#37: Outposts in the Ruins
John Cheever, writing in 1960, unfurled a prescient survey of the emergent American landscape's least beloved elements: "Ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted rivers, jerry-built ranch houses, abandoned miniature golf links, cinder deserts, ugly hoardings, unsightly oil derricks, diseased elm trees, eroded farmlands, gaudy and fanciful gas stations, unclean motels, candlelit tearooms, and streams paved with beer cans." Today, it’s easy to compile a similar list of digital refuse: "Spambots, sponsored content, gratuitous push notifications, shitposting, broken URLs, trolls, hacks, filter bubbles, phishing scams, network outages."
Surprisingly, Cheever concluded his own list hopefully: “These are not, as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization but are the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we—you and I—shall build.” Yesterday, the FCC voted to repeal net neutrality, the latest (but not final) blow against a utopian vision of the internet that has already been in its death throes for years. Cheever’s passage immediately came to mind when I read the news: Much of 2017 has felt like a grotesque act of creative destruction, and, certain small victories aside, it’s unlikely that most of the people and institutions actually empowered to reverse that process will do so.
Cheever's 1960 prophecy, unfortunately, wasn't quite realized. The detritus he pointed out yielded to urban and suburban environments that often looked better but were less equal or free in many ways. That failure, however, is instructive for the present moment, our mandate the same now as it was then, as yesterday’s news should reaffirm: Don’t just wait for an idyllic golden age that never quite happened to return or repair itself, but start building what comes next out of the ruins.
I'm guest editing Spencer Wright's excellent newsletter, The Prepared, this week. It's one of the handful of newsletters that inspired me to start this one. Definitely subscribe if you're interested in a smart weekly exploration of *real problems in the physical world.*
Reads:
Security robots being used to monitor and deter homeless camps in San Francisco.
Architecture critic Alexandra Lange's reflection on Apple's circular headquarters building (the "most hyped building of 2017").
Nick Kaufman's short suggested list of 21st-century digital rights. This is a pretty good start.
Until next time,
Drew