*Uh, well, sorta. Take it away, Kazys Varnelis:
http://varnelis.net/blog/complexity_and_contradiction_in_infrastructure
(...)
"But a Californicated America would have no room for public infrastructural spending. Instead, the exemplary infrastructures of the 1980s and 1990s—telecoms after deregulation, the mobile phones, the Internet—are privatized. Here, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron describe the legitimizing narrative for such ventures as the Californian Ideology, a union of hippie self-realization, neoliberal economics, and above all, privatization advocated by Silicon Valley pundits like Stewart Brand editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and founder of Wired Magazine. As Barbrook and Cameron suggest, the growth of Silicon Valley and indeed, California as a whole, was made possible only due to exploitation of the immigrant poor and defense funding.
(((Barbrook 'n' Cameron, masters of Angeleno infrastructure:)))
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/4085103045/
"Los Angeles, after all, became the country’s foremost industrial city in the postwar period, largely due to defense contracts at aerospace firms. So, government subsidies for corporations and exploitation of non-citizen poor: a model for future administrations.
"But there’s more to infrastructural crisis then neoliberal economic policy. Once again Banham and Los Angeles provide a reference point. Banham describes the ecologies of Los Angeles as dominated by an individualism that allows architecture to flourish. But such a model of the city is insufficient. In the Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles, William Fulton describes Los Angeles as an exemplar of what Harvey Molotch calls “the city as growth machine.” In this model, certain industries—primarily the finance and real estate industries—dominate urban politics with the intention of expanding their businesses. Newspapers too endorse the growth machine as a way of expanding their subscription base and selling real estate ads. Moreover, arts organizations such as the symphony, opera, and art museums are also beholden to the model of the city as growth machine.These interests promote a naturalized view of growth in which we are simply not to question that cities will always get bigger or that they should always get bigger. (((It also raises the interesting question of whether a city can grow without newspapers.)))
"By the 1960s, however, homeowner discontent about encroaching sprawl led individuals to band together to form homeowner groups. The first of these was the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Associations, which protested the construction of a four-lane highway in place of scenic Mulholland Drive. Soon, homeowners teamed with environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club to create a regional park in the Santa Monica Mountains to prevent further development in their back yards. By the time that Proposition 13 passed, Angelenos were set against the growth machine and with it, too, the big infrastructure necessary to drive it or even the projects necessary to repair it. (((I'm inclined to suspect that most any California homeowner group can beat up the founders of Wired Magazine, especially because I've been to Louis and Jane's house and seen their neighbors.)))
"The result, then, is a long, steady process of infrastructural decay, privatized infrastructure acting as a layer or retrofit onto a decaying public infrastructure. (((Post-Communist architecture to a T. My lesson from this essay is that it doesn't much matter what architecture theorists of any persuasion might say; we're in an anthill collapsing from sheer unsustainable age, and it's all about the layer and the retrofit. You might call that the "Torino Ideology" because in these parts they excel at that. So much so that it's actually kind of delightful and I miss it when I'm not around.)))
"It’s in this context, then, that we must situate both Venturi and Banham, as transitional approaches to the material, reducing questions of complexity to form matters, which of course is not too uncommon in architecture. In Venturi’s case, complexity is produced through form, in Banham’s case formal complexity is produced by the laissez-faire city.
"Now I’d like to turn to some contradictions that emerge out of this condition. (((Uh-oh))) First, we could sense a threat to the vaunted neoliberal individual rights from failing infrastructure. Some of these are quite obvious: the inconvenience of traffic and long commutes but also the potholes that (in Los Angeles) cause an average of $746 of damage annually per automobile, collapsing bridges, energy crises caused by privatization such as electricity grids failing and refineries going offline indefinitely (here the city of Los Angeles, which has not privatized its power wound up ahead of the rest of the state during the crisis that brought down Gray Davis during Enron’s salad days). (((Or: do you really WANT to be a super-rich top-dog Yankee banker in a decaying, flooded New Orleans?)))
Neoliberalism thus exacerbates what sociologist Ulrich Beck calls “risk society.” Banham’s autopia isn’t a risk free world, but rather a condition in which risk and threat are everyday factors, creating a contradiction within capitalism. Beck:
“… everything which threatens life on this Earth also threatens the property and commercial interests of those who live from the commodification of life and its requisites. In this way a genuine and systematically intensifying contradiction arises between the profit and property interests that advance the industrialization process and its frequently threatening consequences, which endanger and expropriate possessions and profits (not to mention the possession and profit of life).” (Beck 1992: 39)
(((Can't take it with you, 'specially when it's poisoned and on fire.)))
* * *
Now if environmentalism was in part, a movement created by homeowner desires to protect their rights, we would expect that infrastructural collapse (or for that matter the state of California schools) would also be of concern to homeowners and corporations, but in California, Proposition 13 and a politics of stalemate make it impossible to act. Even as voters seek mandates to restore services, the state is hamstrung by the legislature’s terror of touching Proposition 13, which is known as the “third rail” of state politics. Last month the Guardian asked “Will California become America’s first failed State?”
(((Looks like California won't lack for company:)))
http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html
I want to be stress that in other respects conditions have intensified, moving postmodernism to another phase. Take risk. Environmentalism has been thoroughly capitalized as the green movement, with the Californian ideology now promising to save us from global warming through technological means. Crisis becomes profitable. Crisis becomes profitable. ((("Crisis becomes profitable." I think this may be preferable to the current situation, where crisis is methodically denied because Exxon can't put a dollar-sign on it.)))
On to my last two points. Profit, as Robert Brenner tells us in the economics of global turbulence has become a problem, in part because of some of the problems that face infrastructure. Massive investment in fixed capital make it impossible to abandon when more efficient structures elsewhere threaten. The most familiar aspect of this, of course, is the rise of Chinese industry and the evacuation of American production. But infrastructure is of equal concern. Infrastructure, like other technologies, follows a classic S-curve, in which initially steep returns per dollar invested are followed by diminishing returns as the curve flattens.
The results, for the country have been devastating. California, together with Soho and Boston appeared to enjoy massive growth in high technology, particularly telecommunications and digital technology, during the last three decades. But much of this growth happened not in terms of production, but rather in finance, both in the lucrative financial instruments that accompanied public offerings and in terms of technology that made ever more complex financial operations possible.
Traditional profits, in this context, were considered devalued in comparison with the profits obtainable. Jeffrey Nealon in Foucault Beyond Foucault suggests that in this sort of operation, the classic equation that Marx observed in Capital of M-C-M’ is now rewritten as M-M’, in other words, capital leads to capital growth without any intervening commodity. (((I'm looking forward to the day when capital leads to capital growth without any intervening people. Suppose there was a non-employee corporation with an investment algorithm that made it the richest entity on Earth. Would we worship it?)))
The result, then, is a bit of what we saw this spring when, after President-Elect Obama made a YouTube speech calling for a WPA 2.0 as an economic stimulus, he turned away from infrastructure in the actual stimulus bill. Blame has been laid on Obama’s chief economic advisor Larry Summers. (((I think we should get back to blaming Stewart Brand, because, in ten thousand Long Now years, Stewart Brand will be the only remaining relic of California's stricken civilization.)))
But how the Democrats (or in California, Schwarzenegger) are going to get out of this mess is entirely unclear. (((and that's the GOOD part.))) Economic indicators suggest that the country will endure a long term period of stagnation, different from, but reminiscent of the 1970s and 1980s. This month, the New York Times reported that unemployment and underemployment now stands at 17.5%, the highest level since the Great Depression. Official unemployment in California now stands at 12%. These are staggering numbers. The state is making cutbacks while raising tuitions at the University of California system, leading to mass student protests and the regents macing students. California leads the nation again, it seems. (((Now that there's nobody left in college but RICH students, it's gonna be really interesting to see student radicals take to the streets. I mean, if you're a modern cop, can you really wallop a guy if his dad comes from the 1% rentier class that owns everything?)))
If the restructuring of the 1980s destroyed manufacturing, this decade’s recession has mowed down the creative class and the financial sectors. (((Interesting insight. Who's left standing? Health care people?))) In the latest New Left Review, Gopal Balakrishnan suggests that we have entered into a stationary state, a long period of systemic stagnation. As he points out, Adam Smith never expected the wealth of nations to improve perpetually but rather expected it would come to an end in the nineteenth century as resources were exhausted. Capital’s perpetual growth would have been a mystery to him. (((You gotta love a historical period when the left is so abject that they have to quote Adam Smith like Lucifer reciting Scripture.)))
To conclude then, I want to return to where I started, the theme of complexity. I've been thinking about these issues a lot lately, re-reading archealogist Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter's thesis differs from Jared Diamond's (and also precedes it by a decade). Instead of turning to the external forces of ecological catastrophe (as Diamond does) or to foreign invasion (as other commentators do), Tainter sees complexity as the downfall of societies. (((It was probably the downfall of the Santa Fe Institute, anyhow, because those guys were way into complexity theories that nobody else ever understood.)))
As societies mature, Tainter observes, they become more complex, especially in terms of communication. A highly advanced society is highly differentiated and highly linked. That means that just to manage my affairs, I have to wrangle a trillion bureaucratic agents such as university finance personnel, bank managers, insurance auditors, credit card representatives, accountants, real estate agents, Apple store "geniuses," airline agents, delivery services, outsourced script-reading hardware support personnel, and lawyers in combination with non-human actors like my iPhone, Mac OS 10.6, my car, the train, and so on. (((It also explains why the simple, efficient, rural South so conclusively defeated the Northern states, so top-heavy with trains and mass production. Oh wait.)))
This is the contemporary system at work, and it's characteristic of the bureaucratized nature of complex societies. On the one hand, in a charitable reading, we produce such bureaucratic entities in hopes of making the world a better place, keeping each other honest and making things work smoothly. But in reality, not only is this dysfunction necessary for the operation of the service economy, these kinds of entities rub up against each other, exhibiting cascading failure effects that produce untenable conditions. (((Unless you're living in one of those "untenable conditions," in which case it's a really nice niche to make a pile.)))
In Tainter's reading, complex societies require greater and greater amounts of energy until, at a certain point, the advantages of the structures they create are outweighed by diminishing marginal returns on energy invested. The result is not just catastrophe but collapse, which Tainter defines as a greatly diminished level of complexity. (((Sort of like a too-big library that has too many books: if they're like the Koran, then we don't need 'em, and if they contradict the Koran, they're too complicated. Into the cleansing fire with 'em.)))
Just as rigidity was the failure point for Fordism, complexity is the failure point for post-Fordism. In this light, the culture of congestion valorized by Koolhaas is undone by the energy costs of that complexity.
Now I agree with Tainter when he concludes that the only hope to forestall the collapse of a complex society is technological advance. I’d argue that this is what’s driving the field of networked urbanism at the moment. But, I'm not so sure we can do it. This is where my optimism rubs up against my nagging feeling that urban informatics, locative media, smart grids, and all the things that the cool kids at LIFT and SXSW are dreaming up are too little, too late.... (((I'm formally declaring myself in the camp with the cool kids at LIFT and SXSW. Can't wait to see 'em make some fresh mistakes.)))
