#69: Stardust Memories
I visited Alaska a few months ago. My first stop in Anchorage was the Blockbuster Video ten minutes from the airport, which my friend who lives there had informed me still existed. As you might expect, the store felt like a time capsule, almost exactly what I remembered from my last visit to a Blockbuster more than ten years prior (the Anchorage store would close permanently just a couple of weeks after my pilgrimage, leaving only one remaining US location in Bend, Oregon). The Ringer published a eulogy for the Alaska Blockbusters that contained an interesting observation by the store's owner about the contradiction between his customers' stated preference—they love Blockbuster and want it to remain open—and their revealed preference—they weren't spending as much money on video rentals anymore. "Everyone longs for it, but everyone stopped doing it...All they remember is some fondness for coming to the store. Not why they haven’t been coming as much."
The ever-growing tension between how we want the world to be and how we spend our money is one of neoliberalism's main products: Global-scale efficiency that delivers a competitively priced variety of goods to consumers who are increasingly unable to refuse and increasingly powerless outside of the consumer sphere. While frustrating to a Blockbuster owner, that contradiction is not inconsistent or hypocritical. We shouldn't have to individually pay for everything we want to see in the world. Walmart and then Amazon should have taught us, if nothing else already had, that optimizing one's spending for anything other than price is a luxury, and personally buying the environment you want to inhabit even more so. When Walmart comes to town, you're fortunate if you're in a position to not shop there; Amazon escalates that conflict to a nearly impossible intensity (also, good luck boycotting Amazon when AWS quietly powers a huge chunk of the internet).
We suffer from a similar fatalism in gentrifying urban environments. Who among us hasn't noticed a beloved restaurant, bar, or shop close down before admitting we didn't actually go there very much and maybe have no right to complain. A few different attitudes are available for coping with this condition: Accept the possibility that technological disruption and economic change dooms certain places and social norms; nostalgically cling to a dying iteration of the city; or just try to support the businesses you like as much as possible. We can call the last option GoFundMe urbanism, a form of what Bruce Sterling calls "favela chic": The physical world is a disaster and everyone has to go viral to survive. This, again, is a neoliberal outcome in which everything "public" has become a customer interaction and you only get to have what you yourself pay for. Another definition of public space, though, is everything that exists specifically beyond that consumer scope—the commons that we collectively enjoy without individually paying for it. That's a resource that cities still provide, despite many forces that threaten it. That commons won't include Blockbuster anymore but, by definition, it must preserve some things we liked but didn't specifically buy.
Reads:
Darran Anderson speculating on visions of famous architects and urban planners that were never built. Did you know that Frank Lloyd Wright created a master plan for Baghdad in the '50s? I didn't.
Maxwell Neely-Cohen on "terminal green," the most cyberpunk color. "Penn Station is the most cyberpunk place in New York City. It’s dark except for its electronic light—a boondoggle of a weak government bowled over by corporate power, overwhelmed with a human mass trying to get anywhere else."
The half-acre Migingo Island in Lake Victoria, claimed by both Kenya and Uganda, is one of the smallest and most densely populated islands on earth. The photos in the article are amazing.