Leave the Planet
The era of forced mobility is upon us
Jake Bittle published an article this week about the Marshall Islands’ plan for adapting to climate change in the coming decades. Without sufficient international aid to protect parts of the island group from rising sea levels, the nation will opt to abandon the islands altogether by 2100, migrating to less vulnerable places such as the United States. The Marshall Islands are an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean whose total landmass is smaller than that of Baltimore, spread over an ocean area the size of Mexico; the survey that informed the nation’s climate strategy, in which government officials interviewed 3 percent of the population, found that “a combination of rapid sea-level rise and drought has already made life untenable for many of the country’s 42,000 residents, especially on outlying atolls where communities rely on rainwater and vanishing land for subsistence.” The most optimistic predictions for the Marshall Islands anticipate two feet of sea level rise before the end of this century, while the most dire have many of the country’s islands and atolls vanishing underwater entirely. The climate plan thus comprises a series of “decision points”—in the years 2040, 2070, and 2100—at which the country’s leaders will reassess conditions, likely deciding to consolidate its population on a few islands that can be protected. The final decision point is the most difficult: “If by 2100, no decision can be made to protect areas of atolls to the sea level rise level, or if there is no funding for it, then the decision must be to help all population to migrate away from the Republic of the Marshall Islands.”
Forced mobility of this kind is an emerging theme of the 21st century, in contrast to the discretionary mobility that defined the 20th, which began with the advent of the automobile and ended with supersonic air travel—a century characterized by technology expanding the physical scope of life, propelling us faster and faster, juicing us up with kinetic energy until we seemed to overdose on it, a moment perhaps symbolized by the weaponization of airplanes on 9/11. “The globalization aesthetic of the new millennium was perspectival,” Sean Monahan writes in his most recent report. “Madonna gyrating in front of time lapse traffic rushing toward the future in “Ray of Light”…It was flight paths, urban crowds, container ships. Globalization was a horizon line. And we were going there.” In other domains, however, mobility was already something of a burden. In 1921, Max Weber wrote, “The Puritan wanted to live a vocational life—we are forced to.” Similarly, the modernists wanted to put themselves in motion, and we are forced to. The prospective abandonment of the Marshall Islands represents an extreme case—and climate change has ironically been worsened by our overconsumption of transportation—but everyday life is also filled with unavoidable migration at various scales. In a 2019 newsletter, I quoted Alain Bertaud’s observation that “the new proletariat in places like the United States no longer consists of industrial workers, but rather people who are forced to commute for three or more hours a day because they can’t live near their jobs” The same motorized transport that was once pure luxury is now as likely to be a curse.
Ironically, the COVID-19 pandemic provided a backdoor solution to the problem of excessive travel, at least for those fortunate enough to be employed in Zoom-friendly knowledge work. For a population consigned to a cycle of days and nights in sweatpants, the commute quickly receded from daily life (and in many cases hasn’t returned). The counterpart to hypermobility is the virtualized stasis that the internet increasingly fosters, and this too is a hallmark of the 21st century—the ongoing replacement of reasons to leave home with digitally enabled convenience, and a longing for formerly commonplace but now elusive IRL activities. The broad shift from high-speed movement to a default state of physical stillness seems to parallel the zeitgeist, which has gotten blurry and directionless. When stasis is assumed, we must go searching for new reasons to move while simultaneously avoiding involuntary displacement. Marc Andreessen’s recently published Techno-Optimist Manifesto reads like a nostalgic call to recapture the 20th century’s unambiguous march of progress: “We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity.” The goals that most closely resemble 20th century progress, like self-driving vehicles and Mars, seem less consequential than the comparable milestones of prior eras, at least in terms of their benefits to ordinary people. The threat of climate catastrophe, meanwhile, looms large. We all inhabit the Marshall Islands, in a sense. Our ambivalence about Mars may stem from an unanswered question: We don’t know if we’ll finally go there because we want to or because we have to.
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Reads:
Tse Wei Lim on soup dumplings, standardization, branding, and disposability. “Since we can’t share what it’s like to eat something, no one can tell us what the experience is subjectively worth, and if no one can confirm our assessment of its worth, maybe the food itself is actually worthless.”
Sachin Benny on David Fincher’s The Killer and how technology appears in film and TV. “Perhaps technologies only make solid entrances into our narratives in their late stages. The arrival of stories with the internet as a central narrative then signals that we live in a post-internet world.”
“How about we make [CosMc’s] look like something instead of nothing?”