Rat Information Portal
Reflections on what belongs in public, what doesn't, and who decides
Eric Adams has withdrawn from the NYC mayoral race, confirming that we’ve reached the twilight of what has been a dysfunctional but strangely entertaining four-year term. One thing Adams hates is rats, and his War on Rats introduced a trash containerization policy that curtailed one of New York’s defining images: huge mounds of garbage bags piled up on the streets. The sight of loose trash is still a daily feature of life in this city, however, and assumes countless forms, some so absurd and grotesque that all you can really do is laugh when you see them. I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t one of the aspects of New York I’ve developed a certain perverse fondness for—a category of experience, like rats themselves, that forms a core part of NYC life: all the shitty things that you tolerate long enough that you somehow almost learn to love them, or at least associate them deeply with the parts you do love, which is why New Yorkers have traditionally seemed so damaged to observers from more conventionally pleasant vantage points—but garbage is an especially striking example because what is more unambiguously bad than big piles of trash on the street? The ongoing project to clean up NYC in various ways, which has been underway for decades, is received by many with skepticism because it usually means the rent is going up. But garbage is a perfect symbol of life in a densely populated city because its presence highlights the built environment’s function as a filter on what we see and what we don’t see. In places like New York, you see a lot of things you don’t want to see, but even that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and there’s always plenty more hidden from view.
I rarely work in coffee shops anymore because the vibes are usually awful, for the obvious reason that any coffee shop where you’re allowed to bring your laptop is full of other people who have also done the same, and the kind of work usually being done in a coffee shop is what became derisively known in post-pandemic parlance as fake email jobs, following the explosion of remote employment and the contrast of the “essential worker” designation. Whenever I overhear a loud Zoom call in a coffee shop, I always have the same thought: The less I know about this person’s job, the better. And they would probably say the same about me. I’ve come to think of physical offices as fulfilling the same purpose as trash containerization: keeping that category of activity in its own rightful space where no one else has to see it, thereby upholding the delicate spatial balance between public and private activity that makes city life tolerable. One of the great cultural shifts precipitated by COVID was the accelerated breakdown of physical boundaries between activities that had been traditionally separate—both at home and in public—and that is especially visible in the transformation of urban space into an ad hoc distributed office for people who lack anywhere better to work. The well-documented harm of remote work, which extends the logic of email to its extreme, is that you never disconnect to a satisfactory degree and that work breaks free of any remaining temporal or spatial constraints to follow you everywhere in your pocket.
If we can containerize trash, perhaps knowledge work and other activities that have diffused into the ambient experience of public space should be understood similarly. In an essay about the current feeling of the city, the Meals Meals Food newsletter considers the apparent backlash against SubwayTakes, which is quintessential NYC internet content in ways both good and bad. The incessant encroachment of work upon the rest of life, he writes, is “perhaps why we lash out when we see someone making short form video content on the subway, once a liminal space between work and life, now turned into both by a man who couldn’t make either work on their own.” Such liminal space is a defining pattern of post-2020 urbanism. Choices about which types of activities are appropriate for different types of space, of course, are in the eye of the beholder, and much of the traditional usage was largely upheld by norms and conventions that the pandemic disrupted. Those favored uses also raise questions about who has the means to claim space for themselves in the first place. In her book Virtue Hoarders, Catherine Liu emphasizes the yuppie phenomenon of the 1980s as a turning point for the bifurcating middle class, writing that yuppies “helped to birth a new world for capitalism, a world of public austerity and private luxury,” which has only solidified in the time since, even if seems to have reclaimed that abandoned public space for itself. Getting piles of trash off the street could be a small reversal of that paradigm, at least in theory; the forms of luxury consumption that the yuppies pioneered have only proliferated, meanwhile, and unlike knowledge work these are mostly still grounded in physical space (even if TikTokers do call Manhattan “Work Island” on TikTok). An ever-present, free-floating anxiety about your job may just be the price of getting to play outside.
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Reads:
Sachin Benny on prediction markets and sports gambling as a form of simulated reality. “Markets continually invent new edges for bettors—new niches, more obscure sports, and finer-grained bettable units. As these edges multiply, they create conditions for Truman Show–like tournaments that exploit the asymmetry of knowledge between the bettor and the game.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard on the technological disenchantment of everyday experience and how to restore it (featuring a pilgrimage to visit the great James Bridle). “While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions—the unrepeatable and the unpredictable—are what technology abolishes.”
A brief meditation on a beloved restaurant, Main Character Syndrome, and the misuse of public space.
Insightful article; painfully funny because of your observations are so true.