds apocalyptic, I increasingly wonder if we’ll even notice as it happens. Rather than one big chain reaction that converts LEO into a rubble-strewn wasteland overnight, it might look more like a gradual refashioning of space into something flat and familiar. Orbital lanes will become highways of small satellites and cargo carriers. Companies will send items to space with a single mouse-click. Every government will build its own low-cost, space-station consulate. Over time, insurance premiums for satellites will rise alongside increased orbital density and collision risk. Companies and militaries will spend unreasonable sums on snake-oil tracking and collision-avoidance systems. Eventually, certain orbital highways will become unusable, while the rest strain with untenable congestion, like Los Angeles at rush hour. On any given day, people will complain about poor space traffic management; the junk will be a given.
Everywhere in Blockchains Patrick McGinty When the global investment bank Bear Stearns went broke in March of 2008, I was a college senior on spring break in Florida. My two friends and I had one simple rule—free housing, no matter what—which is how Kelly and I wound up eating a burnt scramble one morning while our friend Ryan and his grandfather obsessed over CNBC in the living room. Bear Stearns was the topic, every segment. The firm was in deep trouble. Ryan and his grandfather argued, the elder championing the indestructibility of the country, the younger soon-to-be banker predicting a nationwide ripple effect. Kelly and I ate at the kitchen counter, debating whether the food and the beds would be better or worse at the next stop. What happened next happened fast. I graduated without a job, eventually secured a temp position in a financial aid office, then spent several months in a basement processing the endless machinations required for several thousand international students to pay tuition at Carnegie Mellon University. In reality, I spent my days reading the internet, wounding myself with an alternating cocktail of dire financial reportage about Lehman Brothers, then David Foster Wallace remembrances. An embarrassing thing I wrote in a journal: “Being a writer is dangerous. Being a worker is, too.” One fall morning, my coworkers opened envelopes containing their retirement statements, then I watched as several cried into the receivers of corded desk phones. October 15 was my first day at a PR firm that was convinced it could help clients navigate the unfolding subprime mortgage crisis; the firm closed its Pittsburgh office several months later, and the tears lasted longer this time. Days after Obama’s inauguration, I joined a team of unemployed adults tasked with opening the Pittsburgh census office, and we became a small part of the decennial national project. I moved to Portland, Oregon, for graduate school, and every day while biking home, I stopped at Occupy Portland, hoping that some speaker might string together the various personal and social failures of my early twenties into some clarifying theory. My fellow spring-breaker Kelly would text me from Zuccotti Park; her updates on Occupy Wall Street were both more substantive and cooler than mine. Got hip, got radicalized—call it what you want, but like many young people in the era of the subprime mortgage crisis, I got it. I was transformed from someone only hazily aware of what CNBC announced in the background of a cramped Florida condo into someone driven to understand the perverse complexity of my nation’s financial system. This era launched one of the most intense and ongoing readerly journeys of my life, a project that probably represents my most genuine act of patriotism, i.e., it proves that I have, at times, cared deeply enough about national concerns to construct a self-made disaster syllabus seeking to answer the question: What the hell just happened to me, my generation, and my country? It’s Complicated I learned things in the early stages of this journey—not necessarily about finance, but about which genres of financial discourse would best help me answer my guiding question. I quickly discovered that 99 percent of academic writing was written for people who were not me. I whipsawed hard from academics to Occupy, and though I often left the Portland encampment feeling some generic version of “good,” I rarely left feeling informed. Kids had smartphones; documentarians had cameras and mics; it felt as though technological devices were leeching out the relevant moments and displacing them in a petri dish where, later, we would all reflect and find the answers, much too late. My overall experience of Occupy Portland synched quite closely with the one Jon Raymond described in his Tin House essay “The Broadway Gang”: I eventually landed on straightforward nonfiction as the best readerly route. Seemingly every week in the post-crisis years, I opened a new journalistic work whose book jacket claimed that in my hands lay a blueprint outlining the true genesis of the financial crisis. I did form a rough thesis about the financial crisis from reading these nonfiction books . . . but not the one the writers intended. Whereas I wanted in-depth assessments of synthetic credit debt obligations of asset-backed securities, I encountered writers more interested in retaining the reader’s attention than engaging seriously with the financial mechanics that had propelled me through six jobs in two-and-a-half years. These reported books promised to unveil the secret world of so-called financial wizards, yet the writers habitually settled on calling Wall Street’s operations “complex” before shoving the narrative onward. I am not exaggerating about the ubiquity of the word complex. Take Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia. (I am hereby eliding all mention of these books’ ridiculously long subtitles; just think of each as I Alone Know the Origins of the Financial Crisis.) Taibbi repeatedly writes things like “This sounds complicated.” He treats his own unwillingness to get technical as a cause worthy of joking about: “Stuff that’s fiendishly complicated and that if ingested too quickly can feature a truly toxic boredom factor.” An overreliance on complex wasn’t the real problem, though. The problem was figurative language. It was everywhere in Taibbi’s book. It had learned to clone itself (“a kind of labyrinthine financial sewage system,” “unseen labyrinths of the Grifter Archipelago,” “immensely complex, labyrinthine political system”). Figurative language was a central characteristic of every financial book I read, most notably Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold. I first heard of Tett in a footnote within The Big Short, where Michael Lewis, loath to get too technical about the housing crisis, promised that “the story of how and why they did this has been painstakingly told by Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett.” Yet what I found in Fool’s Gold was the pinnacle of figurative financial language. To hear Tett tell it, credit derivatives and CDOs were like a spiderweb of deals. And also buckets under a waterfall. They were like calculating the percentage of rotten apples in a bushel. Cut some pizza slices and voilà: you just CDO’d. Russian dolls, a small retail store—the analogies for the financial system were endless in Fool’s Gold, and the more books I read, the more analogies I found. This widespread use of figurative financial language ensured that the public had no idea how the financial sector actually operated. The writers didn’t seem to fully know either. In many books, even the central players didn’t know how to explain themselves. The years of 2008–2009 were, to date, the most significant of my life, the kinds of years where I can still remember every single day—what I was worrying about, which coworker was crying in which office, many of the details backed by embarrassing journal entries—and in trying to learn about those daily upheavals, I kept reading that the inciting incidents were complicated. Actually, these books seemed to say to me, your daily experience as an economic participant in the United States is best explained by something else entirely. We’re in the Money One thing I knew even without wading through the post-crisis literature was that banks—and financial companies that acted like banks—had come a long way from the staid, heavily regulated lenders of yore. Yet there was no refuge in the easy conclusion that banking had gone mad. Soon I was confronted with a new phenomenon to make our financial heads spin: the rise of a money-system operating beyond the reach of the banks and regulators. In a chapter of the collection Regulating Blockchain entitled “Old Utopias, New Tax Havens: The Politics of Bitcoin in Historical Perspective,” political theorist Stefan Eich makes the connection between then and now: “It was only in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that conflicting demands for either the depoliticization or the democratization of money resurfaced. This was the concrete context for the emergence of cryptocurrencies that promised to remove money from both the state and banks.” Eich outlines how, from the 1970s to 2008, there was little to no sustained public discussion seeking to demystify and debate money. The housing crisis changed this—suddenly, without an accessible recent discourse. Referring to the process as the “re-politicization of money,” Eich notes that “the newly visible agency of central banks uncomfortably raised the possibility of political choices in a system that was supposedly without alternatives.” As a result—and with discomfiting immediacy—“the crisis revealed the widely held belief of money as neutral as an illusion.” It makes sense, then, that our language was lacking if we think of the financial meltdown as the country shaking itself from a trance. It’s hard to wake from a nap and revise an entire financial system before your eyes adjust. As our vision and language continue to recalibrate, it’s clear that certain corners of our once sleepy populace have become bug-eyed about the financial alternatives that cryptocurrencies seem to offer. It feels as if there’s now a book-length work of crypto nonfiction published every few weeks, and as a genre, these works share traits with their forerunner, the housing crisis book. Both genres love the word complexity. Ditto figurative language—Swiss Army knife analogies appear in multiple crypto books, and “mining” is the central metaphor, this despite bookkeeping being far more accurate. (Why mining? Because for an idea to spread, it must use words that appeal to a preteen boy.) But these new crypto books are often humming at a level of technical ingenuity that overshadows any accomplishment by their predecessors, which is saying something because the challenges these crypto books must overcome are not few. The protagonists and conflicts are not centralized on Wall Street; like the technology, they are disparate and decentralized. The writers must construct narratives around technologies that are still evolving, ones that often lack clear-cut collapses and origins. The books must also perform some high-grade linguistic cartography, differentiating blockchain from Bitcoin and assets from currencies. These books are game for this particular challenge, often embracing it to absurd degrees. In Blockchain: The Next Everything, Stephen P. Williams privileges clarity to the point where a single line will occupy an entire page. (“Blockchain is software. It’s as simple as that.”) In The Age of Cryptocurrency, journalists Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey do not simply calculate whether cryptocurrencies meet the prerequisites to be a currency; they outline the camps invested in treating it as such. There are libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, “who want government to get its greedy mitts out of the money supply.” Other supporters think of cryptocurrencies as more of a payments protocol than a currency, “including a cross section of techies and businessmen who see a chance to disrupt the bank-centric payments system.” These individuals “are less concerned about its appeal as an intrinsically valuable thing and more with the underlying computer network’s capacity to rearrange the rules of trust around which society manages exchanges of value.” If money boils down to settling and recording debts, this latter camp believes that computers can perform this function more cheaply and efficiently than banks and governments, and Vigna and Casey treat their claim seriously. To demonstrate what a slog our contemporary transactions are, they track the journey of a credit card purchase across two massive paragraphs, bolding terms like “front-end processor,” “acquiring bank,” then “Clearing House Payments Co.” By the end, it’s hard to say you’re uninterested in hearing more about Bitcoin, whose “ongoing community expansion represents nothing less than a currency’s endeavoring to become money.” This is not simple stuff. Financial crisis writing did not need to explain why a dollar wanted to become a dollar. Crypto writing must often explicate the philosophies and mechanisms underlying our current system while also explicating those of a dubious future one. Helpfully, whenever the crypto writer feels their sentences are becoming mired in overly technical language, they have a secret weapon: crypto’s proselytizers, who have been trying to convince, oh, every single person in their life about the untold power of some blockchain-related project. In his Bitcoin-specific Digital Gold, Nathaniel Popper shares a Google engineer’s bullet points with his family, imploring them to consider how “no government can shut it down . . . the miners . . . have incentives to keep mining . . . [and] everything is defined by its source code.” The crypto writer often has an additional and effective, if controversial, source: themselves. Many of these writers have firsthand experience with the technologies they report on, like Camila Russo, who opens Infinite Machine in Argentina in 2013, where she was not just reporting on double-digit inflation, “[she] was also living it.” Russo was converting her journalism paychecks from pesos into dollars as soon as she was paid, “until one day the president woke up and said, Nope! You can’t do that anymore.” Russo scopes out the situation, and “sure enough, the option to exchange pesos from my local currency account into dollars to deposit in my foreign currency account was nowhere to be found.” Argentines soon inform Russo that Bitcoin is the easiest way for her to circumnavigate the country’s populist policies: “They understood right away how significant it was to be able to buy a currency that’s not controlled by anyone and, therefore, can’t be stopped or seized.” This scene—a financial journalist hearing about financial technology from laymen—is impossible in a book about subprime mortgages. Michael Lewis does not have a section in which he writes, “So there I was, trying to trade a subprime mortgage with a bogus AAA-rating.” Whereas the reportage of the financial crisis took the form of retroactive genesis-extraction and ramification logging, these crypto books often capture a real-time experience of the technology’s spread. And yes, it’s notable that Russo is cagey about whether she actually used Bitcoin in the above scene (we go rather swiftly from “Where could I turn?” to “I decided to write about it” without ever really addressing the whole paycheck issue). I am someone who has concerns about journalists using and holding the assets they cover; I am also someone who slogged through countless 2008 crisis books, and it’s clear that the familiarity these writers have with cryptocurrencies results in books that are far better at describing and engaging with complex financial topics than their antecedents. It’s not much of a debate, honestly, which is why I have gravitated toward a thornier question: Is “better at confronting complex financial topics” a meaningful descriptor for a literary genre? What about a financial system? Moth to the Flame Laura Shin opens The Cryptopians where my own readerly journey began: the financial crisis. “In the end,” Shin writes, “it took only seven weeks to trigger the slow-motion toppling of global finance and, though no one saw it then, begin upending the centuries-old method for establishing societal trust.” This was the opening I had been pining for in a crypto book. With a simple statement—“On September 15, 2008, the 158-year-old investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in history”—I felt that Shin was about to present cryptocurrency in the way I had come to understand it: as the logical outgrowth of the big bank-driven financial crisis. Cryptocurrency—just like my own political self!—was born out of the crisis. We shared an origin story. It’s probably obvious by now that I became briefly enchanted by all of this stuff. In my defense: in the decade and a half since the financial crisis, which response or movement or idea has accumulated more cultural space without retreat than crypto? What entity has dug deeper roots? Bernie couldn’t make it to a general election. What, then? Which economic idea has gobbled up more ideological real estate post-Occupy? That ancient, idea-less fact allergy now called Trumpism? The only Bidenism one encounters is a meek defense: “well, Biden is . . . um . . .” Obama seems like a very good dad. Cryptocurrency has filled the post-Occupy space. Because of course code filled the space. Of course the idea of digital currency metastasized during the pandemic, when physical was supplanted by digital interaction more so than any other time in human history. I’d love to single out something more tactile. As a union member who marched with pride on a rainy picket line, I’d love to point to the organizing efforts and teachers’ strikes and mutual aid organizations that have sprung up, but cryptocurrency has, as of this writing, over a two trillion-dollar market cap. It is a sector now large enough to lure even vaguely interested Luddite moths like myself, which is why I’m hesitant to criticize crypto’s adherents too severely. I know the medication routine well. Feeling morose from your thousandth Covid-case chart? Here’s a crypto chart traveling the same trajectory, but you’re profiting. Is your state education system slashing staff and combining universities all while your mother’s state retirement system is experiencing some, shall we say, light corruption? Crypto is at least as trustworthy as all those silly institutions you put your faith in. Are your friends losing money and gaining anxiety thanks to the opacity of the unemployment system or the academic promotion process (or both)? Tell them about crypto, which operates transparently; it’s simple, and there’s a merry horde on Twitter that’s happy to explain, no need for the figurative language of the financial crisis: Do you like your white paper with Twitter thread or meme? The Real Thing The thing about The Cryptopians, though, is that it is longer than those opening lines about the financial crisis. And in the same way that the absence of rigorous financial explication in financial crisis books revealed something to me about the nature of American finance, the absence of any further discussion of the crisis in the remainder of The Cryptopians’s four-hundred-some pages revealed something to me about Wall Street’s would-be conqueror. This is because the 2008 crisis doesn’t seem to strike literally any of The Cryptopians’s characters as all that big of a deal. Shin is a ruthlessly detailed reporter, unearthing countless hyper-personal texts and chat logs, but nowhere, not once, does any source express much interest in or lingering rage about the financial crisis. None of the inventors of these technologies appear to have lost homes, pensions, or careers. Few seem to derive their ideology or motivation from it. And suffice to say that their interest in technology is not driven by a desire to rectify global inequality. Take Gavin Wood, whose PhD project entailed writing “software that would turn music into ‘vaguely pretty’ pictures,” which he then “sold to a few London nightclubs.” Another individual sought to improve the human condition via “remotely controlled videoconferencing robots that roll on a Segway.” Then there’s poor Griff, who, “during the financial crisis . . . had experienced his own disaster: the sale of the Seattle SuperSonics basketball team and its transformation into the Oklahoma City Thunder.” For Griff, the Sonics had been a team which, “if they ever lost, he would be in mourning the next day,” and in his grief he embarked on a colonialist “short-lived stint trying to become ‘the Bitcoin guy for Ecuador.’” These anecdotes about tech men are unsurprising, but I need to keep going, as punishment. One man asks, “Who would mind being hated for $20 million?” Another: “Before making any decision, and no matter what decision you will make, we are, combined—you and us—in a position to make a significant, if not historic, market manipulation.” The original Ethereum team was comprised of the money man who “craved a return on his investment,” plus Amir, the “Bitcoin-rich man-about-town from Israel,” who, according to one colleague, contributes “astoundingly little to the project.” The skipper on this digital boat is played by Charles, self-proclaimed CEO, and who Shin often flanks with parenthetical digressions: “(There is no restraining order by her against him. After one interview, Charles did not respond to further queries.)” Shin’s book does not simply rope off women into parentheticals, as so many financial books do. Her signature achievement is her nuanced reporting on Ming Chan, the former executive director of the Ethereum Foundation. There are numerous gendered characterizations of Chan that make a reader empathize with her (a colleague describes Chan as “a mother hen”), yet there are others where Chan does seem to be a tone-deaf tech baroness (“She brought her sister in as legal counsel, raising questions about conflicts”). Chan’s portrayal vacillates between “this person is treated unfairly” and “this person seems awful”; she is destined to become a central character in some streaming-service drama about Ethereum, and this show will not do the character justice because it will probably be written by white guys as opposed to Shin, who, as a Korean-American woman, is an ideal writer to disentangle the crypto sector’s treatment of women and Asian women, specifically. There are parts of The Cryptopians where it seems as though the only prerequisites for working in crypto are: (1) being named Gavin, (2) having a thing for hiring and/or dating Asian women, and (3) being an Asian woman who knows a person named Gavin. Shin does not let these uncomfortable tendencies pass without comment. She writes of a new hire that “some observers, many of whom liked Aya, could not help but point out that she did have a qualification that one wouldn’t necessarily find on a resume: she was an Asian woman.” Women of all ethnicities hated working at ConsenSys for Joseph Lubin, who is framed quite reprehensibly in Shin’s reporting. Lubin “protected an executive whom multiple female employees had found abusive,” and at an ensuing women’s council on a company retreat, “female employees were crying about sexual harassment they had experienced.” According to its website, ConsenSys is a “software engineering leader of the blockchain space,” although Shin’s sources portray it as a “smoke-and-mirrors company” led by an executive who “masked his old-school, power-hungry, dominate-and-crush ways with a ‘love and light story of decentralization and mutual empowerment.’” Lubin is just Don Draper selling Coca-Cola to hippies, and upon reading the above line about his empty peddling of mutual empowerment, I thought: my pandemic-induced anxieties have quieted my usual tech skepticism to the point that I have been studying the intricacies of this new tech flavor without fully realizing that it has the same Wall Street taste. The Crypto-Keeper’s Apprentice Shin’s insider reporting in The Cryptopians helped wake me, with finality, from my crypto illusions. Other works had been waving smelling salts, like David Gerard’s enjoyably combative Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. When answering “who wants smart contracts anyway,” Gerard rifles off a cheeky list: “computer programmers who don’t have an aptitude for social or legal conventions,” “businesses who want to automate away dealing with customers, but still take their money,” and, the kicker, “innovative entrepreneurs who have come into conflict with the traditional legal system previously, and would like something deterministic enough that they can take your money and escape through the cracks.” Aaron Lammer’s podcast Exit Scam provided me a test case for one such innovative entrepreneur: Gerald Cotten, who did (or didn’t?) die and whose cryptocurrency exchange, QuadrigaCX, did (and . . . definitely did) mysteriously lose track of $190 million after his death. Gradually, I came to agree with practically every single thing David Golumbia wrote or said, most notably in The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism. My overall Golumbian takeaway: despite loudly championing the so-called democratic principles of cryptocurrency, its apostles sure do lose it when there’s any sort of democratically elected oversight of this supposedly democratic technology, to the point that you really do have to wonder whether they misunderstand democratic principles or they simply don’t want any government involvement whatsoever in cryptocurrency, the latter option, of course, not being a terribly democratic one. As Eich observes, “The attempt to remove money from political control is itself a supremely political act that raises profound questions of legitimacy.” But whereas these writers disabused me from crypto in intellectual ways, Shin’s book did so in a more visceral fashion. If I were to travel back in time and hand myself any crypto book at Occupy Portland, The Cryptopians would’ve had the largest effect on me. I would have read about these men of the near future, noted their similarity to what was currently being protested on Wall Street—the misogyny and greed, the complete unfamiliarity with the pain felt by the lower and middle classes—and I might have fought for some speaking time at the gathering near the Plaza Blocks. I may well have wrapped a kilt around a devil stick, lit it, and convinced a group of protesters to traverse the globe and sabotage the spot, “set amid the bucolic Swiss hills in Baar,” where Ethereum would establish its headquarters, a “modern, three-story, taupe-colored bulwark they nicknamed the Spaceship.” No doubt, the crypto apostles would tell me I’m soft-brained, I don’t get it, Web3 will usher in content made by users and distributed to users on user-controlled platforms, you’re NGMI, or “not gonna make it,” to which I reply: of course I’m not going to make it! I’m an adjunct novelist! I entered the workforce in 2008! My deep and abiding sense that I and my generation are NGMI is why I wound up interested in crypto in the first place, and yet the drivers of my own interest in cryptocurrency—the corruption and regulatory oversights that wrought the housing crisis—are often as absent in crypto’s daily discourse as it is in The Cryptopians. The absence of a maturated political ideology was particularly apparent during the crypto sector’s lobbying efforts this past summer against the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Much of the furor was aimed at a provision known as the “Information Reporting for Brokers and Digital Assets,” which would require wallet developers and miners to abide by more rigorous tax reporting. Online mobilization efforts against the provision were swift. Day after day, I saw the crypto community congratulating itself for figuring out how to call senators and sign petitions, many of them kicking around the idea of becoming single-issue crypto voters, and as I watched various accounts retweet a crypto-positive speech by Ted Cruz, I thought: wow, these folks do not have their representative’s number in their phone from the “Repeal Obamacare” wars, or the Dakota Access Pipeline fight, or any other issue from the past decade. It truly does seem like their political awakening is being driven by a fervent interest in tax avoidance and blocking regulatory oversight as it relates to an emerging technology, which: lame. I know certain crypto supporters—some of whom I can confirm did attend Occupy events—who would dispute the above depiction. But to dive into that is a surefire way to never arrive at this essay’s end. I have eighty-three tweets bookmarked that I intended to respectfully interrogate, and I’m overwhelmed by the prospect of appropriately framing and engaging with a single one of them. There’s simply too much crypto discourse from too many angles. Are energy concerns over- or under-hyped? What’s up with El Salvador? Is China’s crypto crackdown less significant than the last crackdown or way less significant? I found many corners of Crypto Twitter to be quite approachable on these topics, but when the topic in question is not merely an idea but an asset, one that has and may well continue to enrich average citizens, every speaker starts to feel as though they’re holding either a bag of cash or a match. In The Cryptopians, Shin quotes her own writing in Forbes, where she reported that These sorts of descriptions could apply to any online community, but the difference is that most communities are not advocating for more of the human experience—finance and art, the energy we expend both literally and metaphorically—to exist online. The figures in The Cryptopians offer the n-millionth piece of evidence that perhaps a life lived relentlessly online has detrimental effects on a person. Shin quotes Ming Chan: “I’m not supposed to post in [this] internal channel when I haven’t slept for thirty, forty, or fifty hours. You’ll know when I’m sleep deprived because there will be ‘removed’ posts (when I can’t stop myself from posting).” Multiple people on multiple projects are encouraged to step back from the internet and reassess their behaviors. Then there’s dear Christoph Jentzsch, a cofounder of slock.it and the individual I identify with most from The Cryptopians. Jentzsch begins to realize that his cryptocurrency project “would hang over his whole life and might one day become something he hated.” He thinks of his life in terms of the Goethe poem, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” from which Disney’s Fantasia derives its Mickey vs. Brooms plot. Jentzsch views the poem as being “about starting something small that gets bigger and bigger until you no longer have control over it.” To exemplify Jentzsch’s thinking, Shin quotes from one of Goethe’s closing lines: “Spirits I have conjured, no longer pay me heed.” The Goethe translation Shin selects is rather transactional, as though he’s calling in with a support ticket: the software is “no longer pay[ing] me heed.” I’m partial to translations of Goethe that ascribe more blame to the apprentice, readings where the spirits “whom I’ve careless raised, / are spellbound to my power not.” “Wrong I was in calling” these spirits, another translation starts, “For I find them galling, / Cannot rule them now.” It is very tempting to end here, to note that by choosing a smoother translation, Shin is unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally) portraying how tech’s acolytes so often fail to take blame for the ramifications their inventions impose on us. But I am not thinking only of Jentzsch when I read these lines about a careless person summoning galling spirits. I am thinking of myself, eager to conjure more open financial discourse in the wake of the housing crisis. Thanks to cryptocurrency (and social media), digital brooms with blue wings now deliver me more language than I could ever parse. I made a wish back in those formative, uncertain days of 2008 and 2009—more language, more specific language—and not only was this stupid wish granted, I was given months of downtime to stuff myself full. My habit of reading widely and ravenously now strikes me as less a credit than a crutch with each passing year that introduces some new technology surrounded by complex language designed to enrich a small conversant few and bar the majority from the conversation. I am someone who is eager to narrate the moments across my adult life in which I have advocated for labor—your principles get a good stress test when striking means you’ll lose health care for your eight-and-a-half-months-pregnant wife—yet increasingly, these winning tales strike me as tainted by my nerdy desire to fully understand the complexities of the forces that press down upon labor. I ask sincerely: How productive is it to have one foot on the picket line and one in the enemy’s section of the library? There’s a more damning analogy I’m loath to share—often, it feels like I hypocritically want one hand on a picket sign and another reaching for a safety net made of whatever new technology is currently filling the space, a way of ensuring I “make it” financially when my political aims inevitably fail. (My safety nets are more like poorly stuffed throw pillows; at present, I hold 2.42714 of ETH and 0.04486611 of BTC.) If this pivot to “labor vs. crypto” feels late and jarring, a reminder: it’s where I started this. It’s certainly where I should have started my readerly journey into crypto—not with “how effective is the writing around it” but “how effectively does it salve the pain experienced by my coworkers in the fall of 2008.” At the financial aid office, my coworkers’ retirements were upturned by the housing crisis, and a central question on my crypto reading journey should have been: Wouldn’t a financial system that sought to eliminate so-called administrative waste via crypto-aided transactions not simply eliminate my coworkers’ retirements but eliminate their actual jobs as well? Multiple articles and projects have suggested that the blockchain could improve and cheapen census operations, yet 635,000 citizens worked on the 2010 census. What job program fills that decennial hole? My officemates were poets and nuns, activists and school board members, many of them economically adrift but quite politically focused, and I should have gone into some of these crypto books asking: Doesn’t a streamlined “Blockchain Census 2030” project only worsen their economic opportunities? If I did know some magical sorcerer who could cast me back in time, it would not be to the outset of any readerly journey. I would slip back to 2008, then my bedroom, and into that sentimental spiral notebook, home to “Being a writer is dangerous. Being a worker is, too.” I wouldn’t need some fancy wand or sorcery or blockchain bullshit. A pen would do. I’d cross out the two sentences then reconstitute the line: “Obsessing over writers more than workers is dangerous.”
Dawn of the Space Lords Corey Pein They called it a “Sputnik moment.” In October, the Financial Times reported that over the summer of 2021, the Chinese government tested a new missile. It was reported to have been fired from a so-called hypersonic glide vehicle that circled the planet at speeds exceeding Mach 5 before landing within twenty-five miles of its target. The strategic implications were overblown, but the Sputnik comparison was apt in that a rival power—a communist one no less—had outperformed the United States in space. U.S. military and intelligence officials feared the test vehicle could allow China to launch an unstoppable nuclear first strike. Chinese officials claimed it was not a weapon, but a peaceful spacecraft—part of a flourishing national program that recently launched a probe to Mars, landed the first robotic spacecraft on the dark side of the Moon, and commenced orbital assembly of a space station, just as the funded lifetime of the U.S.-backed International Space Station (ISS) nears an end. Meanwhile, American capitalism carved its own venturesome path into the final frontier. In November, a capsule made by SpaceX, the company owned by PayPal lottery winner and Tesla head Elon Musk, returned four astronauts to Earth from the ISS. But, as Tesla owners have come to expect, there was a problem with Musk’s design. A toilet seal broke, spilling pools of urine below the floorboards. Fortunately, the structure wasn’t compromised, but the snafu forced the crew to resort to diapers for twenty hours during descent, which the pilot called “suboptimal.” Call that a “SpaceX moment.” What does it say about the U.S. space program—once the envy of the world—that while its generals were figuratively pissing themselves over a Chinese rocket, its astronauts were literally pissing themselves because a profit-hungry contractor screwed up? Red Scares, Blue Origins, and Little Green Men Yes indeed, there’s a new space race on. The stakes are the expansion of military, economic, and political dominion. As in the Cold War, this contest is ideological as well as technological. China has replaced Russia as America’s cosmic bogeyman. But nations are no longer the only leading actors. A new class of spacefaring oligarchs, most notably Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whose space company is called Blue Origin, have been granted a kind of royal charter by Congress, the White House, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The personality cults around these billionaire space lords make the nationalistic spectacle of the Apollo program seem stodgy. More significantly, an endeavor once led by rule-bound bureaucrats now champions the dubious values of Silicon Valley: cost-cutting, disruption, disdain for regulations, and boundless monopoly. It’s too soon to say whether decades of unchecked privatization have blunted the U.S. edge in space, or whether corporations, given generous subsidy, can surpass the achievements of the 1960s. But it is clear the objectives of the civilian space program have already shifted. The pursuit of profit has subsumed the pursuit of knowledge. It is no accident that the two men who perennially compete for the title of world’s wealthiest have chosen to funnel their fortunes into rockets, satellites, space stations, and plans for off-world colonies. That’s how they expect to keep winning at capitalism and, eventually, to appropriate the powers of government. Many scientists still advocate for “peaceful cooperation” among nations to better understand our universe, a program of the kind that President John F. Kennedy pitched in his final address to the United Nations in 1963. But it’s billionaires who are driving policy, and what they offer is a gloomier future of all-powerful corporations that cement their dominance on Earth by laying claim to the heavens. Such is the mission we’re asked to cheer, and to finance. Most of the hype around SpaceX and Blue Origin, along with Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, has served these companies’ principal marketing strategy: space tourism. Having “The Right Stuff” now means having the cash to buy a ticket ($250,000 at the low end, running up to tens of millions of dollars for a first-class experience). Because there’s very little to actually do during a few minutes of weightlessness in the upper atmosphere, these companies are really selling bragging rights, as well as a chance at a rare experience called the overview effect, an epiphany said to affect those who behold Mother Gaia from above. But there are no guarantees! When Star Trek icon William Shatner returned from a jaunt in a Blue Origin rocket in October, he was “overwhelmed” with emotion. As Shatner struggled to articulate the vision of life and death he’d experienced while beholding Earth against the void, Bezos, relishing his PR victory, cut in calling for champagne. So much for higher realities. If it was only about charter flights for wealthy seekers, all this fuss might seem frivolous. And in many ways it is. But the space lords see tourism as a stepping stone. Many business and political leaders have embraced the notion that private space exploration—or rather, exploitation—will transform the economy much as globalization did, promoting corporate consolidation and even higher levels of inequality. And that’s supposed to be a good thing. “I predict the first trillionaire will be made in space,” Texas senator Ted Cruz, who was weaned on the science fiction of Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, told Politico in 2018. During his tenure leading the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, Cruz authored the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, signed by Barack Obama, which permits Americans to keep what they find in space. Cruz also affirmed that the most critical American task in space was sending humans to Mars, a goal Donald Trump endorsed and Joe Biden has not reversed. Musk thinks he can get there before Russia, China, or NASA. The billionaire’s plan entails an unprecedented allocation of resources toward an unconscionably risky enterprise with no discernible upside for the typical earthling. Musk pictures a fleet of one-thousand-plus spaceships lurking in orbit until the arrival of a favorable launch window, whereupon “the Mars colonial fleet would depart en masse,” ferrying eighty thousand people per year on a brisk eighty-day journey to the Red Planet. After a period of forty to one hundred years, he figures a million humans would live and work there (for Musk presumably, doing whatever he wants). Bezos has other ideas. He thinks moving people to Mars is neither feasible nor desirable. “I say, ‘Do me a favor, go live on the top of Mount Everest for a year first, and see if you like it—because it’s a garden paradise compared to Mars,’” he once told an interviewer. Bezos maintains that, being closer to Earth, space stations would prove more economical. He wants to build orbital colonies “miles on end,” each holding a million people or more, and an expansive Moon base to supply raw materials. Musk calls Bezos the unrealistic one, saying his space colonies “would be like trying to build the U.S.A. in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean!” Both are right about the other’s faults. Sniping aside, their fundamental goal is the same: to dictate the course of evolution. Musk hopes “to make life multi-planetary” in order to “preserve the light of consciousness” should Earth go bust. Bezos, to cleanse the Earth, wants the bulk of humanity to leave it forever. “The solar system can easily support a trillion humans,” he said in 2018, and then “we would have a thousand Einsteins, and a thousand Mozarts.” Never mind that a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts no doubt already live on this planet in obscurity, crushed by capitalism. We don’t lack geniuses; rather, most geniuses lack the security that would allow them to flourish. These schemes are unabashedly derived from science fiction. Musk has credited Asimov’s Foundation series, the saga of a far-future galactic empire, as one of his inspirations, and stashed a digital copy of the books aboard one SpaceX rocket. Bezos, a Trekkie and a fan of Iain M. Banks’s Culture series (another utopian space opera), draws his plans from the nonfictional but fantastical work of late Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill. His namesake “O’Neill Cylinders” refer to pairs of ginormous solar-powered habitats that would produce artificial gravity through rotation. Prompted by NASA, the professor cooked up this idea in the 1970s with the help of some freshman undergrads and financing from Stewart Brand, the California “post-libertarian” futurist of Whole Earth Catalog fame. Considering the fanciful nature of the enterprise, it’s fair to wonder whether the private-sector space race is merely a very expensive hobby for nerdy oligarchs. They can’t possibly be serious about space colonies. Can they? I’m afraid that they are serious, and they’re not alone. In November, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius hosted an event at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., titled “Our Future in Space.” Bezos shared the stage with the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines; NASA Administrator Bill Nelson; Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, and other fancy folk. The discussion provided a window into establishment thinking. Bezos wowed the crowd with descriptions of the bounty awaiting future generations born on his O’Neill Cylinders. “These colonies will not be like the International Space Station. They’ll have rivers and forests and wildlife,” he said. Amazon Prime will be built in, he added, with “hypersonic delivery.” That got a laugh, but considering his place in the space program today, such pronouncements are tantamount to national policy. Loeb, more modestly, advocated for space exploration via computerized probes, but the professor has only raised $2 million toward that end. Blue Origin holds government contracts worth more than $275 million in the current fiscal year. If Bezos and Musk are the Don Quixotes of space, the U.S. government is full of Sancho Panzas. Entrepreneurs involved with the Chinese space program, who rely more on regional rather than central government support, are reportedly jealous of the close ties Musk and Bezos enjoy with their government. As one Chinese space researcher lamented to China Daily, “The rapid rise of SpaceX can’t be copied in China because NASA has granted it an unprecedented level of support, ranging from infrastructure and technology to experience.” Even America’s communist rival sees state-sponsored corporate conquest as a more audacious model than their system can manage. Failure to Launch How likely is it that the space lords can deliver? Even a casual observer could note that private space companies have a long record of blown deadlines and spectacular failures. At least seven SpaceX Starship rockets have exploded in the past two years, per a Space.com highlight reel. Such setbacks may come with the territory. Nevertheless, rocketry is the lowest of many hurdles standing between the billionaire colonizers and their off-world imperium. Some of the daunting engineering challenges they face are described in a two-year study NASA commissioned in 2017 from the Institute for Defense Analyses. NASA’s roadmap calls for the construction of a station called Gateway in lunar orbit beginning in 2024; it will serve as a staging ground for manned missions to Mars. But it’s all a bit theoretical. The Gateway requires technologies that “have not been previously demonstrated at the scale required”; the same caveat goes for the tech needed to fly to Mars. The perilous human health risks remain poorly understood. Very few people have spent more than a month in space. The IDA projects NASA’s Mars mission to take 1,100 days round trip, and that’s without touching down. (In contrast to Musk’s braggadocio, NASA isn’t confident about being able to land cargo on Mars because of the thin atmosphere.) The dangers multiply the more time people spend in the vacuum, locked inside a can with finite provisions and oxygen. A task so mundane as doing the laundry produces lingering airborne particles. Foods with a year-plus shelf life may prove insufficiently nutritious—so astronauts could starve. Then there’s cosmic radiation. Now imagine another toilet springs a leak. I expect that if Musk ever executes his Mars mission, everyone on the trip will meet a horrifying, untimely end. Musk acknowledges this risk: “A bunch of people probably will die,” he has said. Of course, he’d prefer they be valorized as pioneers, not remembered as sacrifices to the madness of a corner-cutting billionaire. Ah, yes, the bottom line. The IDA reckons the cost to reach the first successful orbital Mars mission will reach $121 billion, with a launch in 2037 at the earliest. Musk boasts he can land humans on the planet by 2026 for only $10 billion. In a 2017 talk later removed from SpaceX’s website, Musk said he planned to launch cargo missions to Mars as early as 2022—which is clearly not going to happen. Call it overconfidence or sheer hucksterism, but it’s no mystery why the overseers of the U.S. space program would favor smaller numbers and shorter deadlines. Both Bezos and Musk aim to dramatically reduce the cost of spaceflight. This, they believe, is the key to unlocking our multi-planetary future. They’ve undeniably made advances with reusable rockets. But I’m skeptical that an obsession with the bottom line can produce the momentous advances required to, say, build a self-contained floating city for a million people. Can space colonization be done on the cheap? Only with an increased tolerance for sacrifice. The IDA study addressed the question thusly: “Commercial launch vehicles [like those made by SpaceX and Blue Origin] may be less reliable than launch vehicles built under traditional cost-plus contracting and mission assurance approaches, but the lower costs may more than make up for the increased risk of failure.” In other words: So what if Musk’s rockets blow up? They’re cheaper. Given past performance, the odds are that neither Musk nor Bezos will live to see their dreams become reality. It would be a mistake, however, to laugh off these difficult tasks as impossible. For all the limits of current technology, the vast distances involved, and the hostility of off-world environments, the space lords have a number of factors working in their favor. First, as Cruz noted, they benefit from a bipartisan commitment to privatization. The die was cast as early as JFK’s 1962 “we choose to go to the Moon” speech, in which he extolled the “great number of new companies, and tens of thousands of new jobs” created by the space program. NASA further embraced outsourcing in the 1970s, and the 1984 Commercial Space Launch Act opened the door to private launches. But it’s only recently that, despite discouraging language in longstanding international treaties, U.S. companies have been invited to claim ownership over the heavens. In April 2020, Trump signed an executive order proclaiming that “Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space.” Despite recent growth, private investment remains far below what the space lords require. Until they can prove that fortunes can be made, not only burned, in zero gravity, Bezos and Musk will be financing their ambitions out of pocket, abetted by whatever funds they can wring from the U.S. Treasury. That said, it’s entirely possible public resources will provide ample subsidy for incremental advances that can eventually take Musk and Bezos where they want to go. They’re counting on it. Certainly, few in government question the space privateers divine right to profit. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders would be an exception. In a November floor speech, he called a $10 billion handout to Blue Origin in the Pentagon budget bill “beyond laughable,” adding, “It is not acceptable that the two wealthiest people in this country—Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos—take control over our space efforts to return to the Moon and maybe even the extraordinary accomplishment of getting to Mars.” Raising the billionaires’ taxes, as Sanders wants, would also help bring the space program back under public control. Musk calls Sanders “a taker, not a maker” and tweeted at the Senator, “I keep forgetting that you’re still alive.” Let’s give that man a planet! And while present activities like space tourism seem a lark, they do provide a corporate foothold. Blue Origin has partnered with companies, including Boeing, and universities, led by Arizona State, to build a “mixed use business park” in space. Called Orbital Reef, this suburban-sounding outpost is supposed to be operational by the end of the decade. But thus far, the most lucrative niche in space has been commercial satellites. Musk has moved aggressively in this area, with the goal of funding his Mars mission. Since 2019, SpaceX has launched more than sixteen hundred “Starlink” internet-relay satellites into orbit, spoiling the view for astronomers and sparking debate about who has the right to alter the night sky. As it happens, the proliferation of commercial satellites exacerbates a problem that threatens future development in space: debris. What’s more, the technologies needed to intercept, capture, and dispose of this space junk are similar to those needed to mine asteroids—a prospect that makes space entrepreneurs giddy. One of the largest asteroid mining concerns to date, Planetary Resources, raised more than $50 million from the likes of Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, plus the government of Luxembourg, which is bullish on space privatization. The company quickly fizzled out; in 2018 it was acquired by a blockchain company that sold off its assets. Despite such a high-profile recent failure, the multi-billion and even trillion-dollar valuations expected for asteroids containing platinum or rare earth minerals may prove irresistible. According to a 2020 paper authored by Andrew Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University, and cosigned by nineteen other academics and NASA scientists, “it is only a matter of time” until a well-funded asteroid mining concern takes off, “either as part of an effort to develop a market or in anticipation of one.” Finally, there is always the chance of an unexpected breakthrough. As discussed at the National Cathedral event and publicized just about everywhere, the Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have affirmed the reality of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena—objects witnessed by trained observers and verified by advanced sensors, which travel with shocking speed and maneuverability, seemingly impervious to gravity and inertia. Feats deemed impossible may actually be demonstrated in our own atmosphere. It sounds far-out, but perhaps, with government support, scientists will figure out how these objects work. Then maybe the trip to Mars no longer takes two hundred days. Maybe it takes a week. Or a blink. What then? Do we let Musk and Bezos simply purchase sovereignty over the stars? All Your Space Are Belong to Us Capital is staking unprecedented claims. In Genesis, God said to “fill the Earth and subdue it”; no such instructions apply to celestial bodies. Astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz, who organized a 2018 conference on “Decolonizing Mars,” says Musk’s plan would mean giving up on discovering the history of Earth’s neighbor. If there is life on other planets, human settlement could easily destroy it. But who cares about some lousy extraterrestrial microbes? The privatized space race is all about control. Predictably, the space lords’ colonies would be governed as fiefdoms dressed up as libertarian paradises. An O’Neill Cylinder or an uninhabited planet might seem to satisfy the colonial fantasy of a blank canvas for economic and political expression. But no. The easel, the palette, the pigments, and the brushes will belong to the space lords, not to mention royalties in perpetuity from any intellectual property created using their space technologies. Musk, audaciously, says existing laws won’t apply in his Martian sandbox. The terms of service for SpaceX’s Starlink specify that “the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.” Musk says he favors “direct democracy” on Mars. Sure, OK. No democracy can exist where one company controls the life support systems. Vote against the boss? No rations for you. Labor unrest? Try striking without oxygen. Musk claims Mars will be “the planet of opportunity,” promising “an explosion of entrepreneurial activity, because Mars will need everything from iron foundries to pizza joints.” Like many awful bosses, Musk imagines intolerable working conditions can be smoothed over with pizza on Fridays. Bezos, likewise, casts himself as a beneficent facilitator of off-world commerce. Once his space colonies are established, he wants the entire Earth to be zoned for “light industry,” with polluting activities moving off our home planet. It sounds unpracticable, but let’s roll with his idea. Earth would become a nature park, overseen by enlightened caretakers. The prospect of global zoning restrictions might appeal to environmentalists. But this proposal is coming from a rapacious capitalist who made his fortune burning fossil fuels. What he wants is a global mandate for anyone engaged in “heavy” manufacturing to pay him a hefty tax. Consider: Bezos would own the means of access to space (his rockets), as well as the infrastructure required to do business there (his colonies). At that point, his control over planetary logistics would make Amazon’s chokehold on e-commerce seem quaint—and establish Blue Origin as a universal monopoly. The mind travels to some dark places imagining life for the space lords’ subjects. Their record as employers does not inspire confidence. Amazon systematically inflicts physical injury on warehouse workers and psychological damage on office staff. In September, a group of twenty-one current and former Blue Origin employees published an open letter decrying the company’s “toxic,” sexist, and abusive environment; dissent was stifled and safety concerns ignored, driving some to suicidal thoughts. “One directive held out SpaceX as a model, in that ‘burnout was part of their labor strategy,’” the letter noted. And indeed, Musk’s tyrannical tendencies are notorious. As I reported in my 2018 book on Silicon Valley, SpaceX had a revealing nickname among some employees: SlaveX. Press reports depict workers subjected to grueling twelve-hour shifts and impromptu 1 a.m. meetings, all to ensure that Musk’s Starship factory operates around the clock—this despite findings by Congress that overly demanding schedules “directly contributed” to the 1986 Challenger disaster. Musk brags about demanding personal approval via email over the smallest production issues. How would that work when it takes a radio signal up to twenty minutes to travel between planets? On Musk’s Mars, there would be literally no escape from his maniacal, absolute authority. He says enlisting to work there would be voluntary. What if someone wants to quit? Would they have to buy their way home? I’m doubtful Musk will find enough people eager to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a one-way ticket to guaranteed isolation and likely death on a freezing rock. It seems more likely he’ll adopt a proven model, indentured servitude, and front travel costs for those who sign away their rights. There are many arguments about what laws should apply to people in space. In my view, it’s all academic until somebody builds a sustainable off-world habitat. Existing treaties may proscribe an East India Company scenario on Mars. But if Musk gets there first with the blessing of the U.S. government, who’ll stop him? How much influence could any terrestrial government wield over activities tens of millions of miles away? And why would any nation be inclined to assert such authority when its economy and security have grown inextricable from the fortunes of private space companies? Both Bezos and Musk are clear about how they see the role of government: to make amenable laws, to buy their rockets, and to foot the bill for research and development. Asked at the National Cathedral whether people should be comfortable with the growing role of the private sector in space, Bezos said yes, of course, and laid out a task for vestigial civic institutions: “Government will still have a role to play,” he said, “but they should be doing the really hard things.” For instance, he went on, developing “hyperspace point-to-point travel” is best left to the public sector. And if hyperspace travel proves impossible, hey, at least it wasn’t his money burned. Witness the space lord mindset. The richest man in the world, who pays almost no taxes, thinks public money should underwrite his conquest of the universe. While he hoards glory and power like a budding Baron Harkonnen, zipping between the stars and enjoying the fruits of a renewed Eden, we plebes do the “the really hard things”—toiling to grow his fortune, breathing recycled air, eating space paste, and slowly forgetting how luxurious it was to inhabit a self-sustaining ecosystem that wasn’t owned by one strange bald man. Best case, life in a Bezos colony sounds like being trapped in an airport. At least there’s Mozart! Musk might be even more deranged. In 2015, he went on Stephen Colbert’s CBS late-night show and talked about his plans to terraform Mars. Colbert asked how. Musk explained the fastest way to warm the Martian climate would be to “drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles.” Colbert replied by calling Musk a supervillain. (Correct. Specifically, he’s setting himself up as the antagonist in Total Recall.) Scientists noted that Musk’s plan wouldn’t work. It raised other practical questions, too, namely: Where would Musk get a nuke? If the day comes when the space lords control nuclear arsenals, you’ll know there’s been a regime change. Space privatization is a recipe for corporate totalitarianism, and not only inside the hypothetical off-world colonies. The costs involved are so great, and the stakes so high, that moving forward with such plans necessitates a de facto capture of the public sector by private interests. Any show of accountability for a company that claims dominion over an entire planet would be just that—a show. Humanity would be wise to imagine a different future. It’s not that there couldn’t be good reasons to move people into space. But militaries and corporations must not call the shots. In 1963, JFK proposed a joint lunar mission with the Soviet Union. That now sounds like a radically different way of thinking. If we were able to envision international partnerships, Congress might repeal the 2011 Wolf Amendment that forbids NASA from cooperating with China. And if we were willing to tax the space lords back down to Earth, their ill-gotten fortunes could be plowed into public, international scientific efforts. The United States could then ratify the 1979 Moon Treaty, which bans private ownership over extraterrestrial real estate and establishes space resources as the “common heritage of mankind.” Once all that’s done, there will still be roles for space entrepreneurs. Maybe they can deliver pizza.
Becoming Martian Chanda Prescod-Weinstein The first Black woman in space, Dr. Mae Jemison, told poet Nikki Giovanni in a 1993 Essence magazine interview, “The Third World will be the ultimate beneficiary of space technology because we’re moving away from infrastructures.” Giovanni, who like Jemison has Alabama roots, was thrilled. This Afrofuturist techno-optimism is my favorite kind, even if as a Black feminist theoretical physicist, I have become quite cynical. Like Giovanni, I am a Star Trek fanatic. I believe in the Vulcan philosophy of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations” even as I rail against what I call the diversity-and-inclusion racket here on Earth. My own experiences as a Black scientist have led me to believe the night sky is every person’s ancestral heritage and that connecting with the sky is part of what makes us human. Only recently did I learn that two of my heroes were discussing these very ideas in a Black women’s magazine around the same time I, a ten-year-old Black girl, was deciding to become a theoretical physicist. Describing the items that she took into space with her, Dr. Jemison told Giovanni, “I wanted everyone to know that space belongs to all of us.” I love this statement, though I worry about the connotation of the verb belongs. In the context of this colonizer language, English, I often think of Adrienne Rich’s poem “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children,” and in particular the line, “This is the oppressor’s language / yet I need it to talk to you.” As members of the Black Atlantic, descendants of Africans who were kidnapped from their homes and forced to survive the Middle Passage and slavery, Jemison, Giovanni, and I share a linguistic displacement. We speak the language of our ancestors’ kidnappers and owners; we are socialized into their capitalist relationship to land—and now space. When Jemison says “belongs,” does she mean it in the sense of “owned”? When I speak of an “ancestral heritage,” do I mean something more than a capital inheritance? This is not simply metaphysical speculation. These questions are, for me, matters of actual physics. They have been, for close to a century now, material issues of national security for rich nation-states. And as we enter the 2020s, they are understood to be of enormous economic significance. Meanwhile, low-Earth orbit is more and more crammed with tiny satellites launched by SpaceX, which is led by South African billionaire Elon Musk. The company tells us that these facilities are on a humanitarian mission to provide internet to rural communities; I simply cannot imagine these are their only intentions, and as a member of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Dark Matter Working Group, I am keenly aware that these satellites have materially damaged our ability to observe the night sky. I am angry about this, but I must reckon with the fact that my mother and stepfather, who recently moved to a rural area to escape the incapacitating smoke of California’s persistent fires, are among the beneficiaries of satellite internet. Musk is one of three billionaires to have launched a space company that claims to be rooted in humanitarian impulses yet looks, for all the evidence, like a power-hungry vanity project. He’s even easier to pick on than Richard Branson, who had the gall to echo Mae Jemison’s words about space belonging to us all while adamantly refusing to pay what many of us would agree are his fair share of taxes. Nobody likes Jeff Bezos, who has not only gutted small businesses but also is a bit of a bore. Musk, on the other hand, has given his youngest child a completely ridiculous, technoscience-inflected name, X Æ A-12. The Black African diaspora collectively giggled when rapper Azealia Banks referred to Musk, the child of a rich white investor in a Zambian emerald mine, as “Apartheid Clyde.” Indeed, Musk has an extraordinary amount of undemocratically allotted power. He claims that he is planning to take humanity to Mars. Back in reality, our global ecosystem’s ability to sustain life is collapsing under the weight of centuries of white supremacist, capitalist colonialism—the exact structures that allow Musk to be anything more than an engineer with a Twitter account. People murmur about how these billionaires are planning to escape and leave the rest of us behind on a catastrophically warmed planet. And it is easy in this context to transition from Star Trek fanatic to hostile, anti-space luddite. How can we imagine leaving Earth’s surface and making a livable home elsewhere when we can’t even get it right here? Becoming Earthian The idea that we can abandon Earth and just move on and not meet the same fate somewhere else is silly. Our problems travel into space with us, as exhibited by the history of exclusion from space faced by Black and disabled people, and anyone else who isn’t an abled hetcis white man. Without the protection of Earth’s atmosphere and the stabilizing influence of the Earth’s gravitational pull, life is hard. As science studies and disability studies scholar Ashley Shew likes to remind people, we haven’t even totally worked out poop in space. Read any account by astronauts about life in space, and inevitably you get to amusing notes about floating poop. There are a lot of diapers involved. And for some people, life in diapers is normal and necessary. I once shared a panel with Shew where she patiently explained why colostomy bag users are more ideal astronauts than those of us who use toilets to defecate. Conjuring the ideal spacefaring body requires a different kind of imagination. We should also stretch ourselves past the easy binary that governs our discussions about space and resource distribution here on the ground. Too many people believe that we must choose between living in better relations with our ecosystems (and each other) and going to space. People see the price tag associated with going to space—a number with a lot of zeros after it—and think we can’t afford it. The reality is, NASA has gotten multiple robots to Mars on a relatively light budget. What we spend on going to space is a tiny fraction of the annual defense (or major studio filmmaking) budget alone, though much of that money does ultimately end up in the hands of defense contractors who assist in designing the launch facilities. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. We can afford to do more than be space curmudgeons, and we can go to space without relying on a weaponized military-industrial complex. I have to make this argument all the time, sometimes to myself. And the thing is, people are thrilled about going to space for non-military reasons. Nikki Giovanni is excited about going to Mars. In her collection Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose, Mars is a persistent refrain. That is where the Black child can escape to. Mars is a canvas for her Black freedom dreams. Sometimes I struggle to remember that this can be so, because our modern nationalist and capitalist space race cynically co-opts humanist visions of journeys into space. But then I think about Giovanni telling fellow Black Southerner and writer Kiese Laymon about growing okra—a staple of African and Black Atlantic diets—on Mars, and I remember, no, she is talking about a very different universe of possibilities. In her poem “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars),” Giovanni declares that “the trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.” She’s referring to the Middle Passage: the ancestors who survived that journey, she imagines, know the patience required for a difficult journey and understand how to start anew after a treacherous experience. This is an uncomfortable thought for me. The distance is almost incomprehensibly enormous between a chosen journey into space and a kidnapping and compulsory transatlantic journey with insufficient food, lying in one’s own waste and the waste of others, sometimes alongside people who have died or are dying. The comparison feels foul, even as I understand that she means that our ancestors made the decision to make something of their journey, to be human anyway, in all of the ways available to them. Giovanni’s poem argues that NASA needs “to ask us: How did you calm your fears . . . How / were you able to decide you were human even when everything / said you were not . . . ?” The comparison is apt in the sense that the Middle Passage produced the possibility of fantastical journeys for others; so it is with our current arrangement in space travel. Both Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have recently lifted off from the Earth’s surface and flown at least to the edge of the atmosphere, if not really to space. The economic resources that made these journeys possible find their origins in the Middle Passage and similar violent, colonial nightmares, as well as the near-sweatshop labor conditions propagated by Bezos at Amazon. What’s more, the technological materials needed for spaceflight rely on the violently colonial global mining industry. In Brazil, where the real Amazon—a necessary part of our global ecosystem—is being burned to the ground, Black Brazilians known as quilombolas are displaced from their land in order to expand a spaceport in Alcântara. In Indonesia, the indigenous Abrauw Clan of Biak Island are facing the same fate. Meanwhile, peoples around the world are experiencing mass displacement, famine, and other tragedies because of the man-made technological advancements that drive climate change. As a former NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow, I am aware that spacefaring organized by government organizations is not necessarily better. The next-generation iteration of the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s JWST, has, as of this writing, a planned December 2021 launch from a place called the European Spaceport. Coincidentally, the spaceport is nowhere near Europe but is in the Latin American region known as French Guiana, which as an overseas department is not technically a French colony, but it sure isn’t an independent country. Stuck with the Worst of Us This colonialism seems inescapable. So maybe I, too, want to lift off to Mars, to start over, to escape somehow. But part of the problem with being the kind of scientist I am is knowing how improbable this is—not just now but ever. After the sun, the next nearest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri. This means that the nearest planets to us outside of our solar system are Proxima Centauri b (first observed in 2016) and Proxima Centauri c (first observed in 2020). These planets are 4.2 light years away, and because the number involved is close to zero, you might think, “Well that’s not far.” But to understand what this distance entails, let’s recall that a light year is the distance light travels in the course of a year. Light, everybody knows, goes the fastest that anything can go in the universe: in a vacuum, it travels at 6.7 x 10^8 miles per hour, which is to say that it travels one million times faster than the speed limit on most American freeways. This means that to travel to Proxima Centauri in under five years, we would need to travel a million times faster than I do on my commute. The fastest people have ever gone in space is about twenty-five thousand miles per hour. At that speed, we could get to Proxima Centauri in 114,080 years. It’s hard to go much faster than this, the speed of light notwithstanding. People necessarily go more slowly than light because the more massive an object is, the more energy required to give it speed. The 2019 Chinese film The Wandering Earth, adapted from Liu Ciuxin’s short story of the same name, imagines that when our sun enters a red giant phase (which will genuinely happen in about 4.5 billion years), the people of Earth can collectively work together to rocket the planet to a safer location in another solar system. Though the premise of the film is intriguing, the idea of developing the type of energy source needed to move the Earth out of orbit like that is deeply unrealistic—though ultimately still more likely than traveling at the speed of light. The energy required to make anything more massive than a photon travel at the speed of light is, in our current theories of physics, infinite. In other words, without a radical new understanding of spacetime physics, we won’t be going anywhere much further than Mars. And our current technological capacity means that it will be a long, long while before we can sustain comfortable, habitable lifestyles there. We are apparently stuck here together, Apartheid Clyde and I. If our species somehow managed to get ourselves to Proxima Centauri b, which is in that solar system’s habitable zone, we’d also almost certainly verify what we know already from observations: it likely has no atmosphere. We would not even be in a situation where the air had the wrong composition. We’d have to populate the atmosphere from scratch, and our ability to do so would depend on getting the necessary chemicals in place, the right gravitational conditions (a massive enough planet to hold the atmosphere in place), and the right radiative environment (wherein radiation from the star wouldn’t catastrophically damage the atmosphere we installed). We still don’t understand our own atmosphere. It’s hard to imagine we’ll be building a new one any time soon. But if we develop the capacity to do so, we should use that knowledge to rebuild our home. I hate to say “rebuild” because our home has not completely burned to the ground—yet. Well, not everyone’s. Global warming-induced fires have already destroyed so much. Californians like me are keenly aware of this. The entire West Coast has undergone a shift in the last few years, with “fire season” taking on a new meaning. Whole towns have been destroyed, lives lost, lives permanently altered. Meanwhile, the Global South—including the poorest and often Blackest parts of the American South—has been experiencing these kinds of violent, catastrophic transformations for a while. To Boldly Go Yet for all my cynicism, I remain a dark matter theorist who loves to share images from the Hubble Space Telescope with anyone who will listen. I write a monthly column about particle physics and astrophysics specifically because I believe in humanity’s powerful connection with space. Our species evolved under the night sky, and the Black feminist philosopher of science Sylvia Wynter has proclaimed us to be homo narrans, a storytelling species. One of our first sites of storytelling is the night sky. This is how I, the cosmologist, the cosmic storyteller, am made. In my own work as a Black person who is a dark matter expert, I take great pains to make clear for people that Black people are in fact not dark matter but the same kind of “normal” matter that white people are made of. I like to highlight the irony that the kind of matter that comprises both humans and stars is really a minor component of what’s out there. Dark matter dominates gravitating matter. We are the cosmic weirdos, I love telling people. I think there is nothing inconsistent with this worldview in saying that I think Nikki Giovanni is a Martian. I don’t mean she was born on Mars. But she has declared so many times her intent to go to Mars that she has written herself into the geography that I imagine for it. This reflects one of the great aspects of our traditions here in the Black Atlantic: we are always coming up with new ways to be people, and we have always known that even in terrible circumstances, the people could fly. And so I delight in Giovanni’s hypothetical to Krista Tippett in an episode of On Being: Giovanni is asking us to imagine Black pleasure in space, to imagine something other than a capitalist catastrophe. “All my people have ever done is go forward,” she goes on to tell Tippett. Maybe Black liberation thought can get us to space in a different way. The story goes that Star Trek (the original series) was the only show that Martin Luther King would let his children stay up late to watch. “You are reflecting what we are fighting for,” he told Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, the Enterprise’s communications officer. Nichols went on to become an advocate for NASA, playing an active role in the program that recruited the first generation of American men and women of color who flew to space, including a physician named Mae Jemison. When she eventually lifted off, Dr. Jemison carried with her Blackass markers of her life and world in Chicago and beyond: “An Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater poster, an Alpha Kappa Alpha banner, a flag that had flown over the Organization of African Unity, and proclamations from Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History and the Chicago public school system.” Jemison told Giovanni that the first thing she saw from space was Chicago, but that eventually she noted Somalia, too. Seeing the globe in its totality, it was still both Black and contextualized by what her journey did and did not mean to the Black diaspora. “I’m not the first or the only African American woman who had the skills and the talent to become an astronaut. I had the opportunity. All people have produced scientists and astronomers,” she told Giovanni. This was part of Jemison’s version of something all astronauts are said to experience, the overview effect: a shift in how they see the world and the universe because of their firsthand experience seeing what Carl Sagan called our “pale blue dot” from the heavens. In other words, to touch space might well be transformative—if the experience can be democratized. But this requires that we look at power differently and acknowledge its deeply uneven distribution in our globalized world. The only ethical way to space is through practices that sanctify life, rather than stand on the backs of others, which is what billionaire space cowboys are doing when they refuse to care for the environment, or to pay their workers fair wages, or to pay their fair share of taxes. Regardless of their aspirations, Musk and Bezos and Branson should be remembered for the environmental destruction wrought by the corporations they have helmed. They should also be remembered for hanging onto their riches, rather than making this potentially transformative money available to public trusts that are tasked with responding to the climate disaster. Instead of saving Earth, these men dream of escaping it, and they hope that other space geeks like me will join them in the delusion. But Swiss astronomer Didier Queloz was right when he said in his 2019 Nobel Prize lecture that rather than trying to resettle elsewhere in space, we should endeavor to find a way to live in equilibrium with our home planet. Queloz might seem like the best person to comment on this, since he won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to the discovery of the first of what are now nearly five thousand confirmed exoplanets, 51 Pegasi b. 51 Pegasi b is about fifty lightyears away, even more impossibly out of reach than Proxima Centauri b. And it’s easy to point to the impossibility of making the physics work out as the reason that we have to “settle” for Earth. But we have yet to seriously consider what it would mean for us, psychologically and socially, to permanently detach from the planet that birthed us. Ultimately, we will be better positioned to succeed in our journeys far beyond our familiar star if we learn how to succeed in our journey here on Earth. Without the capacity and the will to live in good relations with our local ecosystems and each other, wherever we are, we will be on a suicide mission.
Princes of Infinite Space Kyle Paoletta In the spring of 2016, with most of the United States suffering through a protracted nervous breakdown brought on by that year’s presidential primaries, the billionaire venture capitalist Yuri Milner called a press conference near the top of One World Trade Center in hopes of turning the nation’s attention skyward. “It is time to launch the next great leap in human history,” Milner proclaimed from behind a podium branded with the name of his new initiative, Breakthrough Starshot. While covering the over twenty-five trillion miles that separate the Earth from Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our own, would take over a hundred thousand years with existing technology, Milner explained, a microchip attached to a light sail could theoretically be propelled across that distance in just two decades with a sufficiently powerful laser. This, Milner boasted, was the “Silicon Valley approach to spaceflight.” To back up his harebrained scheme to laser a kite through interstellar space, Milner assembled an attention-grabbing collection of scholars in front of his PowerPoint. Stephen Hawking was the headliner, and he was joined on the dais by two former NASA bigwigs, the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, and Ann Druyen, a writer best known as the collaborator and wife of Carl Sagan, America’s original celebrity scientist. Rounding out the group was Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist known for his research on black holes who harbored his own quiet aspirations of joining the ranks of Sagan’s contemporary imitators. After the panel received a credulous question about whether there was any precedent for a device the size of Milner’s so-called StarChip traveling at the speeds Breakthrough Starshot called for, Loeb piped up with a little provocative speculation about intelligent life projecting itself across the universe using similar technology. “You might wonder whether there is a possibility that such things are flying near us from other civilizations,” he answered, unable to stifle an excited grin. Two years later, Loeb was arguing that evidence had been found that a probe from an alien civilization had indeed made it to our solar system, and that the device in question just so happened to use the same light sail technology planned for Breakthrough Starshot. The interstellar object was discovered by an observatory on Maui and dubbed ‘Oumuamua, meaning “messenger from far away who arrives first” in Hawaiian, in recognition of it being the first interstellar object confirmed to have entered the solar system. After it was first sighted in the fall of 2017, astronomers around the world turned as many instruments as they could to the object, recording all manner of physical attributes that added up to a puzzling picture. ‘Oumuamua behaved like a comet, though it did not appear to be expelling hydrogen gas. It was about ten times as long as it was wide, an extreme dimensional ratio. The object was also extraordinarily reflective and, strangely, sped up as it exited our solar system. While his scientific peers offered various hypotheses for how a naturally occurring object could behave in this way, Loeb argued that the field of astronomy was too disdainful of the search for alien life to accept the simplest explanation: ‘Oumuamua was not naturally occurring at all. Last year, Loeb spelled out his theory at length in a new book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. In a chapter running through and then dismissing the various conventional explanations for ‘Oumuamua’s behavior, he argues that the idea that the object took the form of a large, incredibly thin pancake seemed more persuasive than an earlier suggestion that it was shaped like a cigar, even as a piece of space rock being so thin yet so wide seemed implausible. “Is there a simpler way to achieve the required surface-to-volume ratio for a pancake-shaped object?” Loeb writes. “Yes, there is. You could build a thin, sturdy piece of equipment capable of deviating due to the effects of solar-radiation pressure to exactly such specifications.” If ‘Oumuamua was indeed a messenger, it could only have been dispatched by aliens. Exo Exo Gossip Planet If the astrophysicists are to be believed, there are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. Of these, some 4.1 billion are said to have the same qualities as the Sun. Based on the 4,575 potentially habitable exoplanets that have already been discovered and confirmed by NASA—those rocky worlds whose atmosphere and temperature suggest conditions similar to what’s found on Earth—it is now estimated that there are anywhere between 300 million and 3.6 billion solar systems in our corner of the universe that include a planet that could potentially harbor life. Bearing all this in mind, it’s reasonable to suggest that humans are very, very unlikely to be the only technologically sophisticated lifeform in the galaxy. None of which is the same as saying that we can be certain that there is intelligent life out there, or that it in any way resembles what’s found on Earth. To argue otherwise is to make an unscientific about-face from an estimate formed through dutiful calculation to pure conjecture. Taking that step is a lot more exciting than actual science tends to be, and it’s a move we’re often nudged to make when science gets filtered through the Discovery+ infotainment complex. What’s really surprising, though, is when this sort of conjecture is embraced not by a layman who hasn’t picked up a graphing calculator since high school, but by no less an eminence than the then-chair of the Harvard Department of Astronomy. That Loeb should wager all the credibility his high-flying position affords him on as dubious a proposition as ‘Oumuamua being proof of concept for Breakthrough Starshot is a striking example of the deep allure that fame has to the scientist who has accomplished all he can in the academic realm but finds himself gazing out across the quad and wanting more. Since he first arrived at Harvard in the early 1990s, Loeb has described the early formation of the universe after the Big Bang, predicted the behavior of black holes, and developed a technique for identifying exoplanets. These discoveries led to a short profile in the New York Times and numerous mentions in Smithsonian and Time but weren’t enough for him to become a true scientific celebrity in an age that seems to be minting a new one every few months. For cognitive science, there’s David Eagleman and Steven Pinker; for evolutionary history, Yuval Noah Harari and Richard Dawkins. Physics is the most crowded field of all: there are the string theory hustlers Brian Greene and Leonard Susskind, the futurist Michio Kaku, and the grand poohbah of the whole bunch, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has spent the past twenty years carefully patterning his career off Carl Sagan’s. None of these princes of the sciences has made nearly as great a contribution to their field as they have to the public awareness of it. They are less researchers than ambassadors, but ambassadors who position themselves as the focus of attention by operating as translators between the unimaginable sophistication of academic discourse and the simple ways of the average American. Even the most basic scientific facts are treated as revolutionary by the scientific nobility, particularly if those facts bolster the sense of the audience as having a blinkered understanding of reality that needs expanding by the genius in their midst. In the opening pages of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind—16 million copies sold and counting—Yuval Noah Harari puts on a masterclass in intellectual negging. He describes the fact that Homo sapiens belong to a biological family that includes chimpanzees and gorillas as “one of history’s most closely guarded secrets,” never mind that the basics of Linnaean taxonomy are taught in middle school, if not before. The conspiratorial turn has only just begun. “Homo sapiens has kept hidden an even more disturbing secret,” he continues. “Not only do we possess an abundance of uncivilized cousins, once upon a time we had quite a few brothers and sisters as well.” Believe it or not, folks, there used to be other members of the genus homo. That one of these species, Neanderthals, was first described in 1864 and has so thoroughly permeated pop culture that Ben Stiller once sprayed a group of them with a fire extinguisher goes unmentioned. Such an acknowledgment might undercut Harari’s attempt to style himself as not only a scientific expert but the sort of bold truth-teller who demands a committed following. There’s a Buzz in Your Vest As Extraterrestrial makes clear, Avi Loeb has carefully studied the playbook for promoting oneself as a sage in possession of rare knowledge. “Only a thin line separates philosophy, theology, and science,” he writes, reframing science as an esoteric intellectual and spiritual pursuit rather than a fundamental component of general knowledge. Given that the reader is surely confounded by the strange ways of the astronomist, Loeb generously offers to demystify the field. That is, so long as the reader makes peace with their own stupidity. “When we struggle to make sense of the universe,” Loeb writes, “the fault is in our comprehension, not in the facts or the laws of nature.” In 2015, David Eagleman, a Stanford neuroscientist known for his bestselling book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain and for hosting a PBS miniseries on cognition took the stage at a TED conference and launched into his own version of the same hustle. “We are built out of very small stuff, and we are embedded in a very large cosmos,” he says in a video of the event, keeping things nice and dumbed down. “We are not very good at understanding reality at either of those scales, and that’s because our brains haven’t evolved to understand the world at that scale. Instead, we’re trapped on this very thin slice of perception right in the middle.” Both Eagleman and Loeb tell their audience that they don’t know anything, but do so in a way that makes that lack of knowledge palatable, even normal. Their pronouncements on humanity’s ignorance fall into a grand tradition in popular science, one that harkens back to Cosmos, the landmark 1980 documentary series that turned Carl Sagan into a household name. In the opening moments of the first episode, the camera fades from deep space into crashing waves and then to a wide shot of the cliffs above, before zooming in on Sagan as he intones, “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” Once Sagan’s face and signature tousled hair are finally filling the frame, he continues, “The size and age of the cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding; lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home, the Earth.” Once the audience has been placed into a subordinate role, they are primed to bear witness to a great man’s knowledge. “As a neuroscientist,” Eagleman says in his TED Talk, “I’m interested in the way that technology might expand our umwelt, and how that’s going to change the experience of being human.” It turns out that telling the audience all the ways in which they were deficient was not done in service of granting them new understanding, but rather to debut a product: a vest that Eagleman says has shown some promise in bolstering the perception of the deaf by converting sounds into pulses that can be felt on the skin. Midway through his presentation, Eagleman strips off his shirt to reveal the vest—as well as his perfectly toned arms. “As I’m speaking, the sound is getting translated into dynamic patterns of vibration,” he says, turning around for the audience to see the vest light up with LEDs, prompting applause. Six years later, the product has shrunk from a vest to the Buzz, a Fitbit-like wristband that is marketed not to people who are hard of hearing, but anyone who merely wants to feel sound for the low, low price of $799. Eagleman has completed the leap from famous brain scientist to a man making bank off brain science, all thanks to a little venture capital from his friends. The DeGrasse High Avarice is hardly the only temptation that lures members of the scientific priesthood away from their stated values. Celebrity in its own right is more often the motivating factor, as is evident in the career of Neil DeGrasse Tyson, whose accomplishments as an astrophysicist have always been overshadowed by his skills as a showman. Tyson established himself as a public figure soon after his 1996 appointment to lead the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History by persuading monied Manhattanites to fork over $210 million for the facility’s reconstruction. From there, Tyson went national, serving on a presidential commission, authoring a memoir, and then hosting a PBS miniseries. By the late aughts, he was appearing on the Colbert Report and interviewing Joan Rivers on his podcast. All of this culminated in the big budget 2014 revival of Cosmos on Fox, its debut episode featuring Tyson standing on the very same cliff that Sagan had surmounted a generation before. By this point, five years had passed since the last time Tyson had been published in a scientific journal, but no matter—the man who had once merely theorized starstuff was now shimmering with it. The elaborate edifice of Tyson’s fame came crashing down in 2018 when one woman accused him of rape and several others said he had made inappropriate sexual advances, including a production assistant on Cosmos. Tyson dismissed the claims in a rambling Facebook post, writing, “I see myself as a loving husband and as a public servant—a scientist and educator who serves at the will of the public.” It’s telling that the most famous scientist in America would also turn out to be the sort of man who wielded the power of his station in a way akin to a Harvey Weinstein or a Matt Lauer. Fame does not necessarily turn someone into a monster, but it may just be that you need to start out monstrous to hunger so ravenously for celebrity. It should also be no surprise that, even as his public profile has lessened since the accusations, Tyson has hardly been canceled into anonymity. He retained the top job at the Hayden Planetarium and has published three more books, with another on the way. It’s impossible to imagine Tyson’s station in life proving so durable if he didn’t enjoy such a robust Q Score. While none of his fellows in the scientific aristocracy are necessarily looking to behave as Tyson did once he became a celebrity, it’s hard to believe his career represents much of a cautionary tale, either—especially after his fall from grace created a cold, starless vacuum for the role of America’s most famous scientist. Frontal Loeb Whether or not Loeb theorizing that ‘Oumuamua was a piece of alien technology represented a calculated attempt to become famous, it certainly had that effect. In Extraterrestrial, Loeb writes that, mere hours after his first paper on ‘Oumuamua was picked up by the press, four television crews were vying for space in his office in Cambridge: “I tried to field their questions while simultaneously responding to a steady stream of phone calls and e-mails from newspaper reporters.” While much of that attention came from journalists merely chasing an undeniably buzzy story—what editor would resist the opportunity to put “Harvard” and “alien probe” together in a single headline?—there were also plenty of reporters who quickly picked up on the fact that Loeb was basically saying that ‘Oumuamua used the same technology he was in the process of developing with Milner. In his book, Loeb recounts one German journalist saying to him, “According to the proverb, whoever has only a hammer will see nothing but nails.” While he acknowledges that his ideas were certainly influenced by his work on Breakthrough Starshot, Loeb sniffs at the suggestion that the faculties of a scientist of his stature could be compromised in this way, writing that “the problem with the proverb was that it focused attention on the hammer rather than the person wielding it. Not only do skilled carpenters most definitely not see nails everywhere, but they are trained to differentiate among those they do observe.” Self-aggrandizement is a typical mode for the celebrity scientist (Tyson, for example, quotes himself in the epigraph to his book Astrophysics for People in a Hurry), and it is one Loeb has embraced as his public profile has risen in tandem with his vociferous arguments about ‘Oumuamua. He implicitly compares himself to Galileo in the book, equating the scientific consensus that ‘Oumuamua was naturally occurring to the Catholic Church’s refusal to accept heliocentrism. “Unfortunately, the humility accompanying our never-ending learning experience is, as in the case of ‘Oumuamua, sometimes forgotten out of hubris,” Loeb writes, “whether exercised by ecclesiastical authorities, secular authorities, or, sometimes, scientists who declare victory prematurely and assume a line of inquiry has reached its end.” A little over a month after Extraterrestrial made the New York Times bestseller list, the broader scientific inquiry into ‘Oumuamua was indeed taking a turn for the end credits, thanks to the release of a study by two astronomers at Arizona State University arguing that much of the object’s strange behavior would make sense if it was a piece of a Pluto-like rock that had been sent spiraling into space by an asteroid impact. Briefly, ‘Oumuamua’s shape could be explained by the effect of cosmic rays on a round object over the course of a half billion years of interstellar travel, its shininess by the presence of nitrogen ice (naturally occurring on Pluto and one of Neptune’s moons), and its acceleration around the sun by the evaporation of that nitrogen ice, which would cause a rocket effect. Humility be damned, Loeb has only redoubled his efforts since then. Though he claims in Extraterrestrial that he “neither sought the limelight nor particularly enjoyed it,” in the year since the book’s publication Loeb has received numerous magazine profiles and appeared on every American cable news channel, as well as Britain’s Channel 4 and ILTV in his native Israel. The public push seems to be having the desired effect, with Loeb now becoming well-known enough that he can feature as part of a clue on Jeopardy! All of this led up to the launch of a new initiative at Harvard in July, the Galileo Project for the Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts. The Galileo Project’s goal is to move the search for extraterrestrial life “from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated, and systematic scientific research.” Though Yuri Milner remains focused on his own space-based vanity project, Loeb has secured financial support for the new scheme from a different billionaire patron, Frank Laukien. Even better, Loeb told Scientific American that Laukien’s money comes with “no strings attached.” So what if the core reasoning that animates Loeb’s neo-SETI start-up has been utterly disproven by the very scientific method the astrophysicist pledges fealty to throughout Extraterrestrial? Being the alien guy has gotten him this far, there’s no reason to stop now. The Galileo Project, like Breakthrough Starshot, is unlikely to produce much of anything beyond a warm sense of innovation in the hearts of all its board members. Who cares? Getting to the point in your career where you can rustle up enough money from rich doofuses to establish a program as blatantly self-serving as the Galileo Project is as good as it gets for an academic lusting after fame. One small step for Avi Loeb, one giant leap for celebrity scientists everywhere.
Spoiling the Last Frontier Matthew King This past October, while scrolling through social media one Wednesday morning, I reluctantly clicked into a livestream of yet another billionaire joyride to the lower limits of outer space. It had been a summer of first launches, overhyped PR events intended to jump-start a long-anticipated second space race. In July, licensing megalomaniac Richard Branson flew fifty-three miles above Earth in his Virgin Galactic rocket plane, just a few weeks before supply-chain zealot Jeff Bezos rode his Blue Origin rocket some thirteen miles higher for a whopping ten-minute journey through zero gravity before landing back in the West Texas desert. In September, the Mars-obsessed emerald heir Elon Musk had the surprising decency to stay home while his company SpaceX sent an all-civilian crew—the tickets purchased by a fellow billionaire, the e-payments tycoon Jared Isaacman—on a multiday mission around Earth, now memorialized in a five-part Netflix documentary series. For these modern robber barons, the dawn of commercial space activity marks nothing less than a new chapter for humanity. Branson’s self-proclaimed dream is to “make space accessible to all,” a prospect that inspires little faith given his defunct rail service and bankrupt airline. For Bezos, space seems to represent limitless capacity, the potential to move “all polluting industry off of Earth,” and create floating colonies that house “a trillion humans . . . a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts.” Musk sees himself as some cosmic guardian, helping to preserve the “light of consciousness” by making humans a “multi-planetary species.” Despite this grandiose rhetoric, these launches accomplished something much more prosaic in the short-term; they opened the lucrative market for civilian spaceflight. No matter how flush their war chests of cash and equity, these billionaires know the success of their sci-fi fantasies relies on a succession of practical businesses that can keep the grand delusion afloat for decades to come. Space tourism is one of those big bets, and on that autumn day, as I watched Blue Origin host its second civilian launch, the sight had already become somewhat familiar. The concept had been tested, the price point verified (roughly $250,000 to $500,000 per seat, which might seem outrageous but is not much higher than what the 1 percent already spends on private air travel in one business quarter). Now the industry just needed to drum up demand. As such, the livestream I watched was not just a silent feed but a feverish infomercial. Bezos trotted around the launch site in his blue jumpsuit and cowboy hat, inspiring jokes that he might join the flight at the last moment. The crew this time around included William Shatner, the legendary Star Trek captain who looked terrified standing beside the real-life, plutocrat-funded pleasure craft. Two ecstatic hosts provided play-by-play narration of the press conference and behind-the-scenes footage, like Monday Night Football commentators. The segues between scenes showcased the all-inclusive Blue Origin experience: luxury Airstream trailers, cozy outdoor bonfires, blue specialty cocktails. It was a Marriott-ized vision of space travel reminiscent of James Gray’s film Ad Astra (2019), in which a near-future moon base resembles an even bleaker version of New York’s Penn Station, with the same windowless passageways and grimy fast-food franchises. All three of the billionaire-backed companies discussed above plan to launch dozens, if not hundreds, of civilian flights each year. And tourism represents just one corner of the booming market for skyward expansion, which raised a record $8.7 billion in venture capital funding over the past year, nearly double pre-pandemic levels. Perhaps the even bigger play is the tens of thousands of satellites they plan to launch into low Earth orbit (LEO) in the coming years. These mega-constellations, dubbed Starlink, OneWeb, and Project Kuiper, aim to “connect the world” by beaming high-speed subscription internet to every corner of Earth. The influx of capital and talent into this sector has spawned a growing industry of partners, suppliers, and competitors—early-stage ventures and public companies alike who want to make it easier and cheaper to launch more things into space more frequently. In the near term, that almost exclusively involves satellites, but someday it could encompass materials for research or manufacturing. Today, companies can already rent space in a cargo rocket to lift payloads into orbit, or even buy their own single-use DIY launch site that can fit inside a single shipping container. From a scientific perspective, these projects of course represent no great leaps forward for mankind. Humans have been flying rockets and satellites and astronauts into space for over sixty years. Government space programs pioneered low-gravity research decades ago. If anything, these latest ventures mark an inflection point for space as it evolves from a realm of national ambition to one of commercial exploitation. The brave new world unfolding before our eyes is no endless frontier of renewed exploration, but an uncontrolled experiment of epic proportions. How crowded and neglected can Earth’s orbital lanes become before catastrophe ensues? Rotten in the Stars The flip side of space exploration is the same trail of garbage that seems to follow wherever humanity ventures. But in this case, the consequences are potentially dire—and on a planetary scale. Much as our oceans have filled with soup-like swirls of plastic flotsam, decades of space activity have turned Earth’s orbits into a junkyard of metal debris. By this point, you’ve likely seen a news article or TV segment with diagrams of Earth blanketed by a thick swarm of dots, representing thousands of spent satellites, rockets, and upper-stage boosters, as well as the occasional glove or tool kit that slipped from an astronaut’s grasp. Left off these diagrams is the even more sprawling universe of objects too small to track: half a million marble-sized pieces, from stray nuts and bolts to paint chips; tens if not hundreds of millions of shrapnel bits from accidental collisions or intentional missile tests; and more than 100 trillion micro-objects smaller than one-hundred-thousandth of an inch, any one of which could pose a lethal threat when traveling about ten times faster than a bullet. Scientists have worried about orbital debris since the dawn of space travel. When the Sputnik launch sparked the first space race in 1957, it left behind its four-ton, final-stage rocket launcher in orbit. Eventually, gravitational forces should pull such discarded objects into a fiery doom through Earth’s upper atmosphere. This “self-cleaning” mechanism helps diminish the danger of collision—with other objects in space or onto a populated area down below. But depending on the object’s altitude, that natural process of deorbiting can take decades, if not centuries. Meanwhile, the mess accumulates, other objects collide, and roughly once every week, a large piece of debris survives reentry and crash-lands into Earth. The unique danger of space debris is its replicability. As zombie objects collide, they produce many more pieces of smaller debris and shrapnel, which become even harder to detect but remain dangerous; those offspring pieces then collide into other debris, and the reaction repeats, ad infinitum. Such explosive potential became a reality on February 10, 2009, when a defunct Russian Cosmos-2251 military satellite slammed into an active Iridium 33 commercial satellite. The incident—the first major accidental collision—defied every detection system and risk indicator; within weeks, it single-handedly doubled the total number of debris objects in orbit. Today, combatting space junk has already become a routine nuisance for satellites and astronauts; both rely on propulsion systems to dodge objects throughout their missions. The U.S. Space Command now issues more than one hundred thousand collision warnings every day. Last year, the International Space Station conducted multiple debris-avoidance maneuvers, including one in which the onboard crew had to evade a piece of debris spawned by a Chinese antisatellite test in 2007. For years, untracked pieces of space junk have chipped the ISS’s windows and punctured robotic limbs, informing new spacecraft designs specially outfitted with deflection shields. As more spacefaring companies plan a busy launch calendar, ideal dates and flight paths are as likely to be determined by openings in the shifting clouds of debris as they are by wind or rainy weather conditions. Despite these copious warning signs, the second space race barrels ahead. The number of active satellites in LEO is set to explode from a few thousand to more than one hundred thousand by the end of the decade, a ten-fold increase largely attributed to those mega-constellations of internet-beaming satellites. Musk’s Starlink has already launched over seventeen hundred units, accounting for nearly 40 percent of all active satellites in orbit; eventually, his fleet will number over forty thousand. OneWeb—which Branson backed for years until his relationship with the company exploded in classically disastrous fashion—has launched half of its planned 648 satellites, and Bezos’s Project Kuiper will begin launching the first of its own three thousand next year. This flood of new objects has scarcely begun, and already these satellites are increasing collision risk and curtailing the work of astronomers and climate observers. Even SpaceX’s revised, sun-shaded satellites are prone to photobombing long-exposure shots of the deep galaxy, wasting researchers’ limited time on digital tinkering to remove their glaring, anomalous streaks. Similar to how pieces of plastic marine pollution may eclipse the fish population within decades, astronomers predict that satellites will soon outnumber stars visible to the naked eye—another stark benchmark in our Anthropocene era. Some believe we’re already witnessing a worst-case scenario unfold, as the addition of new debris far outpaces the deorbiting of existing space junk. In 1978, NASA scientist Donald Kessler prophesied a scenario now known as “Kessler’s syndrome,” in which high orbital densities trigger a massive chain reaction rendering LEO unusable. “It has already started,” Kessler recently told Scientific American, an escalation of his stance in 2015, which still presumed the problem could be mitigated by retrieving the largest few hundred pieces of debris. “There is now agreement within the community that the debris environment has reached a ‘tipping point’ where debris would continue to increase even if all launches were stopped. It takes an Iridium-Cosmos type collision to get everyone’s attention. That’s what it boils down to . . . and we’re overdue for something like that to happen.” In Kessler’s view, all it might take are a few collisions between large objects to trigger a potentially cataclysmic reaction, turning LEO into a thick smog of atomized debris. Such a catastrophe would jeopardize not only billionaire vanity projects but the cosmic infrastructure underlying much of our technological lives. The blue GPS dot on your phone, emergency weather monitoring services, and digital financial transactions are just a few of the essential services that rely on satellites in LEO or deep, geostationary orbit, the two realms most cluttered with debris. As the European Space Agency director of operations, Rolf Densing, bluntly put it in 2017, “You might as well move into a museum if all the satellites are switched off.” You could argue it’s encouraging that space junk has become something of a cause célèbre. Debris is a staple of the sci-fi genre, in films like Wall-E (2008) and Gravity (2013), and most recently, the South Korean blockbuster Space Sweepers (2021), about a ragtag group of celestial scavengers in a future where Earth is nearly uninhabitable. The cosmic plight of debris has become a frequent subject of primetime news programs and special committees organized by the United Nations and World Economic Forum. Greta Thunberg hasn’t yet decried its sins, but we can expect it on her agenda soon. I was amused to find during my research that The Economist has reported on space junk incessantly for more than a decade, providing a real-time account of the journey from initial curiosity to mounting despair, in plain sight and full knowledge of its audience, our supposedly pragmatic powerbrokers. As seen with the pet cause of plastic marine pollution, the celebrity attention afforded to a collective problem can backfire. Rather than inspire the difficult work of forging new rules or frameworks, or committing to responsible disposal guidelines, the specter of an environmental crisis can spur an unproductive focus on private choices and silver-bullet solutions. There’s nothing our deep-pocketed monopolists love more than to find new reasons for throwing technology at social problems. In the fast-devolving context of our second space race and worsening orbital debris densities, we’re now seeing the industry’s most shameless hucksters, who have already made a buck polluting the high skies, spin up new schemes to make another buck pretending to clean up their own mess. After the Gold Rush There is a long and complex list of reasons for why “cleaning up” space debris is impractical. For starters, the task of capturing or deorbiting a perpetually spinning object traveling at thousands of miles per hour is arguably more technologically daunting than landing a person on the moon. And for a reactive, rather than preventative, approach to succeed, you’d have to repeat the task tens of thousands of times, while somehow not generating any new debris from your celestial garbage truck. If that doesn’t already sound like a deal-breaker, consider another lesser-known truth: the vast majority of debris is too small to track, and there is little consensus among space observers about how to accurately track the path of those larger objects we can detect. Space junk doesn’t travel in perfect ellipses but rather highly variable paths that never arrive in the same place twice. State-of-the-art databases like ASTRIAGraph show that U.S. and Russian tracking systems sometimes contain two entirely different orbits for the same object. In a sense, the 2009 Iridium-Cosmos crash that ignited global concerns about space debris was a technological wake-up call, revealing the limits of our detective powers. As David Finkleman wrote in American Scientist: “The possibility [of the Cosmos-Iridium collision] was recognized, but the calculated probabilities were actually much lower than for other possible encounters during the same period.” While these efforts are continually getting better and more sophisticated, they are still many factors away from being truly actionable. Nevertheless, debris tracking has become a massive, multi-billion-dollar business. Companies like LeoLabs, Northstar, and Lockheed Martin offer radar-based monitoring subscriptions that can cost between $10 million to $100 million per year. Like every enterprise software product, these companies increasingly tout black-box artificial intelligence that supposedly achieves marginal increases in accuracy regarding object placement or collision risk. Recently, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak revealed a new startup investment that aims to create “the Google Maps of space,” purportedly by launching hundreds of satellites into space to study debris and layering a glossy UI over other publicly available data. If nothing else, I suppose these services provide some small peace of mind, perhaps fulfilling a minimum compliance threshold. Although we can’t yet agree on how to accurately and reliably track space junk, there is already a burgeoning market for clean-up technologies. Early-stage ventures have raised eight- and nine-figure sums to produce working prototypes of retrieval magnets (Astroscale), harpoons (RemoveDEBRIS), and a massive robotic claw (ClearSpace); these missions are undergoing proof-of-concept tests that will last at least until 2025. Then there are the countless pipedreams still awaiting development: giant foam balls, debris-deflecting laser guns, even a weaponized hot-air balloon which Raytheon envisions using to push debris into deorbit—a plan as nuanced as Trump’s idea to attack hurricanes with nukes. Of all the harebrained policies floated about space debris on the global lecture circuit, perhaps the most egregious is the idea of a launch tax, or “bottle deposit scheme.” This progressive-sounding idea would collect fees for a general clean-up fund, to support a technological solution that doesn’t yet exist, and even if it did, would be grossly outmatched in scale. It’s an almost perfectly inane program designed to generate a bureaucratic talking point while doing nothing to address the actual problem. In addition to being unproven, exorbitantly expensive, and scientifically suspect, clean-up efforts in space also court disaster; a failed attempt can result in a crash and detonate a fresh “bomb” of new debris. And even if you pull off a small miracle and successfully retrieve a piece of space junk, it’s not entirely clear you’ll be legally permitted to dispose of it. According to the only signed international space law on the books—the 1967 Outer Space Treaty—a defunct object in space belongs in perpetuity to the host country from which it launched. As your hypothetical garbage truck awaits your command on how to handle its retrieved junk, your breakthrough environmental mission may also be misconstrued as a covert threat, triggering a military response from another country. Spacecrafts that can retrieve a defunct satellite can also be used to disarm an active one. For all these reasons and more, the only chance we have to overcome space debris is to immediately limit new launches and agree on sustainability standards across the board. Every satellite, booster rocket, and other detachable module should be equipped with deorbiting sails or fins to steer it toward incineration, or in some cases, propellers to lift it into a far-out “graveyard” orbit. But today, there are no mandatory end-of-life plans for spacecraft. The scant informal guidelines set by the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee recommend lowering satellites into deorbit within twenty-five years; and even then, only about half of all missions have met this minimum request. Rather than bowing to the gospel of tech and innovation, governments need to stimulate more robust discussion about the economic development of space and which projects are indeed worthy of licensing for the public good. The ideal window for shaping this rollout would’ve been years ago, before the floodgates of capital were opened. One of the basic mandates of the Outer Space Treaty is to avoid harmful contamination of space. But over the past two decades, the converging interests of big tech and military-industrial stalwarts have steadily eroded this provision. In the United States, the administrations of both presidents Bush and Obama became prominent cheerleaders for the cause, directing NASA to transition ISS resupply missions to private contractors and giving startups like SpaceX critical injections of early cash flows. Casey Dreier, a nonprofit adviser on space policy, said that the biggest legacy of the Obama administration “was fully embracing the potential of commercial launch capabilities . . . and fighting for it against a lot of opposition from Congress.” In the home stretch of his final term, with hardly a mention in mainstream news media, Obama signed the SPACE Act of 2015, a lobbyist-backed bill that unilaterally opened the celestial orbits to U.S. citizens and corporations to “engage in commercial exploration for and commercial recovery of space resources free from harmful interference.” If commercialization means harm, as we’ve seen so clearly in the issue of space debris—as well as the space industry’s ballooning carbon footprint and possible ozone depletion—then the United States became the first country to violate the spirit of the OST, while patting ourselves on the back for our brave, adventurous spirit. At first, the only other nations to join our exile were tax-haven Luxembourg and the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, both of whom are eager to oblige the ultra-wealthy fetish for all things space. But last summer, Japan passed similar legislation, and it’s all but certain that other governments will soon follow. Is there any doubt that Obama himself, who vacationed on Richard Branson’s private island in the Caribbean just weeks after leaving the White House, will be riding a Virgin Galactic spacecraft in the next twelve to eighteen months? Space Jam With so few reasons for optimism these days, I sometimes feel like a grouch for questioning all this renewed interest in space. While reading journalist Allegra Hobbs’ dispatch from Blue Origin’s first launch for Texas Monthly, I was humbled by the scene of local residents gathered along Highway 54 to watch, people who still see this work as hopeful. “This is a pinnacle moment in history,” one man tells her. “You watch movies like Star Trek—who’s to say this isn’t the beginning?” And surely there are possibilities in zero gravity for novel scientific and biological research. While living in Boston, I was reminded many times walking through Logan Airport, by its prominent JFK exhibit, about the technologies that sprung from the original space program: everything from LASIK eye surgeries and CAT scans to freeze-dried foods and memory foam. But in looking at the cosmic tragedy of our second space race, it’s hard not to see a damning indictment of our own fecklessness. For decades, the world’s industrialized countries have attempted to unwind centuries of plunder and pollution on Earth, cleaning rivers and oceans of the toxic byproducts from heavy industry. And all throughout this supposed reckoning, we have repeated the same mistakes in yet another domain, this one above our heads and arguably the last unravaged by human intervention. Has there ever been more unassailable proof that we have learned nothing? Over the past year, we’ve already seen a glimpse of how the skies might come tumbling down without any meaningful regulation. Last April, an out-of-control rocket stage from SpaceX’s Falcon 9 crashed into a farm in Washington. In May, space enthusiasts and amateur stargazers tracked for days the uncontrolled fall of debris from the Chinese Long March 5B rocket, which crashed into the Indian Ocean, near the Maldives; citizen-observers in Israel and Oman shared their sightings of the passing debris on social media. In August, we learned that the mysterious disintegration of a Chinese satellite months earlier was in fact the result of a collision with a piece of a defunct Russian rocket launched in 1996—arguably the most notable debris-producing incident since the 2009 Iridium-Cosmos crash. In October, another failed Russian military spacecraft streaked through the night skies like a passing comet over Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana before burning up on its descent. I’ve been particularly baffled by the persistent lack of concern about debris among the industry’s most ardent boosters, even when presented with stories of such close encounters. In an October interview with Science, one former Starlink team member described the tunnel vision of his team’s agenda: “There was a lot of talk about how, financially, we could possibly make this happen . . . There was very little talk about it as a moral or ethical or even just a collision problem.” His last point reveals a stunning lack of competence on the part of those perceived to be our era’s most brilliant operators. By impatiently flooding the skies with their cold imitations of the universe, lusting tycoons like Musk and Bezos are accelerating their own defeat, creating a dense barrier of garbage between them and their boyhood dreams. While the hypothetical onset of Kessler’s syndrome sounds apocalyptic, I increasingly wonder if we’ll even notice as it happens. Rather than one big chain reaction that converts LEO into a rubble-strewn wasteland overnight, it might look more like a gradual refashioning of space into something flat and familiar. Orbital lanes will become highways of small satellites and cargo carriers. Companies will send items to space with a single mouse-click. Every government will build its own low-cost, space-station consulate. Over time, insurance premiums for satellites will rise alongside increased orbital density and collision risk. Companies and militaries will spend unreasonable sums on snake-oil tracking and collision-avoidance systems. Eventually, certain orbital highways will become unusable, while the rest strain with untenable congestion, like Los Angeles at rush hour. On any given day, people will complain about poor space traffic management; the junk will be a given.
Rough and Unready Bryce Covert The pandemic has shined a harsh light through every gaping hole in the tattered American social safety net, which has been deteriorating for decades. People who get sick with Covid still aren’t guaranteed any paid sick leave. Our unemployment insurance program has been underfunded and neglected for decades, which left it entirely unprepared for the influx of demand. We don’t have enough affordable housing for everyone who needs it, an acute emergency when, for so long, the way to stay safe from the pandemic was to stay home. We’ve made huge strides toward getting more Americans insured, but our profit-minded health care system means that many people are afraid to go to the doctor if they feel sick, or even to get a free Covid vaccine for fear that there’s a hidden cost. But the crisis didn’t just expose the fact that the country is miserly in the help it offers the downtrodden, the sick, the old and the very young, parents, and workers. It also exposed the fact that, if and when we change our minds and decide to help people in crisis, we don’t even have ways to do it. When Congress finally turned on a spigot of federal rent relief, the money got bottlenecked by state and local governments that were entirely unprepared to deliver a brand new kind of aid. When government shutdowns threatened the future of the country’s small businesses, there was no funnel to deliver billions in relief to keep them afloat, so the government turned to the anemic Small Business Administration, which in turn routed the money through banks. While the funds were a lifeline for some, the program has been absolute chaos from the start, and it failed many of the business owners who needed it most. And as the country realized that one of the best responses to poverty is to send people direct cash—first through a number of stimulus checks, then an enhanced Child Tax Credit that’s acting as a one-year child allowance—it found that getting cash to the poorest is much easier said than done. We could have seen this coming. After the Affordable Care Act was passed, a country that had never before tried to ensure that all Americans could get health insurance had to figure out how to extend it to more people. Few can forget the disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov, the federal insurance marketplace that kept crashing and was impossible to use for months. By now, public servants and dedicated nonprofit volunteers have scrambled to create new pandemic systems from scratch, connecting as many people as they can with the aid they deserve. Pipelines and portals have been slapped together and deployed. But these efforts are likely to sunset as the worst of the crisis someday fades from view; some already have. Will the country learn a crucial lesson? Not just that we owe more to each other outside of a historic, global crisis—that we can alleviate more everyday suffering if we choose to—but that we have to build the infrastructure and systems to ensure help actually gets to everyone? Or will we let the streams run dry and the pipelines crumble, wasting our chance at a kinder, more equitable society? How to Rent a Room Evictions have been an urgent crisis for decades. Landlords file 3.7 million evictions in normal years, according to the Eviction Lab. In the four worst offending cities in the United States, landlords filed evictions against more than 10 percent of renter households in 2016. In North Charleston, South Carolina, the very worst offender, about ten households were sent packing every day that year. And yet the country has never offered tenants rental assistance in any substantial or ongoing way. Section 8 rent vouchers are reserved only for the poorest of the poor and are still often impossible to get; even if someone manages to obtain one, many landlords refuse to rent to them. Other federal rental assistance is only available for select groups and isn’t meant to plug a gap when someone suddenly falls behind. Some states, cities, and localities have offered a bit of support here and there, often funded by philanthropic money, but there has been no comprehensive effort at the federal level. For the first nine months of the pandemic, congressional lawmakers dithered over fixing this problem, forcing tenants to rack up huge debts in back rent—or to forego other necessities in order to make rent on the first of each month—and wasting time during which rental assistance programs could have been well-designed on a national scale. States were allowed to use money from the CARES Act for rental relief if they so chose, but they used just a fraction of it: $2.6 billion out of $150 billion. Even so, a year after the bill passed, $425 million of the $2.6 billion had not made it to either landlords or renters, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. New York and Florida, both states hit hard by the pandemic, returned tens of millions of unspent funds that they couldn’t manage to get to those who needed it. Last December, and then again in March of this year, Congress finally acted, passing $46.5 billion in rental assistance specifically. States scrambled to set up brand new programs to get out ahead of expiring eviction moratoriums. Administrators, not accustomed to funneling rental money or emergency aid out the door, had to wade through technological problems as they set up new application portals. “It is a huge undertaking to try to set up and scale a program like this in a very short period of time,” said Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “They’re sort of learning the ropes as they go along.” Administrators also had to make key decisions about who could get the aid and how they would prove they deserved it. Many programs ended up being “way too cautious and are oftentimes getting in their own way,” Saadian said. As of late September, about 91 percent of rental assistance programs still required proof of tenancy, about 82 percent required proof of income, and 55 percent even required proof that a tenant had experienced Covid-related hardship. Although the Biden administration has urged programs to allow tenants to swear that they qualify, many renters must submit reams of paperwork: tax returns, proof of residency, and records of any assistance they’ve received during the pandemic. Meanwhile, less than a third of these programs send money directly to tenants, bypassing the many recalcitrant landlords who don’t want to agree to tenant protections or would simply prefer to kick their tenants out. Not to mention that renters who have never been offered this kind of help before don’t necessarily know it now exists. Simply making everyone aware takes time and effort. What should have been a deluge of money into tenants’ pockets, allowing them to get current on rent and stay housed, has instead been a pitiful dribble. In the first six months of this year, states got a mere $3 billion, or 6.5 percent of the total funds at their disposal, to tenants in need. Just six hundred thirty-three thousand families received help, even though over seven million were behind on rent and, as of this writing, 3.6 million are on the brink of eviction. Things weren’t much better by July: by that point, states had only gotten 11 percent of the total funds to people who needed them, and at least fifty cities and counties hadn’t sent out a single penny. New York State didn’t distribute any aid through June; by early August, only about seven thousand tenants had actually gotten money. The Middleman Can’t Renters aren’t the only neglected group. Before last year, the government had never given aid directly to small businesses en masse, either. So, when governors across the country issued stay-at-home orders and millions of businesses were faltering on the brink, the government brought in banks as middlemen to sort through applications for relief and issue emergency loans. It was a form of “path dependence,” argued Mehrsa Baradaran, law professor at the University of California Irvine. “We just take the route we always take.” It’s the country’s default response, at this point, to outsource things to the private sector instead of having the government do them itself. But routing emergency aid through banks allowed the financiers to rake in billions in government fees for processing loans without adding much of use to the process. Sure, they spent time on paperwork, and they’re supposed to be on the hook if they issue fraudulent loans. But the banks assumed no credit risk: if qualified business owners end up defaulting on their loans, the Small Business Administration, the agency tasked with running the Paycheck Protection Program, takes the hit. The banks have also made life difficult for the worst-off businesses. First was the struggle just to get the loans, when every day’s delay was another day closer to permanent closure. Banks prioritized bigger, wealthier clients that they already had existing relationships with over smaller, underserved lenders, particularly people of color. JPMorgan Chase, the bank that has issued the most PPP loans, processed loans for over $5 million nearly four times faster than those for below $1 million, according to a congressional report. “They [were] choosing recipients based on their own business models, which would be fine if it was their own money, but it’s the public’s money,” Baradaran said. Then it came time for those who had managed to elbow their way through the process to wipe the loans off their books. PPP loans took the place of the direct government grants that other countries sent to companies to cover payroll costs, but they were supposed to operate in basically the same way. So long as the money was used for the correct purposes—most of it on payroll, with some allowance for rent, utilities, and other expenses—the loans were to be forgiven. But, of course, that process broke down in practice. Banks don’t generate any money for going through the trouble of forgiving loans, so they’ve been unmotivated to do so. A year after the start of the pandemic, most small business owners were still waiting for their banks to complete the paperwork to forgive their loans—or, in many cases, to simply open up the application process. Even by late summer, less than half of all PPP loans had been forgiven. The more efficient and equitable way to protect small businesses would have been to cut the middlemen out and just give them government money directly. But this is not something we’ve ever done on such a scale, and the Small Business Administration doesn’t have a good track record of rushing money out the door in the case of an emergency. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, for example, it took the SBA an excruciating average of forty-five days to process loans for affected businesses, and in the end, it only approved 42 percent of applications. Other countries were ready for this crisis. Denmark, for example, already has a Danish Business Authority that was capable of directly accepting and processing applications for aid. “Since many European countries had similar social safety net programs already, albeit in far more limited form, the salary supports were relatively easy to expand, almost literally overnight in many places, amid widespread consensus,” Michael Birnbaum and Karla Adam wrote for the Washington Post early last year. “The United States, by contrast, has had to cobble together a support system that is in some ways brand-new.” Portals to Nowhere In 1969, Richard Nixon nearly enacted a form of guaranteed income through a negative income tax. We’ve sent monthly Social Security payments out to almost all seniors since 1940. But the country has never enacted a child allowance, even as most of our wealthy international peers have realized the value in keeping children from living in destitution. That changed for the first time this year when Democrats pushed through an expansion of the Child Tax Credit, which, until recently, offered up to $2,000 for each child against a household’s tax liability, but only to families earning $2,500 a year or more. If the credit was more than what a family owed in taxes, they received a check for the difference in a lump sum. By contrast, the expanded CTC is designed to reach all poor families, with a beefed-up dollar amount to be sent out in regular monthly payments. Before, the money only kicked in gradually as parents earned more so as not to “reward” those who didn’t have a job or couldn’t find steady enough work. Now, over 90 percent of families will receive the payments, and they only phase out for higher incomes. In other words, we have a child allowance, at least before it expires at the end of the year. Yet getting the money out to all families, particularly the poorest ones who newly qualify, is where the excitement of a new benefit meets the drudgery of reality. The IRS is in charge of sending out the new Child Tax Credit, as it was for the three rounds of pandemic stimulus checks that came before it. Families who file regular tax returns have experienced the best that our government has to offer: stimulus checks and the CTC payments have showed up in their bank accounts automatically, without them having to take a single action. But everyone else—typically the very young and very old, as well as those who earn too little to owe federal taxes—has had to wrangle with the worst of government: battling with bureaucratic systems designed by people who don’t seem especially attuned to the realities of people’s lives. To get stimulus checks out, the IRS needed to know who people were, where they lived, what they earned, and how many children they had. There are other government agencies that have this information—Social Security for disability recipients; the VA for veterans who interact with it—but at first, instead of working directly with those other agencies to get the details it needed, the IRS threatened to make all of these individuals file returns on their own. “Their natural indication is to put the burden on a population that really can’t handle the burden,” said Nina Olson, former IRS taxpayer advocate and executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights. The IRS eventually reversed course, and yet its ethos—to not care very much about easing requirements on a population whose lives are usually complicated and overburdened—has carried forward. The agency created a portal for people to enter information in order to receive stimulus checks that didn’t work on mobile phones and was at first only available in English. This, during a pandemic that meant vulnerable populations, already reeling from the trauma of the pandemic itself, couldn’t go anywhere for in-person help. The result was that nearly six months after Congress passed the first round of checks, an estimated nine million people still hadn’t gotten their money because they hadn’t filed with the IRS. All of the same kinds of problems reared their heads as soon as the IRS started trying to send out CTC payments to families. For the first time, the credit has been extended to all poor families, even those who earn too little to file tax returns. But that means the IRS doesn’t already have information on them, and these families represent about seven million of the ten million children who should be getting the new benefit. Once again, the IRS set up a portal for people to register for their payments, developed with the help of private tax-filing behemoth Intuit—the same Intuit (the parent company of TurboTax) that has lobbied against efforts to make filing taxes easier for everyone. As with the stimulus payments, this portal is online-only and not mobile friendly, missing anyone who doesn’t have a computer and internet at home. It’s again only in English. Users also need to enter an email address, which many low-income people don’t have. The instructions are densely written. And the portal has strict security check points that people have struggled to get through, particularly those who aren’t very comfortable with technology. “For this population, if you meet a barrier, you ultimately give up,” Olson noted. That’s if they even know about the expanded payments to begin with. While the IRS has put information up on its website, that’s going to miss many of the families they’re supposedly trying to reach. “The IRS has no, zero, zip, nada infrastructure in the field for outreach and education,” Olson said. It had no existing relationships with anti-poverty groups, community organizations, or even state agencies and has done nothing to create them now. “It’s divorced from what’s actually happening on the ground.” The effort to get people to sign up has instead been taken up by a group of volunteers. Can the Government Do Good? Plenty of other creaky structures nearly gave way under the weight of the pandemic. Unemployment insurance systems were crushed under the masses of people who rushed to sign up in the first few months, forcing many to wait weeks or months to get jobless relief. At least nine million ended up with nothing at all. Benefits distributed through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the country’s only cash assistance program for poor people, barely rose to meet the need and even fell in ten states that didn’t do away with harsh rules. But at least in the case of UI and TANF, something had existed before this catastrophe. For too many other needs that predated the pandemic, we’ve failed to do anything at all. Now that the country has rushed to set up new pipelines to deliver pandemic-related aid, are we going to let them run dry and be dismantled as we start to try to put Covid behind us? Some of them might not be worth salvaging. The Paycheck Protection Program has been so chaotic and so unequal that it would be better, instead, to plan ahead for the next emergency, be it natural or manmade, and create a more functional system. The Treasury Department, which tracks all companies through the IRS, could send money out directly, perhaps with the aid of a better-funded, better-organized SBA. But evictions and poverty won’t end when the pandemic winds down. The government decided for the first time in its history to offer tenants meaningful money to keep them housed when faced with the threat of removal, or at least to send landlords checks so they wouldn’t kick renters out. Democrats coalesced, at least momentarily, around the broad idea that sending cash payments to parents could significantly reduce poverty and give children healthy, more stable lives. And yet everything that has been built up to send those benefits out is scheduled to someday disappear. The National Low Income Housing Coalition is working with a bipartisan group of senators to make rental assistance permanent “so we wouldn’t lose some of this infrastructure being built now,” Saadian said. They want to see at least $3 billion flow through these new pipelines down to state and local governments every year and, ultimately, directly to tenants themselves. And they “don’t want to see the knowledge, the expertise, the systems, infrastructure to be allowed to wither away,” Saadian said. “Because then the next time we’re experiencing a crisis like this pandemic, or the next time a family’s just facing their own crisis because they lost a job or saw a reduction in hours at work, we want there to be that infrastructure to help them.” The IRS is in similar danger of letting a mediocre effort go to waste. While its portals to get people signed up for stimulus checks and CTC payments have been riddled with problems, they are better than having nothing to connect families with the benefits they’re owed. “I kept saying to them, ‘Are you going to keep this up and improve it?’” Olson said. As of early this year, she said, the IRS’s answer was no. Without legislation forcing it to maintain the portal created for the expanded CTC, Olson thinks the agency will let that disappear too. Creating new benefits is the exciting part of policymaking, not to mention a rare occurrence. But if no time is spent on figuring out how to actually get them to the people who need them, they might as well not exist. The experience of the CTC, Olson argues, has exposed the need for a one-stop-shop for government benefits. Instead of navigators to help with the Affordable Care Act, and social workers to guide people toward housing assistance, and other bureaucracies for SNAP and TANF and all other programs, we need one place for people to sign up for exactly what they need. These aren’t just logistical problems. They quickly become existential. For many female and minority business owners who got PPP loans, it was the first time they had ever tried to access government lending programs. But after such a bruising experience, they will probably think twice about trying again anytime soon, allowing the white men who are more comfortable with the system to keep enjoying its fruits. Similarly, renters were promised that, as eviction moratoriums started to lift, their government would send them funds to keep them housed. Then they were forced to wait months to apply and receive money, all while their rent kept piling up; many of the lucky few who have gotten aid haven’t gotten enough to make them whole. Why would they believe that the government is capable of providing people like them with the help that they need? For many Republicans, that’s the very point of making public benefits difficult to access and onerous to receive. Their project of imposing work requirements on anything and everything they can, for example, doesn’t help people work, but it does tie applicants up in so much red tape that they get kicked off or can’t enroll in benefits. For any good government-minded moderates, or for Democrats who purport to champion the needs of poor and working Americans, these details can’t just be glossed over and forgotten. Government benefits are only worth as much as what people can access. Democrats will need to commit not just to keeping these systems in place—very much a question mark, given that at least one senator, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, has been threatening to hold up an agenda that includes a more permanent expansion of the Child Tax Credit—but ensuring that they actually function. The government undermines its own case for doing more when it can’t deliver on its promises. And thus it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: we don’t put the time and money into public infrastructure because we don’t believe it can work. The pandemic was a glimpse at a different world, one in which we do offer help and it can arrive on time. Now we have to decide whether or not that’s the world we want to live in.
The Extractive Circuit Ajay Singh Chaudhary The machinery—the actual form and function—of twenty-first-century capitalism is an extractive circuit which quite literally crisscrosses the world. Its global value chains stretch through physical infrastructure and “frictionless” financial flows at the speed allowed by fossil fuels; telecommunications; and geophysical, technological, psychosocial, and bodily limits and “optimizations.” It connects economically and ecologically dispossessed agricultural communities in the Global South with regimes of hyperwork in the Global North; rare earth “sacrifice zones” with refugees; migrant labor with social reproduction; ocean acidification and atmospheric carbon with profitable opportunity. It has required the transformation of states; it has ripped through biomes and through flesh. Capital often appears and is treated as a historical abstraction; this is doubly true of globalized, financialized capital. The extractive circuit is the leaden reality of a global human ecological niche organized for maximal profitability—no matter how difficult or costly to maintain. Its realities underscore the generalization of a colonial social relation in socioecological terms, even as older modes of imperialism and neocolonialism are hardly swept aside. Its speed, frenzy, coercion, and brutality reach into the very heart of the imperial metropole, far beyond where such relations were already present. Feelings of exhaustion—depression, desperation, fatigue, exasperation—course through its wirings, neurons, biochemicals, and sinews. At every “node” along such a circuit, “inputs”—ecological, political, social, individual—are extracted and “exhausted.” The circuit, like capital, crosses boundaries without entirely obliterating them, and, similarly, connects a vast potential political subject across disparate lines—Global North and South, gender, class, race, nationality, religion, and sexuality. The extractive circuit is the socioecological portrait of capitalism historically and its transformations to maintain profitability in the face of immanent headwinds, like the long economic downturn and ecological limits themselves. Just as Marx once invited us to look behind the factory door—above which was inscribed “No admittance except on business”—to understand the way in which a nascent industrial capitalism was creating value, we need to “unbox” the extractive circuit, catalog its parts, and pry past a few bezels if we want to see Actually Existing Capitalism today. The Rest is Nodes Consider the Philippines. Over the past several decades, the Filipino economy has become increasingly dependent on the export of low-cost labor, largely along gendered lines, in the form of care-workers to North America and Europe (mostly women), and extremely low-cost manual laborers to the Gulf states (mostly men). Remittances now make up ten percent (or more) of the annual GDP of the Philippines. In the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia being the case par excellence, migrant workforces are employed in sometimes slave-like conditions to do much of the country’s basic labor, both “unskilled” and “skilled.” (As much as 83 percent of the Saudi Arabia workforce is migrant according to the IMF.) Yet, for all its repressiveness through arms of direct coercion like its notorious morality police, Saudi Arabia is a remarkably weak state. This imported workforce is vital for the social and political maintenance of that weak state, which in turn serves a key function in the globalized order not only as an oil producer but, crucially, as a control on the world’s oil spigot. Far from the Malthusian fears of “peak oil,” oil is in fact plentiful in the world, in the Gulf region and elsewhere, and Saudi Arabia is a key player in limiting its production to control prices. As paths for economic advancement narrow in places like the Philippines and as industries such as fishing are decimated by changing ocean temperature, acidification, coral bleaching, and other cumulative effects of global climate change, conditions intensify this political economic shift to migration. In turn such shifts drive profitable increases in energy demand, low-cost labor, through dispossession and even social and ecological crises themselves. As Melissa Walker observed of the “disposable Third World woman,” Filipino and Southeast Asian labor more broadly is viewed—in terms of dislocation and distance but also cultural imagination—as docile and pliant. In the Gulf, male Asian workers are considered additionally useful as “less politically menacing” than local and regional alternatives. Ecological resources become sources of social value and “human capital” is naturalized as closely as possible to the supposed infinite free “gifts of nature.” Now imagine a Global North worker, across the globe, likely “middle class.” Probably white but not necessarily so. Place her in California—an increasingly unsuitable geography for mass human habitation. Say she’s white collar—perhaps an office assistant, accountant, or coder. In the 1970s her labor would likely have been lower in waged-hours than it is today, and it would have included, in the famous phrase of Arlie Hochschild, a “second shift” of unwaged “free” domestic labor. Cooking, cleaning, care work: the often “invisible” aspects of social reproduction found in the home. Today, our imaginary Californian works longer hours, in a “productively optimized” labor process, still for a lower wage than a male counterpart, even as part of her “second shift” is now itself displaced onto migrant labor, including everything from general health care work to at-home care and domestic work to independent contract labor for household maintenance, which can range from food preparation and delivery to, in concentrated urban centers, laundry and far beyond. The extractive circuit produces prodigious amounts of such “disposable” people. This move toward “outsourcing” domestic labor was already occurring in much earlier periods (the 1960s, 1950s, and earlier), but in the United States that was, at the time, shifted instead to differently racialized gendered labor; a largely black, racialized caste system underwrote white middle class “normalcy” in the United States. Such a caste system unquestionably continues to this day, even if its racialization has taken on “multicultural” hues. But the augmentation that is key to understanding the extractive circuit is the ever-increasing number of inputs designed—to use somewhat crude economic language—to maximize productivity and profitability. This augmentation has spread comparative advantage from geographies to the body itself. This is the case even if it leads to, at best, an increasingly socioeconically and ecologically tenuous maintenance of current overall economic productivity. Put more simply, our imaginary white-collar Californian now works harder and longer helping to maintain an artificially futile level of production and requiring mass consumption of everything from energy to electronics. And she does so for less. Her real wage has stagnated for several decades; even though the professions imagined above could place her income above the 48 percent of Americans who earn less than about $31,000 a year, they don’t come close to the levels where twenty-first-century capitalism truly pays off (not even taking into account the grimmer picture in wealth.)[1] Her lifestyle is thus supported by financialized debt, which in turn requires her to ever further “innovate” and “diversify” her “human capital.” This includes but is not limited to the intensive self-maintenance through biochemicals, pharmaceuticals, and other technological interventions to her body and its internal composition and processes. She does consume more, but this is not a particularly pleasurable form of desire fulfillment. It is rather her very desire to continue to exist that is rechanneled into the logic of capital accumulation. Even as a rather small node on the extractive circuit, she is also a component along several different if recognizable lines, for example through the “global value chains” (GVCs) producing her computer or cellphone, from cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to Shenzhen manufacturing. The unprecedented speed, precision of production, and division of labor, as well as the ungovernability of these value chains, propels her own speed-up. The food system her (un)well-being rests upon is one form or another of industrialized petro-farming, itself dependent on the labor (and the hyper-depressed wages) of a deeply precarious migrant labor workforce composed largely of undocumented migrants and special H-2A agricultural “guest workers.” Its supposed “green” revolutionary efficiency is a figment of resource-intensive industrial agriculture, which leaves the world both malnourished and obese while increasing energy costs, greenhouse gas emissions [GHG], not to mention the growing enclosure and dispossession of people practicing far more sustainable modes of agriculture that could feed the world far better today. Most carbon dioxide is emitted at the point of production. Take her smartphone. The electricity that powers it accounts for only about 14 percent of the total carbon emissions that span its lifetime as a commodity. Eighty-three percent of the emissions occur at the point of production. The majority of such phones are produced in China, whether their end-use destination is the United States, Germany, Japan, or any other country on Earth. And, if we start looking at the other ways phone production exceeds planetary boundaries, in purely ecological terms, we find all measurable boundaries breached.[2] It’s not just a matter of carbon dioxide and other production emissions but also the processes of resource extraction (mining) itself: excessive freshwater use, eutrophication from biogeochemical flows, deforestation of nearby lands, biodiversity loss from land-use and others. At the same time such extraction is dependent, for just one component, on cobalt found primarily in mines in the DRC. The labor in such mines is, almost without exception, either slave labor, child labor, or both. Capitalism as we know it is dependent on the political subordination of places like the DRC, the designation of its people as expendable, “disposable.” Slave labor keeps the cost of cobalt as cheap as possible. Cobalt is a critical resource in high demand. The cobalt from such mines will likely be turned into phone batteries in manufacturing centers in, again, places like Shenzhen, China. Globally speaking—although improving in some ways within China itself—such “cheap” labor is required to maintain the profitability of that phone. Meanwhile, as we’ve already seen, the end-use of that phone dramatically increases the conditions of “hyperwork”—the speed-up, the exhaustion—in the Global North (and pockets of North in South and vice versa). This manifests in all manner of new, “more efficient,” and “more productive” labor practices across a host of traditionally blue- and white-collar sectors. The very design of those phones—forced obsolescence within approximately two or three years—requires not only an increase in extraction across all these nodes but is itself a source of profitability. At this juncture, capital must keep burning through more of the biosphere and the human systems inside it to keep up profit margins. Fracked and Extracted In other words, the logic of the extractive circuit is one of the most vicious cycles imaginable. At every turn, an increase in energy inputs from both ecological and social sources, and with every increase in energy inputs, an increase in overall inclemency for a global human ecological niche that stretches from rising ocean temperatures and acidification to overall warming, each of which drives a further demand for energy inputs, and so on. The increased consumption demands in the service of accumulation require further fossil fuel extraction, further migration into low-wage, high-risk, precarious- or informal-labor, and even the geo-strategic necessity of different kinds of postcolonial states. At every node in the circuit, there are two simultaneous and related phenomena: value extraction and nodal exhaustion. Value is extracted not only through human labor but also through a series of natural and social inputs. Ecologically speaking, value at the simplest level can be drawn from the “free” use of water or air and other “commons.” But it’s also the value derived from their commodification, from so-called “externalities” in waste flows and mountains; in complex socioecological processes like industrial agriculture where not only are soils exhausted but output is dependent on massive fossil fuel, unsustainable pesticide and chemical-fertilizer inputs, or with the “free” exploitation of flora and fauna, from simple use as with logging to the patenting of DNA strands. Almost every measure associated with anthropogenic climate change—not least fossil fuels—represents a process by which value is added through extraction and exhaustion. Similarly, the extractive circuit derives value from a panoply of social sources from the global majorities “relatively surplus to the functioning of capitalism” to the gendered and often unwaged work of social reproduction. In perhaps the most unintentionally radical paper ever written, the late economist Chong Soo Pyun pegged the “monetary value of a housewife” in 1969 through a set of neoclassical and neoliberal methods at $83,807.58 (or $626,410.28 in inflation adjusted 2021 dollars). Just under thirty years later, the ecological economist Robert Costanza and an interdisciplinary team would argue, “only somewhat facetiously” in political scientist Alyssa Battistoni’s words, the value of the world’s “ecosystems and natural capital” is on average 33 trillion (or 56 in inflation adjusted) dollars per year. As Battistoni notes, feminist arguments regarding social reproduction should serve as bridge concepts connecting the “historical and structural” similarities between labor exploitation and ecological value. At the same time in those majorities (across both South and North to differing degrees), refugees, for example, can be mined for data, exploited for informal economies, or leveraged for geopolitical advantage. Racializing and/or Orientalizing populations helps render entire peoples and geographies suitable for valuable subordination, disposability, or wholesale abandonment. Dispossession and expropriation are socioecological processes. Value can be derived from the limitations of popular sovereign powers over capital. Or from the usefulness of social, political, and ecological crises themselves. In a very different (but still market-based) world-system, the DRC should be able to command extraordinarily high prices for its cobalt, especially if mined in more sustainable socioecological ways. However, value is derived from the DRC’s ongoing sporadic armed conflicts and general instability—themselves shaped in part by the extractive circuit—in providing ideal conditions to maintain child and slave labor, environmentally catastrophic extraction, and capture the extraordinary revenues for transnational corporations like Swiss-based Glencore. The key connective tissue in this circuit is fossil capital, to use Andreas Malm’s clarifying construction, but carbon is not, by itself, the only input. In the wake of different modes of exhaustion—at the level of formal labor but also at the level of those thrown out of the labor market, at the level of communities, at the level of societies, of states, and of the ecologies we can live and flourish in—one thing is pursued: profit. Neoliberalism’s matryoshka doll of financialization, international economic governance, risk shifting, state policies, and adjustments in cultural logic helped nurse profitability out of its 1970s doldrums. It did so through the redistribution of labor income to capital; through creating historically unprecedented speed and mobility for transnational capital flows, business-to-business commerce, and firm-level debt/currency creation; and through transforming the social functions of states into profit generating enterprises, diminishing democratic sovereignty, inhibiting decolonization, and quite a lot more. Although carbon emissions have been increasing rapidly since the Industrial Revolution, it is no accident that 63 percent of all emissions have been produced in these past forty years. Pace the Davos set, these emissions track neither population growth nor consumption from developing states. Their path is unimpeded by the proliferation of eco-conscious marketing schemes, “corporate social responsibility,” and promises (and non-existent realities) of mystical techno-fixes. They track the return to and difficult maintenance of profitability. As an interdisciplinary team led by chemist Will Steffen demonstrated, in terms of GHG emissions, ocean acidification, rainforest destruction, aquaculture depletion, global warming itself, and so on, climate change tracks not only cumulative GDP growth (as is widely discussed) but such conspicuous features of contemporary global capital as the increased use of telecoms, non-recreational transportation, and foreign direct investment (FDI), which moves from almost zero in the 1960s to trillions by the 2010s. Following Polanyi, they dubbed this “the Great Acceleration.” Such acceleration does not aggregate with population growth; perversely, the relation is inverted. Emissions, resource intensivity, and other climate measures are concentrated where end-point consumption is greatest, as many climate scientists now openly state, among the world’s wealthiest. In the global top wealth and income deciles, population growth is lowest or even negative. And as the rate of population growth is curbing globally, climate change continues its exponential pace. Many climate scientists today go further still, like physicist and social ecologist Julia Steinberger, in arguing the need to push past symptomatic criticisms of biophysical and economic growth towards the clear critique of capital as the “fundamental driver” of climate change. Far from reaching a new equilibrium, such a system has little room for maneuver, although it’s not at threat of automatic, mechanical collapse—a perennial, millenarian fantasy of so many across a broad political spectrum. Even with anemic growth rates, every little bit of real capital accumulation requires yet more inputs, more extreme extraction, increased dispossession, and new “sacrifice zones”—completely given over to permanent exhaustion and debilitation. The Covid-19 pandemic, itself a socioecological effect of accelerating capitalist enclosure and zoonotic spillover, proves just how well shocks can be absorbed into the system of macrofinancial capital flows and global value chains of the extractive circuit. Nearly one third of the total wealth that’s accrued to the United States’ 719 billionaires since the 1990s was accumulated during 2020, even as wealth stagnated or declined for vast majorities. Similar patterns can be seen globally. This is the system working; profitability recovers and the brief dip in emissions is reversed, higher in December of 2020 by two percent over the previous year. The shock intensified already existing systemic tendencies while revealing the slim margin of error needed for such a perfectly optimized “real economy.” Some recent shortages demonstrate just how taut the logistics of the extractive circuit are. Other shortages, like those of high-grade silicon (i.e., sand as observed by political theorist Laleh Khalili and internal industry reports alike) for microchips, are examples of genuine resource exhaustion. As scholar of global economic governance Julie Klinger has noted, it is hardly the geographic location of rare earth metals alone, for example, that dictates the location of zones for their extraction. These zones are produced rather through a logic that delicately weaves the power and needs of transnational firms, states, and other strategic actors. Some states may want extractive frontiers within their boundaries for a measure of geostrategic leverage. Some local actors (a diverse array of some workers, surrounding communities, and social movements) are pitted against others. Extractivism is one of the only paths available to material development at many nodes along the circuit, towards some hope of relief. But it also promises destruction and exhaustion in its wake. While many fully aware of this reality in the Global South are rendered dependent on resource exports,in Pennsylvania, families similarly enroll in the latest fracking initiative or otherwise sign away mineral rights as one of the last remunerative games in town. Capital profits off the mine drainage, the freshwater depletion, the emissions, the social strain and desperation alike. Feeding Frenzy Financialized supply chains are structured to allow firms to ignore or skirt local, national, international legal.or even physical attempts to restrict the flow of extraction. They facilitate the shift of risk to the actor—whether at-will contractor, off-the-books migrant employee, or indigenous community in a resource rich area—structurally least able to absorb it. This extends not only into society, but into individuals, their internal biochemical orders, and to the whole ecological niche. Each of these factors contributes to a logic of absolute profit maximization and, as already described, a necessarily ever-increasing speed-up—in extraction, production, labor, dispossession, enclosure, and overall niche exhaustion. This is the world of lean production, just-in-time manufacturing and delivery. While most would, with good reason, focus on the human and ecological costs created by these processes—one key factor here is rather what they make possible.[3] The one-day or one-hour delivery, the expedited shipping, the synthesis of business and “leisure” hours: all of this is a lifesaver to the single parent, the double-shift employee in a food-desert, the downwardly mobile twelve-hours-a-day professional, the hustling informal or aspirational employee, hoping to claw their way out of generalized precarity. All of these, in the understanding of contemporary law and neoclassical economics, are “services” provided for consumers. We should see these “services” instead as facilitating the frenzy of these lives, as shifting literal time and energy not to these individual consumers but rather to the needs of an “always-on” capitalism, creating the very crises to which these services respond. They don’t strictly fulfill consumption ends; they are part of production. Every moment of life is integrated, profitable, from literal labor hours to the production of micro-units of digital value (via social media and other avenues) in the hours-for-what-we-will. Such services are dependent on the speed and ungovernability of GVCs which can, to a degree not possible before, dice up a production process into its most minute parts, spread them as far a global distance as comparative advantage dictates, limited, in strictly economic terms, by the current state of communications technology and the price of oil. GVCs function best—that is to say fastest and most profitably—when the network of small and medium size enterprises as well as more informal “arms-length” arrangements are “governed” by a concentrated transnational corporation (TNC). Think again of cobalt mining in the DRC. Such arrangements and “governance” allow a TNC like Swiss-based Glencore to be both the largest cobalt mining corporation in the world and to avoid not only Congolese legal accountability but American and British as well. Glencore dominates cobalt extraction through organizing a network of subcontractors, subsidiaries, and informal arrangements. The opacity and complexity involved allows risks—political, legal, environmental—to be largely circumvented. Glencore exerts a form of localized sovereignty over its mining concerns, taking advantage of questionably sourced minerals and maintaining the very labor and environmental practices that it forswears in meaningless corporate “environmental, social, and governance” rhetoric. Its form effectively moves responsibility from the TNC to “the miners themselves” for their own enslavement and abuses. This “governance” is backed by the direct coercion of subcontracted semi-private “state” mine police and private military corporations like G4S. The British-based G4S is not only contracted by Glencore or the DRC (technically through a local subsidiary); it operates in ninety countries, including running mega-prisons and migrant camps in the UK, despite numerous accusations of serious human rights abuses in the UK and elsewhere. In the US, G4S has been subcontracted by private firms as well as the military, Customs and Border Patrol, the departments of State, Justice, Energy, Homeland Security and the DEA in addition to subcontracted work for prisons and police at state and local levels. Private clients include GlaxoSmithKline (initially in the United States, Argentina, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and UK, expanding to twenty-eight other countries GSK operates in) and Citicorp. G4S was recently acquired by the security conglomerate Allied Universal which boasts the largest security force (one hundred fifty thousand members) in North America. It is the third largest employer in North America and the seventh globally. Similar mechanisms of speed, ungovernability, risk-shifting, and even violence are found at the site of end-use consumption, even in the arguably most powerful state on the planet, as at sites of basic resource extraction in some of the poorest geographies. Whether a logger in Indonesia or a delivery-person in the United States, TNCs rely on similar methods if not to the same degree. At both nodes in the value chain, human and ecological destruction are rampant. It is not physically possible to achieve the just-in-time production and delivery-on-demand described above without burning through fossil fuels and human bodies with merciless efficiency. The proponents of global value chains often cite this ungovernability—if, of course, not these expressions of it—not only as fact but as added value. And such massive transnational corporations—sometimes “headquartered” in, and yet untethered to, a national economy—also weaken the political power of the end-user, eroding what remains of the “safety net” and social fabric. The form and function of GVCs is fundamentally at odds with basic principles of self-determination and popular sovereignty. The simplest expression of this is the changing relationships in which TNCs shape institutions, including states: “my factories for your reform.” While the United States retains its unique position as the world’s quasi-central bank and imperial guarantor of global capital, this new mode of capital organization facilitates its own versions of “special economic zones.” As of this year, for example, Samsung is extracting concessions in the form of proposed local, state, and federal tax breaks, and low-cost labor incentives, on top of existing environmental and social deregulation, in establishing a new semiconductor plant in Texas. Such “reshoring” is boosted by the catastrophic turn to jingoistic great power conflict with China but it is also not possible without the new socioecological facts-on-the-ground, both generated in the effloresce of the extractive circuit. Many (but not all) in the United States are also increasingly untethered from the national economy, and firms too, frequently subject to the same logic of extraction and exhaustion in socioecological terms. Millenarian Burnout Feelings of exhaustion, taken together—fatigue, burnout, stress, depression, pain—are globally prevalent. Reported levels of extreme stress are only marginally higher in the Philippines (58 percent) than the United States (55 percent). Cumulatively, these numbers tick up every year. At every node of the extractive circuit, we find speed, coercion, and the inevitable stressors on the individual. One of the best analytic lenses we have for this intersection of affect, environment, psychosocial pathology, and neurology is the psychology and political theory of Frantz Fanon. The extractive circuit is a “divided society . . . characterized by a predominant nervous tension leading quite quickly to exhaustion.” For Fanon, mental “illness situates the patient in a world in which his or her freedom, will and desires are constantly broken by obsessions, inhibitions, countermands, anxieties.” Later anti-psychiatry would posit mental illness itself as freeing, while for Fanon the pathologies were all too real and debilitating. His practice took seriously the need to use psychiatric tools to reconstitute individuals, in dialectical tension with a colonial society that is clearly itself “neurotic,” managing pathologies through psychological intervention but towards a clear understanding that the cure lies in radical change in social structure. Although many psychological theories and studies have long explored not only social environments but particularly the effects of violence and trauma, most unidirectionally focus on the individual as object of study and site of intervention. The late cultural theorist Mark Fisher called this the “privatization of stress.” In Britain, by the mid-2000s, depression had become the most treated disease by the National Health Service. “I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies,” wrote Fisher. Neoliberalism had compounded such individual focus into an “incumbent” commandment that “individuals resolve their own psychological distress.” Instead of “accepting the vast privatization of stress” we should ask “how it become acceptable that so many people . . . are ill?” As Fanon argued of neurotic colonized conditions, Fisher posited that “the ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest . . . capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and the cost of it appearing to work is very high.” The “privatization of stress” is a particularly apt phrase: just as one can mine fossil-capital to boost petro-farming outputs, one can squeeze the standard “labor power” of a hyper-employed worker while also exhausting her “mind.” These are some of the latest frontiers in the long history of transforming ecological inputs (for what is labor but an extension of nature working on itself, as Marx says) into abstract value. The “mental health plague” is the expression of this condition—perhaps, again, in normative economic terms, an externality—but the “privatization of stress,” of stressors, is a method by which an individual’s exhaustion can lower the cost of capitalism’s apparent functioning. If a worker takes it upon herself to “resolve” her own distress, or if a member of the vast global surplus populations accepts the “cruel optimism” that they are the source and aspirational solution to their extreme stress, these are real costs saved systemically as individuals squeeze just a little more out of themselves all while reinforcing the ideologically valuable conviction that the existing system works; all evidence to the contrary is on you. At quick glance, the “mental health plague” might seem a classic case of “First World” problems, but reports from the World Health Organization indicate that this kind of depression—and the panoply of affects collected under the rubric of exhaustion—is a global concern. Relatively well-known social phenomena like farmer suicides in South Asia or an individual story like that of the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, widely cited as the beginning of the Arab Spring, are just aspects of the mental health plague most visible in the media. In recent years, suicide has become the second leading cause of death among youth worldwide. As of this year, 77 percent of suicides now occur in low- and middle- income countries. Meanwhile, there are the global psychological impacts of climate change itself: the direct experience of extreme weather events, for example, is compared in many studies with PTSD or grief more commonly associated with modern warfare. This is not to say that pressure is applied equally everywhere. Nor do the mental and physical health crises experienced by Filipino migrants or Californian office workers share the exact same etiology or epidemiology. It is obvious that the stressors experienced by migrant laborers, the permanently unemployed, or even a relatively stable health care or logistics worker have different particular causes and attendant problems. But they are experiencing what we can call “exhaustion,” not only medically but as a relationship to climate, society, and its hegemonic ideologies. There are relays on the circuit—particularly those between ecology and economy—where this exhaustion is very nearly calculable, in the theories of energetics which once so entranced “scientific management.” But there are others that are found in individuals, communities, societies, and political systems, attuned and modified to the needs of the circuit, in far more qualitative terms. The “Golden Age” (not really so golden) of win-win shared growth prosperity in the overdeveloped North has long since passed. Almost every drop of fossil capital and what the late political economist Samir Amin called “imperialism rent” is now needed to shore up flagging growth rates. G7 share of world GDP peaked at 67 percent in 1988 and, although this is still quite disproportionate to population size, as of 2010, stands at less than 50 percent. Interestingly, this correlates with economist Branco Milanovic’s calculation that the “citizenship premium” seems to have peaked approximately ten years ago. In one of his last articles, Amin comes to a remarkably similar conclusion. Over the past decade or so “imperialism rent” increasingly flows to oligopolistic monopolies, not in a real sense to “national” economies, nor evenly: “The privileged (high salaries) have become the direct agents of the dominant oligopolistic class, while the others are pauperized.” This still spills over to many far outside the upper echelons, including to many workers who remain tied to the fortunes of firm and nation. And can be seen not only in income levels but phenomena like vaccine apartheid. It is not yet the case that these more direct forms of governance and rule happen, as Rosa Luxemburg wrote of colonial possessions in the early twentieth century, “without any attempt to disguise them.” But the “sermonizers, counselors, and ‘confusion-mongers’” Fanon identified as crucially intervening in colonizing societies are now working overtime in the metropole. The rolling legitimation crises of our time are the evidence of just how much ideology in the form of consent is breaking down and just how much direct coercion is ever more the norm, even for groups who were not previously subject to colonization. In the face of this coercion, massive increases in repressive apparatuses, personal and social “structural adjustment,” and the palpable experience of anthropogenic climate change, the interests of some workers and majorities in general (if far from universal), begin to align with, the refugee, the South Asian or Latin American peasant, as well as with those already racialized and/or colonized in the North. The concrete realities of the extractive circuit place such individuals and communities far closer to the super-majorities of the Global South than “the 1” or even “10 percent.” In other words, unevenly and to vastly different degrees, more and more are in the colony now. Colony of the Exhausted The point here is not simply to invert a Panglossian, Pinkeresque worldview, but rather to see dialectically, as Walter Benjamin suggested. Climate change itself is the most obvious contemporary avatar of Benjamin’s “storm of progress,” an almost unimaginable techno-social achievement containing within it an almost unimaginable horror. Weathering the storm requires overturning ideals of both progress and regress. The example of Cuban agroecology is illustrative. Beginning in the 1990s, scientists, peasants, and other agricultural personnel launched a series of agroecological experiments drawing on traditional practices and contemporary scientific research in agronomy and ecology. Over three years such projects demonstrated not only enhancements in soil quality and biodiversity but also increased yields, decreased energy inputs, and decreased labor hours (down to four to five hours per day). The new methodologies would eventually scale up to cover 70 percent of Cuban domestic food production. Crucially, this case helps dispel the myth that any deviation from the official path-of-progress will be met with a regress into pre-industrial drudgery (or a romanticization of an imaginary utopian past). In contrast, it underscores what I have called elsewhere the “temporal freedom” that contributes to a socioecologically necessary systemic slow down, provides a palpable, extraordinary emancipation possible within a sustainable, flourishing global human ecological niche. Labor journalist Sarah Jaffe recently summarized the many ecological and quasi-utopian social and economic advantages of “less work”. With capitalism increasingly experienced as inherently dysfunctional, the question about living on a warming planet is not how individuals or communities can become more “resilient” to climate change. Rather, the question is, how has this level of degradation become so acceptable? Profits may be at an all-time high, but capitalism as we know it—capitalism as the organizing principle of our ecological niche—is difficult to maintain. As the sociologist Oliver Nachtwey has recently noted, neither financialization by itself nor neoliberalism as a whole was able “to stop the wellsprings of growth from drying up.” Strangely, this turn of affairs is better acknowledged in global business discourse—as the “productivity crisis”—than it is in many common left theories, ecologically oriented or otherwise. Global North growth rates, as argued by both liberal economists like Robert Gordon and Larry Summers through the “secular stagnation” thesis, or more contemporary Marxian accounts like Aaron Benanav’s work on industrial overcapacity and the long economic downturn, will never return to the 5 percent or greater rates regularly experienced during the “Thirty Glorious Years.” It is far more likely that growth will hover at around 1 to 2 percent or otherwise enter a period of stasis, permanent recession, or some mix of the two. What is often lost in ecological debates is that growth itself, whether one wants it or not, appears to be largely at an end. While Global South states will continue to grow (even as rates in states like the PRC or India are in fact falling), this is highly unlikely to make up for the collapse in the Global North. In every sense except automatic collapse, capitalism as we know it lives on borrowed time. More centrally to the question of a politics of the Anthropocene is how much time and where it’s borrowed from. Measured by emissions and the toll of climate change, every ounce of anemic growth becomes catastrophically expensive. From a socioecological point-of-view, as I’ve argued elsewhere, “we” are investing ever more resources—ecological, social, individual, even political—for paltry returns, a grim present, and a darkening future for the majority of human beings. Transnational corporations—while having a longer history—only became globally dominant in the postwar era, with increased activity mostly coming after the 1960s. Correlation is of course not causation, but the correlation between climate change and the rise of these TNCs—first in industries like fossil fuels and resource extraction, later with the expansion of GVCs particularly in the late 1970s and onward—is staggering. “Acceleration” is aptly put; this is a system predicated not only on increasing material and economic rates as recorded in “Great Acceleration” graphs but quite literally in its speed: the exponential explosion of ecological and economic transformations, facilitated by financialization, fossil fuels, and every socioecological process described, and additionally the experiences, the feelings, of such velocity and violence. In this period, as macrofinancial economist Hyun Song Shin identifies (and economic historian Adam Tooze cites in analyzing the 2008 financial crisis) “island models” of national economies give way, in terms of both value chains and finance, to “an ‘interlocking matrix’ of corporate balance sheets,” in a truly suprasovereign system. There has never been a time when capital could move more rapidly or more freely—from firm to firm; from geography to geography. It could even, theoretically, move out of bounds entirely—capital could cash out (it could be worse as McKenzie Wark remarks). Today, some 80 percent of global trade happens through far-flung, high-speed GVCs. Of that, 60 percent is in intermediate goods and services. In other words, most trade is happening firm-to-firm or within a cross-border GVC. These emissions and this form of trade is inextricably linked to fossil fuels, “sacrifice zones,” and generalized exhaustion. Although capitalism, particularly in this form, promises a cheap, sleek, efficient path to plenty and prosperity, it delivers instead a costly, privatized system based on impossible inputs in a finite natural and social world—so unimaginably cumbersome and irrational that it requires constant, vigilant, crisis-level maintenance from the scale of the microbial to the human brain to states, geopolitics, and beyond. It delivers all-time high atmospheric carbon concentrations of 419 parts per million, the hottest year on record, a climate change induced pandemic which promises both continuation and future epidemiological crises, extreme weather events from wildfires burning Siberian permafrost to Indian flooding, Pacific Northwest extreme heat, and all those political economic, social, and personal structural adjustments that are the daily violence of the extractive circuit. This socioecological violence is a constant norm of this moment for the vast majority of people on earth, “an atmosphere of permanent insecurity” as Fanon called it. “There is, first of all, the fact that the colonized person, who in this respect is like the men in underdeveloped countries or in the disinherited in all parts of the world, perceives life not as a flowering or a development of essential productiveness but as a permanent struggle against omnipresent death.” While normative disaster management literatures preach absorption, quiescence, internalization, Fanon instead proposes externalization, which “implies restructuring the world.” What we are promised—through market-based delusions, through techno-mystical fantasies, and romantic reveries—is a return to normal that is hardly possible and not particularly desired or desirable. The extractive circuit describes the zero-sum game of a bifurcated world. Accounts can often make it seem as if capital hovers about the Earth in almost ethereal form. But the extractive circuit is not a metaphor. It works through real people, specific geographies, economically strategic areas organizing, linking, and connecting our global human ecological niche. The granular level I began with in my paradigmatic example is the very real, material workings of this system. Imperialism does not vanish in such a system, but it is now a layer beneath. Colonization is more generalized. States (in a wide variety of forms) still play a crucial if dramatically changed role even when considered over the course of the last fifty years. But whether one is committed to somehow keeping the system in motion in perpetuity or to hold on until a “cash-out,” the extractive circuit, and its maintenance, one piece of it or another, currently has your fealty. It is the exhausted world—the climate—capitalism built. November 2, 2021: This essay has been slightly updated since our October printing. [1] GDP is notoriously poor at capturing genuine social development and/or quality-of-life issues as perhaps most famously explored by the literatures on communist-led Kerala, which achieved human development levels on par with many wealthy countries with an incredibly low GDP. It is remarkable though, in discussions of climate and economics, massive redistribution from the top down globally is often painted as unpalatable in the North. But even with the extremely limited quantitative tools at hand it seems to escape scrutiny that such redistribution effectively aimed at eliminating the top 10 percent or even 20 percent of highest incomes to raise socioecological standards for the bottom 90 percent would clearly benefit majorities even in the United States. Median per capita wealth in the United States is $79,274 in 2021, far below the $100,000 that comprises the top wealth decile and even the $82,000 for the top 20 percent. This is not to disregard how US per capita GDP is rich by global standards but rather to show in even the most basic terms how much ground there is for converging interests in radical climate politics across seemingly unlikely global positions while at the same time underlining how income and wealth at US median levels does not translate to standard-of-living or quality-of-life conditions, a general problem with GDP as a concept and measure while reflected in critical development literatures. [2] The concept of “planetary boundaries” was proposed by the environmental scientist Johan Rockstrom et al in 2009 as a way to measure “a safe operating space for humanity with respect to the functioning of the Earth System.” They would answer the question prompted by the Anthropocene: “What are the non-negotiable planetary preconditions that humanity needs to respect in order to avoid the risk of deleterious or even catastrophic environmental change at continental to global scales?” As later clarified and expanded by chemist Will Steffen et al in 2015, the concept of planetary boundaries does not draw lines at thresholds or tipping points where “a biophysical threshold” is “likely to exist” but “rather upstream of it—i.e., well before reaching the threshold.” Planetary boundaries are not the only model of such a space but any real sustainable model requires this fundamental shift in conceptualizing and dealing with socioecological risk in ways entirely antithetical to the financialized, just-in-time, high-speed world of 21st century capitalism. [3] While some hallucinate a “good” Amazon or “socialist” Walmart as the backbone of a “Good Anthropocene”, a 2019 public letter signed by nearly nine thousand Amazon employees detail the ways in which the company is in no way currently compatible with even the simplest necessities of climate mitigation and adaptation. For all its stark and brave honesty, the letter actually underplays Amazon’s ecological unsustainability in terms of climate and society. Amazon is paradigmatic of the extractive circuit; not only in terms of the structure of the firm but also in the ways it has shaped many intrinsically socially and ecologically catastrophic technologies, and, as explored further here, what the speed of such firms facilitate.
Land of Thirst Jérôme Tubiana I first visited Sudan in 2004, when the war in Darfur was just over a year old. Flying to Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state, I began reporting on the mass atrocities committed by Omar al-Bashir’s pro-Arab junta against non-Arab communities accused of supporting a small rebellion. Yet if, as I had been told, the conflict was about “Arabs” killing “black Africans,” Nyala painted a more complex picture. It was a stunning melting pot of people, some considered “indigenous,” others who traced their ancestry back to centuries-old kingdoms, others still seen as newcomers, both Arab (some invisible, their skin as dark as anyone’s) and non-Arab. Perhaps no community had a more dramatic story than the Zaghawa, a non-Arab tribe, which at that time numbered no more than a few hundred thousand in a country of thirty million. Originally from Dar Zaghawa, in the far north of Darfur, they had gradually migrated south, fleeing drought. Dar Zaghawa was not always so dry. In the 1930s, its main landmark, Wadi Howar, an extinct river making the border with the Chadian Sahara, was still home to giraffes. Then an administrator in the colonial British government, Wilfred Thesiger boasted that he had killed thirty lions during his two-year tenure in northern Darfur. (It “was perhaps the most beneficial thing I did there, and certainly the most exciting,” he wrote in his memoirs.) As late as the 1960s, lions, which decimated the herds of pastoralists and sometimes killed people, were a grave danger. Firearms and demographic growth hastened the wildlife’s decline, but the primary factor was the lack of rain, which pushed those animals that survived south. People moved the same way. Beginning in the 1970s, thousands of Zaghawa shifted some six hundred miles south; Arab pastoralists also traveled along the same route. But while the migration of most Arab tribes was haphazard, the initial Zaghawa migration was a planned response to worsening droughts. In the late 1960s, two well-educated elites had the idea of relocating their community to more fertile land. Astonishingly, they turned this idea into reality, overseeing, with government support, a mass-migration of tens of thousands of people. For a while, these early “climate refugees” adapted well in the new environment. Zaghawa farmers obtained better harvests than in their homeland, and herders benefited from the absence of the tsetse fly that infected livestock. Over the next three decades, as more moved south, they established settlements across southern Darfur. However, in a bitter irony, they fled drought only to become trapped in ethnic conflict. When the war began in Darfur in 2003, Arab militias known as the janjaweed, or “evil horsemen,” drawn largely from migrant newcomers, attacked Fur as well as Zaghawa (and other non-Arab) communities, burning down entire villages. Death tolls between three or four hundred thousand have been repeated over the past eighteen years, but the continuous violence makes it likely that more were killed. About three million were forced to leave their land. The contrasting stories of Arab and Zaghawa resettlement offer a stark parable about climate migration. While one violently set upon locals in South Darfur, the other tried to coexist peacefully with them and to their mutual benefit. By recent World Bank estimates, at least 216 million people, including 86 million in sub-Saharan Africa, could have to leave their ancestral lands and migrate within state borders by 2050. As larger swathes of the earth grow uninhabitable, much depends on which of these two models communities will adopt. Opening the Land By the end of the nineteenth century, the British conquest of Sudan brought together different precolonial kingdoms, such as the Darfur and Funj sultanates, under the umbrella of a single colony. To this were added more remote interior lands, including those in modern-day South Sudan, which had been bled dry by decades of Muslim slave raiding in non-Muslim communities. In the early 1920s, Anglo-Egyptian administrators abolished slavery, and, according to the colonial historiography, set up a benign system known as the “native administration,” based on ancient chieftaincies. In fact, political power was gradually entrusted to a new elite recruited among Arabized communities from the northern Nile Valley, colonization’s gateway. Thus began their decades-old hegemony over central power in Khartoum. Around the same time, remote peripheries like Darfur fell under the “Closed District Ordinance,” which barred residents from leaving at the risk of imprisonment. Guy Moore, district commissioner of North Darfur, was nicknamed the “tyrant of Kutum” (after the oasis where he was based) for zealously enforcing the law; he saw the area under his jurisdiction to be a reserve of wild people and wildlife. (The fanatic hunter Thesiger was Moore’s deputy.) Insurgencies began in southern Sudan even before independence in 1956; they soon spread through large swathes of the east and the west of the country, which were historically neglected by the center. Civil war has been a constant, mainly in the south, interrupted now and then by unimplemented peace agreements, which mostly allow belligerents to prepare for the next round of fighting. The contradictions of Sudanese state-building can be glimpsed in the careers of General Abderrahim Mohammedu and Mahmoud Beshir Jamma, the Zaghawa elites who orchestrated their community’s great migration south. I met them in 2004: retired General Abderrahim in Nyala, in the house of his friend Magdum Ahmad Rijal, South Darfur’s most important chief, and former minister Mahmoud Beshir at his small house in the city of Khartoum Bahri. By then, both were old, disillusioned with the path the country had taken and worried about the war. Abderrahim was not afraid to openly criticize the regime, which surprised me, as I knew that the intelligence service was busy at work in Nyala. The day before, a Sudanese friend who had invited me for a coke had received a visit from the police. Abderrahim was born in 1937 in northern Darfur, into one of the greatest Zaghawa royal dynasties. In the 1960s, as the newly independent nation began luring students into the army, he became the first Zaghawa to enter military college, and then to be promoted to the rank of officer. It was in the army that he got his first taste of Sudan’s ethnic hierarchy. Most of his comrades, who were from northern Sudan, saw Darfurians as little better than savages. Abderrahim told me that the idea to move his community south had in fact come to him from an Arab, Ahmad el-Nil Defalla, then army commander of Darfur province. Defalla had blamed the poverty of the Zaghawa on their “laziness,” claiming they would have been unproductive even in oil-rich or fertile areas, like in southern Darfur. The remark stuck with Abderrahim, who then persuaded a more open-minded general to write letters to Zaghawa kings raising the idea of migration. But the royals categorically refused to abandon their ancestral land. In 1971, after a stint fighting the Anyanya rebels in southern Sudan during the so-called “First Civil War,” Abderrahim returned to Darfur as part of a state delegation looking into food security. The 1960s had been very dry. Seeing the parched land, the idea of moving people south returned to him. In El Fasher, once the Darfur sultanate’s capital, he met Mahmoud Beshir, five years his elder and one of the first Zaghawa to be educated, at a time when Darfur only had a handful of elementary schools. Dreaming of bringing water to his dry homeland, Mahmoud graduated as a water engineer just after independence and began assisting with the construction of dams. His efforts made water available at the edge of the desert, allowing herders from different tribes to settle there. The Beni Hussein, an Arab pastoralist community, had long lived nomadically—and come into conflict with the Fur—until the British carved an area for them, one that used to be called Dar Otash, the “land of thirst.” In that area, Mahmoud worked on the Abu Jidad dam, which helped bring the skirmishes to an end. “If we had resolved the water problem everywhere then perhaps there would be no war in Darfur today,” Mahmoud told me when I met him in Khartoum. As a child, Mahmoud had to fetch water from remote wells before beginning his school day. He grew up among elders who had survived famines, in areas where cattle were gradually replaced by camels and millet farming increasingly failed. By the time he came to study engineering, he knew that new droughts were in the offing in Dar Zaghawa. He, too, had the idea of moving the community south; importantly, he also had the ear of then-president Jaafar Nimeiri. In 1971, Mahmoud and Abderrahim wrote a letter to Nimeiri outlining their project of moving the Zaghawa south, noting that “people are going to die from starvation if they don’t move.” Nimeiri gave them his support. Of course, Abderrahim knew it was not only about saving lives. The regime’s idea was to use the Zaghawa as a human buffer against the southern Sudanese rebels, who remained seen as a threat, even as peace talks were ongoing. But traditional chiefs kept refusing the ideas of these educated youngsters; they had not been sent to school to challenge the old order. So Abderrahim bypassed the elders. Every afternoon for three weeks, he went to El Fasher market—where the humblest onion sellers have stalls beside the wealthiest camel merchants —and talked directly to his kinsmen. In this way, he obtained the consent of three hundred families. He also spoke to the pupils of the town’s secondary school. “He was well received,” Omer Manis, a student at the time, and now Sudan’s ambassador to France, told me in September 2021. “A respected military officer, telling us of the need to find solutions to allow people to live in dignity. It was our cup of tea.” Abderrahim also wrote letters asking other tribes affected by the drought to join, including the Meidob, Tama, Gimir, Misseriya Jebel, Erenga, and Masalit. “Move with us to the South!” In 1972, Abderrahim, then a major, was asked by Nimeiri to find an area to resettle. He knew where to go. While fighting in southern Sudan, he had heard of Kafia Kingi, a lush and scarcely populated land at the very south of Darfur. It had been the Sultanate’s southern frontier and a post for the slave trade. From Hofrat al-Nahas, a nearby mine, copper was extracted to make nahas, huge drums symbolizing the sovereign’s power. “We patrolled the area for ten days, studied the weather and the land,” Abderrahim remembered. “There were no routes, the trees had grown on the road the British had made in the 1940s. We followed big tracks left by elephants. We couldn’t drive more than twelve miles in nine hours. To eat, we shot game.” The next year, Abderrahim gathered a committee of seventy-five representatives from every main Zaghawa village and took them to Kafia Kingi. Then they called for their kin to join them, and the migration began. Some pioneers came on army or merchant’s trucks. But most traveled on the backs of camels, horses, or donkeys, or on foot with their livestock, bringing all they could carry on the months-long journey. Soon after they arrived, rains brought insects and snakes that desert dwellers did not recognize. The pioneers thought the local people, from tribes they had never heard of, had sent these creatures to scare them away. Many moved back north, but only about sixty miles, to the slightly dryer but still green area of Legediba, where it rained about thirty inches a year, as compared to less than eight inches in Dar Zaghawa. In Legediba and elsewhere, the Zaghawa asked for and were given land by the local Fur chiefs. So, too, were Arab nomads arriving from the north. “Everyone could have land,” Hassan Saleh, a Zaghawa chief, recalled when I met him in 2008 in Dugo, a village founded on the green foothills of the Jebel Marra mountains. “The Fur chief would show you an empty place, then you’d take your axe. When we came here, there were forest and wild animals, elephants, lions, monkeys, ostriches. We cut the trees and farmed, bred cattle and sheep.” They “opened the land,” as goes the Darfurian expression. At first, it seemed all was going well. In 1973, Darfur, like most of the Sahel, experienced its lowest rainfall on record. But Legediba was spared, and the harvest was bountiful; the Zaghawa brought Abderrahim and Mahmoud millet to thank them. Even conservative chiefs, who had remained behind, changed their mind. “I brought my cousin king Ali Mohammedein, who stayed for some time, farming and resolving local conflicts,” he told me. In 1983, as an even greater famine began, nearly two hundred thousand Zaghawa migrated south from North Darfur, together with members of other Arab and non-Arab communities. “The Zaghawa migrants mixed with other tribes and married their daughters,” Abderrahim remembered. “We traded, farmed, bred livestock, went for work to Libya, came back with money, and taught local communities the livestock trade, which they didn’t know.” The Zaghawa also taught Arab herders to farm. The Zaghawa’s migration could have offered a model for other communities in Sudan whose livelihoods were similarly imperiled by climate change. But by the 1980s, the central government had grown unhappy with them coexisting with the Fur, Arabs, and other neighboring tribes. Until then, the traders in Darfur as in South Sudan were all from the Nile Valley north of Khartoum, as were the administrators. Indeed, the very word for trader, jellaba, had become shorthand for anyone belonging to the Arabized tribes in northern Sudan. Abderrahim remembers a jellaba’s threat: “Those people were blind and deaf, but you came and taught them things. You’ll have to pay for that.” Jellaba politicians and businessmen began to paint the Zaghawa as overambitious invaders, turning local non-Arabs against them. “We, Zaghawa, are not wished for because we want to be equal to the jellaba,” Abderrahim told me. Look For a New Planet Meanwhile, discontent was brewing in other parts of the country. In 1983, the Sudan’s People Liberation Army (SPLA), a guerrilla movement founded by the mutinous army colonel Dr. John Garang, embarked on its war for independence from the government in Khartoum. In response, successive governments recruited militias among Darfur’s Arabs, who were seen as natural allies against the non-Arab rebels. The use of proxy forces is an old Sudanese tradition, dating back to precolonial slave armies. As militias fund and feed themselves through pillage, they are less costly than regular forces—a strategy Alex de Waal has labeled “counterinsurgency on the cheap.” As militias proliferated, tensions grew in Darfur between Arabs and non-Arabs. In 1985, Abderrahim left the army and settled in Nyala, where he formed and chaired a committee for peaceful coexistence of South Darfur tribes with his friend the magdum and an Arab notable as deputies. The multi-tribal group tried to reconcile communities in conflict, but their success was limited. Four years later, as a military-Islamist coup brought Omar al-Bashir to power, the first major conflict pitted all the main nomadic Arab tribes of Darfur against Fur farmers. It was spurred by increasing scarcity of resources, which had been exacerbated by the “Reagan famine”—so remembered after the food aid the U.S. president had belatedly sent across. But what made the violence unprecedented was the central government’s intervention in favor of the Arabs. Sharif Harir, a prominent Zaghawa anthropologist studying tensions at close quarters, rightly predicted Darfur would become the next South Sudan. After 1989, as the army grew tired with the war in the South, the Islamist junta stepped up the mobilization of militias, in particular among Darfur’s Arabs. The so-called Popular Defense Forces (estimated to number up to one hundred thousand all over Sudan in the 2000s), a paramilitary group formed that year, was likewise set up to protect the Islamist regime from a military coup. In Darfur, Abderrahim discovered the government was mostly arming Arab tribes, exploiting the hunger for land among these drought-impoverished newcomers. “I knew that soon everyone would fight against everyone,” he said. Now it was the turn of non-Arabs in Darfur to rebel. Beginning in June 2002 and March 2003, respectively, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) launched their first attacks on government targets. Abderrahim’s peace committee made contact with the insurgents in a desperate attempt to contain the conflict. They also wrote Bashir a letter warning of a group of hardliners called the “Arab Gathering,” who were calling for Arab supremacy in Darfur. But the president turned a deaf ear to them. In April 2003, the JEM rebels successfully attacked El Fasher airport, destroying government planes and humiliating the army. In response, Khartoum gave the Arab hawks—traditional leaders and a handful of government officials and army officers—carte blanche for arming the janjaweed. They enlisted landless Arabs, promising them the land of non-Arabs tribes. Early the following year, Abderrahim’s home village of Am Boru was burnt to the ground. Zaghawa settlements in South Darfur were attacked too. Water pumps were systematically destroyed, and those who were not killed were displaced to camps. Atta el-Manan, the governor of South Darfur, was said to be present when government forces pillaged the Zaghawa part of the town of She’eria. “They should look for a new planet,” he was quoted as saying. Abderrahim felt that Khartoum’s aim was nothing less than “the destruction of our history and future.” Shortly before I first met him the next year, Abderrahim had managed to split away four members of a delegation of U.S. congressmen visiting Khartoum. Shepherded around by the government, they were being sold a sanitized version of the conflict, and he wanted to tell them what was really happening. But the authorities noticed when they went missing; they didn’t like that Abderrahim was advocating for peace, including at the mosque after prayer. Their preference was a military solution: annihilating the rebels and their alleged civilian supporters. The retired general didn’t pay much attention, but his daughter Ibtihal was worried. She was then teaching agronomy at Nyala University, which was full of intelligence agents, some hidden among students or staff. Ibtihal felt watched by an Arab student who worked at the library and seemed to follow her around campus. In April 2005, as she was preparing to fly to Khartoum for the defense of her dissertation, he stabbed her to death on the university premises. Caught by her assistant, he was hastily sentenced to death before he had time to divulge who was behind the hit. Three days after Ibtihal’s murder, Abderrahim received a visit by a government delegation including intelligence chief Salah Gosh and interior minister Abderrahim Mohammed Husein, now indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes committed in Darfur. He wasn’t convinced by their investigation. “I’ve got my own conclusions,” he told me. “They are the murderers.” After the burial, Ibtihal’s body was unearthed and abandoned, naked, on the ground. “They tried everything to tear me up,” Abderrahim said. The old man was unwilling to give up. Two years later, he drove to his homeland in Dar Zaghawa and crossed into rebel territory. The insurgents had by then fragmented into dozens of factions, and his ambition was to reunite them. It didn’t work out. When I met Abderrahim again in December of 2010, he looked crestfallen. I felt then that peace might not have been all he was after. In his mind, the death of thousands of Darfurians had merged with Ibtihal’s murder. “Revenge might be good but can cost lots of lives. As for justice, the International Criminal Court is slow and uncertain,” he said. “And it will not kill the criminals. Sending them to prison is not enough. Atta el-Manan is even more responsible than Omar al-Bashir. If I could find him, I’d shoot him, even at the cost of my life.” There was neither revenge, nor justice. Abderrahim died in 2012.[*] Nomadland In Bad Decline Around this time I traveled along one of few stretches of paved road in the interior of southern Darfur. Though I knew the region well enough by then, I was still struck by the sight of camels grazing on grass-covered hills—rather than farms and cattle pastures. When I looked closer, I could make out stone circles hidden under the grass, the only remnants of villages once inhabited by Fur farmers. When the war erupted, those villages were burned by the camels’ owners, who had been enlisted into the janjaweed. Now only the dried palm tents of the Arab nomads could be seen along the road. Most of South Darfur’s Zaghawa villages, which Abderrahim helped settle, had been burned as well. Slightly off the paved road, Dugo was an exception, though not for want of trying on the part of the government and janjaweed. “We have strong self-defense forces, with enough horses and guns,” chief Hassan Saleh told me in when I met him there. “When our livestock is looted, we follow the thieves and fight them very hard.” Cows had been taken from Dugo by neighboring village’s janjaweed, but a Zaghawa posse managed to get them back. Still, Saleh was worried: “Those born in the North are good fighters, but our boys born here aren’t. Maybe the water is different?” The Zaghawa born in South Darfur are nicknamed Ghibeish, after a shrub which has no thorns. In many places, the balance is too unequal and non-Arabs are forced to share their land or harvest with Arabs to be allowed to safely farm. The janjaweed have gradually been integrated into more official paramilitaries. Their latest avatar, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), was created in 2013, ostensibly to reign in the most rogue elements of the Arab militias. It is headed by Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, better known as “Hemetti,” who had been picked from among Arab migrants when the war began. (Driven south by the drought in the 1980s, his small Arab clan had been granted an empty piece of land by Fur chiefs.) Throughout the region, Hemetti’s formidable force is now largely in control, but not better controlled. Whether they are current or former RSF members, disgruntled or rogue elements, Arab militias still tax or steal vehicles on the paved road near Dugo—which, for many years, commercial trucks only braved with armed escorts, sometimes enlisted from the same militias. In 2015, Zaghawa rebels exiled in independent South Sudan tried to reenter Darfur and were defeated by the RSF near Legediba. Beginning in the same year, more than a hundred Zaghawa self-defense fighters and youths from Dugo joined the RSF, uniting with their former aggressors rather than being displaced by them. After that victory, Hemetti’s RSF became Bashir’s praetorian guard, but in April 2019, after months of protests against the regime, Hemetti played a crucial role in the dictator’s ouster. He is now the deputy chairman of the military-civilian council that is supposed to lead Sudan to democratic rule. In October 2020, an RSF crew drove me to Zuruq, an area in North Darfur at the edge of the Sahara, where Hemetti’s clan had returned, after years of conflict in the south with the Fur. The “RSF capital” I had heard so much about was really a collection of huts on a sand hill. “We’re just like refugees, in houses made of wood and straw,” Hemetti’s uncle, chief Juma Daglo told me, with black irony—the real refugees are the non-Arabs his militias displaced. Juma felt his people were justified in joining the janjaweed. “If you’re in a flooded river and see a tree, won’t you catch it?” he asked. In the decades since independence, the government in Khartoum had done next to nothing to combat drought or poverty in Darfur. But when the war began, Juma said, they at least gave them weapons to attack non-Arabs. He caught the tree and had no regrets. “The government supported us, and now we rule the state.” Like many Arab leaders, Juma believes that the time has come for nomads to settle down and get an education. (He himself didn’t go to school; Hemetti dropped out in third grade.) He showed me Zuruq’s new school and clinic, housed in large metal containers abandoned by the United Nations. Apparently the school, which is funded by the RSF, is free for all students; two hundred of one thousand pupils are said to be Zaghawa. The RSF have also erected water towers that rise high above the desert floor. In the large valley north of Zuruq, camels said to be Hemetti’s drink under the guard of RSF troops. But Arab herds also draw from private water tanks belonging to the Zaghawa, who consider the whole area as theirs. At one of those tanks, I met a Zaghawa herder who felt that peace would be possible if Arabs didn’t claim land rights and the RSF treated people equally. Others, however, believe that new conflicts are likely. Could coexistence, which had not been possible in the lush south, be workable in the drying north? Some hope development projects could be the solution. After all, their lack was also a main cause of the rebellion. Indeed, Arabs only returned north because they could now fund services in the desert, thanks to their enrichment during war. However, uneven development can be harmful too. In the 1990s, Arabs who tried to drill boreholes in Zuruq were chased away by armed Zaghawa. This year, as Arab attacks again displaced tens of thousands in West Darfur, non-Arab farmers destroyed their own wells to keep herders away. As for the future, I believe many Darfurians will adopt durably to a new, hybrid kind of nomadism, governed by the rhythms of permanent conflict. The camps set up for displaced populations have already become cities where residents can get services unavailable in rural areas. Based here for the better part of the year, they seasonally migrate to farm after the rains—if the janjaweed do not occupy their land. This summer, in northeastern Jebel Marra, armed Arabs attacked Zaghawa farmers who left their camps to sow the land they used to farm before the war. It was a conflict between newcomers—the original Fur landowners did not dare to return. Famine’s Shadow It is probably a mistake to believe that men on the move do not have any homeland. The Saharan nomads I met spoke with nostalgia of oases, springs, or mountains where their ancestors once lived. Their heirs may have never seen those territories that colonial boundaries made parts of other states. Yet they remain mystically tied to them. In 1951, toward the end of the colonial era, an empathetic British administrator noted of the Zaghawa: “No matter that life is hard, dogged by disappointment, and often lived under the somber shadow of famine, still they come back to the steppes and wadis which they know as home, and which they will not willingly abandon. Our problem is not to help the Zaghawa to leave their present country, but to help them to live a better and more prosperous life inside it.” His advice went unheeded. As far back as the fourteenth-century Arab geographer Ibn Khaldun, pastoralists have been seen by outsiders as more prone to conflict than settled people. From Mauritania to Yemen, I have heard nomadism—much like migration to the north—described as a threat to security by Western politicians. In Darfur as elsewhere, nomads like Juma have themselves spoken to me of their desire to settle; this would end, their reasoning goes, the need for guns to protect wandering herds, and allow their children to get education. I have been struck by their hunger for learning, not least in the Sahel belt where Boko Haram fanatics fight to empty out schools. Yet I have also seen educated Arabs in Darfur spearheading the janjaweed. In December 2019, a video circulated on social media in which an Arab lawyer from West Darfur delivered an inflammatory speech. It spurred a mob to attack a camp for displaced non-Arabs, killing between sixty and ninety and forcing the fifty thousand residents to flee for the second time. I have seen Bedouins in Yemen and nomads in Somalia, as well as potato farmers in the Andes, predicting the rains, and even El Niño, by observing the Pleiades and other celestial bodies. Likewise, it seems to me that Abderrahim and Mahmoud saw the portents of worsening droughts in the changing aspects of their environment, which they learned so much about as child shepherds. But their capacity to organize a response—to plan a mass-migration—grew out their education, unprecedented in their tribe. I think now of the society they did so much to create in South Darfur. The Zaghawa newcomers partly lost their desert culture, yet I can’t help but admire how they adapted to a different environment and learned to live with new neighbors, abandoning their parochial tribal identity for a more cosmopolitan sense of Sudanese belonging. They, too, became kind of hybrid people, in between two worlds—the kind of people we need to learn from in order to survive, and even reverse, man-made climate change. If their efforts were all for naught, it was because of negligent governments, as blind as ours are when they erect solid or administrative walls to keep migrants out. [*] Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this piece indicated Abderrahim Mohammedu died in 2011. He died in 2012.
Beckett on the Richter Scale Marco Roth The characters of Evan Dara’s Permanent Earthquake inhabit an unnamed Caribbean island held in the shaking fist of the eponymous seismic event. The island could be Haiti or Martinique—names are in French, the local constabulary are referred to as gendarmes—but it could just as easily be Thomas More’s island utopia; a circle of Dante’s Inferno; or Georges Perec’s lost island of W, a screen memory for a concentration camp. The earthquakes might have been caused by mining for what seems to be uranium, or something else suitably radioactive, or climate change, but no one left on the island has time, mental energy, or peace and quiet enough to make scientifically informed inquiries. Their foremost challenge is staying upright amid the different vibrational intensities while not biting off their tongues: Despite the literal upheaval, certain things remain constant: the island’s poor and dispossessed toil in the service of a set of “manse” owners. Their older, well-built homes have mostly survived, yet require constant buttressing with stones scavenged from any available rubble, including cemeteries. The teenage protagonist and narrator—sometimes first-person, sometimes third, as if the earthquakes have shaken up pronouns and identities—begins as one of these laborers, shifting stones for a few coins used to buy supplies at the local dispensaries. Dara at least places the reader on somewhat solid ground: the premise and title are B movie; the metaphors Sisyphean; the prose Beckettian, with its staggered rhythms, surprising compounds, obsessive self-observations and enumerations. Steps are counted according to different seismic levels. “With the numbers set, he used them to anticipate his actions. Plan errands, map out routes. Determine the number of stonetrips he’d make to the manses, decide whether to go all the way to a tree to piss. The robot endlessness of everyday.” As in all disasters, but also in the permanent disaster of Beckett’s novels, everyday objects are elevated to talismanic importance. Wrist guards, mouthpieces, and scraps of footwear are as sacred to the nameless narrator as Molloy’s bicycle. “My left footwrap pinching, my right wrap too big—its front tip keeps folding under my foot, tripping me up unless I step higher on that side.” “I go on,” the narrator says, picking himself up between inevitable falls; the “I can’t” hovering unstated. It is not yet “necessary to slither.” But this is twenty-first-century American writing, and although we’ve been going on for a while, not many can or do go on in this way. Adorno perceived Beckett’s style as a response to a totalitarian “surplus of reality” that threatened to kill off any possible subjectivity. This left no choice for Beckett but to push “the artfulness of anti-art to the point of the manifest annihilation of reality.” But here we are, more than half a century into the end of history and Adorno’s “disaster triumphant,” and most literature remains trapped in a tightening loop of older realisms. Worse, “reality” impinges ever more on the work: judgments come in the form of up or down votes on the virtues or essential qualities of author figures. To write, under these conditions, with the unsparing intensity of minimal, late modernism, yet knowing already how that turned out, requires total, practically hermetic commitment to a form and voice that has never been outmoded or transcended, but instead celebrated as “difficult”—all the better for it to be bypassed and then ignored. Beckett remains one of the few writers whose cadences fall close to the desperate unconscious rhythms of our own fracturing lives. As forbiddingly modern as he was more than half a century ago, his work is still anathema to a publishing industry that continues to mistake an unending supply of juvenilia, first novels, and magical realisms for a fountain of youth. Collective Bargaining Only a writer outside the circle of conventional rewards and punishments associated with trade publishing and its literary imprints would have the, erm, “stones” to attempt this kind of work—a pastiche, i.e., a minor form, of what was, in its time, determinedly minor literature. Terry Eagleton refers to Beckett’s “politics of lessness,” in which “every sentence of his writing keeps faith with powerlessness.” Dara’s outsiderness, if not powerlessness, has been preserved or cultivated since the appearance of their first novel, The Lost Scrapbook (1995). That novel rose from the depths thanks to winning a prize from the Fiction Collective Two, judged that year by William T. Vollmann. FC2—the collective started by director Noah Baumbach’s father, Jonathan, along with Curtis White, Mark Leyner, and other theorists and practitioners of gonzo avant-garde fiction that would later expand to include the experimental prose writers of the Dalkey Archive Press—published it under its imprint. Scrapbook deployed a narrative cheat code, switching from one voice to another, one situation to another without warning, breaking off and breaking down the various stories of the vanished inhabitants of a midwestern town destroyed by what gradually reveals itself as a Delillo-esque toxic industrial event. Other novelists, notably Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A. trilogy, have tried before to capture collectivity in this manner. But by the time Scrapbook arrived, the creation of a succession of truncated characters towards whom the reader forms the briefest of attachments—indeed, of whom the reader is meant to ask “Wait, what happened to them! Where did they go!”—seemed to have been tossed onto the scrapheap of novelistic techniques. That is, until another very large multi-character novel appeared the following year. That one was called Infinite Jest. Foster Wallace’s prose was more exacting and virtuosic than Dara’s, and despite the title and the novel’s length, the number of distinct characters and voices turned out to be more finite. Both novels nevertheless shared a preoccupation with technologies of dissemination and distraction that foreshadowed the rise of what we now call the “Attention Economy.” These works also appeared in synchronicity with the end of one American way of making: the tinkerer, the artist, the obsessive hobbyist and sportsperson were yielding to the programmer, the celebrity, the careerist, and the influencer: Dara’s novel contained long disquisitions on stereophonics, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, roofing, and other forms of American DIY; Foster Wallace had tennis and the dictionary. The Lost Scrapbook focused on pirate radio frequencies and fastened on the Walkman as the device through which characters both transmit and lose themselves; Infinite Jest used the seemingly more “cutting edge” MacGuffin of the circulating videocassette. To read both novels now offers a good reminder of the extent to which “each era dreams the next.” Unlike Foster Wallace, though, Dara remained committed to authorial impersonality. To this day, few, if any, know who or how many are behind the masculine-sounding name: there are no interviews, the only photograph circulating on the internet could well be anyone, the name is a pseudonym. Thirteen years elapsed between The Lost Scrapbook and Dara’s next, self-published work, The Easy Chain, again a massive novel (502 pages), told with a certain “gee-whiz” earnestness that makes it veer between a Horatio Alger tale for the tech startup age and a satire of the same. Its notional focus, capitalist superhero Lincoln Selwyn, begins as an eccentric autodidact punk and ends as everyone’s indispensable conduit, connector, influencer, adman, and pal—making a fortune along the way. The use of business and startup clichés (really the novel is one long study of them) made one suspect the author had spent time in the milieu, or at least had good sources. In Flee (2013), Dara introduced the B-movie motif that’s used to greater effect in Permanent Earthquake. A small New England town’s university shuts down, seemingly from one moment to the next, after its sociology department is revealed to be a hollow accounting trick of the provost’s office. The mayor and city council are on vacation, but might never have existed in the first place. The traditional employers go next. Then the inhabitants begin, little by little, to vanish. They are soon replaced by new people with no memory of what has been lost; the cycle restarts. Everything remains ordinary until it becomes creepy; everything is already creepy because ordinary. The atmosphere is Winesburg, Ohio, infected by Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A semitransparent allegory of 1950s communist infiltration paranoia has been repurposed to narrate the rampant privatization and asset strip-mining of various American burgs from the 1990s to the present. As a whole, these novels constitute a rather rare sustained effort in contemporary American fiction to chronicle the atmosphere and feeling of the “creative destruction” of the American economy and its accompanying depersonalization, the extraction of human dignity from American life. Individually, however, none of these works is entirely successful. The scope, the profusion of different voices who never quite become full characters, the “system novel” qualities that keep the reader’s attention on “discourse” and ways of talking—all end up inhibiting the climate of feeling that Dara often evokes before blurring out. A town meeting sequence in Flee is probably one of the best fictional portrayals of American political dysfunction of the twenty-first century; each line of dialogue manages to convey the forces bearing down on the characters that they can’t even conceptualize. But too often the critical overbears the literary, and the novels start to make readers think of that dread adjective “conceptual.” This is not because Dara breaks the frame to make didactic comments about destructive capitalism, but because they manage to represent one of the hallmarks of our economic system—the fungibility and replaceability of any voice by any other, any experience by any other experience—on the page. The novels come to share the same relentless quality of hopeless repetition with their subject matter, performing what they try to resist. Alone Dies All of these issues have been cleaned up and resolved in Dara’s turn from choral maximalism to single-voice Beckettian minimalism, in the shift from narrative realism to parable. Permanent Earthquake has the feel of an “allegorical” novel, but the allegory is as unstable as the ground beneath. Is this situation about the impossibility of equitable global development in the face of permanent, designed “disaster capitalism”? A dramatic displacement of the slow-motion ecological carnage of climate change into the fast and furious pace of unending seismosis? A literalization of the “downward mobility” and “precarity” of the respectable “professional” American middle class to which the narrator once belonged? (His father, we learn, was a public school teacher casualized into life as an itinerant educator, which is how they came to the island.) Is the narrator’s eventual quest for what he believes must be “a stillspot” somewhere on the island an embodied metaphysical struggle, a long-form meditation on “being as thrownness?” An extended jazz improvisation on Heidegger’s concept of anxiety, “I put my foot down and down is not there,” literally described as the feeling of stepping into nothing where once was something? Perhaps the novel is a meta-commentary on conditions of literary production in an age of catastrophes? Or just on the difficulty of writing well? The paragraphs appear to compose themselves unsteadily, sentence by faltering sentence. What R.P. Blackmur said of criticism also holds for imaginative literature: “like walking, [writing] is a pretty nearly universal art; both require a constant intricate shifting and catching of balance; neither can be questioned much in process; and few perform either really well.” The answer to all these questions is yes. Although allegories want to have fixed meanings, a strict correspondence between signifier and the occulted signified, like a code, it’s in the nature of meaning to decay into multiple and occasionally conflicting meanings. What sets Permanent Earthquake apart from Dara’s earlier fiction—also from most fiction being published now—is that this half-life process of meaning-fraying is sped up and rendered visible in the vessel of a basic story structure. As with Beckett, in Endgame or Godot, for example, there’s a humanist or “existential” reading of the novel that’s simultaneously available and withheld, in persistent tension with the nihilistic and cataclysmic created world that’s not just shattered but perpetually shattering. At an early moment in Permanent Earthquake, the narrator attempts to help a fallen old man on the way to the dispensary. Instead of accepting the outstretched hand to right himself, the man uses it to climb on the narrator’s back: “The man clings to me, he hangs on, a human drape that will not come loose.” It’s a classical image of pietas, almost sculptural; Aeneas carrying his father, Anchises, from the burning ruin of Troy. Then the man tries to steal food from the narrator’s front pack and practically bites him in his hunger. The image becomes grotesque, Goya’s Saturn eating his young. “He is only doing this . . . to survive,” the narrator thinks, “he cannot not do this.” The narrator carries him all the same, even after the old man topples them both multiple times. At last, the old man leaves the younger one stunned and in pain and staggers off, “merges with the other crabbed plasms hunching towards the dispensary.” The transformation from humanism to anti-humanism is accomplished in the space of a few paragraphs, but the narrator still can’t help crying. There’s no way out of this double consciousness, the human inside the post-human. As I write this review, the news is devoted to the sudden collapse of a beachside, Miami high-rise condominium. Feature stories on individual victims are being published. The state convenes a grand jury to find individual responsible parties—probably the condo board—as if this were a case of simple incompetence rather than culture-wide negligence in the face of climate catastrophe, brought on by decades of malignant disinterest from those who should know better. The ninety-eight victims are today’s stand-in for the millions more to come, but our culture can only know this and forget about it simultaneously. Neither can Dara’s protagonist, later in the novel, keep himself from other feelings: hope, freedom, wonder, awe, guilt. In his search for the “stillspot,” he encounters a juggler, who, seemingly alone among the inhabitants of the island, possesses a secret inner grace, in both the spiritual and physical senses, allowing him to remain undisturbed by the persistent tremors and temblors. Rings, pins, diabolos, and knives—the juggler has the whole carny circus act. The nameless adolescent hero is smitten and follows him around. When they finally speak, he even recovers or acquires a name: Sam. Here, Dara turns the screws a bit tighter and risks a sentimental, almost Dickensian twist. The juggler offers the boy a job, a way out of the grind of hauling stones, not just freedom from starvation but the magic of art. Yet the juggler reveals himself to be something of the old American showman, a man on the make. “Sam, you have officially been incentivized,” he says, offering him a percentage of their nightly take, “you can walk through the crowd with the cookie jar, kind of encourage the folks to throw something in. Because it’s like that—the people in the back, when they think you don’t see them, they don’t give.” Spirit of play, spirit of capitalism, spirit of art, all merge in this juggler whose joviality or light irony can only ring false. “Only when play becomes aware of its own terror, as in Beckett,” Adorno comments, “does it in any way share in art’s power of reconciliation.” The juggler does not recognize any terror in his play, nor the terror of the populace that it mollifies and subdues. His is the gospel of positivity and of the faith healer. He speaks to Sam as if they are inhabiting a totally different world from the juddering mess they indeed inhabit. His power is that of pretense. The power of pretend in Permanent Earthquake is trying to do something different, even as it shares in the “step right up” showmanship of toying with the impossible, the unthinkable, the “earth shattering.” It’s true that we delight in fantasized destructions of the world, preferably with as many details as possible. Certain qualities of Dara’s writing share in this extremely, aggressively American sensibility, not unlike that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The novel’s bloodied tongues, broken limbs; poverty raised to an exponential power of utter desolation; the piecemeal glimpses of the wider landscape of upended vehicles, downed helicopters, smashed bicycles; the ruins, the dirt, and the grime and the blood and the sinews; and what can only be described as frantic editing—this disaster mashup also feels like Hollywood in the shadow of Michael Bay. Dara activates the contemporary reader’s apocalyptic and bloodthirsty cultural sensibility but also turns it against itself. Every disaster movie contains a seductive survivalist promise: you too could make it, if only . . . Dara is too aware of the genre as well as the depredations of what they have called “intense moral decay turbo-capitalism” to let things in the novel take this particular course. Survival under these conditions is mostly a matter of accident, timing, and also of being willing to let go of most of what makes us human. The subtler tensions and pleasures of Permanent Earthquake arise from the reader’s realization, at a certain point, that we want Sam to take this last step into make-believe and self-mythologizing, to lose himself in order to find his feet. But Dara wouldn’t remain the same impossible outsider they’ve always been if they gave readers what we wanted.
See Your Trash Allyson Paty Every time I throw something away, I take its photograph. I’ve been doing this since February 2016. I post the images of each day’s trash to Instagram. Almost six years later, the account comprises the most detailed and consistent diary I have ever kept. The ritual began in response to a sullen moment. Heading to work earlier than usual one morning, I stopped at a café, ordered to stay, and took a seat. Clear winter light came through the large window, and I inclined my head to it—into the luxury of a breakfast out alone. A few minutes later, the cashier, who turned out to also be the cook, set down my meal of two eggs and toast in a plastic clamshell, accompanied by plastic utensils sheathed in plastic film. I ate quickly and without enjoyment. Then I closed the utensils now mingled with the DNA in my saliva inside the yolk-streaked container and shoved the mess through the hutch over the restaurant’s waste bins. Making trash, especially plastic trash, set a low hum of guilt and anxiety coursing through me. These items I had not wanted, and used for mere minutes—or not at all, in the case of the spoon that came bundled with the fork and knife—could remain in the environment for hundreds of years. The asymmetry brought a familiar sense of abjection. The breakfast was to sustain me through the desk work that constituted my paid labor, employment that in turn was to fund my “real work” as a poet. Yet from another perspective, it seemed more accurate to say that my life’s work was trash-making. I would die, everyone I’d ever known would die, and this clamshell and utensil set would still be there somewhere on Earth. None of my poetry would have such an enduring legacy. What specifically would become of my discards? I had only a vague sense. New Yorkers live among trash, accustomed to stepping over litter and around low mountain ranges of garbage bags and junk items at the curb. But the contents of that trash are already moving away from those who generated it. Working often at night and in the early hours, thousands of people—employees of the Department of Sanitation, commercial carters, informal pickers and canners—orchestrate the first step in the fantastic, disappearing our mingled wastes. Thanks to them, our responsibility for waste disposal seems to end at the proper bin. Where these objects go, who handles them, or what happens to them does not feel like our concern. The very language we use to talk about trash—“to throw away,” “to toss out”—gestures to an unimportant and ill-defined over there with imperious affect. When I arrived at work, I opened a word document and typed out a list of the items I’d just released into the waste stream: “Plastic clamshell, plastic fork, knife, and spoon, thin paper napkin, plastic film wrapping.” I kept a written record like this for several days. My discards tended to be similar. I wrote, “Paper filter and coffee grounds,” “Q-tip with earwax,” “apple core,” “envelope,” “floss,” one day, and I wrote some variation of the same words the next. In reiteration, language belied the unique material presence of each trashed object. So I turned to photography. The photos are not precious. I take them quickly, on my phone, in situ. Many feature my hand. I include anything that I personally direct to trash, recycling, or compost. [1] I do not include excrement or toilet paper, which is directed to wastewater management, rather than handled as municipal solid waste. I photograph objects that I have used but someone else will throw away (e.g., scraps on a restaurant plate), as well as objects that have been used primarily by others but I throw away (e.g., catering platters at work events). If I have shared something that ends its useful life in someone else’s hands, I do not insist that they wait for me to discard it (e.g., if my partner squeezes out the last of the toothpaste one night), but I endeavor not to use this as a loophole. When someone learns about my documentation practice, it is typically because I have taken out my phone to photograph an unconventional subject—say, the plastic wine cup at the end of a party. A common response is to ask if I am trying to “go zero waste.” I reply, no, I am trying to see my waste. I am trying to see the individual items that constitute my life’s trash, to remember them in a kind of elegy, and by posting to Instagram, to let them stand for my living. I Keep My Trash in a Jar Popular discourse around trash—like bodyweight—runs overwhelmingly along lines of management. The framing assumption is that one should reduce. This is nowhere more evident than in a term like “zero waste.” As described in Robin Murray’s 2002 book by the same name, zero waste proposes replacing traditional waste management with a holistic approach that “encompasses producer responsibility, ecodesign, waste reduction, reuse and recycling, all within a single framework.” Along with preventing waste before it’s made (called “source reduction”), the key idea is to conceptually reframe trash as a resource, to be mined, rather than something useless, to be disposed. This would require, among other things, changing the physical composition of commodities, so that products are designed and manufactured with their reincarnation in mind. Needless to say, wide-reaching changes would be needed to achieve zero waste. If enacted, its principles would have major implications across policy, industry, and infrastructure. Still, municipalities around the world have adopted the term to describe targets to reduce dependence on landfill and incineration. For instance, the OneNYC plan Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office released in 2015 proposed several initiatives under the banner of zero waste. These included the plastic bag ban (implemented in 2020), a proposal to overhaul privately run commercial waste carting, the expansion of the New York City Department of Sanitation organics program, bringing recycling programs to NYCHA housing, and diverting truck traffic away from the low-income neighborhoods where transfer stations are concentrated, which environmental justice advocates have long demanded. When friends ask if I am trying to go zero waste, they are not referring to such work. Despite its roots in systems thinking, “zero waste” has also come to denote consumer choices by which an individual cuts their trash down to almost nothing. This sense of the term was popularized by Béa Johnson, a French-American mother of two based in Mill Valley, California, who managed to reduce her family’s annual trash to a single pint-sized jar in 2008. In 2009, she began writing about her efforts in a blog. “I have put my family on a waste diet for the past twelve months,” Johnson noted in her debut entry. “Analyzing whatever comes in contact with the bottom of our one home trash can and slowly trying to get it as close to zero waste as possible. . . . You’ll see what I am talking about.” What follows is a mix of documentary, practical advice, and reflection. Johnson modifies the traditional three ‘R’s to include composting as “rot.” But her most important lesson is another R, “refuse.” By far the most effective way to eliminate one’s waste is to not come into possession of disposable items in the first place. An early post-Christmas entry offers a list of items trashed, replete with strategies to eliminate this source in the future: “Wrappers of cough lozenges. Note to self: find a recipe for honey candy for the kids’ coughs” and “Lego packaging: the boys each received a brand new set from grandma, the box and baggies (#5) seemed recyclable but the sticker sheets and plastic accessory holder did not. Note to self: Call recycling center and ask if the sticker sheets (and USPS stamp sheets) are recyclable.” In 2013 Johnson collected her tips in a guidebook, The Zero Waste Home, now an Amazon bestseller translated into twenty-eight languages. In 2020 she lived with her husband in an airstream trailer, touring the country to preach zero waste. Today, there are any number of zero-waste lifestyle advocates. Most follow Johnson’s basic model, documenting their “zero-waste journey” online and offering advice to others looking to start theirs. Several also sell waste-saving products, such as Lauren Singer, founder of the retailer Package Free. Ironically, the term “zero waste” now evokes a coterie of consumer items such as the cotton tote bag, the reusable water bottle, the thermos, the metal straw, and reusable food-wrap. Like “natural,” zero waste has no standardized regulated definition. Brands also apply it to products that are recyclable or compostable or come in packaging made from post-consumer recycled materials. When I put the term in a search engine, the first hit is an ad for “zero-waste mascara” that I can have shipped to my door. The movement by which a radical idea is swept up into a feel-good consumer trend is as familiar an arc as the turning of the seasons. In the best light, attempting a zero-waste lifestyle challenges the consumer to evaluate her true needs. At worst, zero waste is a fantasy of personal innocence that contributes to a broader social fantasy of sustainable consumption, in which what is ultimately upheld is an extractive relationship to the earth and others’ labor. (It should come as no surprise that the vast majority of zero-waste influencers are middle-class white ladies, a demographic to which I also belong.) What a zero waster cannot do is meaningfully intervene in the ecological and public health impacts associated with trash. When post-consumer trash accounts for only a tiny fraction of the total waste stream in the United States—relative to construction waste and industrial waste—the effect of individual choice is negligible. Every Litter Bit Hurts The fixation on individual habits is not just a matter of narcissism. It is part of the cultural ethos bred in tandem with the consumer society born in the postwar boom. The mid-twentieth century saw the rise of a tremendous variety of new commodities and new habits in material culture. Until the 1950s, almost all containers were refillable or returnable—think the milkman or local soda works—moving “two ways,” from the producer to the consumer and back. “One-way” packaging, which emerged around this time, uniquely transformed the volume and character of discards. It expanded the possibilities for product distribution, introduced new surfaces for marketing, and acculturated the public to a new type of object: one designed to be trashed. Such pedestrian items as the pull-top drinking can, plastic and foam cups, ketchup packets, bubble wrap, even the trash bag are among the sundry one-use products to make their market debuts in the 1950s and 1960s. The applications of plastics became ever more diverse throughout the 1970s. The first polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles for carbonated beverages began to appear in stores in the mid-1970s, ironically in the midst of an oil crisis. In 2018, the most recent year for which EPA data is available, packaging and containers accounted for 28 percent of municipal solid waste nationwide, the largest portion by product type. As single-use packages proliferated, the same industries that developed these products worked to shape waste policy. Heather Rogers’s mid-2000s book Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage offers a detailed history of this period, giving particular attention to the tactics packaging interest groups used to resist legislation. A ban on single-use beverage containers was first proposed in Vermont in 1953, in response to the concerns of dairy farmers whose cows were getting sick after ingesting broken glass from bottles thrown to the side of the road. The law passed but expired after four years, and opposition from the beer industry successfully blocked its renewal. In the years to come, interest groups across the packaging, bottling, and beverage industries countered state and local measures across the country, from restrictions on certain types of packaging to mandatory deposit systems. Even the “bottle bills” requiring deposits now in place in ten states were hard-won and limited in scope. Note that the five- and ten-cent deposit rates have held flat since they were first passed, most in the 1970s and 1980s. Industry leaders also worked to influence public opinion. Particularly significant was the work of Keep America Beautiful (KAB), a nonprofit founded in 1953, the same year as Vermont’s disposal ban, by the American Can Company and the Owens-Illinois Glass Company, and later joined by powerful entities such as Coca-Cola, Dixie Cup, and the National Manufacturers’ Association. In its early years, KAB sponsored community-oriented beautification programs to remove debris from parks and highways. More ambitiously, it partnered with the Ad Council to launch nationwide campaigns against litter. An early series of TV and print ads feature Susan Spotless, a blond tot in a white sailor suit who dutifully picks up trash her father has dropped and places it in a public receptacle. “Daddy, every litter bit hurts!” she scolds. KAB’s most lauded (and also most infamous) ad debuted about a decade later, in 1971. Actor Iron Eyes Cody, in a costume inspired by Plains Indian dress, canoes down a river revealed to be strewn with trash. He climbs a bank and reaches a road, where a driver tosses refuse out of the window, which splatters at Cody’s feet. “Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. And some people don’t,” the narrator laments. A single tear rolls down Cody’s cheek as the narrator continues, “People start pollution. People can stop it.” These ads are not likely to resonate with the contemporary viewer. Susan Spotless’s vision of cleanliness has little to do with the toxic pollution trash now represents, and her pouty finger-wagging offers no solution. The implication that the suffering inflicted on native peoples is a question of “beauty” and that settler-colonialists’ abuse of their land is characterized by littering is outrageously offensive. (To make matters worse, in 1996, it was revealed that Iron Eyes Cody, who claimed to be Cherokee and Cree, in fact had no native heritage.) However, their messages hold. Contemporary discourse around trash, from the three Rs to zero waste, echoes Susan Spotless’s do-your-part duty. Much the same is true of legislation. As regulatory laws were blocked, fines for littering became commonplace. In this bait-and-switch, pollution is presented as the result of post-consumer behavior, and its solution is responsible individual waste hygiene. As Rogers notes, “KAB wanted to turn any stirrings of environmental awareness away from industry’s massive and supertoxic destruction of the natural world, telescoping ecological disaster down to the eyesore of litter and singling out the real villain: the notorious ‘litterbug.’” Reduce, Reuse, Wishcycle The focus on individual behavior dovetails elegantly with the advent of recycling. Recycling is often lauded as a victory for grassroots environmentalists, as the municipal collection programs we know today grew out of voluntary community-based initiatives in the late 1960s and 1970s. Samantha MacBride challenges this narrative in her 2011 book Recycling Reconsidered, which questions whether recycling does any environmental good at all. MacBride argues that the popularity of recycling has masked its many failures, allowing big manufacturers to resist more taxing waste policies. A case in point is New York City’s municipal collections program. In the 1970s, a citizens’ association, the Environmental Action Coalition (EAC), successfully launched local recycling centers across the city, and later partnered with the Department of Sanitation to establish its curbside program, which began in 1986 and became mandatory in 1989. Yet the EAC’s funding division board included executives from companies including Coca-Cola, Seven-Up, and the Aluminum Association. McBride’s archival research reveals that EAC leaders pushed for expanded recycling while speaking against the proposals for “fees, taxes, and other surcharges to force costs and material back onto producers” put forward by the city’s EPA. As recycling programs expanded across the country, so did the annual tonnage of municipal wastes, a trend that continues to the present day. This points to a larger problem with post-consumer recycling, which is that it places responsibility firmly in the hands of the consumer and the state, while absolving companies of all responsibility. More insidiously, recycling locates the environmental impact of consumer goods in a single decision made when an object passes from the realm of the useful to the disposable. The limited focus engenders a positive feeling around simply putting waste in the recycling bin. Manufacturers have preyed on this, against the actual practicability of recycling, in which sorting is only the first step. The chasing arrows emblem, that environmental ouroboros, is stamped on products ostensibly to aid correct handling, but these marks obfuscate. The numbering system codes all objects including those that cannot be recycled within the chasing arrows symbol. Like the mythical “away” into which trash is disappeared, the arrows introduce a possibility, that what you dispose of might find a new life. This has practical problems, leading people to “wishcycle,” that is, throw in with one’s recyclables objects that cannot be reprocessed. In truth, there’s no guarantee that anything you put in the right bin will be turned into new material, let alone that a manufacturer will buy that material to create something new. The process itself can be damaging, involving shipping, low-paid and dangerous labor, and toxicity. If some recycling is sorted and processed locally or domestically, as much or more is shipped abroad, often illegally. Consider the sensational images that periodically circulate the news and social media. A rosy-cheeked toddler sits at the foot of a technoscrap mountain in Guiyu, China, sometimes called the “e-waste capital of the world”; teens burn circuit boards against a landscape of debris and heavy smoke at Agbogbloshie, the scrapyard in Accra, Ghana, also sometimes called the “e-waste capital of the world”; an older man faces a wall of bottles stretching above him to every corner of the frame at an unnamed Malaysian plant. All of these show resource recovery in action. This is not to say that recycling is not worthwhile. It can be, especially for certain materials, such as metals. Yet whatever the environmental outcomes of recycling, its major influence has been in shaping the cultural imagination about discards. After all, what the chasing arrows draw is a loop, a reassuring stamp against entropy. The Heap of Individuals Garbage is defined as such only by the act of throwing away. The objects that enter the waste stream have no inherent properties, save for a history of having been discarded. Greg Kennedy, in his book An Ontology of Trash, proposes that the contradiction between obliteration and endurance is the defining property of garbage. He explains: To consider that garbage comes into being through annihilation is more than a philosophical trick. It reveals the ultimate “zero” with which trash is connected, that of having been absented of value. If I am attending to my waste, it is assumed that I must be trying to reduce it. Trash in itself is not thought to possess any other possible worth. Framed only as a problem to solve, the myriad objects we come to possess and then toss out are written over into abstraction: given in weights, material categories, and levels of toxicity, or else imagined as a symbol, morally charged. Robin Nagle, resident anthropologist at the New York City Department of Sanitation, astutely interprets garbage as a function of the pace of our daily lives. “We depend on our ability to move fast,” she writes, “and so assume the briefest relationships with coffee cups, shopping bags, packaging of all kinds—encumbrances we must shed quickly so that we can maintain what I call our average necessary quotidian velocity.” What sets the pace of this quotidian velocity is, of course, work. The ease that consumerism promises has always been in service of productivity; the associated trash-making is one more expression of capitalism’s purchase on our time. Bereft of its use value and exchange value alike, the trashed commodity is a recalcitrant chunk of matter that speaks to what this economic system ultimately offers, to the earth and in our connections to one another. If the goal of my photographs is to represent the footprint of my waste, it fails for the same reasons a zero-waste lifestyle fails. I can never see the totality of my trash, because it’s bound up with that of others. I may photograph less food waste when I go out to a restaurant than when I cook at home, but it’s only because someone else is cooking, and tossing away the scraps. Still, I continue the practice, in part because I’m curious about what I now see in the images. Looking at my trash, I have also come to understand that waste is much more than a problem. The discrete and diverse objects that comprise trash contain the story of our desires, our material relations to the planet, and to one another. Today, I would still be disappointed if my food arrived in a clamshell container in a sit-down restaurant, but the object would not fill me with abjection. I see now that it bears the trace of interlocking and wide-reaching experiences, all bound up with labor. My brief relationship with that object was made possible by the efforts of the man who rang me up, cooked my eggs, and brought them to me; of those who delivered it to the store, perhaps driving it across the country in a truck, unloading it at a shipping dock, ferrying it across the Pacific; who manufactured it; who drilled and refined the petroleum long underground; who will later bring the café’s trash to the curb; will drive it to a transfer station; will handle it further down the waste stream. Neither the plastic clamshell nor an image of it can reveal the specifics of its history or future. However, on Instagram, my own life is represented as a similar specter: one among many who must have handled this object. The photographs invite me to imagine the many people, places, and materials with which this object has intersected, or will. It’s insufficient to say that “people” cause pollution. Or that “people,” just a heap of individuals, can solve it. But it is exactly such a collective that the wasted items bind together. [1] The terms “trash,” “garbage,” “waste,” “refuse,” have discrete meanings in different contexts, especially in waste management, but I am using them in the colloquial sense, i.e., interchangeably.
Rough and Unready Bryce Covert The pandemic has shined a harsh light through every gaping hole in the tattered American social safety net, which has been deteriorating for decades. People who get sick with Covid still aren’t guaranteed any paid sick leave. Our unemployment insurance program has been underfunded and neglected for decades, which left it entirely unprepared for the influx of demand. We don’t have enough affordable housing for everyone who needs it, an acute emergency when, for so long, the way to stay safe from the pandemic was to stay home. We’ve made huge strides toward getting more Americans insured, but our profit-minded health care system means that many people are afraid to go to the doctor if they feel sick, or even to get a free Covid vaccine for fear that there’s a hidden cost. But the crisis didn’t just expose the fact that the country is miserly in the help it offers the downtrodden, the sick, the old and the very young, parents, and workers. It also exposed the fact that, if and when we change our minds and decide to help people in crisis, we don’t even have ways to do it. When Congress finally turned on a spigot of federal rent relief, the money got bottlenecked by state and local governments that were entirely unprepared to deliver a brand new kind of aid. When government shutdowns threatened the future of the country’s small businesses, there was no funnel to deliver billions in relief to keep them afloat, so the government turned to the anemic Small Business Administration, which in turn routed the money through banks. While the funds were a lifeline for some, the program has been absolute chaos from the start, and it failed many of the business owners who needed it most. And as the country realized that one of the best responses to poverty is to send people direct cash—first through a number of stimulus checks, then an enhanced Child Tax Credit that’s acting as a one-year child allowance—it found that getting cash to the poorest is much easier said than done. We could have seen this coming. After the Affordable Care Act was passed, a country that had never before tried to ensure that all Americans could get health insurance had to figure out how to extend it to more people. Few can forget the disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov, the federal insurance marketplace that kept crashing and was impossible to use for months. By now, public servants and dedicated nonprofit volunteers have scrambled to create new pandemic systems from scratch, connecting as many people as they can with the aid they deserve. Pipelines and portals have been slapped together and deployed. But these efforts are likely to sunset as the worst of the crisis someday fades from view; some already have. Will the country learn a crucial lesson? Not just that we owe more to each other outside of a historic, global crisis—that we can alleviate more everyday suffering if we choose to—but that we have to build the infrastructure and systems to ensure help actually gets to everyone? Or will we let the streams run dry and the pipelines crumble, wasting our chance at a kinder, more equitable society? How to Rent a Room Evictions have been an urgent crisis for decades. Landlords file 3.7 million evictions in normal years, according to the Eviction Lab. In the four worst offending cities in the United States, landlords filed evictions against more than 10 percent of renter households in 2016. In North Charleston, South Carolina, the very worst offender, about ten households were sent packing every day that year. And yet the country has never offered tenants rental assistance in any substantial or ongoing way. Section 8 rent vouchers are reserved only for the poorest of the poor and are still often impossible to get; even if someone manages to obtain one, many landlords refuse to rent to them. Other federal rental assistance is only available for select groups and isn’t meant to plug a gap when someone suddenly falls behind. Some states, cities, and localities have offered a bit of support here and there, often funded by philanthropic money, but there has been no comprehensive effort at the federal level. For the first nine months of the pandemic, congressional lawmakers dithered over fixing this problem, forcing tenants to rack up huge debts in back rent—or to forego other necessities in order to make rent on the first of each month—and wasting time during which rental assistance programs could have been well-designed on a national scale. States were allowed to use money from the CARES Act for rental relief if they so chose, but they used just a fraction of it: $2.6 billion out of $150 billion. Even so, a year after the bill passed, $425 million of the $2.6 billion had not made it to either landlords or renters, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. New York and Florida, both states hit hard by the pandemic, returned tens of millions of unspent funds that they couldn’t manage to get to those who needed it. Last December, and then again in March of this year, Congress finally acted, passing $46.5 billion in rental assistance specifically. States scrambled to set up brand new programs to get out ahead of expiring eviction moratoriums. Administrators, not accustomed to funneling rental money or emergency aid out the door, had to wade through technological problems as they set up new application portals. “It is a huge undertaking to try to set up and scale a program like this in a very short period of time,” said Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “They’re sort of learning the ropes as they go along.” Administrators also had to make key decisions about who could get the aid and how they would prove they deserved it. Many programs ended up being “way too cautious and are oftentimes getting in their own way,” Saadian said. As of late September, about 91 percent of rental assistance programs still required proof of tenancy, about 82 percent required proof of income, and 55 percent even required proof that a tenant had experienced Covid-related hardship. Although the Biden administration has urged programs to allow tenants to swear that they qualify, many renters must submit reams of paperwork: tax returns, proof of residency, and records of any assistance they’ve received during the pandemic. Meanwhile, less than a third of these programs send money directly to tenants, bypassing the many recalcitrant landlords who don’t want to agree to tenant protections or would simply prefer to kick their tenants out. Not to mention that renters who have never been offered this kind of help before don’t necessarily know it now exists. Simply making everyone aware takes time and effort. What should have been a deluge of money into tenants’ pockets, allowing them to get current on rent and stay housed, has instead been a pitiful dribble. In the first six months of this year, states got a mere $3 billion, or 6.5 percent of the total funds at their disposal, to tenants in need. Just six hundred thirty-three thousand families received help, even though over seven million were behind on rent and, as of this writing, 3.6 million are on the brink of eviction. Things weren’t much better by July: by that point, states had only gotten 11 percent of the total funds to people who needed them, and at least fifty cities and counties hadn’t sent out a single penny. New York State didn’t distribute any aid through June; by early August, only about seven thousand tenants had actually gotten money. The Middleman Can’t Renters aren’t the only neglected group. Before last year, the government had never given aid directly to small businesses en masse, either. So, when governors across the country issued stay-at-home orders and millions of businesses were faltering on the brink, the government brought in banks as middlemen to sort through applications for relief and issue emergency loans. It was a form of “path dependence,” argued Mehrsa Baradaran, law professor at the University of California Irvine. “We just take the route we always take.” It’s the country’s default response, at this point, to outsource things to the private sector instead of having the government do them itself. But routing emergency aid through banks allowed the financiers to rake in billions in government fees for processing loans without adding much of use to the process. Sure, they spent time on paperwork, and they’re supposed to be on the hook if they issue fraudulent loans. But the banks assumed no credit risk: if qualified business owners end up defaulting on their loans, the Small Business Administration, the agency tasked with running the Paycheck Protection Program, takes the hit. The banks have also made life difficult for the worst-off businesses. First was the struggle just to get the loans, when every day’s delay was another day closer to permanent closure. Banks prioritized bigger, wealthier clients that they already had existing relationships with over smaller, underserved lenders, particularly people of color. JPMorgan Chase, the bank that has issued the most PPP loans, processed loans for over $5 million nearly four times faster than those for below $1 million, according to a congressional report. “They [were] choosing recipients based on their own business models, which would be fine if it was their own money, but it’s the public’s money,” Baradaran said. Then it came time for those who had managed to elbow their way through the process to wipe the loans off their books. PPP loans took the place of the direct government grants that other countries sent to companies to cover payroll costs, but they were supposed to operate in basically the same way. So long as the money was used for the correct purposes—most of it on payroll, with some allowance for rent, utilities, and other expenses—the loans were to be forgiven. But, of course, that process broke down in practice. Banks don’t generate any money for going through the trouble of forgiving loans, so they’ve been unmotivated to do so. A year after the start of the pandemic, most small business owners were still waiting for their banks to complete the paperwork to forgive their loans—or, in many cases, to simply open up the application process. Even by late summer, less than half of all PPP loans had been forgiven. The more efficient and equitable way to protect small businesses would have been to cut the middlemen out and just give them government money directly. But this is not something we’ve ever done on such a scale, and the Small Business Administration doesn’t have a good track record of rushing money out the door in the case of an emergency. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, for example, it took the SBA an excruciating average of forty-five days to process loans for affected businesses, and in the end, it only approved 42 percent of applications. Other countries were ready for this crisis. Denmark, for example, already has a Danish Business Authority that was capable of directly accepting and processing applications for aid. “Since many European countries had similar social safety net programs already, albeit in far more limited form, the salary supports were relatively easy to expand, almost literally overnight in many places, amid widespread consensus,” Michael Birnbaum and Karla Adam wrote for the Washington Post early last year. “The United States, by contrast, has had to cobble together a support system that is in some ways brand-new.” Portals to Nowhere In 1969, Richard Nixon nearly enacted a form of guaranteed income through a negative income tax. We’ve sent monthly Social Security payments out to almost all seniors since 1940. But the country has never enacted a child allowance, even as most of our wealthy international peers have realized the value in keeping children from living in destitution. That changed for the first time this year when Democrats pushed through an expansion of the Child Tax Credit, which, until recently, offered up to $2,000 for each child against a household’s tax liability, but only to families earning $2,500 a year or more. If the credit was more than what a family owed in taxes, they received a check for the difference in a lump sum. By contrast, the expanded CTC is designed to reach all poor families, with a beefed-up dollar amount to be sent out in regular monthly payments. Before, the money only kicked in gradually as parents earned more so as not to “reward” those who didn’t have a job or couldn’t find steady enough work. Now, over 90 percent of families will receive the payments, and they only phase out for higher incomes. In other words, we have a child allowance, at least before it expires at the end of the year. Yet getting the money out to all families, particularly the poorest ones who newly qualify, is where the excitement of a new benefit meets the drudgery of reality. The IRS is in charge of sending out the new Child Tax Credit, as it was for the three rounds of pandemic stimulus checks that came before it. Families who file regular tax returns have experienced the best that our government has to offer: stimulus checks and the CTC payments have showed up in their bank accounts automatically, without them having to take a single action. But everyone else—typically the very young and very old, as well as those who earn too little to owe federal taxes—has had to wrangle with the worst of government: battling with bureaucratic systems designed by people who don’t seem especially attuned to the realities of people’s lives. To get stimulus checks out, the IRS needed to know who people were, where they lived, what they earned, and how many children they had. There are other government agencies that have this information—Social Security for disability recipients; the VA for veterans who interact with it—but at first, instead of working directly with those other agencies to get the details it needed, the IRS threatened to make all of these individuals file returns on their own. “Their natural indication is to put the burden on a population that really can’t handle the burden,” said Nina Olson, former IRS taxpayer advocate and executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights. The IRS eventually reversed course, and yet its ethos—to not care very much about easing requirements on a population whose lives are usually complicated and overburdened—has carried forward. The agency created a portal for people to enter information in order to receive stimulus checks that didn’t work on mobile phones and was at first only available in English. This, during a pandemic that meant vulnerable populations, already reeling from the trauma of the pandemic itself, couldn’t go anywhere for in-person help. The result was that nearly six months after Congress passed the first round of checks, an estimated nine million people still hadn’t gotten their money because they hadn’t filed with the IRS. All of the same kinds of problems reared their heads as soon as the IRS started trying to send out CTC payments to families. For the first time, the credit has been extended to all poor families, even those who earn too little to file tax returns. But that means the IRS doesn’t already have information on them, and these families represent about seven million of the ten million children who should be getting the new benefit. Once again, the IRS set up a portal for people to register for their payments, developed with the help of private tax-filing behemoth Intuit—the same Intuit (the parent company of TurboTax) that has lobbied against efforts to make filing taxes easier for everyone. As with the stimulus payments, this portal is online-only and not mobile friendly, missing anyone who doesn’t have a computer and internet at home. It’s again only in English. Users also need to enter an email address, which many low-income people don’t have. The instructions are densely written. And the portal has strict security check points that people have struggled to get through, particularly those who aren’t very comfortable with technology. “For this population, if you meet a barrier, you ultimately give up,” Olson noted. That’s if they even know about the expanded payments to begin with. While the IRS has put information up on its website, that’s going to miss many of the families they’re supposedly trying to reach. “The IRS has no, zero, zip, nada infrastructure in the field for outreach and education,” Olson said. It had no existing relationships with anti-poverty groups, community organizations, or even state agencies and has done nothing to create them now. “It’s divorced from what’s actually happening on the ground.” The effort to get people to sign up has instead been taken up by a group of volunteers. Can the Government Do Good? Plenty of other creaky structures nearly gave way under the weight of the pandemic. Unemployment insurance systems were crushed under the masses of people who rushed to sign up in the first few months, forcing many to wait weeks or months to get jobless relief. At least nine million ended up with nothing at all. Benefits distributed through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the country’s only cash assistance program for poor people, barely rose to meet the need and even fell in ten states that didn’t do away with harsh rules. But at least in the case of UI and TANF, something had existed before this catastrophe. For too many other needs that predated the pandemic, we’ve failed to do anything at all. Now that the country has rushed to set up new pipelines to deliver pandemic-related aid, are we going to let them run dry and be dismantled as we start to try to put Covid behind us? Some of them might not be worth salvaging. The Paycheck Protection Program has been so chaotic and so unequal that it would be better, instead, to plan ahead for the next emergency, be it natural or manmade, and create a more functional system. The Treasury Department, which tracks all companies through the IRS, could send money out directly, perhaps with the aid of a better-funded, better-organized SBA. But evictions and poverty won’t end when the pandemic winds down. The government decided for the first time in its history to offer tenants meaningful money to keep them housed when faced with the threat of removal, or at least to send landlords checks so they wouldn’t kick renters out. Democrats coalesced, at least momentarily, around the broad idea that sending cash payments to parents could significantly reduce poverty and give children healthy, more stable lives. And yet everything that has been built up to send those benefits out is scheduled to someday disappear. The National Low Income Housing Coalition is working with a bipartisan group of senators to make rental assistance permanent “so we wouldn’t lose some of this infrastructure being built now,” Saadian said. They want to see at least $3 billion flow through these new pipelines down to state and local governments every year and, ultimately, directly to tenants themselves. And they “don’t want to see the knowledge, the expertise, the systems, infrastructure to be allowed to wither away,” Saadian said. “Because then the next time we’re experiencing a crisis like this pandemic, or the next time a family’s just facing their own crisis because they lost a job or saw a reduction in hours at work, we want there to be that infrastructure to help them.” The IRS is in similar danger of letting a mediocre effort go to waste. While its portals to get people signed up for stimulus checks and CTC payments have been riddled with problems, they are better than having nothing to connect families with the benefits they’re owed. “I kept saying to them, ‘Are you going to keep this up and improve it?’” Olson said. As of early this year, she said, the IRS’s answer was no. Without legislation forcing it to maintain the portal created for the expanded CTC, Olson thinks the agency will let that disappear too. Creating new benefits is the exciting part of policymaking, not to mention a rare occurrence. But if no time is spent on figuring out how to actually get them to the people who need them, they might as well not exist. The experience of the CTC, Olson argues, has exposed the need for a one-stop-shop for government benefits. Instead of navigators to help with the Affordable Care Act, and social workers to guide people toward housing assistance, and other bureaucracies for SNAP and TANF and all other programs, we need one place for people to sign up for exactly what they need. These aren’t just logistical problems. They quickly become existential. For many female and minority business owners who got PPP loans, it was the first time they had ever tried to access government lending programs. But after such a bruising experience, they will probably think twice about trying again anytime soon, allowing the white men who are more comfortable with the system to keep enjoying its fruits. Similarly, renters were promised that, as eviction moratoriums started to lift, their government would send them funds to keep them housed. Then they were forced to wait months to apply and receive money, all while their rent kept piling up; many of the lucky few who have gotten aid haven’t gotten enough to make them whole. Why would they believe that the government is capable of providing people like them with the help that they need? For many Republicans, that’s the very point of making public benefits difficult to access and onerous to receive. Their project of imposing work requirements on anything and everything they can, for example, doesn’t help people work, but it does tie applicants up in so much red tape that they get kicked off or can’t enroll in benefits. For any good government-minded moderates, or for Democrats who purport to champion the needs of poor and working Americans, these details can’t just be glossed over and forgotten. Government benefits are only worth as much as what people can access. Democrats will need to commit not just to keeping these systems in place—very much a question mark, given that at least one senator, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, has been threatening to hold up an agenda that includes a more permanent expansion of the Child Tax Credit—but ensuring that they actually function. The government undermines its own case for doing more when it can’t deliver on its promises. And thus it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: we don’t put the time and money into public infrastructure because we don’t believe it can work. The pandemic was a glimpse at a different world, one in which we do offer help and it can arrive on time. Now we have to decide whether or not that’s the world we want to live in.
The Extractive Circuit Ajay Singh Chaudhary The machinery—the actual form and function—of twenty-first-century capitalism is an extractive circuit which quite literally crisscrosses the world. Its global value chains stretch through physical infrastructure and “frictionless” financial flows at the speed allowed by fossil fuels; telecommunications; and geophysical, technological, psychosocial, and bodily limits and “optimizations.” It connects economically and ecologically dispossessed agricultural communities in the Global South with regimes of hyperwork in the Global North; rare earth “sacrifice zones” with refugees; migrant labor with social reproduction; ocean acidification and atmospheric carbon with profitable opportunity. It has required the transformation of states; it has ripped through biomes and through flesh. Capital often appears and is treated as a historical abstraction; this is doubly true of globalized, financialized capital. The extractive circuit is the leaden reality of a global human ecological niche organized for maximal profitability—no matter how difficult or costly to maintain. Its realities underscore the generalization of a colonial social relation in socioecological terms, even as older modes of imperialism and neocolonialism are hardly swept aside. Its speed, frenzy, coercion, and brutality reach into the very heart of the imperial metropole, far beyond where such relations were already present. Feelings of exhaustion—depression, desperation, fatigue, exasperation—course through its wirings, neurons, biochemicals, and sinews. At every “node” along such a circuit, “inputs”—ecological, political, social, individual—are extracted and “exhausted.” The circuit, like capital, crosses boundaries without entirely obliterating them, and, similarly, connects a vast potential political subject across disparate lines—Global North and South, gender, class, race, nationality, religion, and sexuality. The extractive circuit is the socioecological portrait of capitalism historically and its transformations to maintain profitability in the face of immanent headwinds, like the long economic downturn and ecological limits themselves. Just as Marx once invited us to look behind the factory door—above which was inscribed “No admittance except on business”—to understand the way in which a nascent industrial capitalism was creating value, we need to “unbox” the extractive circuit, catalog its parts, and pry past a few bezels if we want to see Actually Existing Capitalism today. The Rest is Nodes Consider the Philippines. Over the past several decades, the Filipino economy has become increasingly dependent on the export of low-cost labor, largely along gendered lines, in the form of care-workers to North America and Europe (mostly women), and extremely low-cost manual laborers to the Gulf states (mostly men). Remittances now make up ten percent (or more) of the annual GDP of the Philippines. In the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia being the case par excellence, migrant workforces are employed in sometimes slave-like conditions to do much of the country’s basic labor, both “unskilled” and “skilled.” (As much as 83 percent of the Saudi Arabia workforce is migrant according to the IMF.) Yet, for all its repressiveness through arms of direct coercion like its notorious morality police, Saudi Arabia is a remarkably weak state. This imported workforce is vital for the social and political maintenance of that weak state, which in turn serves a key function in the globalized order not only as an oil producer but, crucially, as a control on the world’s oil spigot. Far from the Malthusian fears of “peak oil,” oil is in fact plentiful in the world, in the Gulf region and elsewhere, and Saudi Arabia is a key player in limiting its production to control prices. As paths for economic advancement narrow in places like the Philippines and as industries such as fishing are decimated by changing ocean temperature, acidification, coral bleaching, and other cumulative effects of global climate change, conditions intensify this political economic shift to migration. In turn such shifts drive profitable increases in energy demand, low-cost labor, through dispossession and even social and ecological crises themselves. As Melissa Walker observed of the “disposable Third World woman,” Filipino and Southeast Asian labor more broadly is viewed—in terms of dislocation and distance but also cultural imagination—as docile and pliant. In the Gulf, male Asian workers are considered additionally useful as “less politically menacing” than local and regional alternatives. Ecological resources become sources of social value and “human capital” is naturalized as closely as possible to the supposed infinite free “gifts of nature.” Now imagine a Global North worker, across the globe, likely “middle class.” Probably white but not necessarily so. Place her in California—an increasingly unsuitable geography for mass human habitation. Say she’s white collar—perhaps an office assistant, accountant, or coder. In the 1970s her labor would likely have been lower in waged-hours than it is today, and it would have included, in the famous phrase of Arlie Hochschild, a “second shift” of unwaged “free” domestic labor. Cooking, cleaning, care work: the often “invisible” aspects of social reproduction found in the home. Today, our imaginary Californian works longer hours, in a “productively optimized” labor process, still for a lower wage than a male counterpart, even as part of her “second shift” is now itself displaced onto migrant labor, including everything from general health care work to at-home care and domestic work to independent contract labor for household maintenance, which can range from food preparation and delivery to, in concentrated urban centers, laundry and far beyond. The extractive circuit produces prodigious amounts of such “disposable” people. This move toward “outsourcing” domestic labor was already occurring in much earlier periods (the 1960s, 1950s, and earlier), but in the United States that was, at the time, shifted instead to differently racialized gendered labor; a largely black, racialized caste system underwrote white middle class “normalcy” in the United States. Such a caste system unquestionably continues to this day, even if its racialization has taken on “multicultural” hues. But the augmentation that is key to understanding the extractive circuit is the ever-increasing number of inputs designed—to use somewhat crude economic language—to maximize productivity and profitability. This augmentation has spread comparative advantage from geographies to the body itself. This is the case even if it leads to, at best, an increasingly socioeconically and ecologically tenuous maintenance of current overall economic productivity. Put more simply, our imaginary white-collar Californian now works harder and longer helping to maintain an artificially futile level of production and requiring mass consumption of everything from energy to electronics. And she does so for less. Her real wage has stagnated for several decades; even though the professions imagined above could place her income above the 48 percent of Americans who earn less than about $31,000 a year, they don’t come close to the levels where twenty-first-century capitalism truly pays off (not even taking into account the grimmer picture in wealth.)[1] Her lifestyle is thus supported by financialized debt, which in turn requires her to ever further “innovate” and “diversify” her “human capital.” This includes but is not limited to the intensive self-maintenance through biochemicals, pharmaceuticals, and other technological interventions to her body and its internal composition and processes. She does consume more, but this is not a particularly pleasurable form of desire fulfillment. It is rather her very desire to continue to exist that is rechanneled into the logic of capital accumulation. Even as a rather small node on the extractive circuit, she is also a component along several different if recognizable lines, for example through the “global value chains” (GVCs) producing her computer or cellphone, from cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to Shenzhen manufacturing. The unprecedented speed, precision of production, and division of labor, as well as the ungovernability of these value chains, propels her own speed-up. The food system her (un)well-being rests upon is one form or another of industrialized petro-farming, itself dependent on the labor (and the hyper-depressed wages) of a deeply precarious migrant labor workforce composed largely of undocumented migrants and special H-2A agricultural “guest workers.” Its supposed “green” revolutionary efficiency is a figment of resource-intensive industrial agriculture, which leaves the world both malnourished and obese while increasing energy costs, greenhouse gas emissions [GHG], not to mention the growing enclosure and dispossession of people practicing far more sustainable modes of agriculture that could feed the world far better today. Most carbon dioxide is emitted at the point of production. Take her smartphone. The electricity that powers it accounts for only about 14 percent of the total carbon emissions that span its lifetime as a commodity. Eighty-three percent of the emissions occur at the point of production. The majority of such phones are produced in China, whether their end-use destination is the United States, Germany, Japan, or any other country on Earth. And, if we start looking at the other ways phone production exceeds planetary boundaries, in purely ecological terms, we find all measurable boundaries breached.[2] It’s not just a matter of carbon dioxide and other production emissions but also the processes of resource extraction (mining) itself: excessive freshwater use, eutrophication from biogeochemical flows, deforestation of nearby lands, biodiversity loss from land-use and others. At the same time such extraction is dependent, for just one component, on cobalt found primarily in mines in the DRC. The labor in such mines is, almost without exception, either slave labor, child labor, or both. Capitalism as we know it is dependent on the political subordination of places like the DRC, the designation of its people as expendable, “disposable.” Slave labor keeps the cost of cobalt as cheap as possible. Cobalt is a critical resource in high demand. The cobalt from such mines will likely be turned into phone batteries in manufacturing centers in, again, places like Shenzhen, China. Globally speaking—although improving in some ways within China itself—such “cheap” labor is required to maintain the profitability of that phone. Meanwhile, as we’ve already seen, the end-use of that phone dramatically increases the conditions of “hyperwork”—the speed-up, the exhaustion—in the Global North (and pockets of North in South and vice versa). This manifests in all manner of new, “more efficient,” and “more productive” labor practices across a host of traditionally blue- and white-collar sectors. The very design of those phones—forced obsolescence within approximately two or three years—requires not only an increase in extraction across all these nodes but is itself a source of profitability. At this juncture, capital must keep burning through more of the biosphere and the human systems inside it to keep up profit margins. Fracked and Extracted In other words, the logic of the extractive circuit is one of the most vicious cycles imaginable. At every turn, an increase in energy inputs from both ecological and social sources, and with every increase in energy inputs, an increase in overall inclemency for a global human ecological niche that stretches from rising ocean temperatures and acidification to overall warming, each of which drives a further demand for energy inputs, and so on. The increased consumption demands in the service of accumulation require further fossil fuel extraction, further migration into low-wage, high-risk, precarious- or informal-labor, and even the geo-strategic necessity of different kinds of postcolonial states. At every node in the circuit, there are two simultaneous and related phenomena: value extraction and nodal exhaustion. Value is extracted not only through human labor but also through a series of natural and social inputs. Ecologically speaking, value at the simplest level can be drawn from the “free” use of water or air and other “commons.” But it’s also the value derived from their commodification, from so-called “externalities” in waste flows and mountains; in complex socioecological processes like industrial agriculture where not only are soils exhausted but output is dependent on massive fossil fuel, unsustainable pesticide and chemical-fertilizer inputs, or with the “free” exploitation of flora and fauna, from simple use as with logging to the patenting of DNA strands. Almost every measure associated with anthropogenic climate change—not least fossil fuels—represents a process by which value is added through extraction and exhaustion. Similarly, the extractive circuit derives value from a panoply of social sources from the global majorities “relatively surplus to the functioning of capitalism” to the gendered and often unwaged work of social reproduction. In perhaps the most unintentionally radical paper ever written, the late economist Chong Soo Pyun pegged the “monetary value of a housewife” in 1969 through a set of neoclassical and neoliberal methods at $83,807.58 (or $626,410.28 in inflation adjusted 2021 dollars). Just under thirty years later, the ecological economist Robert Costanza and an interdisciplinary team would argue, “only somewhat facetiously” in political scientist Alyssa Battistoni’s words, the value of the world’s “ecosystems and natural capital” is on average 33 trillion (or 56 in inflation adjusted) dollars per year. As Battistoni notes, feminist arguments regarding social reproduction should serve as bridge concepts connecting the “historical and structural” similarities between labor exploitation and ecological value. At the same time in those majorities (across both South and North to differing degrees), refugees, for example, can be mined for data, exploited for informal economies, or leveraged for geopolitical advantage. Racializing and/or Orientalizing populations helps render entire peoples and geographies suitable for valuable subordination, disposability, or wholesale abandonment. Dispossession and expropriation are socioecological processes. Value can be derived from the limitations of popular sovereign powers over capital. Or from the usefulness of social, political, and ecological crises themselves. In a very different (but still market-based) world-system, the DRC should be able to command extraordinarily high prices for its cobalt, especially if mined in more sustainable socioecological ways. However, value is derived from the DRC’s ongoing sporadic armed conflicts and general instability—themselves shaped in part by the extractive circuit—in providing ideal conditions to maintain child and slave labor, environmentally catastrophic extraction, and capture the extraordinary revenues for transnational corporations like Swiss-based Glencore. The key connective tissue in this circuit is fossil capital, to use Andreas Malm’s clarifying construction, but carbon is not, by itself, the only input. In the wake of different modes of exhaustion—at the level of formal labor but also at the level of those thrown out of the labor market, at the level of communities, at the level of societies, of states, and of the ecologies we can live and flourish in—one thing is pursued: profit. Neoliberalism’s matryoshka doll of financialization, international economic governance, risk shifting, state policies, and adjustments in cultural logic helped nurse profitability out of its 1970s doldrums. It did so through the redistribution of labor income to capital; through creating historically unprecedented speed and mobility for transnational capital flows, business-to-business commerce, and firm-level debt/currency creation; and through transforming the social functions of states into profit generating enterprises, diminishing democratic sovereignty, inhibiting decolonization, and quite a lot more. Although carbon emissions have been increasing rapidly since the Industrial Revolution, it is no accident that 63 percent of all emissions have been produced in these past forty years. Pace the Davos set, these emissions track neither population growth nor consumption from developing states. Their path is unimpeded by the proliferation of eco-conscious marketing schemes, “corporate social responsibility,” and promises (and non-existent realities) of mystical techno-fixes. They track the return to and difficult maintenance of profitability. As an interdisciplinary team led by chemist Will Steffen demonstrated, in terms of GHG emissions, ocean acidification, rainforest destruction, aquaculture depletion, global warming itself, and so on, climate change tracks not only cumulative GDP growth (as is widely discussed) but such conspicuous features of contemporary global capital as the increased use of telecoms, non-recreational transportation, and foreign direct investment (FDI), which moves from almost zero in the 1960s to trillions by the 2010s. Following Polanyi, they dubbed this “the Great Acceleration.” Such acceleration does not aggregate with population growth; perversely, the relation is inverted. Emissions, resource intensivity, and other climate measures are concentrated where end-point consumption is greatest, as many climate scientists now openly state, among the world’s wealthiest. In the global top wealth and income deciles, population growth is lowest or even negative. And as the rate of population growth is curbing globally, climate change continues its exponential pace. Many climate scientists today go further still, like physicist and social ecologist Julia Steinberger, in arguing the need to push past symptomatic criticisms of biophysical and economic growth towards the clear critique of capital as the “fundamental driver” of climate change. Far from reaching a new equilibrium, such a system has little room for maneuver, although it’s not at threat of automatic, mechanical collapse—a perennial, millenarian fantasy of so many across a broad political spectrum. Even with anemic growth rates, every little bit of real capital accumulation requires yet more inputs, more extreme extraction, increased dispossession, and new “sacrifice zones”—completely given over to permanent exhaustion and debilitation. The Covid-19 pandemic, itself a socioecological effect of accelerating capitalist enclosure and zoonotic spillover, proves just how well shocks can be absorbed into the system of macrofinancial capital flows and global value chains of the extractive circuit. Nearly one third of the total wealth that’s accrued to the United States’ 719 billionaires since the 1990s was accumulated during 2020, even as wealth stagnated or declined for vast majorities. Similar patterns can be seen globally. This is the system working; profitability recovers and the brief dip in emissions is reversed, higher in December of 2020 by two percent over the previous year. The shock intensified already existing systemic tendencies while revealing the slim margin of error needed for such a perfectly optimized “real economy.” Some recent shortages demonstrate just how taut the logistics of the extractive circuit are. Other shortages, like those of high-grade silicon (i.e., sand as observed by political theorist Laleh Khalili and internal industry reports alike) for microchips, are examples of genuine resource exhaustion. As scholar of global economic governance Julie Klinger has noted, it is hardly the geographic location of rare earth metals alone, for example, that dictates the location of zones for their extraction. These zones are produced rather through a logic that delicately weaves the power and needs of transnational firms, states, and other strategic actors. Some states may want extractive frontiers within their boundaries for a measure of geostrategic leverage. Some local actors (a diverse array of some workers, surrounding communities, and social movements) are pitted against others. Extractivism is one of the only paths available to material development at many nodes along the circuit, towards some hope of relief. But it also promises destruction and exhaustion in its wake. While many fully aware of this reality in the Global South are rendered dependent on resource exports,in Pennsylvania, families similarly enroll in the latest fracking initiative or otherwise sign away mineral rights as one of the last remunerative games in town. Capital profits off the mine drainage, the freshwater depletion, the emissions, the social strain and desperation alike. Feeding Frenzy Financialized supply chains are structured to allow firms to ignore or skirt local, national, international legal.or even physical attempts to restrict the flow of extraction. They facilitate the shift of risk to the actor—whether at-will contractor, off-the-books migrant employee, or indigenous community in a resource rich area—structurally least able to absorb it. This extends not only into society, but into individuals, their internal biochemical orders, and to the whole ecological niche. Each of these factors contributes to a logic of absolute profit maximization and, as already described, a necessarily ever-increasing speed-up—in extraction, production, labor, dispossession, enclosure, and overall niche exhaustion. This is the world of lean production, just-in-time manufacturing and delivery. While most would, with good reason, focus on the human and ecological costs created by these processes—one key factor here is rather what they make possible.[3] The one-day or one-hour delivery, the expedited shipping, the synthesis of business and “leisure” hours: all of this is a lifesaver to the single parent, the double-shift employee in a food-desert, the downwardly mobile twelve-hours-a-day professional, the hustling informal or aspirational employee, hoping to claw their way out of generalized precarity. All of these, in the understanding of contemporary law and neoclassical economics, are “services” provided for consumers. We should see these “services” instead as facilitating the frenzy of these lives, as shifting literal time and energy not to these individual consumers but rather to the needs of an “always-on” capitalism, creating the very crises to which these services respond. They don’t strictly fulfill consumption ends; they are part of production. Every moment of life is integrated, profitable, from literal labor hours to the production of micro-units of digital value (via social media and other avenues) in the hours-for-what-we-will. Such services are dependent on the speed and ungovernability of GVCs which can, to a degree not possible before, dice up a production process into its most minute parts, spread them as far a global distance as comparative advantage dictates, limited, in strictly economic terms, by the current state of communications technology and the price of oil. GVCs function best—that is to say fastest and most profitably—when the network of small and medium size enterprises as well as more informal “arms-length” arrangements are “governed” by a concentrated transnational corporation (TNC). Think again of cobalt mining in the DRC. Such arrangements and “governance” allow a TNC like Swiss-based Glencore to be both the largest cobalt mining corporation in the world and to avoid not only Congolese legal accountability but American and British as well. Glencore dominates cobalt extraction through organizing a network of subcontractors, subsidiaries, and informal arrangements. The opacity and complexity involved allows risks—political, legal, environmental—to be largely circumvented. Glencore exerts a form of localized sovereignty over its mining concerns, taking advantage of questionably sourced minerals and maintaining the very labor and environmental practices that it forswears in meaningless corporate “environmental, social, and governance” rhetoric. Its form effectively moves responsibility from the TNC to “the miners themselves” for their own enslavement and abuses. This “governance” is backed by the direct coercion of subcontracted semi-private “state” mine police and private military corporations like G4S. The British-based G4S is not only contracted by Glencore or the DRC (technically through a local subsidiary); it operates in ninety countries, including running mega-prisons and migrant camps in the UK, despite numerous accusations of serious human rights abuses in the UK and elsewhere. In the US, G4S has been subcontracted by private firms as well as the military, Customs and Border Patrol, the departments of State, Justice, Energy, Homeland Security and the DEA in addition to subcontracted work for prisons and police at state and local levels. Private clients include GlaxoSmithKline (initially in the United States, Argentina, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and UK, expanding to twenty-eight other countries GSK operates in) and Citicorp. G4S was recently acquired by the security conglomerate Allied Universal which boasts the largest security force (one hundred fifty thousand members) in North America. It is the third largest employer in North America and the seventh globally. Similar mechanisms of speed, ungovernability, risk-shifting, and even violence are found at the site of end-use consumption, even in the arguably most powerful state on the planet, as at sites of basic resource extraction in some of the poorest geographies. Whether a logger in Indonesia or a delivery-person in the United States, TNCs rely on similar methods if not to the same degree. At both nodes in the value chain, human and ecological destruction are rampant. It is not physically possible to achieve the just-in-time production and delivery-on-demand described above without burning through fossil fuels and human bodies with merciless efficiency. The proponents of global value chains often cite this ungovernability—if, of course, not these expressions of it—not only as fact but as added value. And such massive transnational corporations—sometimes “headquartered” in, and yet untethered to, a national economy—also weaken the political power of the end-user, eroding what remains of the “safety net” and social fabric. The form and function of GVCs is fundamentally at odds with basic principles of self-determination and popular sovereignty. The simplest expression of this is the changing relationships in which TNCs shape institutions, including states: “my factories for your reform.” While the United States retains its unique position as the world’s quasi-central bank and imperial guarantor of global capital, this new mode of capital organization facilitates its own versions of “special economic zones.” As of this year, for example, Samsung is extracting concessions in the form of proposed local, state, and federal tax breaks, and low-cost labor incentives, on top of existing environmental and social deregulation, in establishing a new semiconductor plant in Texas. Such “reshoring” is boosted by the catastrophic turn to jingoistic great power conflict with China but it is also not possible without the new socioecological facts-on-the-ground, both generated in the effloresce of the extractive circuit. Many (but not all) in the United States are also increasingly untethered from the national economy, and firms too, frequently subject to the same logic of extraction and exhaustion in socioecological terms. Millenarian Burnout Feelings of exhaustion, taken together—fatigue, burnout, stress, depression, pain—are globally prevalent. Reported levels of extreme stress are only marginally higher in the Philippines (58 percent) than the United States (55 percent). Cumulatively, these numbers tick up every year. At every node of the extractive circuit, we find speed, coercion, and the inevitable stressors on the individual. One of the best analytic lenses we have for this intersection of affect, environment, psychosocial pathology, and neurology is the psychology and political theory of Frantz Fanon. The extractive circuit is a “divided society . . . characterized by a predominant nervous tension leading quite quickly to exhaustion.” For Fanon, mental “illness situates the patient in a world in which his or her freedom, will and desires are constantly broken by obsessions, inhibitions, countermands, anxieties.” Later anti-psychiatry would posit mental illness itself as freeing, while for Fanon the pathologies were all too real and debilitating. His practice took seriously the need to use psychiatric tools to reconstitute individuals, in dialectical tension with a colonial society that is clearly itself “neurotic,” managing pathologies through psychological intervention but towards a clear understanding that the cure lies in radical change in social structure. Although many psychological theories and studies have long explored not only social environments but particularly the effects of violence and trauma, most unidirectionally focus on the individual as object of study and site of intervention. The late cultural theorist Mark Fisher called this the “privatization of stress.” In Britain, by the mid-2000s, depression had become the most treated disease by the National Health Service. “I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies,” wrote Fisher. Neoliberalism had compounded such individual focus into an “incumbent” commandment that “individuals resolve their own psychological distress.” Instead of “accepting the vast privatization of stress” we should ask “how it become acceptable that so many people . . . are ill?” As Fanon argued of neurotic colonized conditions, Fisher posited that “the ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest . . . capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and the cost of it appearing to work is very high.” The “privatization of stress” is a particularly apt phrase: just as one can mine fossil-capital to boost petro-farming outputs, one can squeeze the standard “labor power” of a hyper-employed worker while also exhausting her “mind.” These are some of the latest frontiers in the long history of transforming ecological inputs (for what is labor but an extension of nature working on itself, as Marx says) into abstract value. The “mental health plague” is the expression of this condition—perhaps, again, in normative economic terms, an externality—but the “privatization of stress,” of stressors, is a method by which an individual’s exhaustion can lower the cost of capitalism’s apparent functioning. If a worker takes it upon herself to “resolve” her own distress, or if a member of the vast global surplus populations accepts the “cruel optimism” that they are the source and aspirational solution to their extreme stress, these are real costs saved systemically as individuals squeeze just a little more out of themselves all while reinforcing the ideologically valuable conviction that the existing system works; all evidence to the contrary is on you. At quick glance, the “mental health plague” might seem a classic case of “First World” problems, but reports from the World Health Organization indicate that this kind of depression—and the panoply of affects collected under the rubric of exhaustion—is a global concern. Relatively well-known social phenomena like farmer suicides in South Asia or an individual story like that of the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, widely cited as the beginning of the Arab Spring, are just aspects of the mental health plague most visible in the media. In recent years, suicide has become the second leading cause of death among youth worldwide. As of this year, 77 percent of suicides now occur in low- and middle- income countries. Meanwhile, there are the global psychological impacts of climate change itself: the direct experience of extreme weather events, for example, is compared in many studies with PTSD or grief more commonly associated with modern warfare. This is not to say that pressure is applied equally everywhere. Nor do the mental and physical health crises experienced by Filipino migrants or Californian office workers share the exact same etiology or epidemiology. It is obvious that the stressors experienced by migrant laborers, the permanently unemployed, or even a relatively stable health care or logistics worker have different particular causes and attendant problems. But they are experiencing what we can call “exhaustion,” not only medically but as a relationship to climate, society, and its hegemonic ideologies. There are relays on the circuit—particularly those between ecology and economy—where this exhaustion is very nearly calculable, in the theories of energetics which once so entranced “scientific management.” But there are others that are found in individuals, communities, societies, and political systems, attuned and modified to the needs of the circuit, in far more qualitative terms. The “Golden Age” (not really so golden) of win-win shared growth prosperity in the overdeveloped North has long since passed. Almost every drop of fossil capital and what the late political economist Samir Amin called “imperialism rent” is now needed to shore up flagging growth rates. G7 share of world GDP peaked at 67 percent in 1988 and, although this is still quite disproportionate to population size, as of 2010, stands at less than 50 percent. Interestingly, this correlates with economist Branco Milanovic’s calculation that the “citizenship premium” seems to have peaked approximately ten years ago. In one of his last articles, Amin comes to a remarkably similar conclusion. Over the past decade or so “imperialism rent” increasingly flows to oligopolistic monopolies, not in a real sense to “national” economies, nor evenly: “The privileged (high salaries) have become the direct agents of the dominant oligopolistic class, while the others are pauperized.” This still spills over to many far outside the upper echelons, including to many workers who remain tied to the fortunes of firm and nation. And can be seen not only in income levels but phenomena like vaccine apartheid. It is not yet the case that these more direct forms of governance and rule happen, as Rosa Luxemburg wrote of colonial possessions in the early twentieth century, “without any attempt to disguise them.” But the “sermonizers, counselors, and ‘confusion-mongers’” Fanon identified as crucially intervening in colonizing societies are now working overtime in the metropole. The rolling legitimation crises of our time are the evidence of just how much ideology in the form of consent is breaking down and just how much direct coercion is ever more the norm, even for groups who were not previously subject to colonization. In the face of this coercion, massive increases in repressive apparatuses, personal and social “structural adjustment,” and the palpable experience of anthropogenic climate change, the interests of some workers and majorities in general (if far from universal), begin to align with, the refugee, the South Asian or Latin American peasant, as well as with those already racialized and/or colonized in the North. The concrete realities of the extractive circuit place such individuals and communities far closer to the super-majorities of the Global South than “the 1” or even “10 percent.” In other words, unevenly and to vastly different degrees, more and more are in the colony now. Colony of the Exhausted The point here is not simply to invert a Panglossian, Pinkeresque worldview, but rather to see dialectically, as Walter Benjamin suggested. Climate change itself is the most obvious contemporary avatar of Benjamin’s “storm of progress,” an almost unimaginable techno-social achievement containing within it an almost unimaginable horror. Weathering the storm requires overturning ideals of both progress and regress. The example of Cuban agroecology is illustrative. Beginning in the 1990s, scientists, peasants, and other agricultural personnel launched a series of agroecological experiments drawing on traditional practices and contemporary scientific research in agronomy and ecology. Over three years such projects demonstrated not only enhancements in soil quality and biodiversity but also increased yields, decreased energy inputs, and decreased labor hours (down to four to five hours per day). The new methodologies would eventually scale up to cover 70 percent of Cuban domestic food production. Crucially, this case helps dispel the myth that any deviation from the official path-of-progress will be met with a regress into pre-industrial drudgery (or a romanticization of an imaginary utopian past). In contrast, it underscores what I have called elsewhere the “temporal freedom” that contributes to a socioecologically necessary systemic slow down, provides a palpable, extraordinary emancipation possible within a sustainable, flourishing global human ecological niche. Labor journalist Sarah Jaffe recently summarized the many ecological and quasi-utopian social and economic advantages of “less work”. With capitalism increasingly experienced as inherently dysfunctional, the question about living on a warming planet is not how individuals or communities can become more “resilient” to climate change. Rather, the question is, how has this level of degradation become so acceptable? Profits may be at an all-time high, but capitalism as we know it—capitalism as the organizing principle of our ecological niche—is difficult to maintain. As the sociologist Oliver Nachtwey has recently noted, neither financialization by itself nor neoliberalism as a whole was able “to stop the wellsprings of growth from drying up.” Strangely, this turn of affairs is better acknowledged in global business discourse—as the “productivity crisis”—than it is in many common left theories, ecologically oriented or otherwise. Global North growth rates, as argued by both liberal economists like Robert Gordon and Larry Summers through the “secular stagnation” thesis, or more contemporary Marxian accounts like Aaron Benanav’s work on industrial overcapacity and the long economic downturn, will never return to the 5 percent or greater rates regularly experienced during the “Thirty Glorious Years.” It is far more likely that growth will hover at around 1 to 2 percent or otherwise enter a period of stasis, permanent recession, or some mix of the two. What is often lost in ecological debates is that growth itself, whether one wants it or not, appears to be largely at an end. While Global South states will continue to grow (even as rates in states like the PRC or India are in fact falling), this is highly unlikely to make up for the collapse in the Global North. In every sense except automatic collapse, capitalism as we know it lives on borrowed time. More centrally to the question of a politics of the Anthropocene is how much time and where it’s borrowed from. Measured by emissions and the toll of climate change, every ounce of anemic growth becomes catastrophically expensive. From a socioecological point-of-view, as I’ve argued elsewhere, “we” are investing ever more resources—ecological, social, individual, even political—for paltry returns, a grim present, and a darkening future for the majority of human beings. Transnational corporations—while having a longer history—only became globally dominant in the postwar era, with increased activity mostly coming after the 1960s. Correlation is of course not causation, but the correlation between climate change and the rise of these TNCs—first in industries like fossil fuels and resource extraction, later with the expansion of GVCs particularly in the late 1970s and onward—is staggering. “Acceleration” is aptly put; this is a system predicated not only on increasing material and economic rates as recorded in “Great Acceleration” graphs but quite literally in its speed: the exponential explosion of ecological and economic transformations, facilitated by financialization, fossil fuels, and every socioecological process described, and additionally the experiences, the feelings, of such velocity and violence. In this period, as macrofinancial economist Hyun Song Shin identifies (and economic historian Adam Tooze cites in analyzing the 2008 financial crisis) “island models” of national economies give way, in terms of both value chains and finance, to “an ‘interlocking matrix’ of corporate balance sheets,” in a truly suprasovereign system. There has never been a time when capital could move more rapidly or more freely—from firm to firm; from geography to geography. It could even, theoretically, move out of bounds entirely—capital could cash out (it could be worse as McKenzie Wark remarks). Today, some 80 percent of global trade happens through far-flung, high-speed GVCs. Of that, 60 percent is in intermediate goods and services. In other words, most trade is happening firm-to-firm or within a cross-border GVC. These emissions and this form of trade is inextricably linked to fossil fuels, “sacrifice zones,” and generalized exhaustion. Although capitalism, particularly in this form, promises a cheap, sleek, efficient path to plenty and prosperity, it delivers instead a costly, privatized system based on impossible inputs in a finite natural and social world—so unimaginably cumbersome and irrational that it requires constant, vigilant, crisis-level maintenance from the scale of the microbial to the human brain to states, geopolitics, and beyond. It delivers all-time high atmospheric carbon concentrations of 419 parts per million, the hottest year on record, a climate change induced pandemic which promises both continuation and future epidemiological crises, extreme weather events from wildfires burning Siberian permafrost to Indian flooding, Pacific Northwest extreme heat, and all those political economic, social, and personal structural adjustments that are the daily violence of the extractive circuit. This socioecological violence is a constant norm of this moment for the vast majority of people on earth, “an atmosphere of permanent insecurity” as Fanon called it. “There is, first of all, the fact that the colonized person, who in this respect is like the men in underdeveloped countries or in the disinherited in all parts of the world, perceives life not as a flowering or a development of essential productiveness but as a permanent struggle against omnipresent death.” While normative disaster management literatures preach absorption, quiescence, internalization, Fanon instead proposes externalization, which “implies restructuring the world.” What we are promised—through market-based delusions, through techno-mystical fantasies, and romantic reveries—is a return to normal that is hardly possible and not particularly desired or desirable. The extractive circuit describes the zero-sum game of a bifurcated world. Accounts can often make it seem as if capital hovers about the Earth in almost ethereal form. But the extractive circuit is not a metaphor. It works through real people, specific geographies, economically strategic areas organizing, linking, and connecting our global human ecological niche. The granular level I began with in my paradigmatic example is the very real, material workings of this system. Imperialism does not vanish in such a system, but it is now a layer beneath. Colonization is more generalized. States (in a wide variety of forms) still play a crucial if dramatically changed role even when considered over the course of the last fifty years. But whether one is committed to somehow keeping the system in motion in perpetuity or to hold on until a “cash-out,” the extractive circuit, and its maintenance, one piece of it or another, currently has your fealty. It is the exhausted world—the climate—capitalism built. November 2, 2021: This essay has been slightly updated since our October printing. [1] GDP is notoriously poor at capturing genuine social development and/or quality-of-life issues as perhaps most famously explored by the literatures on communist-led Kerala, which achieved human development levels on par with many wealthy countries with an incredibly low GDP. It is remarkable though, in discussions of climate and economics, massive redistribution from the top down globally is often painted as unpalatable in the North. But even with the extremely limited quantitative tools at hand it seems to escape scrutiny that such redistribution effectively aimed at eliminating the top 10 percent or even 20 percent of highest incomes to raise socioecological standards for the bottom 90 percent would clearly benefit majorities even in the United States. Median per capita wealth in the United States is $79,274 in 2021, far below the $100,000 that comprises the top wealth decile and even the $82,000 for the top 20 percent. This is not to disregard how US per capita GDP is rich by global standards but rather to show in even the most basic terms how much ground there is for converging interests in radical climate politics across seemingly unlikely global positions while at the same time underlining how income and wealth at US median levels does not translate to standard-of-living or quality-of-life conditions, a general problem with GDP as a concept and measure while reflected in critical development literatures. [2] The concept of “planetary boundaries” was proposed by the environmental scientist Johan Rockstrom et al in 2009 as a way to measure “a safe operating space for humanity with respect to the functioning of the Earth System.” They would answer the question prompted by the Anthropocene: “What are the non-negotiable planetary preconditions that humanity needs to respect in order to avoid the risk of deleterious or even catastrophic environmental change at continental to global scales?” As later clarified and expanded by chemist Will Steffen et al in 2015, the concept of planetary boundaries does not draw lines at thresholds or tipping points where “a biophysical threshold” is “likely to exist” but “rather upstream of it—i.e., well before reaching the threshold.” Planetary boundaries are not the only model of such a space but any real sustainable model requires this fundamental shift in conceptualizing and dealing with socioecological risk in ways entirely antithetical to the financialized, just-in-time, high-speed world of 21st century capitalism. [3] While some hallucinate a “good” Amazon or “socialist” Walmart as the backbone of a “Good Anthropocene”, a 2019 public letter signed by nearly nine thousand Amazon employees detail the ways in which the company is in no way currently compatible with even the simplest necessities of climate mitigation and adaptation. For all its stark and brave honesty, the letter actually underplays Amazon’s ecological unsustainability in terms of climate and society. Amazon is paradigmatic of the extractive circuit; not only in terms of the structure of the firm but also in the ways it has shaped many intrinsically socially and ecologically catastrophic technologies, and, as explored further here, what the speed of such firms facilitate.
Land of Thirst Jérôme Tubiana I first visited Sudan in 2004, when the war in Darfur was just over a year old. Flying to Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state, I began reporting on the mass atrocities committed by Omar al-Bashir’s pro-Arab junta against non-Arab communities accused of supporting a small rebellion. Yet if, as I had been told, the conflict was about “Arabs” killing “black Africans,” Nyala painted a more complex picture. It was a stunning melting pot of people, some considered “indigenous,” others who traced their ancestry back to centuries-old kingdoms, others still seen as newcomers, both Arab (some invisible, their skin as dark as anyone’s) and non-Arab. Perhaps no community had a more dramatic story than the Zaghawa, a non-Arab tribe, which at that time numbered no more than a few hundred thousand in a country of thirty million. Originally from Dar Zaghawa, in the far north of Darfur, they had gradually migrated south, fleeing drought. Dar Zaghawa was not always so dry. In the 1930s, its main landmark, Wadi Howar, an extinct river making the border with the Chadian Sahara, was still home to giraffes. Then an administrator in the colonial British government, Wilfred Thesiger boasted that he had killed thirty lions during his two-year tenure in northern Darfur. (It “was perhaps the most beneficial thing I did there, and certainly the most exciting,” he wrote in his memoirs.) As late as the 1960s, lions, which decimated the herds of pastoralists and sometimes killed people, were a grave danger. Firearms and demographic growth hastened the wildlife’s decline, but the primary factor was the lack of rain, which pushed those animals that survived south. People moved the same way. Beginning in the 1970s, thousands of Zaghawa shifted some six hundred miles south; Arab pastoralists also traveled along the same route. But while the migration of most Arab tribes was haphazard, the initial Zaghawa migration was a planned response to worsening droughts. In the late 1960s, two well-educated elites had the idea of relocating their community to more fertile land. Astonishingly, they turned this idea into reality, overseeing, with government support, a mass-migration of tens of thousands of people. For a while, these early “climate refugees” adapted well in the new environment. Zaghawa farmers obtained better harvests than in their homeland, and herders benefited from the absence of the tsetse fly that infected livestock. Over the next three decades, as more moved south, they established settlements across southern Darfur. However, in a bitter irony, they fled drought only to become trapped in ethnic conflict. When the war began in Darfur in 2003, Arab militias known as the janjaweed, or “evil horsemen,” drawn largely from migrant newcomers, attacked Fur as well as Zaghawa (and other non-Arab) communities, burning down entire villages. Death tolls between three or four hundred thousand have been repeated over the past eighteen years, but the continuous violence makes it likely that more were killed. About three million were forced to leave their land. The contrasting stories of Arab and Zaghawa resettlement offer a stark parable about climate migration. While one violently set upon locals in South Darfur, the other tried to coexist peacefully with them and to their mutual benefit. By recent World Bank estimates, at least 216 million people, including 86 million in sub-Saharan Africa, could have to leave their ancestral lands and migrate within state borders by 2050. As larger swathes of the earth grow uninhabitable, much depends on which of these two models communities will adopt. Opening the Land By the end of the nineteenth century, the British conquest of Sudan brought together different precolonial kingdoms, such as the Darfur and Funj sultanates, under the umbrella of a single colony. To this were added more remote interior lands, including those in modern-day South Sudan, which had been bled dry by decades of Muslim slave raiding in non-Muslim communities. In the early 1920s, Anglo-Egyptian administrators abolished slavery, and, according to the colonial historiography, set up a benign system known as the “native administration,” based on ancient chieftaincies. In fact, political power was gradually entrusted to a new elite recruited among Arabized communities from the northern Nile Valley, colonization’s gateway. Thus began their decades-old hegemony over central power in Khartoum. Around the same time, remote peripheries like Darfur fell under the “Closed District Ordinance,” which barred residents from leaving at the risk of imprisonment. Guy Moore, district commissioner of North Darfur, was nicknamed the “tyrant of Kutum” (after the oasis where he was based) for zealously enforcing the law; he saw the area under his jurisdiction to be a reserve of wild people and wildlife. (The fanatic hunter Thesiger was Moore’s deputy.) Insurgencies began in southern Sudan even before independence in 1956; they soon spread through large swathes of the east and the west of the country, which were historically neglected by the center. Civil war has been a constant, mainly in the south, interrupted now and then by unimplemented peace agreements, which mostly allow belligerents to prepare for the next round of fighting. The contradictions of Sudanese state-building can be glimpsed in the careers of General Abderrahim Mohammedu and Mahmoud Beshir Jamma, the Zaghawa elites who orchestrated their community’s great migration south. I met them in 2004: retired General Abderrahim in Nyala, in the house of his friend Magdum Ahmad Rijal, South Darfur’s most important chief, and former minister Mahmoud Beshir at his small house in the city of Khartoum Bahri. By then, both were old, disillusioned with the path the country had taken and worried about the war. Abderrahim was not afraid to openly criticize the regime, which surprised me, as I knew that the intelligence service was busy at work in Nyala. The day before, a Sudanese friend who had invited me for a coke had received a visit from the police. Abderrahim was born in 1937 in northern Darfur, into one of the greatest Zaghawa royal dynasties. In the 1960s, as the newly independent nation began luring students into the army, he became the first Zaghawa to enter military college, and then to be promoted to the rank of officer. It was in the army that he got his first taste of Sudan’s ethnic hierarchy. Most of his comrades, who were from northern Sudan, saw Darfurians as little better than savages. Abderrahim told me that the idea to move his community south had in fact come to him from an Arab, Ahmad el-Nil Defalla, then army commander of Darfur province. Defalla had blamed the poverty of the Zaghawa on their “laziness,” claiming they would have been unproductive even in oil-rich or fertile areas, like in southern Darfur. The remark stuck with Abderrahim, who then persuaded a more open-minded general to write letters to Zaghawa kings raising the idea of migration. But the royals categorically refused to abandon their ancestral land. In 1971, after a stint fighting the Anyanya rebels in southern Sudan during the so-called “First Civil War,” Abderrahim returned to Darfur as part of a state delegation looking into food security. The 1960s had been very dry. Seeing the parched land, the idea of moving people south returned to him. In El Fasher, once the Darfur sultanate’s capital, he met Mahmoud Beshir, five years his elder and one of the first Zaghawa to be educated, at a time when Darfur only had a handful of elementary schools. Dreaming of bringing water to his dry homeland, Mahmoud graduated as a water engineer just after independence and began assisting with the construction of dams. His efforts made water available at the edge of the desert, allowing herders from different tribes to settle there. The Beni Hussein, an Arab pastoralist community, had long lived nomadically—and come into conflict with the Fur—until the British carved an area for them, one that used to be called Dar Otash, the “land of thirst.” In that area, Mahmoud worked on the Abu Jidad dam, which helped bring the skirmishes to an end. “If we had resolved the water problem everywhere then perhaps there would be no war in Darfur today,” Mahmoud told me when I met him in Khartoum. As a child, Mahmoud had to fetch water from remote wells before beginning his school day. He grew up among elders who had survived famines, in areas where cattle were gradually replaced by camels and millet farming increasingly failed. By the time he came to study engineering, he knew that new droughts were in the offing in Dar Zaghawa. He, too, had the idea of moving the community south; importantly, he also had the ear of then-president Jaafar Nimeiri. In 1971, Mahmoud and Abderrahim wrote a letter to Nimeiri outlining their project of moving the Zaghawa south, noting that “people are going to die from starvation if they don’t move.” Nimeiri gave them his support. Of course, Abderrahim knew it was not only about saving lives. The regime’s idea was to use the Zaghawa as a human buffer against the southern Sudanese rebels, who remained seen as a threat, even as peace talks were ongoing. But traditional chiefs kept refusing the ideas of these educated youngsters; they had not been sent to school to challenge the old order. So Abderrahim bypassed the elders. Every afternoon for three weeks, he went to El Fasher market—where the humblest onion sellers have stalls beside the wealthiest camel merchants —and talked directly to his kinsmen. In this way, he obtained the consent of three hundred families. He also spoke to the pupils of the town’s secondary school. “He was well received,” Omer Manis, a student at the time, and now Sudan’s ambassador to France, told me in September 2021. “A respected military officer, telling us of the need to find solutions to allow people to live in dignity. It was our cup of tea.” Abderrahim also wrote letters asking other tribes affected by the drought to join, including the Meidob, Tama, Gimir, Misseriya Jebel, Erenga, and Masalit. “Move with us to the South!” In 1972, Abderrahim, then a major, was asked by Nimeiri to find an area to resettle. He knew where to go. While fighting in southern Sudan, he had heard of Kafia Kingi, a lush and scarcely populated land at the very south of Darfur. It had been the Sultanate’s southern frontier and a post for the slave trade. From Hofrat al-Nahas, a nearby mine, copper was extracted to make nahas, huge drums symbolizing the sovereign’s power. “We patrolled the area for ten days, studied the weather and the land,” Abderrahim remembered. “There were no routes, the trees had grown on the road the British had made in the 1940s. We followed big tracks left by elephants. We couldn’t drive more than twelve miles in nine hours. To eat, we shot game.” The next year, Abderrahim gathered a committee of seventy-five representatives from every main Zaghawa village and took them to Kafia Kingi. Then they called for their kin to join them, and the migration began. Some pioneers came on army or merchant’s trucks. But most traveled on the backs of camels, horses, or donkeys, or on foot with their livestock, bringing all they could carry on the months-long journey. Soon after they arrived, rains brought insects and snakes that desert dwellers did not recognize. The pioneers thought the local people, from tribes they had never heard of, had sent these creatures to scare them away. Many moved back north, but only about sixty miles, to the slightly dryer but still green area of Legediba, where it rained about thirty inches a year, as compared to less than eight inches in Dar Zaghawa. In Legediba and elsewhere, the Zaghawa asked for and were given land by the local Fur chiefs. So, too, were Arab nomads arriving from the north. “Everyone could have land,” Hassan Saleh, a Zaghawa chief, recalled when I met him in 2008 in Dugo, a village founded on the green foothills of the Jebel Marra mountains. “The Fur chief would show you an empty place, then you’d take your axe. When we came here, there were forest and wild animals, elephants, lions, monkeys, ostriches. We cut the trees and farmed, bred cattle and sheep.” They “opened the land,” as goes the Darfurian expression. At first, it seemed all was going well. In 1973, Darfur, like most of the Sahel, experienced its lowest rainfall on record. But Legediba was spared, and the harvest was bountiful; the Zaghawa brought Abderrahim and Mahmoud millet to thank them. Even conservative chiefs, who had remained behind, changed their mind. “I brought my cousin king Ali Mohammedein, who stayed for some time, farming and resolving local conflicts,” he told me. In 1983, as an even greater famine began, nearly two hundred thousand Zaghawa migrated south from North Darfur, together with members of other Arab and non-Arab communities. “The Zaghawa migrants mixed with other tribes and married their daughters,” Abderrahim remembered. “We traded, farmed, bred livestock, went for work to Libya, came back with money, and taught local communities the livestock trade, which they didn’t know.” The Zaghawa also taught Arab herders to farm. The Zaghawa’s migration could have offered a model for other communities in Sudan whose livelihoods were similarly imperiled by climate change. But by the 1980s, the central government had grown unhappy with them coexisting with the Fur, Arabs, and other neighboring tribes. Until then, the traders in Darfur as in South Sudan were all from the Nile Valley north of Khartoum, as were the administrators. Indeed, the very word for trader, jellaba, had become shorthand for anyone belonging to the Arabized tribes in northern Sudan. Abderrahim remembers a jellaba’s threat: “Those people were blind and deaf, but you came and taught them things. You’ll have to pay for that.” Jellaba politicians and businessmen began to paint the Zaghawa as overambitious invaders, turning local non-Arabs against them. “We, Zaghawa, are not wished for because we want to be equal to the jellaba,” Abderrahim told me. Look For a New Planet Meanwhile, discontent was brewing in other parts of the country. In 1983, the Sudan’s People Liberation Army (SPLA), a guerrilla movement founded by the mutinous army colonel Dr. John Garang, embarked on its war for independence from the government in Khartoum. In response, successive governments recruited militias among Darfur’s Arabs, who were seen as natural allies against the non-Arab rebels. The use of proxy forces is an old Sudanese tradition, dating back to precolonial slave armies. As militias fund and feed themselves through pillage, they are less costly than regular forces—a strategy Alex de Waal has labeled “counterinsurgency on the cheap.” As militias proliferated, tensions grew in Darfur between Arabs and non-Arabs. In 1985, Abderrahim left the army and settled in Nyala, where he formed and chaired a committee for peaceful coexistence of South Darfur tribes with his friend the magdum and an Arab notable as deputies. The multi-tribal group tried to reconcile communities in conflict, but their success was limited. Four years later, as a military-Islamist coup brought Omar al-Bashir to power, the first major conflict pitted all the main nomadic Arab tribes of Darfur against Fur farmers. It was spurred by increasing scarcity of resources, which had been exacerbated by the “Reagan famine”—so remembered after the food aid the U.S. president had belatedly sent across. But what made the violence unprecedented was the central government’s intervention in favor of the Arabs. Sharif Harir, a prominent Zaghawa anthropologist studying tensions at close quarters, rightly predicted Darfur would become the next South Sudan. After 1989, as the army grew tired with the war in the South, the Islamist junta stepped up the mobilization of militias, in particular among Darfur’s Arabs. The so-called Popular Defense Forces (estimated to number up to one hundred thousand all over Sudan in the 2000s), a paramilitary group formed that year, was likewise set up to protect the Islamist regime from a military coup. In Darfur, Abderrahim discovered the government was mostly arming Arab tribes, exploiting the hunger for land among these drought-impoverished newcomers. “I knew that soon everyone would fight against everyone,” he said. Now it was the turn of non-Arabs in Darfur to rebel. Beginning in June 2002 and March 2003, respectively, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) launched their first attacks on government targets. Abderrahim’s peace committee made contact with the insurgents in a desperate attempt to contain the conflict. They also wrote Bashir a letter warning of a group of hardliners called the “Arab Gathering,” who were calling for Arab supremacy in Darfur. But the president turned a deaf ear to them. In April 2003, the JEM rebels successfully attacked El Fasher airport, destroying government planes and humiliating the army. In response, Khartoum gave the Arab hawks—traditional leaders and a handful of government officials and army officers—carte blanche for arming the janjaweed. They enlisted landless Arabs, promising them the land of non-Arabs tribes. Early the following year, Abderrahim’s home village of Am Boru was burnt to the ground. Zaghawa settlements in South Darfur were attacked too. Water pumps were systematically destroyed, and those who were not killed were displaced to camps. Atta el-Manan, the governor of South Darfur, was said to be present when government forces pillaged the Zaghawa part of the town of She’eria. “They should look for a new planet,” he was quoted as saying. Abderrahim felt that Khartoum’s aim was nothing less than “the destruction of our history and future.” Shortly before I first met him the next year, Abderrahim had managed to split away four members of a delegation of U.S. congressmen visiting Khartoum. Shepherded around by the government, they were being sold a sanitized version of the conflict, and he wanted to tell them what was really happening. But the authorities noticed when they went missing; they didn’t like that Abderrahim was advocating for peace, including at the mosque after prayer. Their preference was a military solution: annihilating the rebels and their alleged civilian supporters. The retired general didn’t pay much attention, but his daughter Ibtihal
