Recently, a friend mentioned that she believed “natural philosophies” would become more popular in this decade. I responded by pointing out that AUDC’s Blue Monday is subtitled Stories of Absurd Realties and Natural Philosophies. Here is an excerpt from the introduction that gets to the point of what a natural philosophy is and why we employed it.

We are certainly attracted by Deleuze and Guattari’s organizational logics and Hardt and Negri’s tales of Empire as well as Baudrillard’s theories of totalized consumption of the sign and the system of objects, Žižek’s fictionalization of the real, and Jameson’s dissection of late capitalism. These are fascinating explanatory frameworks, but, scandalously, they don’t add up. To weave a coherent whole out of them would be sheer madness. So how to proceed?

During our research into the evolution of art, science, and philosophy we found that these fields were once much more intimately related than they had been in the last century. Prior to the Enlightenment and the development of the scientific method, science was dominated by natural philosophy, a method of studying nature and the physical universe through observation rather than through experimentation. Virtually all contemporary forms of science developed out of natural philosophy, but unlike more modern scientists, natural philosophers like Galileo felt no need to test their ideas in a practical way. On the contrary, they observed the world to derive philosophical conclusions. Taken together, these didn’t necessarily add up. But the lack of metanarrative for natural philosophy is not an obstacle for us, instead it is a strength.

Natural philosophy flourished from the 12th century to the 17th and with it did cabinets of curiosities, sometimes entire rooms, sometimes quite literally elaborate cabinets, filled with strange and wondrous things. These first museums collected seemingly disparate objects of fascination in a specific architectural setting, assigning to each item a place in a larger network of meaning created by the room as a whole. In the cabinet each object would be a macrocosm of the larger world, illustrating the wonder of its divine artifice. Together however, their affinities would become apparent and a syncretic vision of the unity of all things would emerge, as the words Athanasius Kircher inscribed on the ceiling of his museum suggested: “Whosoever perceives the chain that binds the world below to the world above will know the mysteries of nature and achieve miracles.” For the natural philosopher, the cabinet of curiosities possessed a reflexive quality: it was both an exhibition and a source of wonder, a system the natural philosopher built to instruct others but also to coax himself into further thought.[i]

This book, like our web site or an AUDC installation, is a cabinet of curiosities, consisting of a series of conditions that AUDC observes in order to speculate on them in the manner of natural philosophy, extrapolating not theories that could then be applied to architecture but rather philosophies to explain the world. The result is neither the relativist pluralism nor a single monist philosophy, but rather a set of multiple philosophies that almost add up, but being situationally derived, don’t quite.

[i] Patrick Mauries, Cabinets of Curiosities (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 25-26. Some further sources on cabinets of curiosities are Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998) and Giorgio Agamben, “The Cabinet of Wonder” in The Man Without Content (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 28-39.

What of art in this plague year? With our isolation compounded by unprecedented political polarization, is there any hope of exploring the commonality of shared experience through art? As many of us head into our lockdown again, we are all too aware that the implementation of “social distancing” has produced a transformation in our society, unprecedented within our lifetimes; how might art reflect on such processes?

Consider the term “social distancing.” This peculiar phrase is currently being used to refer to physical separation between individuals in order to reduce exposure to viruses, but prior to this year it had a long history in sociology, referring to social separation among individuals and groups. Like many sociological concepts, social distancing originates with the foundational writings of sociologist Georg Simmel. In his 1903 “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Simmel describes the growing distance between individuals as a consequence of modernization and the spatial condition of the city:

This mental attitude of metropolitans toward one another we may designate, from a formal point of view, as reserve. If so many inner reactions were responses to the continuous external contacts with innumerable people as are those in the small town, where one knows almost everybody one meets and where one has a positive relation to almost everyone, one would be completely atomized internally and come to an unimaginable psychic state.

Social distance, then, develops when physical distance is not possible and serves as a means of protecting the psyche. Nor is it done alone. On the contrary, social distance is frequently experienced communally: modern individuals flock with others of their kind and, in doing so, experience distance from those outside the group, those that they perceive as unlike themselves. For Simmel, the stranger is both near and far from us: close enough to provoke anxiety yet isolated and therefore unknown. Hence, this sociological explanation would lead us to understand racism as a product of social distance. Racism, it follows, is not so much a prejudiced encounter with individuals at distant remove, but rather a violent misperception of individuals in close proximity. The increasing polarization of American politics between the “woke folx” and the “deplorables” is further evidence of this, with both groups existing as a defense against a dangerous Other while providing a mechanism for reinforcing their member’s shattered identities. With the dominance of contemporary life by social media, the wounded self becomes a reposting machine for social media outrages as a means for the self to affirming its identity and existence through repetition, much as in a liturgical response. But being based entirely on the external threat of an Othered group, the result is a malfunction of social distance as psychic defense. Not only does political discourse grind to a halt, the self fails to develop as an individual. Facing increasing reliance on social media for human connection leads us toward a feedback loop of dopaminergic rewards for positive social stimuli and, like a chimpanzee in a lab cage punching buttons for cocaine-laced biscuits, we are led closer toward the “unimaginable psychic state” of the completely atomized dividual.      

This sociological concept of social distance initially appears quite different from pandemic quarantine. And yet, it’s no coincidence that political and racial tensions have risen to a fifty-year high in the United States: the social distancing of quarantine and the social distancing of the modern city share similarities. The chance encounters of the street, the park, and the pub have largely ended. Endless Zoom meetings with one’s co-workers or classmates reinforces positions in class structures. Reading the news about groups that egregiously flaunt restrictions angers us and sets us against them. Our isolation leads us to become more addicted to social media and as social media algorithms highlight our posts to those people who “liked” our previous posts, we condition ourselves to the rush of “likes,” of feedback from those people who already give us feedback——creating a false sense of belonging and an experience of growing distance from those unlike ourselves. So, then, back to the original question I posed: is there any hope of exploring the commonality of shared experience through art?        

Early telematic art offers a direction for us. Forty years ago Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, working as the Mobile Image group, created a series of projects entitled “Aesthetic Research in Telecommunications,” both anticipating and surpassing the videoconferencing that has come to be identified with life under quarantine. In Satellite Arts: A Space With No Boundaries (1977), they connected dancers located three thousand miles apart via low-latency satellite links. Although at times the dancers interacted on split screens, as we might see friends interacting on Zoom or Facetime, Galloway and Rabinowitz also composited them together on the screen visible to the audience, thereby creating a third, virtual space. In Hole in Space (1980), they created wormholes to bring together people from opposite coasts. Unlike our screen-based videoconferencing, Hole in Space employed life-size screens displayed in public spaces (Los Angeles’s Century City Shopping Center and New York’s Lincoln Center respectively). Deliberately unadvertised, Hole in Space was as they put it, “a social situation with no rules,” a new condition that, as a documentary of the work shows, was profoundly moving to the people who participated. In a third project, the Electronic Cafe of 1984, they connected five restaurants—in Korean, Hispanic, African-American, and beach communities—with video equipment and drawing tablets so that individuals in one venue (including artists-in-residence) could exchange ideas and images with unknown individuals in another. Throughout, Galloway and Rabinowitz approached electronic technology as a means of overcoming both physical distance and the social distance between individuals. 

It’s possible to imagine what a new telematic art might look like today, outside of the confines of conventional videoconferencing. For example, already yin 2004, AUDC (myself and Robert Sumrell) proposed creating guerrilla versions of the Hole in Space cartable in a backpack that could be deployed at random throughout a network of cities.  

At the time we wrote: 

 

Windows on the World is a formulary for a new urbanism that alleviates boredom with the city and encourages communication in public, rather than private settings. It facilitates open, spontaneous, and democratic exchanges between groups while requiring no special skills to operate. Participants share both their differences and similarities through direct interaction, replacing the myth of global hegemony and projected stereotypes with personal experience.

Windows on the World remaps our cities to create a telematic dérive. Guy Debord’s map “the Naked City” is now a map of the world. Each portal becomes what the Situationists called a plaque tournante, a center, a place of exchange, a site where ambiance dominates and planners’ power to control our lives is disrupted. People can wander from portal to portal within their city, experiencing and constructing different situations. Windows on the World changes the experience people have not only of the world, but of their city.

Like the Situationist dérive, Windows on the World operates outside of commerce and planning. There is no advertisement. The project is at its strongest when it is by chance. Some portals are temporary, even hidden. Others are improbable, or not easy to access. In a back alley in Prague, shaded by a Northern exposure, is a portal to a zoo in Sao Paolo. From a dangerous street in the Bronx, a door opens onto the Champs-Elysees. Another portal, in Zurich, looks out onto a busy railroad yard in Rotterdam.

Sixteen years have passed and the widespread adoption of social media during that time has led us to confuse the public and the private. We invite our friends and even strangers into our living rooms and our bedrooms. Formality has fallen away as suit and dress have given way to sweatpants and leggings. But there is no comfort to these forms of sociality or dress. Instead, we understand ourselves to always be on display, to have to perform at all times to receive our dopamine rush both for social interaction and for work, which is ever more subject to bureaucratic projects like “agile frameworks” and “total quality management” offering micro-rewards and micro-punishments for meaningless tasks completed. With this new search for (over) stimulus, there is every chance that a project like Windows on the World will fail as individuals provoke each other like chimps in separate cages at a zoo (or as humans do on Chatroulette).  But thinking through how social connections and an appeal to a universal human connection might be made today—however obliquely—is an imperative task for art and technology.

Work in this vein certainly does not always need to provide an affirmative alternative space. Returning to my own work at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2016, the Perkūnas project aims to make us sonically aware of the social distancing produced by network culture. Visually, this structure is both abstract—a simple architectural form—and a harbinger from another world, hence the name Perkūnas [the Lithuanian name for (the God of) Thunder]. Built of large ventilation ducting commonly found (and heard) in art museums and other large public structures, Perkūnas’s role isn’t to condition the air in the environment, rather it is to produce sound in accordance with the number of Wi-Fi enabled devices in the room.       

A microprocessor monitors the space for active Wi-Fi-enabled electronic gadgets, increasing or decreasing the amount of air flowing through the duct and hence, the amount of noise in the room based on the number of gadgets. If there are no gadgets present or if everyone’s Wi-Fi is disabled, the duct makes little or no sound. With a couple of gadgets, it make a louder sound. The more gadgets, the more sound. Our ability to communicate verbally is directly affected by the amount of gadgets. If we leave our gadgets behind or turn them off, Perkūnas stays quiet. But people don’t read wall text, they look at their phones, distracted by whatever algorithm is guiding them along their day and Perkūnas howls at them, their distraction drowning out their ability to communicate verbally.

Perkūnas doesn’t bring people together, but it suggests one direction for an art that can speak frankly to us about our social media-obsessed world without resorting to parody or false political promises about participation. Finding new ways for art to negotiate the space between social media and social distancing is a task at hand.

After the election of the Tyrant, a strange thing happened to me. I found my drive to make art and to write about  culture evaporate. This didn’t happened all at once and, for a time, I kept up a certain level of production, but I noticed my disdain for these activities rising. Somehow, producing for a failed culture seemed wrong. Instead, as I’ve chronicled here, I turned inward, taking on a variety of projects at our house, but also turning to radical gardening with native plants as a process of healing a small piece of land much damaged by human disturbance (notably construction of this property forty years ago) together with the violence of contemporary landscaping. It’s been incredibly valuable to practice radical gardening but it’s also a matter of temporal displacement: the work I have done won’t be visible for years to come: it’s an investment in a better future, optimism that this nightmare would end.

As for art, I continued research as a kind of secret activity, but I’ve definitely felt the need to retreat. At some point, I decided that I’d consciously go on an unannounced art strike while the Tyrant was in office. I couldn’t find a way to return to work that has been, at its basis, a sustained inquiry into how we behave to each other in the public realm.  I’ve talked to a few friends about this and apparently this isn’t uncommon at all.

Even if I don’t expect the political polarization crippling the US and the world to stop, with the Tyrant in his twilight, playing golf as performance art and flailing aimlessly about, there’s no question that a certain weight is gone. The world is still damaged, but it’s easier to sleep at night again, there’s room again to breath. If there’s another lockdown—and there should be—I’ll be here, taking notes and experimenting.

Writing and research are both in the works and you’ll be seeing evidence soon.

This month of rage has been building for a while: the last few weeks, the last three years, are nothing new, neither for the country nor for myself. A tyrant sits on his throne, spreading his bigotry and inciting hatred. Black men and women are dying in the streets, killed by not so much by individual crooked cops as by a malignant system central to the disciplinary society that underlies our government.

Nothing new here. That’s not a way of ducking the issue, that is the issue. What follows is a highly personal account that I am set out to write to underscore just how deeply fucked up the discipline of architecture is.

Over thirty years ago, on August 6, 1988 I witnessed the peaceful Tompkins Square Protest against neighborhood gentrification turn into a police riot after cops charged the crowd wielding batons. Police claimed that bricks and bottles were thrown, but I was there, they lied. Cops lie, it’s a fact that my father—a conservative and fan of Ronald Reagan—taught me years before that. The cops charged us. We ran. As we inched our way back to the scene, I watched a young black man in dreadlocks being held by two cops on horses as they hit him over and over with their batons. I was fairly far away and I gauged the scene. I yelled at them and gestured obscenely, hoping they would chase me, giving the man some relief. I figured I’d duck into a storefront. Had they come after me, I am sure it would have been bloody, but they didn’t. They continued beating him. Later, the police would be charged with over a hundred counts of police brutality. Only two officers were actually found guilty of any wrongdoing and only one—conveniently for the NYPD, a woman—was dismissed.

I turned 21 that year and I was in New York because I was supposed to go to Columbia for graduate school in architecture, but after three days I’d had enough and I quit, going back to Cornell to do a doctorate in the history of architecture. But these two moments aren’t random bits of biography, the first led to the second. I’d majored in history of architecture for two years at Cornell and as part of that, I took design studio as well. As was the goal of that curriculum, design studio taught me more than anything else during those two years. It seemed to me that there was something fundamentally wrong with the formalist system of education as it was taught at Cornell, where I studied, as well as at so many others schools, including Columbia.

I tried to find out what was behind this system and, since the first project we worked on was the Nine Square Grid, I eventually traced it to a book that was curiously missing from Cornell’s Fine Arts Library and could only be found via interlibrary loan, the 1971 MoMA catalog, The Education of an Architect: a Point of View, which chronicled the teaching of John Hejduk at Cooper Union as well as the book that every student seemed to hide in their desks like a pornographic magazine, the 1975 Five Architects, which presented the work of Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier. These books were to be read furtively since they suggested that reading, not learning through drawing, might be possible and that the system of education then being employed, which presented itself as timeless, might itself have a history.

I found it difficult, almost impossible, to square these books—filled with formal games and an architecture that defied materiality—with the real political revolution of the 1960s. How could they co-exist in the same milieu? But clearly, it was there, in his preface to Five Architects, Arthur Drexler, Director of Architecture and Design at MoMA, stated “An alternative to political romance is to be an architect, for those who actually have the necessary talent for architecture.”

In 1988, bound for architecture school, I witnessed the violence in the streets and a month later, decided that it was not the time for me to go to architecture school. I wasn’t just interested in understanding the way architecture repressed politics, I needed to understand it. Against all advice, I chose to try to understand the very educational system that I detested.

As I did so, I ran across two curious articles in, of all places, Spy Magazine. Spy, edited by Kurt Andersen, was this wild, satirical magazine that mercilessly targeted the celebrity class, most notably the “short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump,” who remembered that slight well enough that he tweeted about it in 2015 when Charlie Hebdo‘s offices were attacked. The first was a 1991 article by John Brodie, “Master Philip and the Boys.” Brodie examined how Philip Johnson wielded power and influence in architecture and how he gathered “the Kids,” a boys’ club of formalist architects around himself (curiously enough, this included three of the five members of the New York Five plus Robert Stern and Frank Gehry). The second was the late Michael Sorkin’s 1988 article, “Where was Philip?” (thanks, Trump, you fucking fuck, for dragging your feet on effective measures against the COVID-19 virus and thereby killing Michael Sorkin, much better a man than you or your awful children will ever be). Using primary sources, Sorkin uncovered how the very same Philip Johnson tried to create a fascist party in the United States, going so far as to accompany the Nazis on the blitzkreig into Poland, singing the invading army’s praises in (what we now call fake) news articles for extreme Right-wing publications. This led to that again: I realized these three phenomena—a formalist architectural education, an aged architect who gathered power around himself, and the largely-supressed Nazi past of that architect—were not distinct, but were all aspects of the same system.

I spent three years writing a dissertation exploring how contemporary architecture was fundamentally based on a process of spectactularization—of stripping politics from history for the purposes of an illiberal politics of form. I was writing in the aftermath of the scandals about Paul de Man’s collaborationist writing and I was naïve enough to believe that the academy would take my work to heart and examine itself. Matters had already changed by the time I filed my dissertation when Franz Schulze’s published his biography of Johnson. I hadn’t known Schulze was writing the biography, or even doing research into Johnson’s fascist period until right before publication, so his work hardly impacted mine, apart from some last minute revisions. Schulze’s book was a bizarre and offensive combination of pinkwashing—Johnson loved the boys in their black boots and hot uniforms so it was all ok—and old school outing (Johnson was gay! he was gay, imagine the scandal!). Schulze, who demonstrated no interest in critical thought, either didn’t have the capacity to make the connection between the postwar whitewashing of Johnson’s Nazi past and the concomitant removal of both Left and Right politics from modern architecture or more likely, chose to ignore it. These were the same things: they both served power, privilege, and a Nietzschean drive to form at all costs. If Schulze didn’t draw this connection, I would soon find out that the academy didn’t want to hear it.

I published two articles from my dissertation in the Journal of Architectural Education. Editor Diane Ghirardo greatly supported this work, as did the peer reviews I received. The first article was “We Cannot Not Know History,” in which I examined on Johnson’s Nazi past and the attempts to repress it. This immediately got me in hot water with the JAE’s parent organization, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. Whether the directorate was interested in killing the article because—as they claimed—it opened the organization to libel lawsuits or whether they hoped to kill it because the article hit too close to home is up to you to decide. The second article was “The Education of the Innocent Eye.” My exploration of the formalist system of architectural education was damning as well—after all, I concluded, “An initial exposure to architecture through the absolute system of the visual language of architecture clearly puts materialist questions second. Beam, column, wall, compression, shear, and rotation take precedence, and history, theory, gender, race, and class take a backseat.” This time, quashing the article wasn’t in the cards and I won Best Article of the Year from the JAE.

But I’d already found that not only was architecture not willing to tackle the questions I’d raised, my dissertation topic was, on the contrary, an impediment to a career in the academy. Granted, it was the recession, but I spent two years unable to find employment until Margaret Crawford gave me a chance to teach history and theory of architecture at SCI_Arc. Even then, my work was received with suspicion by virtually all of the design faculty there and many of would have gladly curried favor with Johnson if given the opportunity. In the end, upon becoming Director, Eric Moss asked me in an accusatory tone what I was hoping to gain from writing this sort of thing. No great surprise, it was well known that he was a wannabe Kid. He made it clear I was unwelcome in his regime and his leadership style (so clearly prefiguring Trump’s presidency in its vulgarity and absolutism) were such that I didn’t want to work for him in any event.

In the meantime, I’d hoped to publish my dissertation in book form. Theory was rapidly falling out of fashion and there weren’t many takers for my work on architecture education. What still shocked me was how reluctant publishers were to publish my material on Johnson. Encouraged by some colleagues (notably Mike Davis), I put together a proposal to publish my work on Johnson together with the texts he wrote back in the 1930s. Unfortunately, these publishers had no interest in helping architecture confront itself. One asked, like Moss, “what I hoped to gain from all this.” (I started posting these articles in 2017 but the silence sapped my spirit…I’ll try again another day and see if there is any greater interest this time).

I taught as a visiting faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania for a term under the late, brilliant and gentle Detlef Mertins, but work there was only temporary. Clearly it wouldn’t have been possible for me to stay in the history of architecture—my work was too dangerous for a powerful figure in that program, friends confided in me (I suspected having a non-anglo-saxon name was also a problem for this fellow… as it has been in so many places throughout my life)—and that was the last time I was a full-time member of a history of architecture faculty in the US. I reinvented myself: if my dissertation had been around social networks, I now looked to theorize the impact of digital networks on cities and forged a career in that field. I managed to land a position in the laboratory research wing of the architecture school at Columbia that lasted well over a decade until it was eliminated by a new Dean seeking to cut costs. Even so, it was clear at Columbia that my presence as a historian was deeply questionable, not to be publicly acknowledged and I was never asked to be part of that faculty. Architecture still can’t stomach critique, this is clear to me.

I’m out of teaching, likely for good. I knew that this work was too dangerous for architecture and I had a backup plan for funding that paid off at just about the same time that the labs were shut down at Columbia so now I can work on other projects that interest me more. I’m much happier without the phony leftism of the university, of faculty who pretend to be Marxists, but whose real goal is defending their own turf and the system.

I have a lot of (political) gardening to do, I need to make some art, and look over a translation of one of my texts, but along the way, I intend to go back to some of these projects and post material from them on this site. Let’s see if there’s any interest this time. I’m not confident about it.

I am taking a break from email and social media for a few days but more likely for a week. With all of the death around us and the moron in the White House, it’s just too much. If I owe you anything, sorry, I need to protect my mental health more.

So this post is late, what do you expect from the 2010s? Ten years ago Time Magazine dubbed the 2000s the “worst decade ever,” but in retrospect that was such a carefree time, wasn’t it? Even the end-of-the-decade collapse seemed full of possibility, promising a truly cataclysmic civilizational implosion if nothing else.

In contrast, the 2010s weren’t just another failed decade, they were the decade of shit. All the hype and excitement led us to a universal dissatisfaction. Left, Right, and Center, we’re all pissed off about where we are and not enthusiastic at all about where we’re going. Even the proponents of doom are disappointed. The whole ZeroHedge crowd has been left trying to cover their short positions as the economy lurches onward and the doomers are facing expiration deadlines on their MREs as they wait for TEOFTWAWKI. Now sure, this year we’ve already had firestorms the size of Austria ravaging Australia, a rain of rockets in Baghdad, Ukrainian jetliners getting shot out of the sky, a deadly pandemic in China caused by people eating creatures that they really shouldn’t, and the failure of the Senate to uphold the rule of law, but the banality of it all is crushing. While the Dark Mountain set drinks wine around a campfire, gets henna tattoos, and sings along to songs about the end of nature, for the rest of us, it’s just an exhausting, daily slog through the unrelentingly alarming headlines.

We finish the decade with network culture in its last days. Back in 2010, when I was working in earnest on a book on network culture,* I made the following prediction:

“Toward the end of the decade, there will be signs of the end of network culture. It’ll have had a good run of 30 years: the length of one generation. It’s at that stage that everything solid will melt into air again, but just how, I have no idea.”

Well now we know how. All the giddy delirium about the network and globalization is gone. We’ve got our always-on links to the net in our hands all the time, we’ve got our digital economy, and with it all we’ve have entered a period of stark cultural decline. It’s an empty time, devoid of cultural monuments. Name one consequential building of this past decade, one!

Well, there is this great project by architect Valdas Ozarinskas (who didn’t make it through the decade), a massive dark summation of our failures. But culture’s not doing well. The easy appeal to dopamine receptors provided by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, and YouTube has undone our ability to focus. This is the golden age of cat videos, nothing more. Any sustained thought is gone and bottom up efforts have dissipated.

A decade ago, my blogging comrades and I were plotting how to take over architectural discourse. But this amounted to nothing. Those blogs, and many others, have been silenced, absorbed into garbage sites like Medium, Facebook, Forbes, and BusinessInsider or just left in whatever state they were in, circa 2014, as their creators went on to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or just premature (or belated?) fin-de-siècle ennui. Podcasts are the one flourishing outpost of real DIY content on the Internet, perhaps because they distract from the world around us, but in all other respects the DIY ethic is on the wane. The most interesting publication of the 2000s, Make Magazine, went under in 2019, at least temporarily. Kickstarter is the metaphor for the decade: a lot of promises, a lot of crap that we’ve thrown away, a lot of outright lies, and a feeling of dread that somehow we’ll be sucked into its maw and participate again.

But its not just banality, as Bruce Sterling points out at his State of the World 2020 at the Well, we were always too optimistic about what bottom-up efforts could do. Network culture gave birth to the vilest of viral propaganda, some of it from state actors, some of it genuinely home grown. In Bruce’s words, “Our efforts had evolved an ecosystem for distribution of weaponized memes.”

Network culture didn’t usher in a new world of Free! Open Access! Networked Culture!, rather it ushered in the first phase of the Jackpot. That’s a phrase I used often these days, lifted from William Gibson’s 2014 The Peripheral, one of a handful of genuinely insightful cultural artifacts from the last decade (note that William Gibson’s Twitter name is @GreatDismal). The Jackpot refers—not so cheerily—to the end for some 80% of the world’s population, rich and poor, developed and undeveloped (largely the former in each pair).

Time for a lengthy quote from Gibson:

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there. …

But science … had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable. …

None of that … had necessarily been as bad for very rich people. The richest had gotten richer, there being fewer to own whatever there was. Constant crisis bad provided constant opportunity. … At the deepest point of everything going to shit, population radically reduced, the survivors saw less carbon being dumped into the system, with what was still being produced being eaten by those towers they’d built… And seeing that, for them, the survivors, was like seeing the bullet dodged..

Now amidst modernization, two World Wars, massive pollution, and unprecedented environmental cataclysms such as Minamata bay, Chernobyl, or Bhopal, the twentieth century was hardly a cakewalk and when it comes down to it the salinization of the Fertile Crescent is likely our real original sin (won’t someone start a green Church around this as the fall from grace?). But the Jackpot officially began on 9 November 2016, a day that reminded many of us of the outrage followed by the blank numbness that we experienced on 9/11. A new emergency was declared by never-Trump neoliberals, anti-Trump leftists, and, outraged by all the outrage, the pro-Trump neoreactionaries and neo-Nazis who had stocked up on guns in case HRC was elected and then had nothing to do. There would be no turning back now.

The horrifying truth underlying the Jackpot is that it isn’t just an accident. We used to think that global inequality was based on structural poverty, but now it’s becoming clear that automation will ensure that vast numbers of people are no longer needed. Couple that with climate change and you have the Jackpot. Entire swathes of the world—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, South Sudan, and Yemen—have already been rendered nearly uninhabitable by drought and continual war waged by the United States, Iran, Russia, and their proxies for strategic purposes. Trump’s America is full of individuals who have no future whatsoever and, with self-driving vehicles on the way, millions of truck and taxi drivers are about to find themselves as in demand as coal miners in West Virginia. Moreover, even as we continue to belch out carbon at an unprecedented rate, it’s only a matter of time before jobs in the fossil fuel and traditional automotive industries disappear as well. New jobs will appear, of course, but there will be far fewer of those and the idea of teaching coding to coalminers proved not to be that sound.

The newly disenfranchised have little to lose: the cracks are showing. It’s not that the containment can only last so long, it’s already breaking everywhere. We can see the collapse of the Paris Accords not just as a deliberate step further into dark acceleration, it’s a lizard-like reaction to the Jackpot, part of a new strategy, national government as survivalist retreat.

Sure, the Trump administration is largely composed of knuckle-dragging defectives, but we can discern a strategy if we look carefully enough: rather than making sacrifices to survive the Jackpot, they will do what they can to get the biggest piece of the pie for themselves and their cronies in the colossal redistribution of wealth it represents. And don’t get your hopes up about a socialist revolution in the next round of elections. My academic leftie friends impute way too much to old Frankfurt School notions of ideology: the reason Trump and his cohort of populists have been elected isn’t because the poor have been duped and only need to see the way, it’s because they know there’s no hope for them. There’s no standing in solidarity behind a neo-socialist boomer, they all know that’s not going to work and if they’re going out, they’re going to drag down the elites with them. Americans elected this grinning, Adderall-abusing droog and will most likely do so again, just like the rest of the populists rising to power worldwide. In the words of Joseph de Maistre’s (and Julie Mason’s) words, “every nation gets the government it deserves.” Who better than the “King of Debt” to show us that the Jackpot is here?

If anything, not only has the Left failed to come up with a convincing counter-argument, it’s gone down the entirely wrong route with identity politics, which has all but taken over not just Left politics but also the academy and museums. Identity politics isn’t-anti-Trump, it’s high Trump, embracing the idea that the Jackpot has started and the next step is to redivide the pot in favor of your tribe. In the art world and the academy, it teams with an exhausted neoliberalism looking for an alibi while it also helps sell culture to a new generation of oligarchs even as it further exacerbates the rampant tribalism in our society. Steve Bannon understood it well, if the Left fights on the basis of identity politics, his Right wing identity politics wins every time. But for many on the woke Left, this is hardly a problem: a Trumpian government gives their screaming more legitimacy and feeds their fevered dreams of revolution.

Against the rise of identity politics on the Left and Right, the Center is left floundering. Neoliberalism is exhausted, its most appropriate cultural manifestation being is overtourism. As the decade started, I repeatedly tried to launch a major research project on the phenomenon in the academy, but the project fell on deaf ears. I wasn’t surprised. Universities are just like travel: there is an appearance of diversity and difference, but it’s a generalized sameness, a gray nothing in which you won’t ever encounter anything new, just another Starbucks serving poor quality beans over-roasted beans so that you can’t tell what they are and some screaming about how special the place is.

My sense is that if there’s to be any kind of hope in the next decade to get out of what Bruce Sterling appropriately calls “the New Dark,” it’s going to be to achieve the impossible: throw out identity politics (left and right) and turn back toward a grand project—what academics used to criticize as a “metanarrative”—that most of us can get behind.

As this decade showed, there’s little question that this is climate change and toxins in the environment. Here’s where the Jackpot has its upside: the deaths of billions of humans pales in comparison to the species-cide we are undertaking to species left and right. Have you listened for the dawn chorus of birds lately? A hundred years from now the biggest news of this decade may be that this is when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring became real as birds and pollinators died off in massive numbers. Here on the Northeast seaboard, we’ve bid goodbye to the ash tree and are watching for beech leaf disease, white pine needle disease, sudden oak death, and hoping the spotted lanternfly doesn’t cross the Delaware. It seems like the only place nature really thrives anymore isn’t in national parks, it’s in radiation exclusion zones.

But dead birds and trees don’t matter much to the average person who doesn’t have anywhere to shop besides the Dollar General Store and hasn’t seen fresh vegetables in years. The key is probably going to be luck, bad luck (and what is the Jackpot about if it’s not luck?). Maybe, just maybe if a series of truly awful major environmental cataclysms hit the key countries involved in carbon production—the US, China, India, Canada—they might, be alarmed enough to do something about it. We aren’t talking about a category 5 hurricane hitting New York City. Nobody will care about that, we are talking flattening a good portion of Florida and the Southeast, plus a good bit of Texas, maybe a good Dust Bowl 2.0 coupled with massive flooding in the Midwest then doing that five or six times over worldwide in the space of a couple of years. That’s a horrible, terrible thing, but if luck isn’t with us and it doesn’t happen, what are our chances of avoiding much worse conditions? And even if it does, will we be too late to turn back the clock?

*Never finished because a publisher botched the project to the point I quit working on it in disgust. But you can read an early essay (circa 2006) on network culture here.