*

*

“Nobody has a job. Everybody has a set of contracts. Some keep you in the same place for eight hours with the same coworkers five days a week, but it isn’t a job. A job requires benefits. A job requires taxes be paid by an employer. As a subcontracting entity you’re paid to pay your own taxes, to waive your own minimum wage requirements, your own working time directives. You are management. You don’t rent, you pay fractional reserve interest on a 99-year heritable lease entity that sublets your front room as storage space to a distributed shop. Every Saturday you pack boxes in your hall to tell other people how they can make a fortune out of the new economic climate by packing boxes in their hall. There are more guns in the world than there are people who can read properly. You ride a bus to the building that is your ‘office’. It used to be a hotel, when people could afford to go to other countries that weren’t over the road. You need a passport stamp to visit your mother. You don’t need a passport stamp to visit your father. You have six identity cards. You broke your leg in school and as a result can’t join a library. If there was still a library open near you you couldn’t even go in it. Instead you just can’t login.

Every morning when you get onto the number 27 you sit in the window and watch the UAVs circle over the shanty town in the park. You have extensive scarring on your left shoulder where the man next to you was extrajudicially assassinated when you used to get the number 26. Your ex-boyfriend left a camera in your shower, and you only found out when his ex sued for a share of the earnings, naming you as a witness. Your best friend Jane and you have a tradition. Every new year you buy another lock for her front door, fit it beside the others, then drink vodka until you vomit blood. You fight, and don’t talk again until christmas …”

- erithromycin, ‘Re: Cyberpunk in 2008‘, RPG.net, 28/06/2008

Whoever Michael Huges & Damien Wake actually are, I’ll hold on to the vague hope that they live in a hollowed-out volcano, and have an army of overall-clad mooks to do their bidding.

From their description:

“These 3000 ft mobile tower-cranes toddle towards suburban communities where they proceed to drill deep footings at the center of their cores into the earth and outstretch their tripod legs over a 2000 ft radius of suburb. The crane tears out homes from their plots and shelves them in 60 floors of open floor plates.  Breaking it up into five sub neighborhoods, commercial/public floors are packed full of the big box stores and strip malls that sustain residential communities …”

This got me thinking about how much I’d like to see Prince Charles take on one of these beasties!

“ELEVATED GEOTHERMAL NEIGHBORHOOD  SMASH PUNY ROYAL!” *stomp*

… And then I remembered some notes for something vaguely relevant, lurking at the back of a notebook -

[Micro-pitch: THE PHYSIOCRATS]

Set in a cyberpunk (ribofunk?) Duchy of Cornwall following the near-total collapse of suburbia, this [comic? TV mini-series? novella? machinima?] puts the reader/viewer in the heart of the conflict between the moneyed members of the pluto-gerontocratic military-agricultural-biotech complex and the last remaining fragments of the disenfranchised rural refusniks in a series of final skirmishes for the very heart & soul of the British countryside!

*dramatic chord!*

• Alistair Parvin’s Agri-Noir facilities in white plastic, chlorophyll, and photovoltaic blue …
• Citizen journalists unearthing corporate espionage in the vat-grown meat industry …
• Rogue combine harvesters churning through suburbia’s greening ruins …
• Eurocrats turning a blind eye to organic biscuits made from people …
• The dodgy pharming practices at the heart of a highly contagious cross-species pandemic …

Basically, I think we’re looking at Gothic Hi-Tech (cf. Bruce Sterling) with silage & giant chickens. It’s Ghost in the Shell meets Countryfile, as a six-part mini-series.

My Winnipeg is a challenging film, in the best possible sense of the word. Despite falling asleep halfway through my first attempt (or perhaps because of it?), I really got on with this noir Canadian autogeography.

It’s a film which – to my mind – shares a lot with, and stands as a companion piece to, something like This is my City. Both take as their subject specific places as filtered through the eyes of specific people. With the latter, it’s this kind of viewer tension between (a) those insiders curating their city’s sights (sites?) & hotspots, and (b) our self-designated heroes, who stumble into existing dramas and unfamiliar landscapes. In My Winnipeg, it’s the eyes of our narrator and filmmaker, Guy Maddin, with the film’s visuals filtered through his melancholic half-memories of  urban legends and familial traumas.

So while the team behind my City aims for authenticity by keeping their curation & mediation to a minimum, presenting things (more or less) as they happen, Maddin’s gone to every effort to simulate and recreate a city which – in reality – may never have existed. A re-enactment of the past which echos, then exorcises. Memory versus documentary … not quite opposites, but – I don’t know – different ways of approaching the same goal, maybe? Of representing a subjective experience of the real? Of the city and its built environment, supposedly external to the body; objective, immune to memory’s holes and biases.

(Via Digital Urban)

I’d argue that this is what the internet does better than traditional broadcast media – empowers those with the skills to bypass the gatekeepers, plugging their output straight into an audience. As ever, the watchword is authenticity. Admittedly, I may be carrying a certain nostalgia for my own 6th form-era travel documentary exploits, but from the look of it, these guys deserve an audience.

These videos (from Ivo Gormley & Matan Rochlitz) make me pretty ruddy cheerful.  There’s a certain vagus nerve-tickling, ludotopian current to this whole thing.  And I like that.  A lot.

*People have been talking about the twilight of national sovereignty for as long as I can remember. The thing that’s different now is those big, scary, non-integrating Gap patches where the Westphalian deal is just frankly dead. Beyond help. Failed states, non-states. People are getting used to failed states, or fake hollow-states. They are starting to talk seriously about a “failed globe.”

Sound familiar?

It should do.  He’s talking about SEZs, tax havens, and pirate ships (opens pdf). Kaliningrad, Somalia, and the self-declared Principality of Sealand.  Alter-urbanism in its rawest form.

*It’s kinda hard to imagine *cities* going away … short of a massive population crash. All the major cities in the Balkans are still there, even though the “nations” they conjure up have changed their flags, passports and currencies five or six times.

For more on the whole Balkan thing, check out Bruce’s video from Belgrade.  Some interesting commentary on the commodification of heritage, the relationship between the past and futurity, and how this is realised in the “real” physical landscape.  I guess you could also look at the rapid emergence of the geographically tiny Republic of Montenegro – making the journey from union with Serbia to likely EU candidate & tourist-friendly film location.

*New York has a future. Chicago has a future. San Francisco is dynamic. Any place called a ‘creative class city” is very attractive. Life in American heartland Red States is cheerless and imperilled and getting worse… I’ve been to places where nations lose their primary loyalties… in a globalized world, they just… leach out.

So innovation in the Red States converge on the small blue islands – islands that swing elections.  Competition between  ideas drives innovation – which is the closest thing we have to “progress” in these post-modern times.  Perhaps we need a return to Mill’s “experiments in living”; a seasteading stripped of its egos and sinister overtones.

*[S]ubcultures, countercultures and bohemias … generate a lot of strange ideas and alternative practices. A lot of those ideas turn out to be crap, of course, but at least they’re being pioneered by volunteers, they’re not crap ideas opposed from on high by the Stalinist Central Committee.

(image based on a photo by Guido van Nispen)

In the aftermath of the 1986 nuclear reactor disaster, Chernobyl has been cast as a city reclaimed by nature. As to whether this portrayal is justified by the evidence, the jury’s still out … but whatever the truth, it certainly hasn’t been allowed to stand in the way of a good story.  Take the first-person shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (based loosely on Stalker (1979), a film by Andrei Tarkovsky).  The game and its 2008 prequel – S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky – are both set in an alternate reality where a second nuclear disaster caused strange changes in the zone of alienation.

We’re talking a strange mix of historical fact, malevolent alien hive minds, and a multitude of mutant beasties. A reflection, then, of the symbolism lashed to Chernobyl in popular culture, public memory, and the collective unconscious?

So, what does this tell us about the alter-urban typology? This wild city isn’t simply anarchic, chaotic (as a “feral city”), or organised in a way which ignores / subverts the precepts of “Western” urbanism (as a “rogue city”) … instead, it actively endangers the bodies of those who would seek entry. Rather than amorality and ambivalence, the “wild” of the physical environment and its perverted forms of (un)nature approach the human intruders with absolute emnity.  For a better sense of this reading of the setting, have a look at this trailer for Clear Sky.

__________

(Image courtesy of Vivo (Ben))

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Contemporary political discourse on armed violence and insecurity has been largely shaped by references to spatial knowledge, simulation, and control: “human terrain”, “urban clutter”, “terrorist sanctuaries”, “failed states”, “core-periphery”. The historical counterpoint to this is to be found in the key role the successive technologies of clock, engine, computer, and network have all played in spatializing the practice of warfare. In this context, what implications do “feral” Third World cities, “rogue” cities organized along non-Western ideas of urban space and infrastructure, and “wild” cities reclaimed by nature, have for the battlespaces of today and tomorrow?

A substantial ramble follows beneath the cut. Brace yourselves!

For me, it’s all about funnelling (seriously, bear with me).  Coming from an undergraduate degree that combined Anthropology with International Relations (I’ll have to stop talking about how awesome it was soon, surely?), and having – as part of that – written on virtual economic spaces, the notion of an American homeland and the aesthetics and symbolic economies of the supposed “war on terror”, this Battlespace/s thing was a point at which the funnelling – in which my interests kept narrowing and focusing – is starting to ease off. I’ve been working for a while on the underlying suspicion that all these things have been linked, but I’ve been struggling to define and describe what the link is, and what – if anything - it means.

At first, I thought it was something to do with islands.  Circumscribed pockets of otherness in a sea of something else.  HM Fort Roughs.  Guantánamo Bay detention camp.  Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net (a brilliant & terrifying image of supply-chain capitalism & the network economy, penned waaaaay back in 1988).

In the wake of Wednesday’s attacks in Mumbai, the mental soup / leaf mould seems to have taken a turn for the exothermic; rapidly gaining its own sense of energy … of momentum.  Bouyed by my current fascination with a 4-part drama set in the English Civil War (The Devil’s Whore, which inspired this rather nifty piece on English radicalism), I found myself reminded of a long-dormant plan to pen something on the parallels between the Czech Hussites of the 15th century (speculating on the movement’s potential trajectory, and ignoring its historical collapse into factionalism & infighting), and the Indian Naxalites’ plans for a Compact Revolutionary Zone, cutting a band through India’s east coast, and linking rebel strongholds in Andra Pradeshand Jharkand with the Maoist presence in Nepal (a presence which, following the conclusion of the Nepalese Civil War in Spring 2008, is now participating in electoral politics, with one of their own as PM).

But to pull myself away from that peculiar tangent, and get back to the intended purpose of this entry, there was something Geoff said about these urbanisms of the radically other that made me stop and think.  It was a question about the need to identify whether their emergence and growth represents something qualitatively new, or – alternatively – if we can recognise / assemble a historical context for the “feral” city.  And, on this point, I’m inclined to echo Jamais Cascio’s reflexive desire to hit anyone claiming “this changes everything” on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.

Yeah, I’m looking at you, iPhone!

So, I thought it might prove valuable (or, at the very least, interesting) to take our man Manaugh’s basic typology of the different forms of alter-urbanism (I’m not entirely convinced by the term, but can’t think of anything better), and try and bulk it out with some examples from history and fiction. Kind of like this and this, from Sterling.  A “genealogy”, building on Foucault’s methods of studying … well … pretty much everything.

The List

In this article (Manaugh’s point of departure), Richard J. Norton describes the prototypical “feral city” as

a metropolis with a population of more than a million people in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city’s boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system … [y]et a feral city does not descend into complete, random chaos. Some elements, be they criminals, armed resistance groups, clans, tribes, or neighborhood associations, exert various degrees of control over portions of the city.

Norton remains vague on whether (at the time of writing) such a place could be said to exist.  Indeed, he seems to admit that “[t]he feral city may be a phenomenon that never takes place”.  I’m attempting to assemble a list, including Manaugh’s speculations on ‘rogue cities’ (analogous to rogue states) and ‘wild cities’ (cities that have either been reclaimed by nature, or integrate their human inhabitants with a ‘wild’ natural environment).  I’m also intending to follow up on some specific examples from said list in their own dedicated blog posts.  So, watch this space.

__________

(Images courtesy of octal and mr lynch)

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SEPTEMBER 22, 2019

Humans have 23 years to go

Global Extinction Awareness System starts the countdown for Homo sapiens.

PALO ALTO, CA — Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the “survival horizon” for Homo sapiens – the human race – from “indefinite” to 23 years.

“The survival horizon identifies the point in time after which a threatened population is expected to experience a catastrophic collapse,” GEAS president Audrey Chen said. “It is the point from which a species is unlikely to recover. By identifying a survival horizon of 2042, GEAS has given human civilization a definite deadline for making substantive changes to planet and practices.”

According to Chen, the latest GEAS simulation harnessed over 70 petabytes of environmental, economic, and demographic data, and was cross-validated by ten different probabilistic models. The GEAS models revealed a potentially terminal combination of five so-called “super-threats”, which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks. “Each super-threat on its own poses a serious challenge to the world’s adaptive capacity,” said GEAS research director Hernandez Garcia. “Acting together, the five super-threats may irreversibly overwhelm our species’ ability to survive.”Garcia said, “Previous GEAS simulations with significantly less data and cross-validation correctly forecasted the most surprising species collapses of the past decade: Sciurus carolinenis and Sciurus vulgaris, for example, and Anatidae chen. So we have very good reason to believe that these simulation results, while shocking, do accurately represent the rapidly growing threats to the viability of the human species.”

GEAS notified the United Nations prior to making a public announcement. The spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General Vaira Vike-Freiberga released the following statement: “We are grateful for GEAS’ work, and we treat their latest forecast with seriousness and profound gravity.”

GEAS urges concerned citizens, families, corporations, institutions, and governments to talk to each other and begin making plans to deal with the super-threats.

###

Superstruct! Play the game, invent the future.

Now, I’ve landed myself a position on the Superstruct team as a Community Leader / Game Master, with responsibility for one of the five “superthreats”. As part of the application, they asked us to submit a brief vignette responding to the following:

It’s the summer of 2019. You are yourself, but 10 years in the future. Describe where you are having for dinner, what you’re eating, and what you’re thinking or talking about. How did you wind up there, compared to where you had dinner most often in the summer of 2008?

You can submit your own scenario as a comment over at the IFTF page. I got a lot out of Stuart and Guy’s responses, both of which were globally-aware and delightfully disjunctive. In comparison to which, mine seemed downright parochial.

SPAG BOL

It’s been a week since my thirty-second birthday, and I’m having lunch with James – a friend from sixth form – at his house in rural Sussex. A stone’s throw from my parents’ place, the building is a beast of cob and plaster, situated in the grounds of a farmhouse built the best part of a century ago by James’ father.

There’s a certain symmetry here; a mirroring which I don’t think is lost on James. He’s been talking about the house since we finished university back in the late 2000s. Heck, I’d even tried to sustain his interest in Project Off-Grid in the face of his declaration of intent to join the British armed forces. Back then, I lost, but a couple of months after the final cessasion of hostilities, and James was back on the scene, brandishing the original sketches, and annoucing that Project Off-Grid was back on the cards. That was 2016, but it’s only now – after three years of paperwork and legal wrangling – that the structure is approaching completion

And, much as it pains me to say it, that’s no small thanks to our benevolent overlords. James is definitely committed to the low-impact lifestyle, and that’s definitely something that this lot want to encourage. New government, new priorities.

So here I am. This morning, I helped lay cabling out to the turbines (still wrapped in polythene). After dinner, we’re planning to tackle the internal walls. It’s a far cry from the hassles of the day job, and a welcome change of pace.

The magazine sent me away for the summer; said they couldn’t afford the risks of keeping us in the city. With the bitter memories of the air pollution scares of last August, seasonal resettlement subsidies from the GLA, and the threat of a lawsuit from a former employee, the big boss was all too willing to roll back our activities over the summer months. Central office is running on a rotating skeleton staff and, for the next five weeks, I’m working part-time. Telecommuting from the my parents’ back garden. And four day weekends mean more time to help out mates with their hare-brained building projects.

Lunch is a relatively relaxed affair – smothered in clay and sun lotion, we arrange the wobbly plastic deckchairs at a trestle table found lurking in some dingy outbuilding. In the absence of a proper electric oven, we prep the soy mince in tin foil, resting it in James’ solar cooker. The soy is supplemented with a hearty supply of locally-sourced seasonal veg, and some opaque and foul-smelling home-brew that I’m assured is (technically) cider. Luckily, it tastes better than it smells.

I’m too hot and tired for serious conversation, so drift from mindless chatter about college friends to suggesting surreal additions to the building project (“How about environmental sensors on some kind of tethered balloon? They wouldn’t cost that much, it’d help with the agricultural stuff, and we might even be able to get one of the universities to foot the … so, that’s definitely a no, then?”) as we wait for the soy to cook in a beam of concentrated sunlight.

It’s hardly restaurant fare, but the final meal – a loose analogue for Spaghetti Bolognese – is both edible and filling. As we finish up, I’m just about ready for an afternoon siesta. James, however, is loathe to lose my labour to the warm embrace of sleep. There’s still plastering to be done, and he pesters me until I relent.

Plenty of time for rest later.