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The New Inquiry Magazine New World Order Vol. 16, May 2013 thenewinquiry.com
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The New Inquiry Magazine is licensed under a creative commons license [CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0]

Images The Night Walker, 1964 [Courtesy monstermoviemusic.blogspot.com] The Woman Hunt, 1973 I, Madman, 1989
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s Editor-in-Chief Rachel Rosenfelt Creative Director Imp Kerr Executive Editor Rob Horning Senior Editors Emily Cooke Malcolm Harris Managing Editor Joseph Barkeley Editors Atossa Araxia Abrahamian Adrian Chen Max Fox Samantha Hinds Sarah Leonard Willlie Osterweil Associate Editors Tim Barker Erwin Montgomery Editors at Large Aaron Bady M. Monalisa Gharavi Laurie Penny Contributing Editors Elizabeth Greenwood Ethan Hon Nathan Jurgenson Sarah Nicole Prickett s Founding Editors Rachel Rosenfelt Jennifer Bernstein Mary Borkowski Arts Editor at Large Jesse Darling A/V Editor Michelle Groskopf Publishing & Development Will Canine Reader and Advisor Michael Seidenberg
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Essays The Slopes of Davos 7 by T. Paul Cox Country Crushes 15 by Michelle Lhooq Just the Facts 23 by Jesse Ellias Spafford I Want to Believe 30 by Jarrod Shanahan Power Loss 37 by Amanda Shapiro

Reviews A Woman Under the Influence 44 by Sarah Nicole Prickett Urban Planting 50 by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
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Column Unsolicited Advice for the End Times 57 by Michael Seidenberg

Editors Note

ITS BEEN CLEAR to most people for some time that the world we live in is ending. This has always been true and also never been true enough. But at least this world, the one where white men and their valets conspire to make money make money, is on its way out. The numbers arent adding up. People are getting jumpy. This much is obvious. What was the world, and what ran it? The clues have been all around us. Yet the technocratic psychopath guild that controls the media the Bilderberg group, the reptilians, the Masons try never to let the narrative get so far out of their grasp that were able to piece it all together. And so there are a lot of unanswered questions. But by looking closely at what the elites say in Davos, or in mainstream political discourse on talk shows we can get a sense, at least, of what theyre trying to hide. In Just the Facts, Jesse Spafford demonstrates the contiguity of conspiracists and wonks, Alex Jones and Ezra Klein joined in their blind obeisance to the empirical. And in The Slopes of Davos, Paul Cox exposes the embarrassing attempt of the managers of global capital to play the growing instability in the market like theyre improvising jazz. Jarrod Shanahans The Illuminati treats the ur-conspiracy theory with a dose of materialist analysis, reading it as a folk understanding of the real ways capi5

talists operate as a class. If you can find a place to run to, youll want one. Those rich enough have already begun their scouting. Amanda Shapiros Power Loss tracks down the in-the-know survivalists mountain redoubt, courtesy of the NOAH project, with airstrip and stable ready to withstand an EMP attack launched from anywhere in the world. Michelle Lhooqs Country Crushes investigates the international public relations campaigns that countries such as Korea and Denmark have deployed to make themselves, in the words of Monocle magazine, trendy. Another option assuming the refuges of nation and nature disappear would be to seek out one of the future cities Atossa Araxia Abrahamian profiles. These neoliberal utopias have rich antecedents in St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Dubai, but still hold promise for developing countries that have stopped developing. They will be built for an international class, the bearers of global capital, but they will be built by migrant low-wage workers. Some things wont be new. This issue of the New Inquiry Magazine is by no means an exhaustive charting of the new world order. But it contains hints. This is no time to believe in the current order of things, least of all because its barely managing to stay put. Well only see its true shape as it comes apart. n

The Slopes of Davos

by T. PAUL COX

The World Economic Forum charts its darkest fears: superbugs and fake tweets.

DURING THE ANNUAL meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, in a school auditorium outside the ski resorts secure perimeter, theres a smaller Open Forum no invitation required for anyone who can make it up to the Swiss Alps. Its TEDx to Davoss TED, a neat package of webstream-ready inspiration. One of this years presentations was Life Lessons from Jazz: Improvisation as a Way of Life, in which Columbia ethnomusicology professor Chris Washburne and his band taught the audience how to survive neoliberal uncertainty with the spontaneous creativity that we have inherited from the African-American culture. Quoting the early soloist Sidney Bechet,
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Washburne calls jazz the sound of freedom. Its the sounds that emulate [sic] from the emancipated slaves. The newfound freedom that they found in the South of the United States, and they had to make sense of that freedom. They had to turn ugliness into beauty, and to rebuild their lives. So, too, do we have to grasp the new freedoms of the neoliberal world to improvise a way of life that celebrates uncertainty and precarity. A favored metaphor in Davos, jazz offers these life lessons to the precariat and the elites alike, while negating the responsibility of the latter to do anything about the vulnerabilities of the former. Were all in the music together, and risk sets the rhythm. Jazz mu-

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sicians have one of the riskiest jobs in the world, because failure is just around the corner at every single turn, Washburne assures us between sets of Azure and Caravan. As a matter of fact, you can think about jazz as just a series of failures. The World Economic Forum belongs to those who drape themselves in risk and find opportunity in each reversal of fortune. They are used to improv only improv promises mostly to enrich them, rather than allowing them to scrape by. In a way, the economic elite see this meeting as their own Montreux Jazz, a place for free-market thought leaders to fearlessly riff on the future as it comes. Their setlist comes in an annual Global Risks report prepared at the start of the year. This document, with its clean graphics in five colors Google plus purple lays bare the terrors of the moment and sorely tests the macho boardroom definition of risk. In the corporate world, risk always carries a harmonic of opportunity; always exists to be snatched up by someone with big enough balls and a good enough hedge. It is a kind of commodity. Any disaster just needs to be quantified in two variables likelihood of occurring, and potential impact and its ready for the market. The first Global Risk reports emerged seven years ago from a network of experts and roundtable consultations bringing together risk advisors, academics and executives. Insurance corporations Swiss Re, Zurich Insurance, Marsh & McLennan played, and continue to play, a nonspecific role as collaborators, providing guidance in the selec9

tion of risks. In 2011, the process switched to a larger email survey of leaders and thinkers from business, government, international organizations and the academies. Respondents were asked to rate a list of risks by likelihood of occurrence in the next ten years, by potential cost in billions of dollars, and by connection with other risks. In 2012 the survey pool grew to include NGOs, and the unit of potential impact changed from billions of dollars to a valueneutral five point scale. Like the Open Forum, this was Davos in its inclusive, multistakeholder guise. The sample nevertheless remains heavily skewed toward the business world, which accounts for over 42 percent of respondents this year; all other groups are dwarfed, with governments coming in at 8.1 percent. The list of risks also reached its current size and shape in 2012, and the authors decided to fix it in place for the sake of year-to-year analysis. These fifty possible disasters would thenceforth serve as the basic scale on which to jam the definitive threats to business and, by extension, humanity. Until the next overhaul, were stuck with the sound of 2012 but if its catastrophic imagination that we need, 2012 was a creative year. Global Risks 2013 explores catastrophes that are too big and unknown to hedge, even if many of them are already coming to pass. Its portfolio is fifty risk factors thick, with water shortages, liquidity crises and orbital debris, each precisely weighted by likelihood and potential impact and charted like commodities. Backlash against globalization is up.

The Slopes of Davos

Extreme weather is up. Nothing is down. Its for synergies across mitigation and adaptanever been clear exactly whose nightmares tion, across the demands of the carbon cycle these risks are, and the lack of attribution is and the GDP in other words, looking for part of the point. They are supposed to rise routes to continued growth that also happen up out of the data, objective and urgent, the to reduce emissions. The diametric opposivoice of the planet demanding to be heard. tion of these goals has not lessened in recent The data visualizations in Global Risks years, but with language like search and pos2013, network charts and scatter plots of sibility, the report holds out hope that we can drifting risk points, look like graphic notation improvise our way between these major and from the avant-garde wing of jazz. Simultaneminor scales. With communication and inously abstracting and reconstituting survey novation, we can plan smarter, not harder. data into swarms of color, the graphics go for At some grand systemic level, climate-smart impact over legibility, sketching impressions asks us to believe that capitalism and nature of an intricate score that, if played as music, rise and fall together, and to trust that the Fowould carry a clear, smooth, rising melody. rum believes this too. From more than a thousand survey reThe second constellation is called Digital sponses, the authors tease out three risk conWildfires in a Hyperconnected World. This is, stellations of interlinked potentialities. The indeed, talking about Twitter. The authors first constellation, Testing Economic and Enliken the Internet to early radio, and digital vironmental Resilience, invites a Sandy commisinformation to the 1938 War of the Worlds parison that couldnt have been in last years broadcast which would be frightening, if report: Like a super storm, two major sysWellss staged Martian invasion and the retems are on a collision course. The noreaster sulting panic had actually been the worst of economic crisis and thing that happened in the hurricane of climate the 1930s. change, in their union, All the classic pranks will bring unprecedentof recent years are presClimate-smart asks ed challenges. ent the Sandy shark us to believe that With green photos, fake Tony Haycapitalism and nature growth going stale, the ward, and The Innocence rise and fall together, World Economic Forum of Muslims. But this risk endorses a successor stands on two unacand to trust the Forum mindset from the UN knowledged assumpbelieves this too Food and Agriculture tions: that the effects Organization: climateof misinformation are smart. Being climate negative, and that the smart means searching consequences of false
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T. PAUL COX

information are greater than those of true information. The latter is disputed by several of the reports examples, like the case of the YouTube hit United Breaks Guitars. This ballad about a musicians travel mishap did damage United Airlines stock value, but it was not untrue. What it comes down to is that executives, including many of those involved in the survey, regularly rate social media among the greatest risks their corporations face. The way the CEOs see it, talking about misinformation is the safest way of talking about the control of information. The reports authors nevertheless acknowledge that restrictions on freedom of speech may have undesirable consequences. Their alternative proposal is halfhearted and unworkable: a persistent credibility rating system for Internet users, described as eBay feedback for the digital self. The final constellation of risks is juicily titled The Dangers of Hubris on Human Health, referring to the unwinnable race against drug-resistant bacteria and viruses. This looks like the contest in which our would-be Satchmos come up against the planets true masters of improvisation. But the assignment of blame gets a bit confusing.Interestingly, respondents to the Global Risks Perception Survey connected antibiotic-resistant bacteria to failure of the international intellectual property regime, the authors explain, ever so slightly embarrassed with their own data. The connection highlights a global market failure to incentivize front-end investment in antibiotic development through the promise
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of longer-term commercial reward. This strange, spurious connection forces us to reflect finally on whose heads were looking into, and what these graphics actually measure. The first question is answered deep in an appendix on page 61 where we find the breakdown of the survey sample, and that a lions share of 42.1percent hail from the business world. Academics (17.8 percent), NGOs (16percent), governments (8.1 percent) and international organizations (7.7 percent) provide the sidemen to these bandleaders. These well buried figures are important because the report tells us that different groups acknowledge different risks. NGO staffers give higher likelihood scores for most risks than government assessors, and higher impact scores than the business sector. Economists worry much about fiscal imbalances and little about income disparity. Women rate almost every risk higher, with important implications for managers seeking expertise to make the most informed decisions (There is only one risk, backlash against globalization, which men rated as more likely than women.) Risk assessment experts deal with complex global systems, unknown variables, and the contentious political ground in which the acceptability of risk is decided. This is the reason for the survey: its a clever way of quantifying the unquantifiable, crowdsourcing the actual work of assessment to a thousand informants whose own rationality operates below the reports level of analysis. The experts of 2013, now plugging the survey re-

The Slopes of Davos

sults into their own calculations, are getting las was its foremost anthropologist, who, nothing but feedback. with political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, But the results are perverse: Every scatter created the cultural theory of risk in the lateplot in the report slopes contrary to the stastructuralist 1980s. Douglas described how tistical curve of actual risk. In the real world, certain risks are selected for focus and conthe most destructive possibilities the real cern by groups primarily as an expression of Hollywood spectacles are the least likely the social order they wish to manifest. While to occur. But in the Davos surveys, a strong governments see threats to authority and hipositive relationship between likelihood and erarchy, environmental activists see invisible impact lines up the dots on a 45-degree angle poisons flowing from a corrupt modernity. from 0/0 to 5/5 in the aggregate results, in Institutions devoted to the market focus on every breakdown, and even in the individual dangers that threaten the primacy of free responses. As the authors note, but do not atcontract between individuals because free tempt to explain, survey respondents seem individuals, improvising, can ride out any to be associating high-likelihood events with other challenge. high impacts an association found in no All of us, every fisherman or engineer or model of risk. parent or plutocrat, operate with keen risk The word risk is of sterling coinage, inventawareness in our everyday fields of compeed with probability theory in the 17th century tence, says Douglas. But these fields are limmathematics of gambling. Its meaning is forited, and the same awareness doesnt necesmal and formalizing, which is why a science sarily apply to big risks that involve complex continues to be built around it. However, social judgments of value. Here, even for most of us even experts have a way of slipexperts, the onus of choice is shifted away ping into adjacent folk from particular issues to concepts. In positively a choice between kinds associating impact and of social institutions, likelihood, the Forums writes Douglas in Risk Survey respondents survey-takers are revealand Blame Blame falls seem to be ing not the slope of risk in such a way as to reassociating but the slope of danger: inforce the local comhigh-likelihood that which looms closest munity ideal. Far from looms largest. being steadily analyzed, events with Risk as danger is from the start danger high impacts messy, political, and culis roped into the work tural not a subject for of showing up villains mathematics, but for anor maintaining morale thropology. Mary Dougwrites Douglas.
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T. PAUL COX

In stark political terms, its even easier to say: If an expert is warning that the retreat of intellectual property law may loose antibiotic-resistant bacteria on the world, that expert most likely belongs to an institution that feels strongly about the IP regime perhaps an institution within the private pharmaceutical sector. Maybe its just vested interest, or maybe there does seem to be an affinity between the invaders of protected bodies and the invaders of protected markets. When Davos analysts collect such feelings and recirculate them as quantified risk, they are engaging in an ideological task well known to anthropology, consolidating their view of global morality in the most powerful language they speak. It should be a harmonious collaboration, drawing the Davos set further into a shared understanding of our age. But the strange concerns and backward slopes get in the way.

and decision-making suggests that people use rules of thumb to make judgements in the face of ambiguity and complexity. This approach usually serves well but can lead to predictably faulty judgements under some circumstances. Psychologists call such predictably faulty judgements cognitive biases, and these biases influence how we respond to the best information at our disposal and integrate it in decision-making structures.

Institutional cultures and ideals are certainly not discussed in Global Risks 2013. Rational, free individuals are too fundamental to both economics and risk analysis. Instead, to explain their shortcomings, the reports authors take a leap over the cultural and go right to the cognitive level sooner questioning decision-makers brains than their allegiances.
Research in cognitive psychology

The mental flaws include our over-reliance on recent personal experience; our hyperbolic discounting of delayed costs and benefits; and thresholds of concern below which we ignore risks. This we is never the specific we of the reports own survey sample, who are after all experts, but the authors choose the collective pronoun all the same. Each of us is entreated to look within, to clear out the cobwebs of irrationality that keep us from seeing the world as it is. To locate these distortions in the recesses of human cognition, rather than in institutions and cultures, is a major feat of neoliberal thought. Its with such feats that the World Economic Forum papers over the base conflicts of our world, finding hope for consensus, triple wins, climate-smart synergy. Without acknowledging the different worlds of risk, danger and opportunity that we inhabit, theres always the promise of something simple and elegant. Something with a role for all of us, improvising together, as a band. Like this elegant Davos Quintet for 2013:
As the world faces a squeeze in public

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The Slopes of Davos

funds at the same time as the effects of climate change are increasing, it is only through collaboration among governments (to further the public interest), businesses (to search for innovative products and solutions), legal experts (to mitigate fear of liability), science (to bring good quality supporting data and analyses) and the financial sector (to innovate and avoid future damaging costs) that the limits of environmental and economic resilience can be successfully navigated.

If this collaboration ever happens, Chris Washburne has some advice from up on stage. When jazz musicians are really improvising, we are pushing the limits almost over the precipice into chaos, he says, setting his trombone aside. Were up here and need to deeply listen to one another, to hear

each others stories, and where were going, and work with that together as a team. If we dont listen, thats when chaos kicks in, and thats when bad jazz happens. Like the whole jazz metaphor, his insight is operationally useless at the global scale. To envision the Davos Quintet as musicians creating together leaves out power and conflict and all questions of resources. The proposal relegates all sides to communicative roles, simply writing the problem of the squeeze in public funds out of the score. Its not really a model at all, and neither is jazz. Rather, both work to naturalize the Davos world view an ideology of the information age that, following the lead of jazzmen before, mystifies the musicians on stage as a conduit for something greater: the flow of the music. n

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Country Crushes
by MICHELLE LHOOQ

Why do we swoon over some cultures, but not others?

I. Introduction EVERY FEW YEARS, a new country grips the public imagination, spawning a morass of food trends, fashion trends, and dance moves. We are seduced not just by bands or designers, but by entire foreign nations that rise out of obscurity into the forefront of popular culture. Why are some countries more attractive than others and how do they do it? The ascent of Korea and Denmark current darlings of the East and West can give us some clues. Their rise onto the global stage may seem like happy accidents or good fortune, but like most cool things, were actu16

ally the results of concentrated, and very deliberate, efforts.

II. Everyone Is Eating Ash And Dancing To Psy Danophilia and the Korean Wave are just the most recent versions of a persisting phenomenon that has existed ever since weve had the technology to learn about the others across the horizon. In the 19th century, European artists collectively creamed themselves over japonisme. And, as Tolstoy so effectively lampooned in his novels, aristocrats in Tsarist Russia just loved parler en franais.

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Today, the speed atwhich culture is propagated and consumed has increased dramatically: We consume more, connect more, and get bored of things more quickly. And, as the New Yorker a leading propagator of country-crushes in the U.S. documented last year, Denmark is quite literally the flavor of the month. Ever since a group of Danish chefs drew up an influential New Nordic Cuisine Manifesto, stating their mission of only using local ingredients in 2004, restaurants and some households all over the world have adopted the Nordic mantra of using local and seasonal ingredients, sometimes to an obsessive degree. But none have been able to surpass the worlds top-rated restaurant (at least according to Restaurant magazine) for three years in a row: Noma in Copenhagen, where foodies salivate over actual volcanic ash and moss. In some circles, the I went foraging with Ren Redzepi! story is akin to hanging out with Jesus. Then theres the Danish brand of noirdrenched TV shows, like The Killing and The Bridge, which everyone, from British housewives to Turkish hipsters, is hopelessly hooked on. Factor in the popularity of Denmarks minimalist design, and it becomes clear that Scandi-fever is a global epidemic. Even its politics are in vogue. The Economist jumped on the super-fan bandwagon with a February feature on Denmarks successful model of social democracy. It noted: Development theorists have taken to calling successful modernization getting to Denmark. The story went viral.
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Meanwhile, Korean cultures sweeping popularity or hallyu, as the locals call it has been propelled throughout the Eastern hemisphere by the slick sweetness of Korean soap operas, movies, and pop music. These three industries have collectively boosted Koreas reputation as Asias it country of the moment. Teenagers in Bangkok are ripping off their bedrooms posters of Tokyos shaggy-haired idols, replacing them with Seouls androgynous heartthrobs. Even my grandmother, who lives in Singapore, religiously tunes in every single afternoon to her favorite Korean drama dubbed over in Cantonese. Of course, Korea has already been on the global map thanks to the dominance of Korean tech brands like Samsung and LG. But it wasnt until a certain galloping, pot-bellied K-pop star became 2012s biggest meme that the world started falling for Korean pop cultures sugar-coated charm. When I asked Monocles editor-in-chief, Andrew Tuck, if he thought Korea could break into the Western hemisphere, he told me, Psy was just the tip of the iceberg. I took that as a yes.

III. The Three Stages Of Popularity Before examining how Korea and Denmark have been so effective at winning the publics admiration, its important to note that their trendiness is not quite the same as soft power a concept coined by Harvard professor Joseph Nye, who defined it as the ability

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to get what you want through attraction and ply by virtue of being American. Tokyo party not coercion. This basically means flashing girls dont bat a crystal-encrusted eyelid over your boobs instead of punching someone in picking at McFlurries. the face to get what you want a relativeSoft power isnt easy to measure, but every ly marginal strategy for the official Ameriyear, Monocle magazine tries to do exactly can foreign policy establishment (the U.S. that. In 2012, Britain topped the list (much spends about 500 times more on its military to the glee of the British media), thanks to that it does on public diplomacy efforts like a myriad of factors, from the London Olymbroadcasting and exchange programs) but pics to Skyfall. Joining it at the apex were one thats been at work for as long as America other giants like the U.S., France, Germany has been a country thanks to its pop-culture and Japanwho form a nice little circle of exports. hegemony over the rest of the worlds culturCountries with soft power have been able al consumption. Denmark and Korea arent to channel their appeal into a more permathere yet. According to Tuck, the countries nent type of clout; thus, trendiness is a stepthat topped the list have soft powers that are ping stone to the ultimate goal of amassing deeply rooted, and itll be a long time before soft power, which then allows countries to go anyone overtakes them. Its not a snapshot of about spreading their ideology to the world. hipness. Americas soft power, for example, played But this snapshot of hipness opens up a an integral role during the Cold War, when third kind of cultural popularity that MonoHollywood movies helped cast American cles list ignores (but that the magazine itself values in a glamorous lightwhile hostile indulges liberally.) Call it niche appeal: This Martians and nuclear category belongs to the war-spawned monsters countries that grab inwarned of communisms ternational attention, dangers. but only briefly, among Soft power Today, Americas select groups of people. isnt easy to glossy, gum-smacking For example, if youd measure, but culture is hard to avoid asked your film buff abroad. If Korea and friend what the coolevery year Denmark are like the est country in the world Monocle attempts cool indie band about was in 2007, the anto rank countries to make it big, America swer would most likely by just that iswell, Justin Bieber. be Romania which Even McDonalds is conswept the international sidered a cool hangout film festival circuit in the in some countries, simmid-aughts with home18

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grown hits like Police, Adjective, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. But the Romanian New Wave never spilled outside of the film industry, and the world remains just as ignorant about Romanian cuisine which may or may not be a good thing. A second example is Singapore. The garden city has been billed as the next Monaco a paradisiacal wonderland for the ultrarich where nightclubs are packed with billionaires, skin-tight Herve Leger dresses are practically a uniform, and every other chair is swathed in ostrich skin. But even though Singapore has been successful in attracting in a certain type of taxavoiding young billionaires, like Romania, it has (so far) failed to produce a seductive local culture that plays well on the global stage. The average Americans knee-jerk response when posed the question, What do you think of Singapore? is, Thats the place where you cant chew gum, right? Ouch.

IV. How Denmark and Korea Did It Despite the obvious differences between them, Denmark and Koreas road to trendiness merge at several key points. Both countries began as underdogs; in fact, Denmark was barely a blip on Europes radar. In Britainwhere the Danish delirium is now the strongestpeoples perceptions of Denmark were quite limited and clichd, said Guardian journalist Patrick Kingsley, author of How To Be Danish. We saw Denmark
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as this vague place that had Vikings hiding there, Gunther, and nice tables, probably, he said, And in the rest of Scandinavia, Ive heard it joked that Danes are the slightly more oafish ones who dont properly enunciate. Fast forward a few years, and that oafishness is now perceived as rustic charm and a rugged form of authenticitya counterpoint to the glossy trappings of our overcommercialized capitalism. Koreas relationship with its neighbors is more strained. Open wounds left behind by the Korean War, Japanese colonialism, and ongoing disputes over shared territory still sting. In Japan, where anti-Korean hostility is arguably the strongest, comic books with hateful portrayals of Koreans became bestsellers in 2005. John Seabrook noted in the New Yorker, hallyu has erased South Koreas regional reputation as a brutish emerging industrial nation where everything smelled of garlic and kimchee, and replaced it with images of prosperous, cosmopolitan life. He continued, Korean ancestry used to be a stigma... now its trendy. While this might not be completely true (deep-seated mistrust and economic competition cant be swept away by the flash of a pop stars thighs), what is remarkable is how far Korea has risen on the cultural totem pole despite this ugly babel of hateful racism. A second similarity lies in their finances: Both Seoul and Copenhagen are extremely well-developed cities small-scale, wealthy, wired, educated, high-output, secretly very competitive places, as Robert

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Bound, the culture editor of Monocle put it., when asked if he thought these two popular cities had a certain X-factor. Poor cities attract artists for the cheap rent but rich cities have the right infrastructure to incubate artistic talent. There are at least 15 years of hard work behind their bright plumage, Bound continued, Not in a horrible twatty-banker way, but in the unfancy bedrock beneath the illuminated dance floors investments in talent in music, art, fashion, film, and TV by which to proliferate it. Its also worth noting that financial support of both Denmark and Koreas biggest cultural industries comes from just a few giant organizations that profit handsomely from their countries appeal abroad One of the biggest investors in Danish culture is a company called DR a hugely influential public service broadcaster thats the local equivalent of the BBC. When Lauren Collins delved into its dayto-day operations for her New Yorker piece on Scandinavian TVs widespread popularity, she found that DRs centralization was key to its success, because it allows its employees to exploit decades worth of accumulated institutional knowledge. A showrunner can float a plot point by a specialist on the news desk. A producer can get a backdrop made in minutes in the downstairs workshop. Its no coincidence that Borgen, The Bridge and The Killing all three of Denmarks most popular TV programs were created and produced in-house. This hit factory system works just as well
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in Korea. Three music agencies, S.M., J.Y.P. and Y.G. (all named after their founders initials) dominate Koreas music scene, and are responsible for churning out Koreas flawless-trained and impeccably groomed idols year after year. Almost every hyper-polished Korean star goes through rigorous training before making their public debuts; this idolmaking process can take up to a decade, and each wannabe star is trained not only to sing and dance, but also to act, speak several foreign languages (Chinese and Japanese are key), and deal with the emotional pressure of intense media scrutiny. These agencies control every aspect of their idols careers by simultaneously taking on the roles of manager, agent and promoter and the rigor of their self-created system nullifies the likelihood of mistakes. Yes, Koreas factory-made idol system may be a backbreaking process for all involved but theres no doubt that its success derives, in part, from its remarkably efficient centralization. The success of Danish and Korean culture abroad, then, is not just a happy coincidence, but rather the effect of concentrated corporate efforts to develop, propagate, and monetize their products. Their governments roles in helping these efforts, as a form of good PR, should not be downplayed. The Islamic cartoons crisis of 2006 presented a spectacularly embarrassing debacle for Denmark, which it was eager to wash away. After the crisis, Kingsley said, Denmark has made a point of trying to create a different image of itself, exporting its cultural capital to create a different kind of image.

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Similarly, when Korean culture started gaining traction in the early aughts, fear that the Wave will fade like a fad inspired frequent discussions about the need for state support and appropriate state policies, wrote Korean scholar Sue Jin Lee. Mark Russell, the author of Pop Goes Korea, is staunchly opposed to giving the Korean government too much credit. [It] likes to take credit for things, and detractors of Korean pop culture sometimes claim it is just a government-pushed PR mirage, but neither is remotely trueonly after Korean music was established and significant did the government get interested. And yet, one cannot ignore the invisible helping hands of organizations like the government-sponsored Korean Culture and Content Agency (KOCCA), which was supplied with an annual budget of $90 million to do everything it could to support Korean cultures global dissemination. To wit: In March of this year, KOCCA began paying for expenses like airfare and accommodations when top Korean artists perform in music festivals around the world. When I asked Seabrook what distinguished K-pop from J-pop, its cultural predecessor, he replied, Korean cultural products are made specifically for export, whereas Japanese cultural products only happened to become popular abroadpartly because their domestic market was large enough to absorb most of their cultural production. Not true in Korea. Creating culture that can be marketed overseas was therefore part of the plan from the start.
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V. We Want What We Dont Have Peeling back the curtain to examine the catalysts to Korea and Denmarks meteoric rise reveals several key factors, none of which are particularly sexy. Behind the veneer of effortless cool, highly concerted financial assistance and well-thought-out strategizing by both corporate and government bodies have been instrumental to these two countries success. While it is important to acknowledge the talent and hard work of their artists, it would also be nave to think that Denmark and Koreas cultural ascent was an entirely serendipitous, bottom-up movement. Certain key factors such as corporate centralization, economic stability, a sharp eye for marketability, and generous government assistance enriched the soil in which the seeds of talent could take root, and blossom into their fullyrealized potential. However, fostering conditions for cultural growth is very different from a top-down approach of trying to squeeze out creativity. Obviously, a government cannot command its citizens to innovate any more than it can force them to have sex (although Singapores government has certainly tried, in many awkward and embarrassing ways). Providing structural and financial support without infringing on creative freedom is a tricky balancing act, and that is the lynchpin for both Korea and Denmarks success. But one final factor, perhaps the most vital, remains: both of these cultures are especially seductive because they show us an alternative

COUNTRY CRUSHES

way of life that is somehow better than our own but at the same time, familiar enough that we can envision a bridge between our world and this vision of utopia. The forest-foraged mentality of Denmarks culinary scene, the rugged pragmatism of their crime-solving TV shows (and their heroines home-spun sweaters), the large safety net of their politics: All of this looks extremely comforting from afar, a welcome respite from capitalisms soulless gloss. In times of recession, the desire to return to our roots, to a simpler time when everything worked as it should, can be overwhelming. On quite the opposite side of the spectrum, Koreas air-brushed soap opera and pop music stars are ambassadors of the polished sophistication that its neighbors are striv-

ing to achieve. Confident, stylish and wired, these superstars reflect their home countrys successful modernization but still retain their Confucian values. You can wear Margiela and still be a good Korean daughter, the dancing baby dolls of Girls Generation, Koreas most successful pop group, seem to be saying. For countries like Vietnam and Thailand that are still trying to figure out how to reconcile the forces of westernization, modernity and tradition, this call is also impossible to resist. Tapping into what others find strange yet familiar exotic, yet accessible seems to be a key ingredient in winning a country mass appeal. In the end, its not so different from any other commodity. The pleasure of pop is also the pleasure of recognition. n

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Just the Facts

by JESSE ELIAS SPAFFORD

Conspiracy theorists and technocrat pundits seem like opposites, but theyre closer than they may appear.

IT WAS JUNE 5, 2008, and Alex Jones was in Chantilly, Virginia, with a team of producers to stake out the annual meeting of the Bilderberg Groupa club where some of the worlds rich and powerful gather to candidly discuss geopolitics. Jones, a paleoconservative radio host and prominent producer of conspiracy-related documentaries, was sitting down to do a radio interview over the phone when a fire alarm began to sound. Rather than become annoyed at the disruption, he leaped instantly into crisis mode. Get your higher-quality cameras out and roll them! he barked at his producers. This may be some kind of setup. Turn most of the lights out. They do not want me on this show.
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Thats why this was done. This was done the minute Coast to Coast AM called. You got the small cams? A producer tossed him a thumb-size camera disguised with a Doublemint wrapper, a pseudo-spy device Jones had brought as a precaution in case they come and grab our cameras. Though Jones didnt explicitly say who they were, he was likely referring to henchmen of the New World Order, an alleged cabal of international global elites whothrough various front groups including the Federal Reserve, the Bilderberg Group, and the entire U.S. governmentare supposedly working to enslave the human species. Jones had come to expose these

JESSE ELIAS SPAFFORD

globalists, and the fire alarm was a sign that the New World Order was onto him. Though Jones had braved multiple arrests attempting to expose the conspiracy, this development appeared to be too much for him. Were going to check out tonight, he informed the crew. Im getting out of here with the footage weve got. Im not going to sit here and push my luck. Like the intricacies of the Talmud or preSocratic philosophy, the particularities of Joness conspiracy theories will seem a bizarre collection of arcane and useless trivia for everyone but true believers. More significant than the details is the structure of those beliefs and the broader conspiracy movement for which he has become a de facto spokesman. Conspiracism as a political movement is characterized by the de-emphasis of normative claimsthe ethics endorsed by Jones are almost comically noncontroversial, amounting loosely to the ethos that slavery and mass killing perpetrated by evil tyrants is badin favor of an intense focus on spurious empirical claims about, say, the role of the U.S. government in orchestrating the 9/11 attacks or the desire of elites to create a world government. It is an aposteriori politics that is driven by supposed facts rather than value-based interpretations of circumstances. To preserve the integrity of their detailoriented theories from empirical attack, conspiracists such as Jones will dismiss conflicting testimony as part of the conspiracy and cherry-pick pieces of ambiguous evidence that confirm their beliefs. They can thus
25

resent themselves as enlightened empirip cists who, through sustained diligent analysis and research, have come to understand the reality that eludes the ignorant masses. With its emphasis on the empirical, conspiracism is uncomfortably similar to the technocratic mindset of mainstream political discourse. Technocratic punditstypified by the likes of Ezra Klein, a journalist and blogger who runs the Washington Posts Wonkblogare likewise driven almost exclusively by data sets and empirical studies. As Bhaskar Sunkara suggested in a piece for In These Times, such pundits operate under the assumption that the facts are so powerful that they might lead people of all ideologies to embrace a particular array of ideologyfree policies.

JUST THE FACTS

When technocrats disagree, their debates are supposedly over strictly factual questions rather than ethical ones: Do restrictions on firearm sales actually decrease gun violence? Will running continued deficits destabilize the economy? Does raising the minimum wage increase unemployment? This is not so different from conspiracy theorists, who ask questions about the long-term effects of certain policies (e.g. water fluoridation), whether historical accounts of past events are consistent with the available evidence, and what will happen if certain groups acquire political power. The technocrats are akin to conspiracists in that they both claim a monopoly on the sorts of political facts that should sway policy. Both groups come equipped with their own body of experts and studies to vouch for their prescriptions. And both Jones and Klein derive their legitimacy from having, through their supposed diligence and uniquely sharp analytical minds, privileged access to some set of truths of political significance. Both assume that answers to factual questions will make the necessary political action irrefutable. All that divides the conspiracist from the technocrat is the nature of the facts they fetishize. The appeal of technocratic political debate is its scientism: By focusing on hard numbers, technocratic politics seems to escape from the subjectivity of values, inhabiting the seemingly more stable world of objective truths. Klein and his ilk have risen to prominence because they come wrapped in the respectable neutrality of the scientist and have eschewed the partisan bias of the d emagogue.
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This technocratic politics fits with a broader centrist hope that, through empirical data and policy battles fought strictly on the basis of factual information, we might find reconciliation that will render political disagreements obsolete. Rather than the left and right having to exist as perpetually warring factions, technocratic discourse promises us the serenity of consensus. Yet an information war also happens to be exactly what Alex Jones claims to be fighting. Given the similarity between Kleins and Joness political projects, why do we give so much credence to former yet dismiss the latter out of hand? After all, both believe they are discussing the facts and demystifying ideological distortion. The obvious answer is that Jones is simply incorrect, that the things he believes are laughably false. We might, thus, concede to Klein the status of the scientist, providing us access to the truth while relegating Jones to the ranks of alchemists or cranksthose whose theories are compelling but untrue. It is an intuitive solution but also one that cannot be sustained. The problem, unfortunately, is that there is simply no rationally justifiable way to divide the scientists from the loonsthe Kleins from the Joneses. The theoretical problem that conspiracy mongers like Jones poses for scientific inquiry was raised by 18th century philosopher and empiricist David Hume, who faced down nave scientism with a radical skepticism. Hume worried, for instance, that since we cannot actually observe a force like gravity in operation but can only infer it, we have

JESSE ELIAS SPAFFORD

no way of knowing whether gravity is a thing at all. The possibility of its absence means theres no way to verify the truth of the law of gravity across time; our belief that masses will continue to be drawn together tomorrow ultimately rests on faith alone. Even if we cant know whether a theory is true, couldnt we at least rule out others as false? This is how philosopher of science Karl Popper attempted to redefine the scientific project. For Popper, the defining feature of a scientific theory (as opposed to a pseudo scientific one) is that it must be falsifiablethere must be some occurrence that could potentially demonstrate the theory to be untruei.e., inconsistent with observed reality. Thus, Joness conspiracies could be tested and, when their predictions fail to occur, deemed false.

However, in practice, no theory can be conclusively falsified by experimentation, as the outcome of any particular experiment rests upon a number of distinct hypothesesany one of which might be to blame for a failed prediction. (This problem is commonly referred to as the Duhem-Quine thesis.) For example, consider a hypothetical theory that a particular substance is poisonous to humans. Seeking to falsify this theory, a skeptic might ingest a bit of this substance and declare her survival to be an effective refutation, as the theory, if true, would have entailed her death. However, the skeptics conclusion tacitly assumes a number of theories of her own, namely that she is not a special case, that she was not slipped an antidote, that what she ate was, in fact, the substance in question, and so on. If only one of these theories turns out to be false, then the falsification is invalidated and the original theory remains in play. All that conspiracists need to do to sustain their beliefs in the face of widespread debunking, then, is replace one experiment-related hypothesis with an alternative, r efutation-undermining hypothesis and their pet theory is safe. A study shows that contra the claims of 9/11 truthersjet fuel can, in fact, burn hot enough to melt the steel that made up the infrastructure of the World Trade Center? Oh yeah, well, such a refutation assumes that the exact same kind of jet fuel powering the planes on 9/11 was used in the experiment. And that the tested steel was insulated in the same way it was in the actual building. And that those conducting the study werent paid agents of the New World
27

JUST THE FACTS

Order who falsified their data to cover up the conspiracy! By declaring any one of these theories false and asserting its inverse, the conspiracist calls the refutation into question. Although this move does not settle the matter, it does successfully shift the locus of the debate from one theory to another. Now, in order to contest the original theorysay, that a substance is poisonous or that jet fuel cant melt steelthe skeptic must defend her refutation by contesting a new, inverse hypothesis, e.g., that the test subject was slipped an antidote or that the experimenters used the wrong sort of jet fuel. From here, the infinite regress becomes visible: In order to falsify this new inverse theory, the skeptic must present another refutation, which, in turn, will rest on another layer of theories that the conspiracist might contradict with an additional inverse t heoryagain shifting the locus of the debate in what has become a progression with no necessary conclusion. Popper was suspicious of this sort of ad hoc patching of theories with adjunct hypotheses, suggesting that it pushed the theories away from scientism and toward the realm of pseudoscience. And indeed, the proliferation of pseudoscientific staples advertised on Joness website, including herbal remedies, anti-vaccine documentaries, and crank science lends additional support to such a view. However, as philosopher of science Imre Lakatos notes in Science and Pseudoscience, such behavior can hardly serve as a criterion for demarcating science from nonscience, as almost all scientists are guilty
28

of the exact same move. For example, Lakatos challenges the reader to identify an experimental outcome that would convince a Newtonian scientist to give up Newtonian theory. It is hard to come up with a compelling case: No matter what sort of refutation was presented, such a scientist would almost certainly seek to explain it away as a mere aberration via the introduction of her own set of inverse hypotheses. More important, even if scientists did behave differently than pseudoscientists or conspiracistsabandoning their theory in the face of experimental refutationit is not clear why this would make their theories more plausible. Any supposed refutation forces a theorist to choose between theories: Will she reject her original one or reject one of the tacit theories that give the experiment legitimacy? Alex Jones always chooses to reject refutations, and, for doing so, is declared unreasonable. But what reason is there for choosing to reject the original hypothesis? There is no obvious answer to this question. The only clear reasons for choosing one theory over another appear to be that (a) the chosen theory has been verified or (b) the rejected theory has been falsified. Yet Hume showed the first option to be impossible and it should now be clear that the second is impossible as well. There will always be an ad hoc adjunct hypothesis that can be proposed to save a theory from falsification

JESSE ELIAS SPAFFORD

theories that are, in turn, propped up by other theories in a cascade that goes all the way down to the unreachable bottom. Because of the absence of any positive or negative reason for choosing one theory over another, scientific disagreement inevitably comes down to subjective and fundamentally irrational judgments about which theories seem more plausible than others. There is simply no principled way of demonstrating that one theory is more reasonable than anotherno way of proving that a theory is false or true or even more proximate to the truth than its competitor. To dismiss Jones or embrace Klein becomes a matter of faith and subjective taste, resting on an intuitive but irrational sense of what is true. In day-to-day practice, the theoretical problems of science have little effect on how we conduct ourselves and evaluate fringe claims to truth. However, the technocratic character of contemporary political debate is causing the irrationality of science to overflow its bounds. Each political camp trots out its pet studies only to have them dismissed
29

by rivals as flawed; evidence for mutually exclusive positions proliferates. In the face of partisan ideology, empirical claims collapse into irresolvable antinomy. In this light, the wonks contribution to political discourse appears overstated. The startling rise of the wonk to political prominence has been buoyed in large part by the hope that the scientific objectivity of the technocrat might finally resolve political disagreement or at least convey some bit of truth to those reasonable enough to listen. But stubborn ideological opponents can no more be convinced by a pie chart than Alex Jones can be dissuaded from his beliefs by Ben Bernanke. And there are no grounds for thinking that they should be. If we are to make progress in the public debate, we may have to withdraw from empirical matters. Instead, our political discussions need to grapple with ideology and psychology, and with the underlying tendencies that draw people to particular ideologies. If consensus is to be forged, it will be from shared values rather than agreed-upon facts. n

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I Want to Believe
by JARROD SHANAHAN

Just because we can hear the black helicopters doesnt mean they dont exist.

MY OLD CO-DRIVER Nick and I would pass the time on interstate furniture deliveries by assessing the incipient mass movements taking off around the world. We debated the potential of the Arab Spring, Occupy, anti-austerity strikes in Europe, daily wildcats in Chinese factories, and other tantalizing glimpses of working class self-activity. And before long, we always reached the same impasse. I agree with you hed object, but how can you expect everyday people to get behind all this? Well, youre just a truck driver Id reply with a smile, and you seem to know whats up. One day a new co-worker sat grumpily
31

wedged between us, saying nothing as our usual debate took shape. He grew increasingly agitated as we argued, and at long last became unable to stifle his perplexity. You guys do know that the world is controlled by a dozen families, right? he asked us. Ever hear of the Rothschilds? They run the economy and tell all the governments what to do. Experts agree. Nick and I learned that the global political order is coordinated by a tiny cabal whose tentacles extend to every aspect of society-political power, the production of cultural goods, and especially commerce, their center of activity. Centuries of war, social upheaval, euphoric boom and cataclysmic bust have all

JARROD SHANAHAN

unfolded at the behest of this shadow government. Never mind the pageantry of national sovereignty; never mind the illusion of government by the people; and never mind the wiles of particular captains of industry. A hidden structure prefigures these institutions and fixes their course. The perpetrators of this worldwide coterie are a nefarious group of billionaire bankers with untold powers, before whom heads of state cower and fortunes are made and dashed. They are the notorious Illuminati. And nothing anyone, especially a few penniless truck driving nobodies, could ever do could possibly change this. Familiar as Nick and I were with this tired old canard, and especially wary of the xenophobia and anti-Semitism with which it typically comes packaged, we were still intriguedand slightly appalledby the amount of this narrative with which we could actually agree. Begrudgingly, we conceded that in the present, human events unfold within a limited set of possibilities, and that there is in fact a tenuous global order. We admitted that the actions of sovereign states, the decisions of participatory democracies, and the interplay of free enterprises are in fact predetermined by a logic which they cannot defy in their present form, lest it undermine and ultimately destroy them. And while we of course recognized that individuals or groups may wield immense power, take actions with beneficent or disastrous consequences, and create vast masturbatory displays of their own wealth and power, they can only do so under the compulsion of a power higher still. And
32

among the worlds poor, individuals acting as such are powerless, with their powerlessness apotheosis in misguided martyrdom or impotent political violence. As a point of divergence, however, we insisted that this higher power is ultimately not human, no more than it is divine. It has been called many names over the years, but its simply the necessity for capital to accumulate, and for capitalism to expand, destroying all barriers which stand in its way, and incorporating all extant social forms into its own reproduction or else wiping them out. Beheading the king, as they say, we maintained that this process is not exactly executed by, but more specifically through humans, whom it forms as subjects through their daily work and behind their backs. As such they are subjects who do not determine this rationality, but only serve to make it function more effectively, and reproduce its material existence. The prefigured roles for humans to act out their will in the world fix them within strict parameters which do not challenge capital. Outside of this is outside of the law, and in the minds of many, outside of the imaginable. In short, we informed our friend, there are no Rothschilds necessary, nor even possible. At this stage in its historical development, the conspiring businessmen and heads of state are merely vectors through which capital expands, expropriates, and encloses. Particular human actors have a choice to play by these rules or be cast aside, to be replaced by others just like them. Shadowy cabals meet in broad daylight at international summits,

I WANT TO BELIEVE

as Chomsky is apt to remark, and their meetings are terrifically boring. And the symbol of this New World Order is emblazoned on the dollar bill alright, but theres no need for symbolic decoding. For maximum effect we set about prodding the rawest nerve of the modern minds bad conscience--the destruction of our ecosystem. A conspiratorial shadow government, Nick and I maintained, would never allow for the planet to destroy its potable water, poison its air, destabilize its climate, and harken an age of flooded coastal cities and apocalyptic super-storms. After all, what is a throne but a plank with red velvet? Even the Rothschilds need air and water. To face the possibility, we concluded, that the international ruling class is nothing more than the wealthiest representatives of a species dominated by forces outside of its control, is to admit that theres no way out of eminent catastrophe without collective action capable of radically altering the very structure of society. Individuals, we conceded, are powerless as such. But classes are not. And like good conspiracy nuts, Nick and I added, we know it sounds crazy, but our version of events has the advantage of being the truth. You guys have a depressing view of the world our new friend concluded, returning to silence.

The modern conspiracy theory is a mytholo33

gization of capitalism. That humanity writhes in the grip of a power alien to itself is so palpable that the expression of this reality assumes countless forms in the popular imagination, permeating pop culture, politics, and the persecution anxieties of our booming psychiatric industry. Films like The Adjustment Bureau and television programs like Burn Notice capture the zeitgeist with the laughable simplicity of its most trite tropes, trench coats and all. The novels of Dan Brown append cheap noir to rich cultural pseudo-histories in order to make them more entertaining. The wildly popular television program Ancient Aliens became a cash cow for the History (!) Channel by attributing the greatest historical achievements of scientific discovery and collective activity to little green neo-Calvinist deities from outer space. And never mind the 9/11 Truth Movement and the shocking contention by some of its leading ideologues that the Federal Emergency Management Agency could organize a poker game, let alone a secret network of underground internment camps in which Art Bell and Alex Jones will soon argue over the top bunk. In all these expressions, which blur entertainment and information in a manner consistent with the present cultural imaginary, human or extraterrestrial agents are depicted as consciously directing world events behind the backs of those who live them. Though countless colorful theories fall under the umbrella of New World Order, and this canon has enjoyed a febrile explosion since the election of the suspiciously other Barack Obama, their basic structure is largely universal. Most

JARROD SHANAHAN

importantly, any good conspiracy theory rise of global capital. proceeds from empirical premises which are Though the Illuminati itself was disbanded manifestly true. In the vein of Dan Brown, in 1785, the class whose values it embodstray facts are woven into vast interconnectied was on an irreversible course to achieve ed webs by tenuous strings of causality and world dominance. Particular groups such as barbaric modus ponens proofs. Historical the Illuminati were only an expression of this and social phenomena which are in fact inzeitgeist, not its cause. Since the late 18th timately intertwined by the total social relacentury, and in plain sight, the entire world tion of capital are instead linked superficially has been quite violently molded into one exby cheap literary devices. pansive international market and playground It is no coincidence that the actual Illumifor the European bourgeoisie. Nation states nati, by most accounts short lived and powhave increasingly come to exist solely for erless, dates back to 1776. As revolutionary the benefit of the markets which function fever gripped the Continent and the colothrough them, developing vast apparatuses nies, the small group was founded as a secret of population management, security techsociety of Bavarian intellectuals possessed by nologies, and militarized police forces, which the spirit of Enlightenment liberalism and serve the needs of production here and relaissez faire social and economic policy. Its pression there. It is no coincidence that these erudite members opposed religious superspectacular agencies of surveillance and popstition and absolutist sovereignty, promoted ulation management figure so prominently internationalism through free scientific inin conspiracy culture. We may be able to see quiry and open philosophical debate, and and hear the surveillance helicopters, but promoted the equality of men and women they still exist. under the law of liberal The irony of the instates. Evoked as a bocreasing rationalization geyman by royalists and of society toward some reactionaries long after it mythic equilibrium is Though the Illuminati ceased to exist, the secret the intensification of was disbanded, the society which counted paroxysm, of violent criclass whose values the venerable Goethe sis, of catastrophe on a it emodied was on among its members was heightening scale which the perfect metaphor for it has ensured. The crises course to achieve the rise of the European inherent in the capitalist world domination bourgeoisie, a cosmocycle now grip the enpolitan world driven by tire planet, leaving desEnlightenment values, titution in the wake of and the corresponding periodic booms, leaving
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I WANT TO BELIEVE

entire regions to starve, evacuating capital from entire cities and letting them rot while the local ruling class throws up their hands. In the major developed countries, the transition from hulking welfare state apparatuses to militarized police forces maintaining order indicates the increasingly reactionary tendency of states, faced with simply containing the results of a disordered market by brute force, rather than even pretending to curb the causes of destitution and hopelessness among the poor. When market experts discussing the flow of capital sound like meteorologists groping to account for the weather, this is not a coincidence, nor are theyre being disingenuous. Chaos rules the day, though it is backed by the forces of law and order, a hybrid monster as the bald man remarked, the former referring to legal statutes aimed at responding to crime, and the latter aimed at extra-legal (and often illegal) intervention preventing hypothetical crimes and generally molding the social terrain. The chaos underlying modern life and the scrupulous social order which protects and enforces it appears as a vast global intrigue against those who reproduce it with their daily work. And in a way, it is. In short, somebody would have to be bat shit crazy not to develop a conspiracy theory about the centralized interconnectivity of these conditions. The appeal of conspiracy
35

theories is simple. Whether its Lizard People, Ancient Aliens, Freemasons, Occupys 1%, or the poor maligned Rothschilds, the conspiratorial mind clings to the comforting notion of a world controlled by a rational agent capable of exerting its will to guide human events. Somebody is driving this thing ... anybody. To the conspiratorial mind we are not alone with ourselves, left to our own devices, which can be the most terrifying prospect of all. The conspiracy fills the seeming vacuum at the center of society, the paralyzing abyss beneath our flimsy facades of order, with a reassuring rational kernel. Beneath the purported chaos of a modern world seemingly driven inexorably toward its own destruction, a secret logic hums away, unseen, yet steering with the circumspection of a protective father. In this way the conspiracy theory is a secularized monotheism which replaces our dearly departed God with an equally shadowy intelligence serving the same omniscient function. Sometimes it even lives in outer space and knows what were thinking. Tempting though it may be to dismiss outright, the modern conspiracy theory moves beyond the illusions of liberal democracy, and in its broad strokes can be more sophisticated than the theology of progress through the free market, democratic elections, and the litigious acquisition of rights. Discounting these as fetish concepts prefigured by forces which set their activi-

JARROD SHANAHAN

ties within parameters acceptable to an overarching global order, the average viewer of Ancient Aliens may be in a better position to understand capital than an Obamaniac with a PhD in Political Science. Accordingly, it is tempting to imagine these conspiracy theories, which often attract young, energetic, subversive minds, as a short-lived stepping stone between the dead forms of the past and the class consciousness of the future. Indeed, the conspiracy theory might just be a final moment of theology among a class becoming aware of itself and its historic power. In the very least, to evoke a favorite argument of conspiracy theorists, this claim cannot be proven untrue. In a world determined by an advanced and globalized mode of production, everything is in fact connected. The confusion arises when these connections are posited as the result of an exceptional conspiracy, without which they would be disparate social phenomena. This is the last gasp of liberal ideology, which has ceased to believe in itself but still refuses to concede that the world is not a series of isolated atoms which relate to one another only through exchange. Conceding a commonality which transcends mere commensurability, the conspiracy theory is willing to look in the most exotic and improbable places for its cause, anywhere but where it actually lives: the banal mechanisms of daily work, production, circulation, social reproduction, and the promotion and expansion of private property. As in Dr. Langdons absurd hermeneutics, the banal truth is actually much more interesting than fantastical
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narratives which overestimate the power of isolated individuals to make the world, and underestimate the power of a united people to remake it. Far from depressing, the alternative we face is radically empowering. If in fact the core of our supposedly rational society is a great vacuum, if its present arrangement precludes any contestation to the Thanatos-fivefueled expansion of capital, then the seizure of power by the working class becomes a necessity for the continuing survival of the species. If the myths we have ceased to believe in are being replaced by those more absurd still and equally fated to unbelief, perhaps the challenge becomes crafting better myths; more convincing myths, myths grounded in the material reality of daily life, of daily work and life in common; myths which smash the artificial divisions between us, myths which know that the past cannot be recaptured but that the future remains unwritten. Or, to invoke a word blasphemous to the relativistic mythology of our time, do we have the courage to offer the truth? Facing the imminent threat of ecological ruin and unprecedented human suffering which capitalist states are powerless to reverse, the stakes of the proletariats historical mission become even higher than its 19th century prophets could imagine. As we cast aside illusions and face the sobering reality that its either us or nobody at all, everyday people will discover that the biggest conspiracy of all is the one which has undermined their power as a class for so long. Experts agree. n

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Power Loss
by AMANDA SHAPIRO

Are survivalists paying for better odds or just better amenities?

NEWT GINGRICH IS very concerned about the end of the world. Electromagnetic pulses, or EMPs, which can happen as a result of nuclear blasts or solar flares, are according to him the greatest strategic threat we face, a catastrophe whose impact would be so horrifying that we would in fact basically lose our civilization in a matter of seconds. Sometimes Gingrich writes novels of historical fiction with a friend named William R. Forstchen. A few years ago, Forstchen wrote a novel about society crumbling after an EMP attack, and Gingrich wrote the foreword. He described the book as a work of fact and a future history, and he compared it to 1984. When he ran for president
38

in 2012, Gingrich raised the subject of EMPs during forums and debates and was widely lampooned by the press. An EMP is essentially a burst of electronic energy that can short-circuit any electrical system within range, including power grids, computers, and communication systems. In the film Oceans Eleven and the TV show 24, EMP-producing devices are used to cause temporary blackouts across limited regions. The EMPs that have Gingrich and others in a tizzy are different from these filmic versions. Gingrichs EMPs would come from solar activity or from nuclear weapons; if a weapon were detonated high enough, some say, the resulting EMP could knock the entire con-

AMANDA SHAPIRO

tinent off the grid, and the lights would not come on again. Cue high-stress action music: Computer screens would go dark. Cell phones would go dead. Any vehicle with a computer chip would stop running. Planes would fall from the sky. It makes for good TV, but the EMP threat has been a hard sell in the real world. Noah Shachtman, a national security writer for Wired, points out that if Iran or North Korea decided to nuke us, its unlikely they would just turn off our electricity instead. In other words, a terrorist with a weapon powerful enough to produce a catastrophic EMP would probably just detonate it on the ground, where it would kill a lot of people instantly. And according to the Pentagon, the U.S. missile defense system is set up to intercept a nuclear weapon no matter how high its launched and regardless of its intended use. Most EMP alarmists are white, conservative, and well-heeled. Theyre former military officers; theyve sat on missile defense commissions; theyve advised Congress. Theyre joined by conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, which published two online articles on the subject in March alone. Chaos From the Sky: Why the EMP Threat is Real and The EMP Threat: Just a Scare? seem intended to bring skeptics into the fold. Still, most people are not freaking out.

My stepfather keeps his apocalypse supplies

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in the basement, on a set of plastic shelves next to the washing machine: jumbo packs of batteries, lanterns of various sizes and strengths, a tent and sleeping bags, two tengallon bladders of water, 100 servings of instant oatmeal, and a bunch of canned goods with an emphasis on processed meat. Ive teased my stepfather mercilessly about the apocalypse supplies (why, in the case of a nuclear holocaust, does he think hell want to be eating weenie dogs from a can?), but it turns out his stockpile is nothing compared to the true survivalists. To them, my stepdads shelves look like nothing more than a Costco run. To survive for a year, he needs at least 700 pounds of preserved food about 2200 calories a day and double that if he wants to keep my mom alive too. He needs a 55-gallon reserve of water and a rain catchment system, a propane heater, and a ham radio. It wouldnt hurt to have a fruit orchard, too, twenty percent of his assets in gold bullion and silver coins, and an underground safe house. The survivalist community is large, its fears innumerable. Long considered the domain of backcountry militiamen and the mentally ill, the movement has seen a surge in popularity, first after 9/11 and again during the economic collapse. Add to that extreme natural disasters like Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, the earthquake in Haiti, and the tsunami that caused the nuclear-plant meltdown in Japan, and survivalism begins to seem like a smart hobby to pursue. (Nevertheless, the movement got some bad press last winter when Adam Lanza killed 27 people and himself

POWER LOSS

in Newton, Connecticut with his mothers .223-caliber rifle. His mother, who was one of the victims, was reported to be a survivalist. She had six other guns in the house.) For most survivalists, the ultimate goal is to be 100 percent self-sufficient for at least a year after a catastrophic event. They bill themselves as a group of proudly hardscrabble DIYers: Theyve retrofitted bug-out vehicles, wired off-the-grid electrical systems, and hauled thousands of pounds of rocks for avalanche booby traps. The dating website for survivalists, Survivalistsingles.com, boasts over 5000 members. Almost three-quarters are men. The sites tagline reads, Dont Face the Future Alone. A 62-year-old retired Navy medic lists his hobbies as read in the winter, prep, clean my firearms, sharpen my knives etc. Warm weather, go shooting, ride my harley. Another 62-year-old from Kentucky writes, The bottom line is, I am going to live off grid with a self sustaining life style. I have been preparing for this for a while now... I AM A BAKER. I MAKE FRIED PIES FOR A LIVING. If youre a diligent survivalist, there is always work to do: replenishing food stores, keeping firewood stocked, cleaning the weapons, etc. Getting ready for the end times, it seems, is not so different from actually living in them. But not all survivalists are interested in roughing it now or in the post-apocalyptic world. For those with means, survivalism can look a lot like planning for a very comfortable retirement. The National Geographic Channels reality show Doomsday Preppers is the highest rated show in the cable channels
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history. In November, 1.3 million people watched the Season 2 premier. Preppers is another word for survivalists; some might say prepping is survivalism for yuppies. Here are some samples from the Doomsday Preppers episode guide:
Kellene Bishop, a self-described foodie, amazes her friends by whipping up a dinner party entirely from shelf-stable foods, proving she wont sacrifice the finer things in a financial disaster.

Real estate developer Larry Hall is creating luxury survival condos in an old missile silo.
To prep for life after the EMP, Brent has constructed a medieval-style castle that will serve as the ultimate bug-out fortress. Capt. William E. Simpson, has spent six years singlehandedly building his perfect bunker, but its not underground: its his sailboat.

These people are anticipating the end of capitalism; meanwhile, capitalism is happy to help them prepare for its demise. The luxury prepper market depends on people who want to spend money instead of time. Freezedried gourmet meals take the place of bulk food storage, high-tech water systems replace rain barrels, disaster-proof domes replace the everyday yurt. Zeb Gear, one of these up-market survivalist retailers, is located in Fort Mill, South Carolina and online. Its owned by Laura Kunzie, an ex-Coast Guard survivalist, and sells solutions (not products) for the discerning prepper. For $2,558.73, a Ham Ra-

AMANDA SHAPIRO

dio solution. For $2,490.93, a one-year meal price. Places like these invite people to justify plan solution for two, including 18 gallons of all manner of extravagance in the name of beoatmeal, 42 gallons of soups, powdered milk, ing prepared. But, thrust into an end-of-days and six gallons of Taco Supper. For $14.84, scenario, will the survivalist with the $150 a device that lets women pee standing up, portable toilet have a better chance of staybecause apparently women will not be able ing alive? Or will she simply be more comto squat post-Doomsday. For $149, a Barterfortable? ing Bucket that combines four top barter trading commodities: sea salt, cane sugar, u matches, and coffee. For those unfamiliar with the concept of bartering, the website helpfully expounds: Bartering is the free Sid Morris is a businessman in Davidson, exchange of goods or services. This system North Carolina, a short drive north of Charof trade is practiced all over the world today, lotte. One of his hobbies is aviation: He owns except in the United States, where it is the exa plane and a helicopter and has a customception to the rule of money. made heli-pad on the dock behind his home. There are dozens of stores like Zeb Gear Morris made his money doing marketing that are devoted entirely to high-end survival campaigns with NASCAR in the 70s and equipment. The National Geographic Chan80s. According to his companys website, nel just debuted a new reality show called he wrote what is still considered the Bible of Apocalypse 101, which centers around the Motorsports Marketing. owners of Colorados Forge Survival SupA few years ago, Morris read a novel called ply, the purveyor of $2700 pre-loaded backOne Second After. It was packs and a $10,000 a terrifying account of water catchment device. a catastrophic EMP atForge, like plenty of othtack, with a foreword er survivalist retailers, is Will the survivalist written by Newt Ginowned by survivalists, with the $150 grich. Frightened into and theres no reason to portable toilet action, Morris began to fault them for turning a have a better research the potential hobby into a livelihood. of a real-life EMP event But theres something chance of and determined that unpalatable about apstaying alive? the government and the pending the word surmilitary were woefully vival or emergency to underprepared and, furbasic camping gear and thermore, were doing selling it at a very high
41

POWER LOSS

nothing to protect people. So Morris tracked down a few well-connected EMP activists as well as William R. Forstchen, who also happens to be an aviation enthusiast. Morris flew his plane to Forstchens house for the Fourth of July and they ate hot dogs. With Forstchen on board, Morris founded The NOAH Project. The mission of NOAH, Morris told me in an interview, is coming up with workable solutions that any family can implement to survive a catastrophic event. Heres how it works: For a $250 fee, you get to take a survey, which assesses your preparedness level. Then you get a personalized list of solutions that have been tested and approved by NOAH experts. Through a partnership with Zeb Gear, everything NOAH recommends is available to buy online. In addition to the opportunity to spend more money, members also get a signed copy of One Second After and a PDF called Timeline to Disaster, a five-page narrative written by Forstchen in which he imaginatively describes what will happen in the days, weeks, and months after an EMP attack. By the end of day one, he writes, the social order will already be disassembled: For those among us who have no regard for law and order, it will be a signal that all restraint is down, such as we witnessed in the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, and again, post Katrina, New Orleans. Forstchens timeline reveals a deeper truth about the EMP cohort. The true nightmare, for them, isnt the disaster itself; its the disorder and anarchy the disaster spells, the eruption of longstanding socioeconomic
42

tensions. In this way, prepare for an EMP becomes code for protect the status quo. The America we know, cherish and love, will be gone forever, warns Gingrich in the foreword to One Second After. When he says we, its clear whos included and who isnt: Hes not talking about most Americans. For them, after all, the system has already failed.

When the end comes, some of the wealthiest and most powerful survivalists will be together, somewhere in the Appalachians near the Virginia-North Carolina border. High Mountain Lake and High Mountain Camp are private resort communities; they are also completely off the grid. This is a gentler form of self-reliance. Surviving in style, as the High Mountain Lake website announces, residents live in 3000 square foot cabins, eat from working farms, and hike along miles of scenic trails. Visiting experts teach skills like foraging, pottery, and gardening. Everyone is guaranteed a years worth of food in the case of a catastrophic event. Its easier to get into the Augusta golf course than it is to get into a NOAH community, Morris told me. The NOAH Project owns High Mountain Camp and High Mountain Lake, where Forstchen and Gingrich both have homes. The operation is the second, less-talked-about wing of the business, although NOAH stands for Neighborhoods of Alternative Homes. Its essentially a

AMANDA SHAPIRO

private community for Morris, Gingrich, and other like-minded individuals, as Morris put it. If youre interested in living at one of the properties, having money is only the first criterion. Youd first have to be a NOAH member, then be interviewed, and then go through a battery of tests, including a family and personal history, a medical screening, and a psychological profile. Were trying to build a sociological scenario, Morris said. These places are not for the average guy in terms of money or mindset. The kinds of people who come to us dont sweat about dropping the check. These are very unique individuals. Many of the residents have their own planes, so Morris put in an airfield. There are stables for residents who want to bring their horses too. And although he wouldnt provide any numbers, Morris said that interest in the communities has been substantial. He has plans to create more communities for survivalists at the highest of the high-end. Its unclear where The NOAH Project makes most of its profits memberships, product sales, or real estate and how that money gets distributed. But the overhead costs for basic membership services seem marginal compared to the High Mountain properties. The NOAH Projects business model could look a lot like a familiar political strategy: Maintain a wide base of values voters but keep the money at the top. In this case, maintaining the base means continuing to sell $200 survival flashlights. Paranoia is a profit-driver, and the customers are loyal to
43

say the least. Thats not to say that Morris is lying when he says he thinks that an EMP is the greatest threat facing mankind today. Morris is scared: He has not one but three homes on the resort properties and a couple of planes to get him there when the time comes. It makes me think that my stepfather doesnt have a chance, not with his small lantern collection and cans of roast beef hash. And this, of course, is how the survivalist industry works. It makes Doomsday seem like zerosum game in which the people with the right stuff win, and everyone else is, well, doomed. But the so-called winners might do well to take another look at Forstchens predictions. In the history of societal collapse, hiding out with ones money has rarely ended well. Consider the French flight to Varennes; consider Tsar Nicholas II. The EMP survivalists are right to be worried. After all, theyre outnumbered by citizens who arent very happy about the way the system works now. And, if history is any guide, theres not a lot these elite survivalists can do. The High Mountain Camp may give them electricity, but it probably wont save their power. Say, for the sake of argument, that an EMP occurs. Say it does exactly what Gingrich and his friends claim it will do. When that time comes, the elite survivalists will get in their bug-out cars, their planes, their boats, theyll retreat to their missile silos, theyll check in to their mountain retreats where theyll survive in style on oatmeal and Taco Supper. As for us what O what will we do without them? n

A Woman Under the Influence

by SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT
THERE COMES A time when the way you are is not just the way you are but also the way you might die. There arrives at that time a word for what you said or hoped was indescribable, a diagnosis for your lure. Always there were moods you had that others did not, moods that were your organizing principle. Now they become your undoing. You werent wrong to think nobody else was like you. Not many people are. Almost nobody would want to be, and thats wherein your wilding momentsyou were wrong. I was. The numbers could also be wrong. If not, and if youre an adult in America, there is a two to five percent chance you have what is now called bipolar affective disorder (and I want B.A.D., an acronym that feels bratty but also courteous, like a warning, to catch on). If you write for a living, multiply that chance by 10. Of course, you (or I) dont write only for a living but also to live; you (well, I) believe writing is both a reason to keep doing so and the effect of doing it singularly. Then comes a time when writing is just another symptom. Records of the human condition are often kept by its least reliable narrators. Consider the case study conducted by the American psychologist Nancy Andreasen and compiled in her 2005 book The Creating Brain, for which she chose 15 authors from the Iowa Writers Workshop, class of 74. As the connections between ones creativity and ones psychiatric history, or diag 44

Mary MacLanes spectacular moods first fueled, then failedher.

Mary MacLane I, Mary MacLane Melville House, 227 pages I Await the Devils Coming Melville House, 304 pages

a woman under the influence

nosis, began to light up, Andreasens group grew to 30; so did the control group. Over the next 15 years of follow-up studies, two of the Iowa writers committed suicide. Nobody in the control group died. In 1983, psychologist Kay Jamison, herself bipolar, surveyed 47 British artists and writers and found that 38 percent had sought treatment for mood disordersa percentage about 30 times the national average. Writers, according to writers, were suffering a higher rate of breakdown, while among them, poets had it worst of all: Half of those surveyed had been hospitalized for depression and/or mania. Poets, decided Jamison, had the most creative fire. At first, this seems a suspiciously convenient thing for poets to believe: Its better to burn, burn, burn than to pay the heating bill. Still, there are few other explanations for the survival of poetry, which must feel like rubbing together sticks while other writers use barbecue lighters, blowtorches, barrels and barrels of oil. The poet, always having to prove shes not dead, must be more concerned with breaths and heartbeats and flickers of viscera than any other writer, and so, more than any other writer, its the poet who remains our most stubbornly libidinal subject, at odds with the fleshless world, embodying at least one early, Freudian notion of bipolarity. Whether a person is bipolar before being named as such is for structuralists to contest. After the diagnosis, certain erraticisms do cohere. Certain flaws get excused. Six close friends say theyd always known it. All we actually know is what studies say, and what studies say is that manic depression (as it was once known and is still better described as) gets diagnosed later in life than depression, in part because its often misdiagnosed as just the latter. For women, the first episode is typically depressive; for men, manic. Whether or not that divide collapses 45

when gender norms do, doctors agree that the first episode tends to occur before 25 and is easily confused with, well, being under 25. Two years before Jamisons study, Francesca Woodman, who is now considered a seminal proto-Cindy Sherman photographer but was then just 22 and mostly unknown, jumped from a Lower East Side loft window to her death. It was a shock, not a surprise. In her system a switch had gotten stuck. Betsy Byrne, her best friend, wrote in 2011 that Woodmans ultimate conflict was between a strict American puritanical work ethic (depression, surely) and a pure Roman delight in lifes sybaritic pleasures (sounds awfully like hypomania). In Marya Hornbachers 2008 memoir, Madness, Hornbacher recalls days of work so intense her friends resented her, then a night she drove 600 miles on a whim. Robert Lowell, self-lacerating after a 1959 manic attack, blamed himself for all the Baudelairean vices, plus stupidity. Woodman, too, excoriated herself. Francesca bounced from extremes, wrote Byrne, living very regimented in control or very recklessly out of control, and she berated herself mercilessly for the latter. I always thought that Francesca secretly longed for the conventional, a life of plain old day-in-and-dayout sameness and securityforget about the art, the constant self-doubt, loneliness, insecurity, and obsessiveness inherent in the process that can overtake the life. Longing, unlike desire, conceals the need for dissatisfaction. What you long for, you definitively cant have. When whats longed for is sanity or conventionality or adulthood, the mad one longs mostly, I think, to reassure herself that these responsible choices are not ones she canor can be expected tomake. All I wanted was a little piece of life,

SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT

to be married, to have children I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, said Anne Sexton, whose damnedest looked a lot like dancing the Dying Swan in a backyard filled not with balloons but with bottles, and who nonetheless had babies with someone named Alfred. But, she added, one cant build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out. You will be interested to know that nightmares happen overnight, and so tooso oftendoes the axis-bending turn in bipolarity. Woodman had early-onset, untenable extremes; she went out like a match. More commonly, its as the early 20s turn to the late 20s that certain, amplified tendencies become wildly unlike delight. For most of us, when a time comes, it comes then.

fucking syntax. (If you sold 100,000 copies of your diary in one month, you too would be a bossand I do mean one hundred thousand copies. Of an unknown girls diary. In one month. In 1902. Anyone still want to talk about Cat Marnells book deal?) I, Mary MacLane didnt change the game. Fifteen years of fame and infamy and reactive detachment, of moves to Manhattan and back to Butte, had amounted to near career suicide. MacLane had been writing her second book for several years, allegedly since her late 20s. Now she was in her middle 30s. In 1917, that was considerably older than it is in 2013. Her feminism, intellectual fervor, and active bisexuality were neither suppressed nor about to be socially accepted; she was still called the wild woman of Butte. And yet the older a wild woman gets, the more shes left to roam alone. Then as now, then as before, its wild girls who get all the

good outrage. The egotism of youth is merciless, measureless, endlessly vulnerable, writes MacLane from

In 1917, at age 36, Mary MacLane published the better and less read of her two memoirs, I, Mary MacLane. It had been a while. A decade and a half earlier, when she was 18 and unknown to her hometown of Butte, Montana, let alone the world, she wrote a memoir in which nothing happens outside her febrile, arguably vile, indisputably brilliant mind. Published in 1902 when she was 21, The Story of Mary MacLane was the phenomenon a century forgot. This year, republished and restored to its original name, I Await the Devils Coming feels both proto- and anti-confessional: MacLane invented female self-expressionism, with its radicalized ego and racing nerve, and yet, faced with the nadiristic, nth-degree prospect of Marie Calloways first book, What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life, I am sure shed say put on some 46

her Neat Blue Chair (her capitalization of certain signifiers is capricious but the inconsistency works: that cocky Me separates ego from a self who knows better). I have got by that stage of egotism. But Ive entered on another wilder, more lawlessfartherseeing if less bevisioned. MacLane, with her weary clear-gray eyes, sees not only farther but deeper too. She can imagine the world almost well enough to empathize with its women in ways she could not when, as an 18-yearold #radfem, she considered herself infinitely more human than the mere persons around her. At 36 she doesnt think of herself any less, only differently. This diary of her days may or it maynt show also a type, a universal Eve-old woman, she disclaims. If it is so it is not my purport. I sing only the Ego and

a woman under the influence

the individual. Later, there is an updated About Me page that makes my ribs feel like wishbones, and is worth quoting in one long breath:
I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly and damnably important to Me. Face to face I look at Me with some hatred, with despair and with great intentness. I put Me in a crucible of my own making and set it in the Caming trivial Inferno of my mind. And I assay thus: I am rareI am in some ways exquisite. I am pagan within and without. I am vain and shallow and false. [...] Im like a leopard and Im like a poet and Im like a religieuse and Im like an outlaw. [...] I am strong, individual in my falseness: wavering, faint, fanciful in my truth. I am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it. I am ultra-modern, very old-fashioned: savagely incongruous. I am young, but not very young. I am wistfulI am infamous. In brief, I am a human being.

Compare this perfect self-elegy with the recursive boasting of I Await the Devils Coming, in which MacLane declares herself a thief, a philosopher, a beauty, a fool, a woman from the age of 12, and above all, a genius. Not just any genius, either. She is by turns a peculiar, rare genius, a genius in [her] own right, and a genius more than any genius who has ever lived. The word genius is used 46 times in I Await. In I, Mary MacLane the word genius occurs in one turn of phrase, used just twice. There is no Cleverness in this I write, she says (the capital C implying not clever, which is elsewhere uncapitalized and used differently, but something like pretentious). There is writing skill and my dead-feeling genius. Two hundred pages earlier, shed ended said elegy with: I 47

am presciently and analytically egotistic, with some arresting dead-feeling genius. And were I not so tensely tiredly sane I would say that I am mad. At 36 it is too late to say shes mad, anyway. Were MacLane alive in the 70s or the 90s or now, it would have been said by her psychiatrists at 19 or at 21 or certainly by 27, when she had left cities and begun to keep diaries again. But in 1917, in Butte, Montana, much of the grandeur had gone from her madness, and the delusion from her genius, and maybe there was no genius without the delusion. But what a delusion! To claim the fatherly crown, whether deserved or not, is a radical and astounding act, and it happened a 110 years before, say, Sheila Hetis female genius debate. There had never been as defiantly an of-herself a heroine, or, as MacLane said in I AwaitThe Devils Coming, a not-heroine. In I, Mary MacLane, the older, sadder I sees herself as anot thesubject. She sees also the world. And yetshe can never quite reach it. The wider and brighter it becomes, the further she recedes, lapsing day after day into silent, solitary routines performed in plain black dresses. Today in her diary she is oddly joyous. Tomorrow all seems a nasty life. But always she dresses the same, as if exerting magisterial authority and control over moods she, at 19, described as alternating periods of hope and despair, of hunger for life and flirtation with death. Now her highs are the flashing burning sparkling mad magic of being alive and her lows the cold and restless terror accompanied by thoughts of death, of death and destruction, of death and death and death everywhere. Here it is either that MacLane exaggerates her moods, or that her moods have grown huge and ungraspable, leaving her powerless to exaggerate her

mind. Or, if not powerless, daily less desirous of what shed most admired: Strength. I might say I prefer strength to weakness or weakness to strength, she writes, nearing the end. Neither would be true. What I prefer is a hellish hovering, an endless torturing Tenterhook between the two. And then: One reason it will be pleasant to be dead: I can then no longer Waver.

The doctors tell B.A.D. girls to keep a mood diary. They use words like document, and 48

familiarize, and monitor. And manage. I sigh: Do I have to? Isnt this just, like, Twitter? And also impossible? (Ellen Forney in her graphic memoir of bipolarity, Marbles: How could I keep track of my mind, with my own mind? She almost doesnt.) But slowly I learn to follow self-reportage like a script, eschewing a prescription, getting better by pretending to be more here, less here. Im 25 and 26 and some days Im fine, asymptomatic. Then Im 27 and those days are fewer, then farther apart, and I dread the day after which no more days are fine. In I, Mary MacLane, she writes to God, and you know a time has come. Theres no more externalized

a woman under the influence

bipolarity than MacLane turning to heaven from the depths of a death-mood, just as, 15 years earlier, she waited for the Devil on a high. In that moment, when he finally arrives:
It feels as if sparks of fire and ice crystals ran riot in my veins with my blood; as if a thousand pinpoints pierced my flesh, and every other point a point of pleasure, and every other point a point of pain; as if my heart were laid to rest in a bed of velvet and cotton-wool but kept awake by sweet violin arias; as if milk and honey and the blossoms of the cherry flowed into my stomach and then vanished utterly; as if strange, beautiful worlds lay spread out before my eyes, alternately in dazzling light and complete darkness with chaotic rapidity...

This is genius but not mad, only the most extreme poesis of manic lust. Even mild upswings make me feel invincible enough to love whoever can hurt me the most, and so, in the summer, I ride on the back of a motorcycle down Mulholland Drive. In the fall I climb onto the unprotected ledge of a hotel looming over the West Side Highway. Come winter I dont fuck with condoms, and by spring Im forgetting to not to say I love you. But Im older, a little. The light is less dazzling, only too bright, and the darkness doesnt rest. I stop counting fine days. I can act. As long as nobody asks if Im okay, Im okay, and at the same time, it cant be that bad, because who has ever accused me of being a poet. When I am asked, I list exigent concerns: Work, money, sanity. I dont say the real fear is never again feeling love so high Im sure nobody has ever felt it, or ever will. Now I am sure of nothing, not even Nothing. The passion-edged mood is burnt out, wrote MacLane when her gray days began outnumbering, irreversibly, the violet and pink and blue days. 49

Gone, gone, gone. It is true some nights that when all the champagne turns to ash in my throat I think, flickeringly, Ill never taste happiness again. And I do not think its safe to walk home. As long as your creative fires burn, you are propelled forward, opined the New York Times on Woodmans life and death. This was in 2011, when a faintly soap-operatic documentary about her and her family, The Woodmans, came out. The movie prompted a significant revival of interest in Woodman, and of concern-trolling: But if you are consuming yourself in the process, what is left when the fire begins to sputter? There are ways MacLane martyred herself on that artistic pyre. There is also a way in which, if the diary she wrote at 18 invented her life, the one she published at 36 tried to save it. It was her mood diary, only no doctor told her to keep it. Still, she could not be her own doctor and her own teacher, her own lover, her own sister, her own companion. Even at her clearest, Mary MacLane could not seem to find anyone with a humanness equal to hers, or to try. But she knew they were out there, or, better yet, under there. Id like, she wrote, with breathless eagernessto read the analyzed being just beneath my skin. Everybodyevery human beingis w ildly Real: radiant and desolate. That Mary MacLane could be wildly, really, truly of-herself, even while psychically divided against herself, makes her my personal genius. That she lived so long and only for herself left her a solitary, middle-aged corpse in a Chicago rooming house, August 1929, cause of death unknown, or known only to those whove read her, and who are themselves a little too radiant, or too desolate, some days. n

Urban Planting
By ATOSSA araxia ABRAHAMIAN

The dream of urban cosmopolitan prosperity has a long history of failure.

Daniel Brook A History of Future Cities W. W. Norton & Co., 480 pages 50

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, an economist named Paul Romer put forward a bold new idea about how to raise the standard of living and expedite economic growth in poor countries. His vision was to create charter citiessemi-autonomous city-states within economically underdeveloped countriesand import first-world laws and best practices to these zones. Third parties, like foreign governments or multinational corporations, would oversee the management of the zones, acting as sponsors, or charterers. The idea was that with the right infrastructure, free trade and development would thrive. Lured by low tax rates and labor costs, a stable government within a government, and reliable business-friendly rules, companies would set up shop. If the first world has maxed out on its growth, and the so-called emerging economies are thwarted by third-world problems, then charter cities would provide the best of both worlds: a sanitized environment, grafted onto high-growth, low-cost territories, ruled by technocrats with deep pockets. Romers charter city idea is the latest iteration of the future city, an idea that has been around for almost as long as there have been cities at all and is the subject of journalist Daniel Brooks new book. As Brook writes in A History of Future Cities, four of the worlds cultural and business capitalsShanghai, St. Petersburg, Dubai, and Mumbaiall gained prominence thanks to their willingness to think of themselves as

atossa araxia abrahamian

osmopolitan hubs, with their leaders importing forc eign (usually Western) ideas, sometimes forcibly, to overcome national identity and reputation. Not unlike Romers hypothetical charter cities, the future cities of the past built architecture and infrastructure to mimic and ultimately attract foreign investment. They welcomed selected outsiders with open arms, offering them tax breaks, concessions, and preferential treatment, and they neutralized their otherness with a determined cosmopolitanism. The cities proclaimed cultural, political, legal, or even regulatory independence from their governing state. But more often than not, their ambitions were thwarted by conservatism, nationalism, and waras well as an attachment to territorial and cultural values. Brooks narrative begins in Russia at the dawn of the 18th century, when Russias young tsar, who would come to be known as Peter the Great, embarked on an undercover voyage to learn from his European neighbors, traveling around the continent and even working as a shipyard intern for the Dutch East India company in Amsterdam. He claimed to have wanted to live like common people and to do what common people did, but came home with an epiphany of Bloombergian proportions: People, it turned out, were really just like machines! Like machines, people were composed of a series of complex but ultimately rational systems, writes Brook of Peters conversion, and as in any machine, changing the inputs would change the outcomes... if human society was a rational system, then social change was just an engineering problem. The emperor vowed to use his knowledge and the worlds technologies to change Russias feudal populace into a cosmopolitan and productive society. The logic was identical to that of Romers charter cities: If Peter the Great could imported favor51

able Dutch stimuli architecture, technology, and expertswouldnt his people act more Dutch? When building St. Petersburg in Amsterdams image, Peter imported everything: wheelbarrows, boat paddles, and people, thousands of them. In fact, there were so many imported people that visitors couldnt tell where in the world they even were. Brook cites a pair of Irish sisters who remarked that Petersburg was overrun with French as with locusts. With these new residents came new buildings, new ideas, and new ways of doing things, but it wasnt always the best use of the citys resources. As Brook puts it, the best Western minds had indeed been brought to the new Russian capital, but they were being tasked with the most decadent and inane assignments, which they dutifully took up with complete scientific rigor. This pattern continued under Peters successor, Catherine, who vowed to turn St. Petersburg into the art capital of the world. The resounding success of her project is visible still throughout the city, but at the time, as Brook writes, Russias greatest art collection contained virtually no Russian art, just as Russias greatest city all around it had virtually no Russian buildings. Such ambitious plans came back to haunt the city when the French Revolution broke out and Russian citizens and foreign visitors alike grew excited by the prospects of revolution. Catherine became a reactionary, banning books, suppressing free speech, and reversing much of the cultural openness that her predecessor had pioneered. And despite some key changes in the countrys social structurenotably, the end of feudalismRussias subsequent rulers continued to turn inward. Tsar Nicholas I restricted railroad travel to prevent people from opening their minds too much. In a last-ditch attempt at keeping St. Petersburg Russian, Alexander III built the Cathedral of Spilled Blood, a gaudy, swirling structure thats so intensely

URBAN PLANTING

Russian it looks like a psychedelic Faberg egg. Russia continued to attract foreign investment as it so happens, newly freed serfs in an autocracy make for cheap, servile laborersand the presence of multi nationals expedited the countrys industrialization. But with industrialization came a massive disparity in wealth and living conditions, and the cosmopolitanism that Peter the Great sought for so long manifested primarily in the lavish boutiques along Nevsky Prospect, Petersburgs Fifth Avenue. The backlash continued during the Soviet era. St. Petersburgrenamed Leningradhad become known as something of a rebel city and was marginalized culturally and politically for its openness. The purge of Leningrads revolutionaries was also a purging of the revolutionary values of Russias gatewaythe love of the new and the foreign in architecture, the arts, literature, and politics, writes Brook. In the Soviet era, there was no room left for cosmopolitanism. Even the Internationale was axed in favor of a more nationalistic song. Despite the utopian communist ideal of a united, international proletariat, Communism precipitated the decline of another great future city: Shanghai. Brook introduces his reader to Shanghai in the early 20th century when, after the Opium Wars, China signed unequal treaties with foreign powers. These commercial deals forced Shanghai and other cities to establish special extraterritorial zones where foreigners could live, work, and be taxed and tried by an external set of rules. In many ways, these were the original charter cities, but the concessions were organized by nationality. As Brooks tells it, Shanghais concessions were a haven in every sense of the word. Jews, Parsis, and other displaced persons from all over the world came to live, work, play, and shop in the only place on earth that did not require an entry visa. (Later, Brook notes, the government began requiring a special visa to enter 52

Shanghai at all.) But as Shanghai fever spread, discontent escalated throughout the rest of the country, leading to the overthrow of Chinas imperial leaders. With each new stunning skyscraper and luxurious nightclub, the metropolis on the Huangpu became more estranged from the rest of China, Brook writes, adding that as it grew, Chinas greatest city would always be dwarfed by the countrysides hundreds of millions of peasants, many of whom were now armed under Mao Zedong with Chinas capitalist heart in their crosshairs ... Shanghai was in China, after all. In Future Cities, Brook tells the story of each city through an appraisal of its architectural evolution. Sequestered zones, foreign quarters, and Art Deco illustrate the influence of expats in Shanghai; canals and European-style houses yield to Orthodox cathedrals as reactionary sentiment grows in Petersburg; and East-meets-West hybrid buildings in Bombay symbolize the eclectic mix of Indian village market and London high street atmosphere that arose as the British developed the area into their idea of a model city. As per Brooks account, Bombays metamorphosis into Indias main metropolis and trading hub was largely thanks to Sir Bartle Frere, the governor of Bombay in the mid 1800s. Frere managed his city under the premise that even Indians could be properly civilized through exposure to Western culture and education. So, like Peter the Great, he tried to create Anglicized Indians through osmosis, importing British architects, ruling with a European administrative style, and installing British schools. If this sounds a lot like Romers plan, thats because charter cities are practically colonial re-enactments, only with corporate gods in the place of monarchs. When India achieved independence under Gandhi, Brook writes, it did so by disavowing Bombay by breaking the spell

atossa araxia abrahamian

the city had cast over the subcontinent. Brooks final city, Dubai, has yet to go through the cultural rags-to-riches cyclemostly because it sprung from the desert sand relatively recently. Dubai never had any pretensions: It was built for astoundingly wealthy foreigners by astoundingly poor foreigners, with a tiny number of Emirate natives calling the shots. The only thing that both classes of foreigners have in common is a highly precarious existence: Visas can be revoked with a days notice. It has elevated being business-friendly to a raison dtre. And despite the UAEs highly conservative environment, it has also redefined a certain type of freedom. Unlike most free economic zones in the world, where factories and companies are granted special tax privileges, in Dubai, there were no corporate income taxes to begin with, writes Brook. The government was funded largely with the profits of state-owned enterprises, oil revenues, and sin taxes on alcohol, leaving corporations to do as they pleased, with no responsibility toward the city, country, or world in which they operate. Dubai also figured out a novel way for conservative Islam to coexist with the freewheeling Western consumerism that the city thrives on enabling. Like in concession-era Shanhgai and in Romers hypothetical charter cities, separate laws crafted specifically for businesses govern certain regions, like the McKinsey-designed Dubai International Financial Centre. Carving Dubai into free zones was more than just an economic development strategy, writes Brook. While in the foreign

oncessions of Shanghai, different people were bound c by different legal codes based on their nationality, in Dubai, the same people would be governed by different legal codes depending on where they were in the city. In Shanghai, extraterritoriality meant that you were in a legal sense, always back home; in Dubai, the free zones made traveling from neighborhood to neighborhood, in a legal sense, like moving from country to country. Dubais advantage over the rest of the world was its willingness to accept the total irrelevance but cosmetic necessity of countries. It could be every country, no country, and its own very particular kind of country, all at once.

Charter cities are practically colonial re-enactments, only with corporate gods in the place of monarchs

A project as ambitious as Future Cities runs the risk of glossing over crucial historical facts, and it doesbut not to the detriment of its greater mission. Brook contains the madness of revolutionary Russia, the decadence of extraterritorial Shanghai, and the heady days of early Dubai into a neat narrative arc while zooming in on each citys architecture to add depth to the story and contribute his own considerable expertise. The thesis of Future Cities is almost Hegelian: Sleepy, provincial towns get fast-tracked into corporate cosmopolitanism by an ambitious leader until their global ambitions are suppressed by

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nationalist discontent. They undergo a period of stagnation until finally, they lead their nation into the new global economy we live in today. All of these changes come at the expense of the very poor. Future Cities comes out at a time when cities are being extolled across the board as the shining economic future, or as the NGO circuit prefers to dub them, engines of growth. Economists make such pronouncements in good faith and with apparently good reasona recent paper from the Brookings Institution estimated that the worlds 300 largest metro economies account for 48 percent of world GDP, while housing only 19 percent of the global population. But cities arent all brick and mortar. Theyve become a metonym for free trade and a light regulatory hand, symbolizing automation, innovation, new economics. Every emerging economy must have its trademark metropolisa commodity of sorts to mark its ascent. The current state of the places Brook profiles speaks to this urban ideology. In 2013, St. Petersburgs Nesvky Prospect has more than moved on from the Soviet era; it is, once again, comparable to Oxford Street, the Champs-Elyses, or Fifth Avenueonly now, its post-Soviet oligarchs are leaving Russia to mingle with the global elite rather than importing them. India dealt with bloated and antiquated bureaucratic operations for decades; it wasnt until the country adopted a market-driven approach and began to follow the recommendations of the IMF and the World Bank that the spiritual India of Gandhi and the socialist India of Nehru was razed and rebuilt in Bombays image: energetic, acquisitive, worldly. Bombaynow Mumbaiand Shanghai are home to a range of multinational corporations. And though the glamorous abandonment of recession-era Dubai has become its own genre of disaster porn, the city continues to import the best of the West: Harvards, 54

Googles, and Goldman Sachses. These cities learned to a ccommodate global capitalism by adopting a Jekyll and Hyde identity: becoming at once cities of the rich and cities of the poor. The problem isnt that these cities are, or hope to be cosmopolitanits that the current face of cosmopolitanism is a superficial one. When the perpetrators of this new kind of melting pot come primarily from the investor class, one winds up with a bland cosmopolitan monoculture that crystallizes the worlds inequities into a snowglobe of Louis Vuitton luggage and Tiffany jewelry, mingling over pan-Asian cuisine cooked by a Frenchman, served on plates made in China, by Mexicans in an anonymous downtown high-rise made of glass and steel. Describing Peter the Greats clusterfuck of foreign professionals, Brook writes that with so little shared experience, a culture of lowest-common-denominator kitsch can arise itself. He was talking about Russiatodays kitsch capitalbut he could have been describing the lobby of any given Ritz in any given city on earth today. Pakistani architect Arif Hasan has a name for urban centers like the ones in Brooks book. He calls them World-Class Cities:
According to the World-Class City agenda, the city ...should be an international event city (Olympics, sports fairs, etc), writes Hasan. It should have high-rise apartments as opposed to upgraded settlements and low-rise neighbourhoods. It should cater to tourism (often at the expense of local commerce). It should have malls as opposed to traditional markets...The most important repercussions of this agenda are that the requirements of global capitaland not local requirements increasingly determine the physical and social form of the city.

Brooks Future Cities arose more organically than

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Hasans somewhat mercenary portrayal, and for all their faults, the rulers of those cities had a grander, less cynical vision. Still, the direction in which theyre heading todayone that prioritizes multinational corporate culture over, well, peopleis troubling. Hasans thesis is particularly relevant when reading Brooks descriptions of Bombay, where slums sit mere miles away from airports, hotels, and glittering skyscrapers. (Katherine Boos treatment of the subject, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, also comes to mind.) Charter cities, if they succeed, will push this blandness further. They will be urban McMansions McMetropolises, if you will. Its not hard to imagine St. Petersburg, Mumbai, Shanghai, and also London, Geneva, New York, and Lagos culminating in a Dubaisian dystopiaa cosmopolitan city where most people are not cosmopolitans, where, per Brook, the Indians really are Indian, the Egyptians really are Egyptian, and fewer and fewer people have any sorts of rights at all. Yet Dubai seems downright folksy compared to some of its newer offshoots. South Korea, for instance, has bought into the future-city mentality in name and in spirit alike. In 2010, I visited a suburb called Incheon near the Seoul airport, with a commercial area aptly named Tomorrow City and a free economic zone called Songdo. I was struck by how sterile the area was -- it looked more like a prototype of a city than an actual city. Later, I looked it up online and read the following description:
Tomorrow City in Songdo is a futuristic city equipped with all the latest gadgets and technologies. Encompassing a space of over 47,000m2, it is a six-story building consisting of the U-Transit Center, U-City Vision Center, U-Mall, and U-Square (all named to reflect the overarching theme of ubiquitous city). The U-Transit Center has a tourism

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information desk and a city tour stop ... The U-City Vision Center admits visitors every 30 minutes starting from 10 a.m. While they wait, visitors are entertained by a robot waiting at the entryway. Once inside, people can watch an exciting movie in the 3D Interactive Theater on the fourth floor or experience futuristic living on the fifth floor. Concluding a 70-minute tour, visitors will have the perfect photo opportunity to take pictures in the Vision Hall on the sixth floor. Tomorrow City is connected with the University of Incheon Station (Incheon Subway Line No. 1). The area right behind the station is Songdo Central Park, modeled after the famed Central Park in New York. Visitors can walk along a waterway supplied with sea water using seawater (the first of its kind in Korea!) or take a look at the Compact & Smart City and Incheon Global Fair Memorial.

At the time, Incheon was developing blocks upon blocks of hotels and office towers, presumably in the hope that a particular breed of global businessman would gravitate therea sort of call of the wild for investment bankers and management consultants, stranded between airports and five-star hotels. It even launched an initiative called Smile with English, which provided language classes to make itself as Anglo-friendly as Hong Kong or Singapore. But the great migration hadnt happened yet; the only people listening to the K-pop blaring through telephone poles and lampposts were construction workers. One small drag of restaurants entertained hotel guests, and one grocery store remained open at all times. Near the hotel where I stayed, I saw a brandnew office building with a massive hole at its center. It seemed empty, and the middle was omitted intentionallyas if to say: The city is so ready for the future that you could fly a plane through it. u 56

Paul Romers charter cities dont exist yet, but theres good reason to suspect that if they are built, they could well endure the same dialectical shifts as the cities Brook describes in Future Cities have seen. In a profile in the Atlantic, economist Sebastian Mallaby wrote that Romer had some potential takers in African countries at the time. That didnt work out, so a couple of years ago Romer moved on to Honduras, and convinced its government to pass a constitutional amendment allowing certain zones function under different rules and regulations. Some members of the government were enthusiastic about the plan, and Romer was appointed to a so-called Transparency Commission, which would ensure a safe and honest transition to isolate a free-trade zone in one of the most dangerous countries on earth. In theory, Romers plans had their own internal logiched have made a great technocrat. But in practice, they proved much harder than anticipated. The very values he sought to promote through his charter city idea were busted before takeoff, when the Honduran government failed to live up to the Transparency Commissions levels of, well, transparency. Romer quit the project last fall, and barely a month later, the Honduran Supreme Court ruled these zones unconstitutional. Then, in February, the cities all of a sudden became legal again, through some political maneuvering and dismissals in the high court. Its probably too early to say if the plans will come to fruition, but it wont be surprising if a version of Romers charter cities becomes a reality in the next decade. If theres ever been a time for a corporate-colonial throwback, ours is as good as any. If Brooks Future Cities has a moral, its that building a city on an imported, prefabricated idea of development is a design fordiscontent. n

AS WE START to grasp the reality of the upcoming end of times, many of us will feel tempted by a We Are the World way of thinking. You might find yourself drawn toward unwarranted sharing, and the next time youre dining out, you might even notice that youre opting for a seat at the community table instead of that cozy quiet seat in the corner. Whats next for you if you start making life decisions that will adversely affect your digestion? I strongly advise against falling
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into any kind of rainbow-like, all-embracing oneness with the universe, let alone your next-door neighbor. Sure, if we had unlimited time, Id say, Lets organize a few million-man picnics. If there were days to spare, we could dot the planet with a series of mile-long conga lines. Id be the first to say, Lets fill every available music studio with every aging rocker and raise money for every crisis we can still create in these final days. As well-intentioned as all

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these activities might be, they dont seem the most efficient use of our time as we enter the gather our rosebuds while we may time of our existence. Im not suggesting adopting a mean-spirited, selfish philosophy but rather reminding you that those rosebuds are not going to gather themselves. Something that might help us concentrate and focus as we live-stream the coming apocalypse is practicing some healthy separation. I know that people tend to have a bias against walls, but I think we need to switch from thinking of walls as dividers and recognize them as fortifiers. they can be bulwarks against bullshit, barriers that keep away anything that might impede our goals. You might think you dont need any partition protecting you, but let me remind you that as nice as exploding rockets might look you want to be on the other side of the rampart when viewing their red glare. Back in the day, I was the lone voice asking Mr. Gorbachev to put back that wall. They could at least have taken it down slower or even tried dressing it up a bit: Hang some art, give it a fresh coat of paint. Who knows what a little splash of color and a few trompe loeil doorways might have done? Sometimes you break down barriers by raising walls. There is no limit to how many can be constructed, and there is no
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limit to the closeness we can achieve with all this separation. The beauty part is, while were building all these bridges, we will also be growing our economy. Wall building can be the next growth industry. We can partition our way back to economic health, and I promise you, we will never have to worry about a wall bubble: We can always tear them down and sell the pieces as souvenirs. n

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