The BBC’s In Our Time did a show recently about the Lancashire cotton famine – basically when the British textile mills were cut off from their main sources of cotton in the American South due to the Civil War. The British had outlawed slavery, but were all too happy to take advantage of the slavery practiced by their trading partners. How convenient, and a nice way to claim the moral high ground. Slaves aren’t useful for value-added work anyway, and that was the key to Britain’s prosperity, but, hey, we’ll gladly make use of the cheap cotton produced by your slaves and pat ourselves on the back for our morality!
In any case, some have claimed slavery was no big deal anyway for capital formation because Britain just pivoted to getting cotton from Egypt and, especially, India. But Indian cotton, although not grown by slaves, was grown by subsistence farmers who were dragooned by the British authorities of the Raj into producing cotton in sufficient quantities for export. How did they pay for the transition? Loans, of course. You can’t eat cotton, and it’s very vulnerable to variations in the monsoon rains.
Fast forward today, and what are all those small farmers committing suicide at a staggering rate growing? You guessed it, cotton (now woven in Bangladeshi sweatshops instead of Lancashire mills). And now it’s genetically modified cotton, which is produced by Western corporations and bought via debt upfront, with all the risk laid at the feet of the small farmers. This means the farmers also need to buy the pesticides, the upside being that they can always drink it if the rains fail to show and the debts come due, which is exactly what many of them are doing.
So, one again, an attempt to wash the blood off the hands of the creation of capitalism falls short.. But what I want to highlight this part which put it in a historical context:
[5:30] Melvyn Bragg (host): Who are the people working in the cotton industry?
Emma Griffin: Well, in Lancashire everybody’s working in the mills; some of these mill towns have the vast majority of the populations working in these mills,. And whole families will be employed. They offer a lot of employment for children. Children can start working from the age of nine. Now they’re not going to be doing very skilled work or operating the machines, but they’ll be doing menial work around the factory. And as they enter their teens they’ll start to become machine operators, and as Lawrence has already mentioned, and quite unusually, there’s a lot of employment for women, and in many mills women will actually outnumber the men. But all of the tasks within a factory are usually divided up according to gender, and of course it will be no great surprise to hear that women tended to have the lower paid jobs whilst men had the most senior positions – the overlookers, the engineering, and the heaviest work. That always came with the greatest pay, and of course with the greatest status.
I think one point that is important to emphasize is that we tend to think of factory work as low skill and low pay, but for nineteenth century Britain, that simply isn’t true at all. In the context of the time and given that these are relatively uneducated workers, these workers are able to command a real premium for working in the factories. It is regarded as skilled work, that these are valuable workers, and this is particularly true for the women. The other alternatives for them are things like domestic service, or cleaning, or laundry work. By contrast, the money they can earn in the factories is very significantly better than the alternatives there.
MB: And the background to this is at this the end of village industry, really. Village cottage industry where everyone was at the loom if they weren’t in the fields.
EG: It is. There’s been a very significant switch in the way that things are made. So traditionally people are paid for making things according to how much is made. So a shoemaker gets paid for his shoes when he’s made his shoes and is not really paid for his time--he’s paid for what he actually accomplishes. In the factories that logic doesn’t really work because the employers have spent money invested in very expensive machinery, and that means they’ve got to keep the machines running all through the week, as long as possible. So they’ve got to get workers to the factory early in the morning, they’ve got to get them working intensively throughout the day, staying until late into the evening. And that’s a very different kind of working pattern that’s being introduced. So instead of people dovetailing working at home with managing a cotton garden or something, now they’re going into the factories. And it’s the beginning of modern working patterns that we’re familiar with, where we’re effectively paid for our time rather than what we manage to get done.
MB: But there was a preference for people to work in the factories rather than to stay in the countryside in these not idyllic village in these lousy conditions.
EG: There’s a real draw. I mean it’s clear that population is moving into Lancashire so workers are very clearly…there are some push factors from the rural sector as well, but there are clearly attractions to the factories. And one of the attractions is that there’s a lot of employment for children. So if you imagine a family in rural Norfolk of five or six children, many of those children won’t be at work because there is no work for them to do. You make the move to somewhere like Manchester or one of the mill towns all round about, and suddenly all of your family is at work. So you go from having one breadwinner to having four or five wage earners in your family, which makes a very significant difference to living standards indeed. So, yes we’ve got basically, since the end of the eighteenth century, we’ve got rural migration into the towns, whole families are moving and taking up these new opportunities.
Getting paid for what you actually accomplish. What a concept! Instead, most of us are chained to our desks for forty hours a week regardless of what we actually accomplish. What sense does this make? In fact, all we do is “fiddle around on computers all day” (as David Graeber puts it) and actually accomplish very little. Yet we must sit there and put in our forty hours regardless of whether there is four hours of work to do or forty. Not to mention the odd idea of selling a concept as ephemeral as time – how bizarre that is. One’s time on this earth is so limited; something feels wrong about selling it to the lowest bidder. Indeed, before the invention of precise timekeeping that wasn’t even possible. The clocks that were designed to help monks time their prayers evolved into shackles for the working class.
Of course people take the modern work situation for granted because the authorities do their best to induce historical amnesia and make us think that the way things are is the way they have always been. This is what George Orwell meant when he said that whoever controls the past controls the present (and by extension, the future). That is why Americans are kept as ignorant of history as those in power can make them.
As Emma Griffin points out, those work patterns make sense when you work in a factory where every second the machine isn’t running it’s a loss of profit. This is also why agricultural societies have always been more leisurely than industrial ones--working harder won’t make the plants grow any faster, after all – once the land you’ve got is seeded and watered, it’s several months minimum before you harvest your crop with little to do but pull weeds and wait. By contrast, a machine never gets tired, and you will give out before it does, hence the Stakhanovite working hours of the early Industrial Revolution (only ameliorated by brutal strikes where workers often sacrificed their lives in a hail of government-sponsored gunfire).
But in case you haven’t noticed, not a lot of people are working in factories anymore. Yet, bizarrely, the entire structure of society is designed as if we do! We all get into our cars and head to work at the exact same time every day (causing epic traffic jams), and file home at the exact same time (causing yet another traffic jam). We all work Monday-Friday (with a few exceptions). During that time we’re chained to a desk for eight hours regardless of what we actually accomplish. It doesn’t matter if there’s four hours of work to do or forty – we’re parked there whether we like it or not. But there is no spinning machine, no power loom, no drill press, no drop forger. No machine at all except sometimes a computer which can go anywhere and work anytime. We’re not producing any goods at all! Graeber again:
...through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves...working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their [F]acebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.
The "efficiency" of factory working patterns in a post-factory age.
I think the crux of the problem is that we've built our society around the expectation of a steady income. In fact we need to have a steady income, otherwise we are homeless. Every single month we have to write that rent or mortgage check to keep a roof over our head. So getting paid intermittently is difficult unless we own the home, and even then we have to pay utility bills. We simply aren’t structured for a world of intermittent work. This is because the entire market is predicated on people getting a steady paycheck. In other words, everything is still predicated on the industrial/Fordist model in a post-Fordist world. And we have no real clear idea of how to move beyond it.
What we have is a very serious mismatch between the design of the post-industrial world and the requirements of its economy. We all know this selling of time makes no sense anymore, yet we cannot move beyond it. We’re accustomed to it. Making it worse is the fact that (in America, especially) so many things are tied to our jobs like health care and retirement.
Being in modern industrial society practically requires us to be in debt. That means being yoked to a steady repayment schedule. This is a major barrier to the kind of society we need where we get paid by what we produce. Even that is tricky, because most of us don’t produce a damn thing; we do “interpersonal/ administrative” work, i.e. push paper. Compare this to back when people lived on the land for generations making a living, and almost nobody outside of entrepreneurs and monarchs/governments had to worry about debt.
Of course, now there are less and less places interested in buying your time anyway. Getting paid for what you produce is a nice idea, but it's harder than ever. In the Middle Ages you had carpenters, coopers, cobblers, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, thatchers, brewers, butchers, tailors, etc. Today, our stuff is produced by factories filled with robots, often on the other side of the world. You can't hand-produce an automobile or microwave or refrigerator in your basement workshop, and even if you did, there is no way you could sell it for less than GE or Toshiba. Even food is produced by vast factory farms undercutting anyone without enough land. Our notions of "self reliance" are completely at odds with this reality.
And the kind of stuff you can produce is almost impossible to sell nowadays. Musicians, writers and other artists are seeing their livelihoods disappear because everyone expects free stuff, and it's hard to make a living crocheting for Etsy, despite all the pronouncements of techno-utopians. See this: From bestseller to bust: is this the end of an author's life? (Guardian)
Rupert Thomson is the author of nine novels, including The Insult (1996), which David Bowie chose for one of his 100 must-read books of all time, and Death of a Murderer, shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year awards in 2007. His most recent novel, Secrecy, was hailed as "chillingly brilliant" (Financial Times) and "bewitching" (Daily Mail). According to the Independent, "No one else writes quite like this in Britain today." Thomson has also been compared to JG Ballard, Elmore Leonard, Mervyn Peake and even Kafka. In short, he's an established and successful writer with an impressive body of work to his name.
After working seven days a week without holidays, and now approaching 60, Thomson, you might think, must be looking forward to a measure of comfort and security as the shadows of old age crowd in. But no. For some years he has rented an office in Black Prince Road, on London's South Bank, and commuted to work. Now this studio life, so essential to his work, is under threat. Lately, having done his sums and calculated his likely earnings for the coming year, he has commissioned a builder to create a tiny office (4ft 9in x 9ft 11in) at home in his attic, what he calls "my garret".
The space is so cramped that Thomson, who is just over 6ft, will only be able to stand upright in the doorway, but he seems to derive a certain grim satisfaction from confronting his predicament. "All I want is enough money to carry on writing full time. And it's not a huge amount of money. I suppose you could say that I've been lucky to survive as long as I have, to develop a certain way of working. Sadly, longevity is no longer a sign of staying power."
Thomson is not yet broke, but he's up against it. The story of his garret is a parable of literary life in Britain today. Ever since the credit crunch of 2008 writers have been tightening belts, cutting back and, in extreme cases, staring into an abyss of penury. "Last year," said novelist Paul Bailey, speaking to the Observer in 2010, "was sheer hell". Off the record, other writers will freely confide their fears for the future, wondering aloud about how they will make ends meet. Hanif Kureishi, for instance, recently swindled out of his life savings, told me how difficult his life had become. Never mind the money, the very business of authorship is now at stake.
We’re actually going the opposite direction as it gets harder and harder to get paid for producing something. So the modern working pattern we’re familiar with simply don’t work anymore! We’ve moved on, but we can’t escape from them. And this make no sense.
What we should be doing is moving to a society where we do not have to rely on the steady paycheck and get paid for what we actually produce. That means severing the ties between a job and social benefits. Yes, that means universal healthcare and retirement pension. Housing is a stickier issue, but an important one. When Classical economists like Ricardo talked about “rent,” what they meant was the crops (or money from the selling of crops) paid to the landlord who was distinct from the farmer in order to use the land. What do you do when the land produces no revenue? Classical economics doesn’t really address the issue (Georgist economics does).
The other point I wanted to make based on that snippet has to do with employment. One sneer often hurled at “luddites” by economists and other Cornucopians is how we all left food growing and cotton spinning and dirty factories and all that behind and yet we still have plenty of jobs. Case closed--jobs will always self-create in sufficient numbers without any sort of planning; to claim otherwise is the “Lump of Labor Fallacy,” and all that. But note that it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. In the early Industrial Revolution, as noted above, everyone worked--men, women and children, young and old included.
That’s a huge amount of the population that is just not in the job market anymore. That is actually forced out of the job market by law – it’s illegal to hire anyone below sixteen with a few exceptions. That is, we artificially keep children out of the job market. That a huge portion of the population – actually the majority of the population in some countries (less so in the West – which is not coincidental). Again, we just think of this as the normal state of affairs, but as the above points out, it is anything but. In fact, like selling our time instead of anything useful, it is the aberration for most of human existence. We just take modern working patterns for granted thanks to Shifting Baseline Syndrome. In the movie of human existence, the industrial model would be the last few frames, yet we tend to assume it was the entire movie.
We also used to keep women out of the workforce too, as any viewer of Mad Men knows. Women were expected to get married and keep house – and yes, that had a lot to do with making sure there were enough jobs for the men. I’m sure my readers know that the women who worked on the assembly lines during World War Two were politely asked to step aside when the men came home. The generation who lived through the Great Depression would have never accepted the nonsense spewing from today’s economists about the "Lump of Labor" fallacy – they lived through unemployment rates as high as 25 percent and a decade of people being tossed out into the street.
Women tentatively slipped their toes back in the water in part-time jobs as long as they were not taking jobs from male breadwinners (e.g ‘Kelly girls’). Eventually that changed as feminism (encouraged by business) “liberated” women to enter the workforce regardless of the effect on men’s jobs and wages (because jobs are always unlimited, declared economists, “Lump of Labor,” and all that - see The Rise of the Permanent Temp Economy). Now women actually dominate the workforce. Women have essentially won the gender wars. Note also that the wheels came off the economy in the late 1970’s opening the door for Neoliberalism and ending thirty years of rising fortunes for the middle class in America. Coincidence?
We are also keeping people out of the workforce ever longer thanks to increasing education requirements (even though for most jobs it’s useless). In other words, a degree is nothing more than a job-hunting license.
Now you may scoff at this, but consider the reason why we take children out of the workforce and stick them in the warehouses/gulags we call schools for over a decade. Ostensibly, it’s to train them in the necessary skills they need to do the kinds of jobs that modern post-industrial society demands. Except their skills are now useless – we now all take it for granted (thanks again to the economics priesthood) that a high-school diploma is worthless and not worth the paper it is printed on and enables you to do nothing but work the deep fryer, stock shelves, or, if you’re lucky –swing a hammer or hang drywall - A College Degree Is Now Required of Basically Everyone (Jezebel). And we assume that such people deserve to have no healthcare or vacation or a decent, reliable income because they have no “skills.” “Skilled” labor, by which economists mean a piece of paper from a degree-granting member of the education cartel, allows one to actually make a living at less than poverty wages. Yet now even that is not enough! Anyone who can’t remain out of the job market until age thirty, well, to hell with you, I guess. And I’m not even going to get started about how it’s entirely on our backs to make ourselves amenable for the few jobs that are on offer.
We also count people over sixty as “retired,” whether they are retired or not. As the progress harpies constantly point out, we’re living longer today. So that’s not properly counted either.
All this is to say that we’re now holding an awful lot of people out of the job “market” for ever-longer periods of time, skewing the job-abundant present situation constantly proclaimed by economists ever further from an apples-to-apples comparison with the past, even the fairly recent past (and even then the workforce participation rate keeps dropping). Economists like to claim that employment has not vanished at all in the two hundred years of productivity gains since we left the farms and factories behind, but they keep moving the goalposts. An apples-to-apples comparison keeping all things equal would consider anyone over the age of nine until death not working as unemployed.
What would that look like?
Our gains in efficiency have eliminated a massive of jobs, we’ve just dodged the bullet by redefining who needs a job. Children (and formerly spouses) were able to be supported by one breadwinner. Not anymore. It’s almost as if school (and retirement) were a design to camouflage the amount of jobs lost over the last few hundred years. And now the creeping normalcy of endless requirements for “more school” is yet another attempt to camouflage this fact. And we’re not even discussing bullshit jobs, or guard labor (which I’ve discussed before) All part of the plan, with economists fulfilling their roles as normalizers and chief propagandists, of course.
Another thing to point out is how much the economy has changed since back then even though today's economic priesthood declares that working less is pie-in-the-sky and unrealistic. We went from men, women and children working in factories and sweatshops, to single male breadwinners to two-income families in the last few hundred years. We went from sixty-hour, six-day workweeks to forty-hour five day workweeks (all while the economy grew). We went from unionized jobs to temp work. Yet now, if you even dare suggest shorter workweeks or less working hours, you are met with stories abut how the economy will fall to pieces and everyone will be thrown into poverty. Another case of historical amnesia.
Stupid Luddites (sneer).
Finally, it’s worth noting that shifting children from economic boons into economic burdens, and sending women into the workforce in droves is the secret mechanism that industrialism is gambling on to halt worldwide population increase. One can't help but wonder about the limits to that approach.
I'm sure others have noticed the supreme irony that these two movies happen to be out at the same time. If Tomorrowland is a product of 1960's optimism, Mad Max is a product of 1970's pessimism. Mad Max came out of the oil shortages of the 1970's and the birth of Neoliberalism; Tomorrowland out of the early 1960's oil glut and managerial capitalism. The 1964 Worlds Fair is an example of better living through technology brought to you by Monsanto and GM, the 1970's of oil embargoes brought to you by Arab sheiks and garbage piling up courtesy of striking garbagemen. Tomorrowland is quintessential American techno-optimism, Mad Max a shorthand for the worst possible dystopia.
So here we go.
TRIGGER WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD - I pretty much give away the entire plots of these movies, so if you care, you'll not want to read further. Still here? Okay, then, on we go:
That skyscraper looks an awful lot like Hubbert's Peak, doesn't it?
Tomorrowland
Tomorrowland is direced by Brad Bird from a script by Bird, Gene Roddenberry, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and R. Buckminster Fuller. Oops, sorry, I mean Lost's Damon Lindelof.
The "where's my jetpack"? theme of Tomorrowland is delivered with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, because the entire opening sequence literally centers around a jetpack! The year is 1964, and young George Clooney, er--I mean, "Frank Walker," is taking the bus alone (where are his parents?) to the 1964 World's Fair in New York City to enter the young inventor contest. He presents his chrome plated Rocketeer-style jetpack to dour sourpuss Hugh Laurie, TV's House. House grimaces and scowls and diagnoses the boy's rare kidney disease - okay, he doesn't do that, but rejects his invention because it doesn't work. In flashback we see young George on the farm trying on the jetpack and it behaving like you would expect, it just drives him horizontally through a cornfield in a fun romp that would easily kill anyone if they actually tried it in real life. "Besides, what use is it?" harrumphs House frowning like the Grinch. "Can't it just be for fun?" smiles, young, puckish optimist George Clooney with a twinkle in his eye.
Just behind House is a young girl named Athena (goddess of wisdom, get it?) who we perceive to be his daughter. She takes a liking to young George's optimistic can-do attitude and hunts him down inside the park, handing him a special Tomorrowland pin. She tells him to follow her and her dad House into the "It's a Small World'" ride, which he does. Mercifully, we are spared the song. Inside the ride, a trapdoor opens, and he's catapulted into a marvelous world of high-tech futurism only accessible to the ultra-elite few: Dubai.
Okay, it's not Dubai, it's the real Tomorrowland, a Grade-A, genetically modified, shiny high-tech Jetsons future on steroids and nootropics. It's filled with every sci-fi trope you can imagine - jetpacks, flying cars, monorails, robots, spaceships, skyscrapers with trees, although geodesic domes are conspicuously absent. Presumably it's all powered by nuclear power, or cold fusion, or zero-point energy, or algae, or Tinkerbell's tears, or something. A robot shows up and miraculously fixes young George's jetpack. With the jetpack now fixed by intelligent robots without him having to understand a thing, he straps it on and zips away to find Athena.
George, er, Frank, is accepted to be one of the elite scientists inside this - whatever it is - hidden compound, alternate dimension, space colony, theme park, drug trip. Considering his only qualification is a jetpack that didn't function, it seems like the recruiting criteria is rather biased. Whatever happens to his parents we're never told - is this where the missing children end up? Is Tomorrowland also using my missing socks? How Tomorrowland is funded we'll never know - is it funded by the military industrial complex? There's plenty to eat given that the entire city is surrounded by wheat fields out to the horizon - the future is apparently not gluten-free. The residents probably just all drink Soylent shakes anyway.
Unfortunately young George is in for a few grim surprises. His girlfriend is actually an android, a clear advance from Vicki the robot from the late 1980's sitcom Small Wonder, and unlike George Clooney, she stays 12 years old forever. This puts a crimp in their relationship, and not wanting to become a pederast, and with adult sex robots apparently outside the thinking of the squeaky-clean 1960's scientists of Tomorrowland, he is heartbroken (George apparently never gets a real wife or girlfriend and lives alone in his fifties- scientists are creepy).
Even worse, he invents a machine that uses tachyons - particles that travel faster than light so familiar to regular viewers of Star Trek the Next Generation - to build a machine that can see into the past. But more importantly, it can see into the future, and George sees the utter destruction of all life on earth - TEOTWAWKI in his machine. His requisite idealism shattered, George is banished from Tomorrowland for being Captain Bringdown (the effect on everyone else is unclear and pretty much ignored).
Apparently, when you leave Tomorrowland you draw a full pension, and George is able to live like a hermit and an old rickety, decrepit house in the middle of nowhere with no visible means of support, which is filled with high-tech booby traps including lasers, explosives, and a holographic guard dog. Evidently he can invent interdimensional portals but not better housing technology. There he spends his days alone in a room filled with video monitors doing nothing but watching the grim dystopia he predicted unfold before his eyes- hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanoes, melting glaciers, droughts, political turmoil, Duck Dynasty, FOX News, the Kardashians, etc. Geez, man, get a hobby. If I knew when the end of the world was coming I'd be living it up.
Enter our plucky young heroine Casey, played by Brittany Robertson (who manages to outshine Clooney - no mean feat). She lives in Cape Canaveral and is the daughter of NASA engineer Tim McGraw, who is busily designing the latest Martian rover with Randy Travis, Garth Brooks, and Kenny Chesney. Every once and awhile Clint Black stops in to consult on interplanetary physics. Okay, that doesn't happen, but Casey is very upset that they are dismantling the launch platform because, in McGraw's words, "Dreaming is hard and giving up is easy," or something like that which sounds like the title to one of his songs. I think I have that on a T-shirt somehwere. No mention of Republican budget cuts or Ted Cruz.
At school, her gloomy teachers drone on endlessly in Ben-Stein mode about how the world is going to sh*t and how we're all living in the political dystopias of Brave New World and 1984 (I'm guessing Florida school teachers are also the victims of budget cuts). Through every speech we see our heroine with her arm raised insistently waiting to be called upon and being stubbornly ignored. Finally, when a teacher does call on her, she issues this show-stopping mic-drop: "what is anyone doing about it?" This causes the teacher to hand her a copy of Overshoot by William Catton and The End of Growth by Richard Heinberg. No, that doesn't happen, instead her teacher stands there dumbfounded like a deer in healights, mouth agape like a fish pulled out of the water, apparently having never even thought of that! Take that, pessimists!!!
Young Casey attempts to sabotage the platform demolition with drones, and while doing that in real life would earn you a felony and at least ten years in a dark hole courtesy of Homeland Security, she is released the next day with a mysterious Tomorrowland pin among her belongings. Touching the pin takes her into Tomorrowland, but she is still spatially wherever she is, leading to some uncomfortable mishaps like slamming into walls and falling down stairs. Eventually she heads to a big open field and teleports herself to the great big, shiny, beautiful future.
Artist's rendering of Google's new headquarters.
There is a bravura sequence where people are flying around with jet packs (when they crash an inflatable suit saves them - really) and taking off into space as graduation presents. Everyone is fit and healthy, and the massive buildings are probably not filled with sick people trying to stay alive like ours are, and no one is running around in those scooters like in Wall-E (a much more realistic Disney depiction of the future). Curiously, there are no television screens either, and people aren't waking around mesmerized by their cell phones. Then again, they probably get everything through brain implants, anyway. This Tomorrowland is filled with people, which makes no sense given events later in the film (see below).
Finding another identical Tomorrowland pin for sale on eBay, Casey hops on the next bus to Houston (telling her dad she's "going camping"), where the collectable store advertising the pin is manned by killer robots, including one looking like a female hipster with cats-eye glasses and another who looks like a Reggae dude. They threaten Casey with powerful energy weapons, proving that the people of Tomorrowland weren't just working on peaceful projects all this time (and ignored Asimov's rules of robotics to boot). Small Wonder girl from George Clooney's past shows up and rescues her and they race off in a pickup truck to George's remote fortress of solitude.
We are informed that Athena was built especially to recruit people for Tomorrowland, based on some sort of test score that we are never told the criteria for, but assumed to be a mix of raw intelligence, creativity and optimism, much like the recruitment for Google. In fact, I can imagine Google taking notes about this idea, since they seem to be intent on building an actual Tomorrowland here on earth whose geniuses will also be hermetically sealed off from reality. I'm sure someone is already pitching holographic pins and recruitment androids to Larry Page in Mountain View right now.
Grumpy George wants nothing to do with them and tells them to go away - he's busy watching FOX News and the Kardashians. Then some more evil androids who are dressed like the villains from the Matrix show up, and our threesome escape in a rocket-ship bathtub (don't ask). Now on the run, they somehow end up in Gustauve Eiffel's secret apartment inside the Eiffel Tower, where it is revealed that the Eiffel Tower was not an architectural marvel built for the 1889 World's Fair at all, but a radio transmitter for Nikola Tesla to contact other planets (WTF? Seriously!!!) Eiffel, Jules Verne, and mortal enemies Tesla and Edison were part of some ultra-secret society/cult (called "Plus Ultra," not to be confused with MKUltra) which met in the Eiffel Tower who founded Tomorowland and were in contact with aliens/being from another dimension or something??? Apparently Einstein and H.G Wells were insufficiently practical or too socialistic to join the club. Screw you James Clerk Maxwell, James Prescott Joule, Lord Kelvin, Marie Curie, and all you other science-people the general public has never heard of! In some online info, we are informed that Uncle Walt was recruited as the chief propagandist for the movement, and built the 1964 Tomorrowland to prepare people for the big public reveal which never happened (is this also the source of UFO's?). After all, Walt Disney was already amenable to the idea of elite Aryan supermen changing the world for the better.
To top that, underneath the Eiffel Tower is a giant steampunk rocketship that takes off into outer space with our threesome while the people of Paris look on in amazement (did the French government know that was there?). Even though Tomorrowland is in another dimension, or on earth, or something, they somehow need to go into space for some reason ("This part gets weird," suggests Clooney helpfully). Somehow (?) the rocket takes them to Tomorrowland, designed by Santiago Calatrava(!!), now empty and abandoned, much like Calatrava's actual buildings here on earth. So what was Casey looking at before? Was it a time warp too?
Evil Hugh Laurie struts around in a sash, boots and leather jodhpurs, seemingly the only guy left in Tomorrowland besides the evil Matrix androids (has everyone else been banished too?). His name is actually Nix as in "let's nix that idea." Again, subtle as a sledgehammer. He's also the same age as in George's youth because he drinks anti-aging shakes which now come in chocolate flavor (*sigh*, I am not making that up). Casey takes the globular reins of George's tachyon machine and watches a 3D movie of whatever ends the world - climate change, nuclear war, the energy cliff, the California drought, ISIS, another Bush presidency, or whatever, and then watches Matthew McConaughey flying off into space to save us. Okay, that doesn't happen. We are informed by House that TEOTWAWKI is only 58 days hence!
Seriously, what's up with all the wheat?
Then House reveals his nefarious plot - apparently he's been using George's tachyon machine to beam images of the dystopian future into the heads of everyone on earth starting, oh, I'm guessing about the time of the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, to warn people and get them to roll up their sleeves and fix it, darnit. So know we know the REAL reason behind Jimmy Carter's Malaise Speech of 1979. "You have starvation and obesity at the same time, what's up with that?" cries House, practically pleading, "Why doesn't somebody do something to fix all the problems???"
But rather than treat it as the warning it was, the people of earth collectively decided they actually liked the apocalypse and started making movies like like Escape from New York, Rollerball and The Hunger Games instead of fixing all the problems. The nerve of them! At least they managed to elect Reagan. But, you see, the negative images are actually causing people to think negatively, and here comes THE MESSAGE - it's a self-fulfilling prophecy because everybody's so gloomy. Everything's getting worse because we think everything's getting worse, and no one does anything about it because we all think that there is nothing anyone can do anything about it. See? The future's totally up to us!!!
Earlier, young Casey's irrepressible optimism and can-do spirit causes George's apocalypto-meter to drop from 100% chance to 99.9999 percent chance, giving him hope. Unable to convince House, however, they resort to fisticuffs. George manages to destroy the tachyon gloom-machine by using his jetpack to drop his fatally wounded childhood crush into the machine below where she blows it up and sends it crashing down onto House and all the other Doomers.
Clooney and company set to work rebuilding Tomorrowland and open a magic portal to the real world where they can bring in elite people to help them put the place back in business. Casey brings her NASA engineer dad Tim McGraw through as the first recruit, along with molecular biologists Brooks and Dunn and nuclear scientists Madison County. Clooney builds a new set of recruiting androids who for some unexplained reason must all look like multicultural children aged 10-14. They will go forth and find "special" people who make a difference (and whose test scores are high enough) and recruit them for the elite otherworldly priesthood of Tomorrowland free from politics and budget cuts forever.
So, Tomrrowland is basically the Gates Foundation? Let's hope Microsoft isn't working on a tachyon machine or we're all doomed!
As the movie ends, in a montage scene we see our young recruiting androids dropping Tomorrowland pins into the instrument cases of musicians, giving it to people protecting endangered wildlife, planting trees in Africa, designing something-or-other in modernist brick lofts, gazing into microscopes, or whatever other visual shorthand for smart people solving problems. It seems to me it would be a whole lot easier just to pony up the $5000.00 or whatever it costs to attend the TED Conference and hand out Tomorrowland pins to all the presenters. In fact, this whole movie might have been called TED the Movie if the name TED weren't already taken for a different movie and the sequel were coming out later this year.
Finally, at the very end of the movie, the national debt is paid off, poverty is eliminated, climate change is reversed, oil is phased out, GMO foods, aquapaonics and and artificial meat eliminate starvation, the hyperloop gets built along with the moon colony, space tourism takes off, cancer is cured, the Amazon rain forest is replanted, the ice caps are refrozen, the aquifers refilled, intelligent robots eliminate work and unemployment, we all get cybernetic implants and finally make it to Mars. Okay, that part isn't shown, but you get the idea. That part you have to imagine when you leave the theater and log onto WIRED or the Singularity Hub, assuming you still have Internet service.
I left Tomorowland optimistic about the future as got in my 14-year old rusty car that doesn't start half the time into the dimly-lit parking lot and and drove home over the potholded streets avoiding all the speed traps set by cops who are trying to fill budget cuts. I'm told Tomorrowland missed expectations at the box office, meaning some people might not get THE MESSAGE. Since almost half of Americans don't have $400.00 in case of emergency, a lot of them probably couldn't scape together the 15 bucks required to see Disney's message of can-do optimism, or perhaps they were busy having their cars repossessed. I wonder how Tomorrowland played in Detroit, where in 1964 it was one of the richest middle-class cities on the planet? Or how about New York City, where, unlike in 1964, inequality levels are at the same as Rwanda's? I don't know if it will be a hit in the European market, but China is where all the action is anyway. Oh, and speaking of Disney: - Disney Fires Workers, Then Makes Them Train Their Replacements (refinery)
In October of last year, about 250 Disney employees, white collar workers who did data management at Disney Parks, were gathered in conference rooms and told their last day on the job would be Jan. 30, 2015. But, it got worse: They also learned they'd be expected to spend their last few months training the workers who'd replace them — immigrant workers brought in on temporary visas from an outsourcing company in India, according to a New York Times report.
“It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job,” one former employee, an American man in his 40s, told the Times. “I still can’t grasp it.”
Americans are used to jobs disappearing overseas, but this is a newer phenomena: white collar workers coming to the States on a temporary visa called H-1B, to replace American employees inside the States — mostly, so the company can cut costs.
According to the law, that type of visa should only be given to foreigners with advanced skills when Americans can't be found to fill the positions. In other words, they shouldn't come at the expense of American jobs. In this instance, that appears not to be the case.
Down and out in the Magic Kingdom, indeed. Why doesn't somebody do something about all the PROBLEMS???
Comments:
I was reminded of this comment I saw on Naked Capitalism:
You are viewing science in a mystical/religious sense rather than as a tool for investigating nature. It’s an absolute fundamental concept of science that science can not prove anything, and getting that wrong is not a minor mistake. It’s the difference between someone who knows what science is and can use the word “science” in a conversation with intellectual honesty, and someone who can’t.
Tomorrowland is the epitome of seeing science in a mystical/religious sense rather than a tool for investigating nature, or as a way of thinking. Rather, it's depicted as a a cornucopia where all our dreams come true. Even more frustrating, it depicts scientists as some sort of ethereal priesthood removed from ordinary humanity, rather than regular people like anyone else with all the weaknesses, blindspots, biases, limitations and foibles as the rest of us. the depiction of scientists and other creative people as "special" anointed ones with the ability to solve any problem with enough grit and determination is not the solution - it's part of the problem!
I'm sure most people leaving the theaters were cheerily thinking "well, those smart people will think of something - they always do!" Tomorrowland seems almost designed to encourage this mindset. This kind of thinking is incredibly toxic. Disney calls itself the Magic Kingdom, but science is not magic. It also promotes the idea that when you wish upon a star, all your dreams will come true.that's not what science tells us. I'm also thinking of the wheatfields depicted around Tomorrowland and George's jetpack. The idea of a young farmboy tinkering in
his garage and inventing a new miracle technology that changes the world has become a
founding myth like George Washington and the cherry tree. You see it today with our appeals to 'entrepreneurship" to solve all our problems.
Somehow, I don;t think the causes of our problems is some all-pervasive pessimism or not enough people thinking of solutions. Lots of people are paid to do that full-time. They have apparently not heard of Sevareid's law - the major cause of problems is solutions.
Many people have written about how techno-optimism seems to be a quasi-religion in America. The original Tomorrowland was built at the end of an extraordinary period of invention which transformed an agricultural society of farmers into an urban-dwelling society of office workers enjoying all sorts of conveniences--cars, radios, televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, telephones, air travel, etc. It seemed like anything was possible. The descendant of Tomorrowland is Disney's EPCOT center (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), located in Florida. Ironically, both EPCOT center and Cape Canaveral are expected to be underwater at the end of this century, along with the entire Florida peninsula. Maybe EPCOT will be transformed into a floating community. Tomorrowland is the Vatican in the church of Progress.
The reaction of a lot of reviewers to Tomorrowland is about the same as that of Gil Scott-Heron in Whitey on the Moon. They condemn the trite simplicity of the message that if we just click our heels together and wish hard enough we can solve our problems. I guess the negative tachyons haven't entirely subsided yet. A better explanation might be that the Uberization of movie reviews mean that reviewers can't get paid anything or make a living, that is, if computers aren't writing the reviews for them, hence the eye-rolling.
In the future, hood ornaments are people. Job creation!
Mad Max: Fury Road
Which brings us to the inevitable sequel to Mildly Annoyed Max and Increasingly Perturbed Max: Mad Max:Fury Road, or as I like to call it, Burning Man gone feral, or the logical endgame for ISIS. It's post-apocalypse done right.
Unlike the ridiculous, inconsistent plot of Tomorrowland (a Damon Lindelof specialty) Mad Max's plot is simplicity itself. It's basically one long car chase sequence, where in the last act of the movie, they turn around and head back the other direction. That simplicity is a virtue as, unlike Tomorrowland, we are actually able to follow the plot (it probably helped out at the box office too, since nobody could understand what the hell Tomorrowland was about).
Max Rockatansky is now played by Tom Hardy of Star Trek: Nemesis fame replacing Mel Gibson. I'm guessing the producers wanted to avoid the all the political baggage associated with Gibson, although in my opinion the sad, explosive disintegration of Mel Gibson's personal and professional life would have made him ideal for the role now in 2015, as opposed to the the young, fresh-faced actor at the beginning of his career. A grizzled, bedraggled, bitter man ranting about Jesus, women getting raped by packs of n*ggers and Jews controlling the world would be perfect for a post-apocalyptic hellhole, but old Mel may have objected to the anti-patriarchal tone of the movie (about which more below). Hardy has maybe ten lines of dialogue, and his main role is to grunt and look beaten down, which is harder than it seems.
Max, who is haunted in visions by the people he could not save including a little girl we take to be his daughter, is captured at the outset of the film and taken to an oasis citadel in the middle of the desert ruled by a dictator/cult leader named Immortan Joe sporting an unkempt plume of white hair and a breathing mask that makes him look like an alpha-displaying baboon, which I'm guessing is not an accident. I assume he is called "Immortan" because he has lived long past his prime because of these devices, outliving most people who probably die at, like, thirty, giving him Stalin-like cult status due to his longevity. Max is kept alive as a prisoner and used as a blood donor since a tattoo declares him to be a universal donor (type O).
What i love about Mad Max movies is how well they depict primal human social relationships when the formal institutions of society break down: clans and warlordism. We revert to tribal societies and the "big man" system where leaders are defined by 1.) Their ability to control resources and divert them to their followers - note that "lord" means "giver of loaves," early temples were grain distribution storehouses and temple priests were the first accountants. Feudalism, remember, is "government by personal relationship," and it's the most ancient and durable form of government for small-group social savannah apes such as ourselves. Typically elites were able to command more and more surplus for themselves and make everyone else dependent upon them, institutionalizing their power, as depicted here. 2.) The ability to control the thoughts and feelings of their followers and legitimate their power with religion and ideology. Early priest-kings depicted themselves as rainmakers with a special hotline to the gods. They used religious ideas centered around their own charismatic authority to motivate their followers and provide for social cooperation, and 3.) the ability to make war and deploy force- iron weapons, horses, tanks, etc. Early state making was defined by warfare, and the need to fight led to command-and-control hierarchical social structures.
We see this depicted viscerally early on. From a platform atop his mountain, Joe addresses the mass of desperate rabble below holding bowls and jerry-cans. He than declares that it is only though his largesse that people are able to survive. He then gives the signal and a gusher of water flows through two giant pipes sticking out of the mountain crashing down onto the parched masses below. It's the original trickle-down economics - literally!
It's interesting to note that that water is depicted as even more rare and necessary than oil to the desert dwellers - a concession to our new drought filled future perhaps? Joe then begins reading to the masses from the only book preserved in the post-apocalypse: The Bible, Atlas Shrugged. Okay, that doesn't happen, but it just as well might have, since its the logical conclusion to Ayn Rand's philosophy.I can imagine a lot of scenes like this taking place in Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago, only with chariots instead of cars. "Forward to the past," as George Miller says.
So, really, Joes' source of power isn't really all that different from to today's' elites - just substitute "jobs" for "water," and "economics" for the religious cult.
Inside the mountain we see the source of Joe's power - a massive Steampunk-style pump-works powered by humans inside of giant treadwheels. He gives the signal and they start walking, pumping water from deep below the earth. He also seems to have hydroponic gardens inside the mountain, meaning he's probably the only one able to grow a lot of food, not to mention brew Fosters. Because only he controls the pumps, he is a virtual God. Actually, more like a literal god - hes is the center of his own cult of personality, surrounded by "war boys" - nuclear mutated albinos. Joe's war boys believe that dying in battle will get them to Valhalla. A simple glance from Joe causes them to go ecstatic ("He looked straight at me!!").
In the real world, these kinds of male-dominated warrior cultures often tend to reward death and place a low value on human life. Its not mentioned, but I wouldn't be surprised if these guys also get seventy-two virgins in the afterlife, since there are no women for them (why in a minute). Again, one is reminded of today's ISIS fighters. Historically, highly unequal polygynous patriarchal societies with lots of males who don't have access to women or opportunities to start families are hotbeds of war, poverty and violence, and the poverty and violence is then justified post-hoc by various religious philosophies.
In other words, the social order of Joe's citadel is depressingly realistic given what we know about human behavior and social relations. It's like Mad Max was written by historians and anthropologists, while Tomorrowland was written by engineers who have never set foot outside the lab.
Some people have criticized the use of cars and trucks in Mad Max when oil is scarce, but to me this makes perfect sense- oil is liquified modernity, and whoever controls it is sure to have power (as we already see today with nation-states instead of individuals). The ancient world's elites were defined by their ability to command and provision horses and chariots for battle (Mesopotamian kings, Indo-European chiefs, Roman equites, medieval knights, etc.), so the control and command of oil- powered vehicles would be the symbol of a future elite it seems to me - commanding horsepower instead of horses. Internal combustion engines are an incredibly useful and powerful technology that are hard to replace or substitute, so it makes sense that as they get rarer they would be treated with almost mystical awe - heck the car is already a fetish object in the United States right now. There is certainly no logical reason for our car culture. Immortan Joe's war boys carry steering wheels as totems, smear grease on their face, make the sign of the V-8, and even ritually spray chrome on their teeth before going into battle for that shiny smile. "Machines are more permanent that human life," as director George Miller puts it.
IJ is sending Charlize Theron, aka Imperator Furiosa (Seriously, the best part of post-apocalypse is the cool names you get to have) to bring back a new shipment of fuel from wherever it is produced (fracking wells?). Despite the lack of technology, somehow Furiosa has a cybernetic left arm (?). Unbeknownst to him, Furiosa is instead making a break for it, and stowed away on board her truck is Joe's harem of wives. See, Joe has apparently monopolized all the nubile young females in the entire citadel for himself and stashed them away in a harem (everyone else being sterile and mutated from radiation or something - I don't know). Just like the real world, elite males restrict reproductive access of females to themselves to pass along their genes exclusively which probably happened in antiquity as well. We know that with the rise of agriculture around 8,000 BC only one man passed his genes along for every 17 women, and this was probably why. Access to female was partitioned by wealth, with most men ending up as slaves, servants, serfs, eunuchs, flunkies, roadkill, cannon fodder, nomads and hermits. Shades of our own future with most men having no jobs, wives or prospects in the new economy, and only a small amount of alpha males able to afford the costs to reproduce.
Furiosa and her fellow wives in Immortan Joes' harem are sick to death of being sex slaves and milking cows in the patriarchal society (he's got some sort of breast milk spigot going?). When Joe discovers the double-cross, he calls on his allies in Gas Town and Bullet Farm and sends out an army to get them back, a la Helen of Troy. His massive flotilla (drivetilla?) of cars is played off by the guy who steals the entire movie from Hardy and Theron despite having hardly any screen time - the Doof Warrior, a guitar-rocking heavy metal guy in a gas mask and red onesie, tied to a bungee cord and perched atop a massive truck filled with speakers with taiko drummers on the back. Did I mention that his guitar is also a friggin' FLAMETHROWER!!! The Internet has gone nuts for the Doof Warrior, and collectively agrees that he alone is cooler than all 120+ minutes of Tomorrowland, as the still below proves:
This still is more awesome than all of Tomorrowland.
Geez, no WONDER people loved the post-apocalyptic future in Tomorrowland! Note to Hugh Laurie: if you want to talk people out of embracing the apocalypse, for Gods sakes, DO NOT SHOW THEM THE DOOF WARRIOR!!!
Anyway, Max spends pretty much half the early part of the movie shackled in an iron mask as a human hood ornament/portable blood bag for the war boy called Nux (not to be confused with Nix, above, or the Knights Who Say Ni. I know it's confusing). The chase scenes are marvelously done, and even though I wasn't planning on seeing this in 3D I'm glad I did - trust me, spring for the extra cost, in this case it's worth it. Interestingly, one of the reason that the movie's chase scenes are easy to watch and follow is because of George Miller's directing technique. He keeps the the center of your attention in the center of the frame at all times, so that when it's cut together, the action is seamless and easy to follow because your eyes aren't wandering all over the screen. This is the difference between a good action director and a lousy one. Somebody please inform the talentless hack Michael Bay that CGI shit spinning around the screen with no frame of reference and no concession to the laws of physics induces confusion and nausea rather than awe.
In gratitude for getting his mask off, and with nothing else better to do, Max decides to help Furiosa and the wives get to the "green place" where Furiosa grew up, with Nux tagging along. So I guess everyone really is moving to Portland.
After more harrowing experiences, Furiosa is united with her all-girl desert-dwelling clan. When asked where the green place is, they assume it's where Furiosa came from. D'oh, we were there all along! The sisters have been saving seeds and are ready to plant a new civilization, all they need is water. Hey, they happen to know a guy who has lots of the stuff. Rather than strike out across an impassable desert in search of someplace better, Max, Furiosa, Nux, the wives, and the Ya-Ya Sisterhood decide to return and confront Immortan Joe and his minions to get back to the water supply and plant their seeds.
You can pretty much take it from here. In the chase the other direction, Nux gives his life to save the others, Joe is killed (by having his mask ripped off - eww) along with his son Rictus (shouldn't he be called Immortan Ted or something?), The Bullet Farmer, the People Eater, the Organic Mechanic, and even the Doof Warrior (NO!!!). Returning to the citadel, they inform the confused residents that IJ is dead and the caravan is not coming back.
The film ends on a surprisingly optimistic note, with the mountain being opened up and the resources withheld for so long are turned over to the people. Joe's minions and toadies, sick of his bullying, accept the new regime without question and Furiosa and the wives become the new rulers. Max, his work done here, wanders back into the desert to continue his search for someone to help with his anger management issues, at least until the inevitable sequel: Mad Max 2: Rise of the Doof Warrior.
There's supposedly some sort feminist message here that's gotten a disproportionate amount of press coverage (they love controversy!). If there is - I'm all for it. Patriarchies suck for everyone. Rule by women is much better than sociopathic alpha males. I don't know why anyone would object to this. Yes, the men are mostly assholes, and the women decent, but this reflects real life in my experience. Kick-ass women are okay in my book. And don't forget, men are heroes too (Max and Nux).
Unlike Tomrrowland, Mad Max feels visceral and real. People behave like actual people, and the relationships have much more heft despite the breakneck action sequences and minimal dialogue. I felt much more emotionally invested in these characters and what happened to them than anything in Tomorrowland. It felt like there was actually something at stake here unlike the other movie.
In Mad Max's world, the laws of physics apply, scarcity is real, you have to make and do things yourself, and you have to know how they work. Trucks break down, require fuel, and have kill switches. Doors jam, metal rusts and bolt cutters are needed to get your metal mask off. Perhaps part of the reason it feels so visceral and real is that a lot of the visual effects and stunts were real:
Final Thoughts
Watching just how well Tomorrowland simulated the future that we thought we would actually be living in by now on the screen, I kept thinking of this memorable quote from David Graeber's article in The Baffler:
"...as I watched one of the recent Star Wars movies...I couldn’t help but feel impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.”
"Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?"
"Why did the projected explosion of technological growth everyone was expecting—the moon bases, the robot factories—fail to happen? There are two possibilities. Either our expectations about the pace of technological change were unrealistic (in which case, we need to know why so many intelligent people believed they were not) or our expectations were not unrealistic (in which case, we need to know what happened to derail so many credible ideas and prospects)."
Graeber argues that elites prefer to trade off a more technologically-constrained future for increased power and control.
End of work arguments were popular in the late seventies and early eighties as social thinkers pondered what would happen to the traditional working-class-led popular struggle once the working class no longer existed...From the perspective of those living in Europe, North America, and Japan, the results did seem to be much as predicted. Smokestack industries did disappear; jobs came to be divided between a lower stratum of service workers and an upper stratum sitting in antiseptic bubbles playing with computers. But below it all lay an uneasy awareness that the postwork civilization was a giant fraud. Our carefully engineered high-tech sneakers were not being produced by intelligent cyborgs or self-replicating molecular nanotechnology; they were being made on the equivalent of old-fashioned Singer sewing machines, by the daughters of Mexican and Indonesian farmers who, as the result of WTO or NAFTA–sponsored trade deals, had been ousted from their ancestral lands. It was a guilty awareness that lay beneath the postmodern sensibility and its celebration of the endless play of images and surfaces.
[...]
By the sixties, conservative political forces were growing skittish about the socially disruptive effects of technological progress, and employers were beginning to worry about the economic impact of mechanization. The fading Soviet threat allowed for a reallocation of resources in directions seen as less challenging to social and economic arrangements, or indeed directions that could support a campaign of reversing the gains of progressive social movements and achieving a decisive victory in what U.S. elites saw as a global class war. The change of priorities was introduced as a withdrawal of big-government projects and a return to the market, but in fact the change shifted government-directed research away from programs like NASA or alternative energy sources and toward military, information, and medical technologies.
It strikes me that in America today we have people with devices straight out of Tomorrowland walking around looking they just stepped straight out of Mad Max. I thought of this during a recent trip to Target. Much of the American public, especially in economically depressed areas, look like extras from Max Max as James Howard Kunstler often likes to point out. Giant bloated and distended bodies, shaved heads, outlandish hairstyles, long scraggly beards, elaborate tattoos covering much of the body, piercings in every orifice, and garish ill-fitting clothing including leather biker-wear are all de rigeur everywhere in modern-day Middle America, as any trip to Wal-mart will prove. Yet these same people have computers straight out of Tomrrowland in their pockets, swipe credit cars to pay for merchandise from the other side the world, have artificial pacemakers and titanium hips implanted inside them, and find their way around with satellite navigation.
And again I'm thinking of Dubai. Nowhere on earth looks more like the actual Tomorrowland than Dubai, except surrounded by the parched deserts of Mad Max rather than amber waves of grain. But most of us will never set foot in Dubai. It's for an international jet-set elite. Just like the interdimensional Tomorrowland, it is inaccessible to most of us.
And that's the problem.We don't see tent cities surrounding Tomorrowland; in Tomorroland there are no homeless spikes. Its tall buildings are not reed-like Pikettyscrapers designed to optimize sales for footloose absentee owners which lie darkened and empty half the time. But Tomorrowland does depict scientists and elites living in a world separate from the rest of us, and that's looking uncomfortably like the real world. From gated houses in the Hollywood hills, to"enterprise zones" like Guragon in India, to Google's human terrarium in California, to Bangkok where a few malls use more energy than entire provinces, to plans to set up seasteading "tech-incubators" outside of international laws and labor regulations, the rich are seceding from society, and in place of technologies to benefit us all, they see us as just another resource to be extracted, used, and thrown away if inconvenient. Anyone outside of Tomorrowland had better fend for themselves is the new reality; and most of us are on outside. Rather than technocrats with a conscience, the tech elite are behaving more like Immortan Joe. It's Tommorrowland's technology coupled with Mad Max's social relations. It's like a movie where Tomorrowland is surrounded by the oil-guzzling hot-rod barbarians of Mad Max.
In the same part of the world as the futuristic city of Dubai with its indoor ski slopes, artificial islands, medical rejuvenation facilities, and kilometer-high skyscrapers, is the Islamic State, a self-described Caliphate ruled by Sharia Law straight out of the thirteenth century, which is currently charging across the Middle East, beheading people, and torching oil refineries. This seems to be the bellwether of our future. And therein lies the contradiction. Which one is spreading and which is receding? It's not Tomorrowland versus Mad Max, they seem to be both occupy exactly the same space like the imaginary Tomorrowland depicted in the movie and our world. I know which one I live in. One thing's for sure - it probably won't have a happy ending.
Mad Max reminds us that its is still possible us to find hope and redemption in a world gone mad. To me, that's going to be a far more important lesson for most of us than Tomorrowland's simplistic bromides about wishing for a shiny jetpack future.
A while back I mentioned the fact that one of my coworkers was ill with cancer. She died last week Friday, about a month shy of her sixtieth birthday. She told me once that she put away the maximum amount possible in her 401K. Unfortunately, she will never see it. It makes one question the entire “be miserable until retirement and then start living when you’re 60,” mindset we’re supposed to have under capitalism. Sometimes 60 never comes.
But at least she was not miserable. She genuinely loved her job. She told me she looked forward every day to coming into work. This wasn’t bullshit either; this was genuine. Every day, even with cancer she was there desk at 6:00 AM in the morning. She worked continually through the day, never an idle moment. She worked at the same firm for 25 years. And unlike a lot of the other ultra-boring people here, at least she was interested in a variety of things, from medieval history to travel to geography (it was nice occasionally to have an intelligent conversation once and a while.)
What strikes me is that she was genuinely happier battling terminal cancer than I am in my normal state. Often times she had to cheer me up. It’s pretty awkward complaining about how much you hate your life when the person sitting next to you is literally dying.
Her story was typical of her generation. She grew up on Milwaukee’s South Side and went to our South Division High School where she as the only female in mechanical drafting class. She was reluctantly convinced by some mentors to pursue a career in architecture, which she did, eventually being grandfathered in and allowed to sit for the exam mid-career and without a degree.
But really, in the end, the profession sort of left her behind. The office became much more corporate and she did not have the pedigree that today's corporations are after. AutoCAD replaced her hand drafting and lettering (which I’m told was exquisite). She struggled a bit with Revit and BIM, which we now use for production. But she hung on through it all, through all the changes in the profession, even as she stagnated in the corporate hierarchy and was left unappreciated except for her dedication and personality. Yet despite this, she was still able to supervise contract document work on large hospitals around the country.
She grew up in a much less cruel time. It was a time when “ordinary” people could have a real career in a place like Milwaukee without family money and connections.
Not any more. Such a person could never become an architect today. Today, such people are being displaced by the footloose upper-class who move around the country (and even around the world) to occupy the slim top tier of professional/technical jobs. Our summer interns this year are all full-time graduate students from Clemson University in South Carolina. Clemson is not cheap:
Founded in 1889, Clemson University consists of Six colleges: Agriculture, Forestry and Life Sciences; Architecture, Arts and Humanities; Business and Behavioral Sciences; Engineering and Science; Health and Human Development, and Education. As of 2014, Clemson University enrolled a total of 17,260 undergraduate students for the fall semester and 4,597 graduate students and the student/faculty ratio is 16:1.The cost of in-state tuition is about $13,054 and out-of-state tuition is $30,488.US News and World Report ranks Clemson University 20th among all national public universities. (Wikipedia)
The intern who sits in my area is from Rochester, Minnesota, so the latter figure is the accurate one. I can’t even imagine being able to afford that even if I could not work, not that they would admit me in any case. Here is another biography another newly hired intern (name omitted of course):
XXX is a M.Arch and M.LA dual degree student at Washington University in St. Louis expected to graduate in the winter of 2015. He earned his bachelor degree in Material Physics before studying architecture. His professional training in aesthetics and engineering have been honed through several internships. At PTW Architects Shanghai office, he applied his knowledge in physics and successfully developed a building facade system that could produce a cloud of vapor to help the cooling of the building. At Gensler’s Chicago Office, he worked with various clients ranging from motor centers, national franchise supermarkets to national banks. Last summer XXX worked for Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, where he focused on the EXPO 2017 project (DD and pre-CD). While in school he manages the 3D Printing Lab, supervising students in 3D modeling and providing 3D printing technical support. He is a proficient user of Revit, has construction documentation and LEED project experience.
And it seems the “ordinary” salt-of the earth local I have worked with over the years are slowly being displaced with the shiny new globalized hyperachieving models. And this is happening across the board in every profession. Average is over, apparently. The old timers I worked with by-and-large were always the most knowledgeable and the most down-to-earth. Usually they had no degree and came from humble origins, like my co-worker. Times have changed. Whenever I go to one of these funerals, it feels like I am witnessing
the slow dying off the white working class. They are not reproducing themselves. Their kids are struggling. As much as I hate to say
it, I see an utter cluelessness on the part of the lower classes
themselves about this fact. The look of their eyes is that of the cows
in the feedlot – happily chewing their cud totally oblivious to the
fate in store for them and their children. Call it the burden of knowing. I feel bad for them.
Chris Ryan recently talked a little bit in his past two episodes about his decision to not have children. Given that such a mode of life is essentially nonexistent here in the Midwest, I was interested to hear his reasons. I might reflect on my own reasons besides the practical (i.e. as a male I don’t have the equipment).
I could clearly see even from a young age that the lower classes were being liquidated. I could also clearly see that entry to the middle class has been totally shut down. Everything I have seen since has convinced me that this trend is not changing but accelerating (as I’ve written about over the years). That’s the “new” economy and the “new” America. You’re either in the upper class or you’re done for. And my family was definitely not in the upper class. Everyone else will have little to look forward to besides demeaning jobs, patching together enough gigs to survive another day, pinching pennies, debt serfdom, uncertain retirement, etc. Not much of a life, in other words. Since I don’t like cubicle life, and that is the only life there will be in the future, why would I even think about creating new life even if I had the chance? Nonexistence seems preferable to being a wage-slave.
The one saving grace to my family being a complete and utter horror show is the lack of any desire to propagate it into the future. In fact, my only desire is to bring this family to a well-deserved conclusion. I myself should never have been born, but I was, and I’m here, and that’s OK. There’s nothing I can do about that besides self-termination, and I’m going to die anyway, as are we all. But I see no reason to continue that forward, and feel no obligation to do so given the miserable circumstances and lack of opportunity I grew up in. I don’t see anything “noble” in life for its own sake. I always believed in my heart of hearts that my parents should never
have had me. Not because there is anything particularly bad about me,
but because my parents were simply not the kind of people who had the
circumstances and emotional maturity to do so. I never had much of a
chance, really.
I also realized I was profoundly ordinary. I’m not particularly good at anything, I’m not a genius, I’m not particularly attractive, I wasn’t the head of my class, I wasn’t a super-athlete, I’m not a musician, I’m a middling artist at best. I’m not a doctor, a physicist, an engineer, a math-whiz or anything like that. There is nothing special about me, and in an age where average is over, it’s helpful to realize that being average, you have nothing to offer the brave new world we’re building. Since I haven’t really enjoyed my life at all to this point, I certainly don’t want to pass along that “gift.” I see it as more of a burden. I wish my parents had offered me the same courtesy. I think there can be no more selfish act than having children and not thinking about what kind of future those children will have. Yet sadly we see it all the time.
I also don’t tell anyone else what to do, nor to I begrudge anyone else's situation. My circumstances are unique. In fact, sometimes I wish that more people who had their shit together would have children, rather than the most fucked-up people imaginable. People tend to bring another soul into the world with no more concern than buying rims for their car, or bringing home puppies.
I’ve had a lot of difficulties in my life, and a lot of misery, and I would never want to subject another living being to what I have gone through. Now on the other side of forty, things are better now, and I’ve figured out a lot of things, but that doesn’t erase the pain of all those years, and the realization of how messed up and antithetical to human happiness and well-being our society is. So many people I see going through life on auto-pilot following the script, operating on instinct and social cues – now the job, now the degree, now the house, now the wife, now the kids, now the minivan. And I look around and think that it doesn’t look so appealing to me. Just another repeat of the same.
I wish I could understand the motivation. I wish I could join the party, be a happy cubicle worker, bright and bushy-tailed at my desk at 7:30 AM commuting in from white-picket fence-ville, anesthetizing myself in a fog of reality TV and spectator sports. It seems so much easier.
Tomorrow is my annual employee review with the suburban Midwest ultra-breadwinners.(with their “dad bods,” lol) I don’t even know what to say anymore. Now, even people like me with insufficient degrees are being forced out of the profession. It’s clear that I have no future at this firm or in the profession in general anymore. I’m sick of what I do. Should I say that? It’s clear that you need to have a certain type of personality to make in corporate America (and the Midwest “culture”on top of it). I call them "homo corpratus." The rest of us are just wasting our time. They actually wrote “Where does Chad see himself in five years?” on my review. Where indeed? Unemployed? In debt (again)? Homeless? Deceased? It just keeps getting harder and harder to give a fuck.
Life is short indeed. Some people just aren’t cut out for the way the world is now. The least we can do is recognize it and not propagate the suffering. RIP Audrey, you belong in this world a lot more than I do.
P.S. Agree or disagree - here is some food for thought:
At the Hipcrime Vocab I don't often write about personal stuff, but I hope you'll allow me a brief indulgence. I suppose whether you find this a welcome or break or not will depends on you, but personal stuff seems to popular on blogs for some reason.
Anyway, If you've been following this blog for a while, you may have gotten the impression over the past year that I am becoming increasingly dissatisfied with where I am, both geographically and in life in general. One of the things I realized during my trip(ping) in California was that my failures have a great deal to do with where I am. Every day my heart and my gut tell me that I just don't belong here. The cold and gray skies and endless winter envelop me in a gloom that is palpable. I know that everyplace has its downsides, but increasingly I feel that there is nothing here for me anymore. I feel it every day. Listening to Chris Ryan's podcast among others has also altered my perspective.
Yet I'm afraid. I've only ever lived here, and I have no real friends or connections anywhere else.
On the C-realm last week, KMO read a comment from the Friends of the C-Realm on Facebook, and I was struck by this in particular: "I'm reminded of an interview with Scott Adams, the cartoonist who does Dilbert. He was asked why the two smartest people in the strip, the paperboy and the garbageman, aren't engineers. He said something to the effect that really smart people don't allow themselves to be used by others like Dilbert is by the pointy-haired boss, Catbert, etc. Instead they live their own lives, according to their own rules."
Notice how those professions are considered "low status." But I can see that being a high-status "professional" isn't all its cracked up to be, from the endless stress, to the boring meetings to the the nonstop personality politics. Without a litter to put through college like me cow-workers (sic), I can't help but wonder why I'm putting myself through this.
Intrigued, I decided to look for the interview. I didn't find it, but I did find another interview with him. I picked up his book from the library.
The first thing that struck me was the fact that Adams had gotten on plane and moved out to California from New England with no job, due to an incident where he nearly froze to death in his car. I can relate, especially since it's been 10-30 degrees colder than the average year round for the last four years (and we are already the second coldest metropolitan area in the country after Minneapolis).
Adams also realized that his small New England town didn't have much to offer in the way of opportunities. On the plane to California, a businessman sitting next to him told him that the thing to do when you get a job is immediately to look for a better one, that is, your job is not what you do; your real job is to look for other jobs.
Adams' philosophy is basically that success is a matter of luck, but you can make the odds much better by following system where your odds of succeeding are higher than they otherwise would be, much like a hunter going to a bird blind in a marsh to hunt ducks rather than sit in his backyard.
Adams famously held a series of corporate cubicle jobs that later formed the basis of his work, but his real goal was to be a CEO or entrepreneur. He pursued a never-ending series of harebrained business ideas and get-rich-quick schemes to free himself from cubicle serfdom. We all know what happened of course - one particular harebrained scheme to be a cartoonist took off. Adams self-effacingly points out that this is despite neither his writing or humor skills being particularly terrific, and he points out all the coincidences that made Dilbert work when there were such long odds against it. Believe it or not, Dilbert did not start as a cartoon about office life. Because he was one of the first cartoonists to make his email public (email being new back then), people unanimously told him that the office strips were their favorite, and the format changed to what we know today. And the timing was perfect - Dilbert came along right as neoliberalism was turning workplaces into downsized dystopias, and it quickly became the symbol of the absurdity of corporate life that we know today.
Even after the comic took off, Adams continued to invest in one scheme after another, often failing (including a TV show, a series of restaurants in California, and the "Dilburrito."). This is in keeping with his philosophy that the key to success is not being afraid to fail often. Other ventures, such as writing and speaking were more successful, but also due to serendipity. There's lots more, of course, but I'll save that for another time.
Last week, a woman at work decided to pursue her lifelong dream to move to New York City, "while I'm still young," (she's probably like 20-21). (Seriously, what is it with young women and NYC, I just don't get it). Anyway, she already had a job lined up. When I asked her how she did it, she said connections and networking. Not much help for me there, I'm afraid.
In a weird note from above, the firm I left to come to my current one, where I was treated very poorly and left under not the best terms because of it, is relocating from the far northwest side to literally a block away, just down the street. Every day Mordor is moving closer to completion, and I have to walk by it every day on my way to work. You can imagine how that makes me feel. Those people are going to be in my neighborhood very soon, and I do not want to see them.
Like Adams, I've grown increasingly disenchanted with my cubicle-bound existence. It seems that architecture is just another desk job full of drudgery, overwork and stress for all but a lucky few. I increasingly feel like my architecture career is over. I just don't enjoy it anymore. The reasons could fill a post in and of itself, and someday I may do that. But with only a four-year degree, it seems like I'm pretty much unhireable. I just don't feel like spending two more years of my life on expensive and useless education jumping through more arbitrary hoops when I already know what the "reward" will be. As the saying goes, "if you liked school, you're going to love work." I'm also reminded of the old adage about law school - "a pie-eating contest where the first prize is more pie."
That means the thing I've done for the past twenty years I can no longer do. I'm scared of having to start over at my age. It seems that the economy "naturally" wants people unemployed rather than employed, and places all the burden on you to rectify that situation.
Clearly I'm not going to succeed in the office environment. It takes a "special" type of person that I'm just never going to be. It's also the most homogeneous place you can imagine. Bland, boring, upper-class professionals with the suburban house and the minivan and the 2.5 kids discussing spectator sports and golf all day long (seriously, the guys who sit near me spend their weekends watching professional golf on TV). I feel so alienated, and trading in one cubicle for another doesn't seem like a good plan. There are just so few architecture jobs here to begin with, and they're much worse than even the status quo.
Given Adams' advice, it seems like being around people more like me will give me a better change at friendship, romance, and carer advancement in whatever career I end up doing.
As a sidenote, the past few weeks I unexpectedly encountered a couple of people who to my great surprise, are actually from here. I've been watching the brilliant Wolf Hall on PBS. Mark Rylance, the lead, is considered to be one of the best classical actors today. He also grew up in Milwaukee (his parents were teachers who moved here from England to teach). And I listened to this interview with Ginger Kern before discovering at the end that she is also from Milwaukee. Ginger's dream was to live abroad, and now she coaches other people on it too.
Anyhow, to cap this off, I've been thinking about signing up again at my local Crossfit gym. With the weather warming up and my health issues seemingly behind me, it seemed like a good time. I used to go there a few years back. The thing is, when our 6-month winter hits, I am literally CRUSHED. I'm a physical and emotional wreck. It takes everything I have just to get out bed and make it through the day for at least six months out of the year. Everything hurts, I have cold and flu symptoms nonstop, lethargy, no energy, fevers, headaches etc. continuously for months on end. Working out is totally out of the question. However, during our brief 3-4 month summer, I'm extremely active and outside or in the gym as much as possible.
The nice, sweet older woman architect who I've sat next to has been battling cancer for years. She still showed up every day whenever was physically able. She loved to travel. We regularly talked about foreign places, the Middle Ages (she used to be in the SCA) and all sorts of other topics. She was our longest-serving employee, there from the very inception of the office - over 20 years. She had not been in for several months. Last week her cubicle was totally cleared out in a day. She would not be returning to work. Another architect was moved in immediately. Life is short indeed.
Anyway, I've rambled long enough. It's been an odd few months. I still don't know what to do. But it appears I keep getting hit over the head with messages. I just wish I had some sort of guidance.
