The Follies of Mammon
Image taken from The Pitch’s article “Wake held for Knickerbocker Hotel amid demolition” by Celia Searles, commemorating one of the last examples of a regional architectural style that is being demolished to make room for a new apartment building. Photo by Adam Carey.
I wrote two years ago from the main room of a coffee shop that is no longer there about how Edgar and I had been displaced from the section of town that we had been living in. My thoughts have been turning back to that issue – specifically through the lens of science fiction.
One of the most enduring tropes of science fiction is terraforming: the long-term project to turn an alien world into an earth-like garden. This was a cornerstone of no less estimable a book than Frank Herbert’s Dune, and it forms a major component of the plot of James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse (which has been made into a television show, first – quite excellently – by the horribly named Syfy network; it’s been picked up since by Amazon and I’ve noticed a distinct change in quality.) Like faster than light travel and telepathy, though, this particular trope has had a number of doubts cast on it.
That being said, there is a long history of the “natural” world being reshaped by human beings for human ends – the extermination of the mammoth, for example, led to the spread of forests, and there is good reason to believe that the Amazon rain forest is largely the product of indigenous geoengineering.
The world can be reshaped to our ends. We’ve done it before. We’re doing it now. This is a fairly deep topic that I occasionally end up shouting about at great length, but I want to stick to the shallows here.
The Polish-language cover of Annihilation, previously used for this article here.
The mirror of terraforming is “xenoforming” — think here of the “red weed” mentioned in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, making the Earth alien-like, or of the strangeness from the Southern Reach Trilogy. Gentrification is like xenoforming. It isn’t some extraterrestrial force though, no little green men are showing up to pry off the old house numbers and put up the addresses rendered in metal Neutraface, the official font of gentrification.
Gentrification is perhaps better thought of as capitaliformation – instead of transforming an alien world into a copy of Earth, or the Earth into an alien world, it is the transformation of a space meant primarily for humans to a space meant primarily for the movement of capital.
The best example of this I can think of is the type of building sometimes called the five-over-one, the one-plus-five, or the podium building. If you’re in the global north, you’ve seen these: the bottom story is concrete, and usually houses commercial space or some kind of amenity, while there are a number of stories above (usually five) built principally of “wood” (given that it’s largely plywood or processed wood, the actual wood content is lower than one might expect, and the oil content is much higher.)
These buildings are not made for human beings, but are made simply to be collections of dead, inert matter arranged in a profitable fashion. Specifically, their design is conceived of primarily as a machine for the extraction of rental income. I say this because these buildings are cheap to construct, generally used for “luxury” housing, and lack durability: while under construction they are prone to destructive fires and after they are constructed, they are the perfect ground for mold to grow in. For more information, I strongly recommend watching (or listening) to the episode on them from the Well, There’s Your Problem podcast.
I’m far from an expert on this, but it seems like the half-life on one of these buildings might be about ten years (which is not to say that they will all be gone then – simply that I expect about half of them to be gone in ten years.) This, of course, means that further construction will happen on the same site, thus allowing another explosive movement of capital, because if you move it around then you get more of it, apparently.
These thoughts are partially driven by the fact that I’m reading Jane Jacob’s 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which I have returned to after reading Geoff Manaugh’s A Burglar’s Guide to the City (mentioned in my prior piece). I believe that most policies relating to gentrification are a result of misreading this book (which advocated for mixed-use construction, which I’m generally a fan of, but the five-over-one enthusiasts seem to ignore her suggestions that they found inconvenient.) What Jacobs was calling for was an increased diversity in American cities, viewing the urban environment as a kind of social ecosystem. What is being created by the gentrifiers of today is a capitaliformed environment: a socio-economic monoculture that lends itself to a one-dimensional life, where the city is carved up into a series of bands of increasing affluence, most of them dominated by endless blocks of five-over-ones, where all people live in their apartments and shift up one band to work during the day (or down if they have a managerial position) and are grateful to live in a vibrant diverse city – how could it not be diverse, there’s a fusion restaurant right next to the gym on the first floor?
In short, think of the city as a bulls-eye drawn in ever-increasing intensities of capital (and, of course, at the center is the “central business district” where no one lives. It’s all about the accumulation of wealth, jettisoning the excess weight of living human bodies to make it happen.) This is, of course, the exact sort of thing that Jacobs describes as unsustainable in her piece. And also, by intuition, we know that such a city, if made from whole-cloth and dreamed into existence in Nebraska or Texas or in some other place stereotyped as empty and cheap, would simply be a ghost city because no one would live there. At sunset all of the lights would kick on one by one and at dawn they would snap off one by one, and the streets would all be empty, even of urban scavengers like raccoons and opossums – there wouldn’t even be trash to live off of.
I have this image saved to my hard drive as “hell teeth”.
This is what a completely capitlaliformed city would look like. The buildings all blandly identical, like the teeth of a CGI cartoon character, the streets clean except for dust, everything working on a timer measured down to the tenth of a second. The only human shapes to be seen would be those of mannequins in the windows of the retail shops placed at the bottoms of some of the five-over-ones.
A capitaliformed environment is one where the human environment is a secondary byproduct of economic actions taken without consideration for the effects on the human participants in the process. Its ultimate expression would be a world without people, because people would be superfluous (this is not to say that I think that building a five-over-one is tantamount to human extinction; what I mean is that these buildings seem oddly indifferent to human needs.) This is something that architectural critic Kate Wagner has said: the awful homes that she reviews look the way they do because they were not homes but assets. In many ways, the people who live in these places – who grew up in them – are homeless, because their homes last maybe fifteen years, because it’s conceived of as an investment that is supposed to produce a return on investment.
Also, as an aside, you can get PTSD from anything. What are the long-term psychological effects of living in a home that looks fantastic, but will decay around you and isn’t designed with any real aesthetic sensibility – save perhaps a Cheesecake factory-esque “postmodern design hellscape”. The mark of ultimate middle-class status in America is to live in an ugly box that makes neuroses happen (what else is new?)
It’s no mistake that I’m bringing up suburban McMansions up in the context of the five-over-ones – both are expressions of the same thing, and one can see that in the adoption of suburban aesthetics by the people building the five-over-ones, as noted in this Common Edge piece by...Kate Wagner (look, she’s doing really good criticism of very bad architecture.) She makes the point that these buildings are bad for reasons other than aesthetics, and she’s absolutely correct on that, but I want to discuss the aesthetic element, because there’s a common thread here.
Let’s put a pin in the human environment and move into the purely human (my favorite Vivieros de Castro quote comes to mind, about how when everything is human, the human must be something very different than when we imagined.) I would like to introduce you – if you haven’t read it – to the essay “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny”, written by Raquel S. Benedict for Blood Knife. In this article, Benedict explicitly draws on Wagner’s handling of the built environment to discuss the simultaneously extremely aesthetic but desexualized treatment of the human body in media. Benedict writes:
The same fate has befallen our bodies. A body is no longer a holistic system. It is not the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure during our brief time in the land of the living. It is not a home to live in and be happy. It, too, is a collection of features: six pack, thigh gap, cum gutters. And these features exist not to make our lives more comfortable, but to increase the value of our assets. Our bodies are investments, which must always be optimized to bring us… what, exactly? Some vague sense of better living? Is a life without bread objectively better than a life with it? When we were children, did we dream of counting every calorie and logging every step?
The cover image from the Jacobin story I linked. Attributed to “Ross G. Strachan / Flickr”.
This is positioned as not just sound economic sense, but an explicitly moral action – if a difference is acknowledged between the moral and the financial at all (shades of Graeber, consider the stank that follows the idea of a debt around. It’s both a financial reality and a moral hazard.)
This is our bodies being capitaliformed, an alien logic being inserted into us, like one of the mind controlling parasites, to reference a completely different science fiction trope. Our behavior is altered, and we are led to view our bodies in not as ourselves, but as a collection of commodities that form a property that we manage. One could see this as the logical extension of growing up in a capitaliformed environment – and how many of those “21st Century Victorians” mentioned in the Jacobin article up above grew up in the suburbs?
We adapt our way of life to the environment that we live in. This cascades out, changing not just the broad patterns, but our moment-to-moment behaviors, our way of speaking, our way of thinking.
But it’s important to remember that this is simply a metaphor: capital is not an invading alien force, it isn’t a brain parasite. It is, at best, pseudo-autonomous: it seems like something that has a will of its own, but this is just an aggregate of human decisions made with bad instructions.
The real problem is that this system of perverse incentives that change everything from the rental properties we live in to our choice of leisure activities could not be more effective at smoothing out variation – killing off mutant epistemologies and punishing perversity – if they tried.
My contention is that these are exactly the sort of things – within bounds – that need to be encouraged, and it seems to me that these things are inherently opposed to the capitaliforming forces that can be found at work in the world right now. So it’s necessary to give them a push, and rebalance the scales. What is being wiped out and retarded needs, instead, to be accelerated.
After some reflection, I see that this is related to something else I’ve mentioned in the past: the cyberpunk nature of our present moment. In cyberpunk fiction, capital is shown to have colonized our bodies, carving out the living flesh and replacing it with metal, plastic, and vat-grown tissue. What we are experiencing here with the capitaliforming of our bodies is the metaphor de-literalized: instead of being inserted with scalpels and clamps, it sneaked in through the backdoor of our behaviors, stealing in like a thief.
Image taken from Business Insider, credited as “"Unborn Cities, No.18, 2015," 55 x 70 inches. Pigment print. Kai Caemmerer”
Instead of extending us, though, as early cyberneticians thought that these enhancements would, this is doing the opposite. They are turning us into perfectly-sculpted mannequins – through some depraved transubstantiation, we have adopted the same essence as our material environment: capital – dead labor, inert matter – frozen and waiting in place, like an apartment in a Chinese ghost city, immaculate, unused, and possibly never to be used.
The purpose of a home is to be lived in.
The purpose of a body is to carry us through life (or, as I would position it, to live.) A big part of that is experiencing pleasure.
By reducing these things to a commodity, we impoverish the human world at the expense of the dead world of inert matter – and your McMansion, your luxury apartment, your perfect six-pack will never love you back.
On the bright side, this is something that we can all begin to move on singularly. We can decide to pursue ends more congruent with the world of living humans instead of the dead world of inert matter. Treat your home as a place to be lived in, not as something to be flipped and sold, decorate it in outlandish ways that bring you joy. Adorn your body however you want, use it to bring yourself joy.
Because, while joy and pleasure and fun aren’t the sole end of life, you shouldn’t try to live without them.
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