The Social Zamboni

An adaptation of the “KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD” sign in downtown Portland, shared to wikimedia commons by Tony Webster and used under a CC BY 2.0 license.

Every American lives in a part of the country with a “weird town.” I don’t mean the sort of creepy place you find in a Shirley Jackson or Stephen King story – I mean a “Keep X weird” kind of weird town. Portland, Austin, Savannah, Madison, Santa Fe, and our own Lawrence, Kansas, all have this same general vibe: a place where people do things that are unexpected and whimsical, simply because they have the time and space in which to do so.

Most college towns are at least a little weird, for example. This can be chalked up, largely but not completely, to the students. This sort of environment spurs on creativity – whether of the corporate sort or the artistic sort, though there’s always going to be some that’s simply a sort of wildcat outsider weirdness.

Image of Dick Mills at a 2009 reunion of the BBC Radiophonic workshop, uploaded by Kevan Davis to Flickr, and used under a CC BY 2.0 license. To understand “popular modernism”, let’s talk, briefly about electronic music in Britain: it simply wouldn’t have existed or taken its contemporary form without the influence of the BBC radiophonic workshop, which was government funded — which means, in a roundabout way, that modern electronic music owes its sophistication to the social democratic policies of Britain.

This is what Americans have instead of what Mark Fisher called Popular Modernism. There aren’t really that many government-supported art programs, much less at a state or national level. What we have are these places that function as an undirected crucible of strangeness, and occasionally it spits out something useful or interesting.

By “weird”, I mean those moments of unexpected strangeness, the oddly aesthetic occurrence of being surprised by something to which someone has taken an artistic approach. I’m struggling to avoid the word “innovation” and derivatives, here: in the past twenty years or so, that’s taken on a sort of vibe that is different from what I’m talking about.

So what makes the above – as well as college towns in general – “weird towns”?

Believe it or not, for decades, rent was very cheap in Portland and Austin. People could work less and still be able to support themselves. In short, while they might be comparatively cash-poor to people in other locations, they were time-rich. They had what college students largely get for long stretches of the semester, which is the freedom to experiment and explore things without the necessity to constantly hustle.

This is, honestly, what Universities were originally designed to be: as a refuge for the sort of strange and unsupportable people that are ill-suited to corporate life. David Graeber noted this in The Utopia of Rules, when he lamented that “There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.” When talking to Edgar about it several days ago, I referred to colleges as “the hyperfixation box”, using a common term from discourse around neurodivergent people (experienced, I know, by individuals with ADD and ADHD) and it struck me as perhaps the most apt description of everyone who has gone on to get a master’s degree: why would you spent all of your life cramming as much information as you can about Seventeenth Century French Poetry, or butterflies, or the zoo of subatomic particles – what the hell is a “boson” anyway? – unless it was simply too cool to you to not dedicate your time to?

Think also, how many people were able to experience the pure joy of learning about something that they considered to be cool and interesting, without thinking about the end goal of it for a moment. To experience that kind of wonder is a sort of freedom, and one we’re often denied later in life.

Image of the crowd at San-Diego Comic-Con in 2011, uploaded by PopCultureGeek.com to Flickr and used under a CC BY 2.0 license. If you think that this crowd is more enthusiastic about Marvel Comics, Anime, or video games than an English academic is about Jane Austen or James Joyce, then you’re sadly misinformed. The difference isn’t in hygiene or habits, simply focus and wardrobe.

When properly set up, this is academia at its best: you place the obsessives (like your writer for today) in an environment where they can pursue that obsession safely, and when that knowledge is needed you bring them out or send someone in to learn the necessary packet of information. To many people, this is what college is, because they don’t know about administrative bloat.

Let’s not get on to administrative bloat, yet – I’ve talked about it before, and I need to get back to talking about weird towns.

What are the stereotypes of Portland and Austin? They’re expensive and full of hipsters – and, at least in the case of Portland, many of the Hipsters are also Nipsters, and so there’s a fair number of street fights going on at any given time – but what makes them this?

The answer is fairly simple: gentrification. While it’s obvious that gentrification is in ethnic minority neighborhoods, where the population was forced by red-lining or similar programs, and who are thus multiply-displaced, is a far greater evil, it is the same process and it’s almost universally a negative. However, where there is a surplus of time and energy that can be capitalized upon, that’s exactly what happens – the apparatus of extraction begins, and capitaliforming takes over. Soon, the town is no longer weird, because the necessary prerequisites are no longer in place. Everything becomes normal again.

Here, I see something analogous to administrative bloat in Universities – the skyrocketing number of administrators, as well as the increase in the administrative load placed upon the professors – there is something from which value can be extracted, and so it is. Despite this hampering what is supposed to be the primary mission of the original thing – to be a place for people to live and flourish; to produce scholarship and education – this is seen as a good thing, because it is labeled as more valuable or efficient.

Okay, so technically, the manufacturer is Zamboni, and the particular machine is an “ice resurfacer”, but that makes the phrase to complicated. [image uploaded to wikimedia commons by Myrabella and used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.]

I call this “the social zamboni.” It is something that smooths out the rough edges and fields of intensity. I do not think that this particular social formation is one that was designed – such thinking would be conspiracism – but one that has gradually emerged to make the environment in which it occurs more stable.

The social zamboni is the confluence of rising rent, stagnant wage, and an increase in what Graeber saw as “bullshit jobs” – a narrowing of the space in which people can be weird. Alongside this is the tendency of what could be called “artificial weirdness,” which is strange and unexpected things turned into advertising. Usually, this is strangeness extracted from one or more of those weird towns I mentioned.

So, what can we do to describe the functioning and the reasoning behind the social zamboni?

Fundamentally, it is the other side of the tendency of capital to try to wring every jot of profit from every possible source. Lower labor costs, higher prices, and still the rate of profit declines. So rents go up and wages don’t. This means that workers, to stay where they were in regard to their standard of living, need to be promoted (and there are only so many positions higher up the pyramid), or work more.

Both solutions lead to less free time, and the loss of income (from lost rent) means that people have less freedom outside of work. This means that they cannot be as experimental as they would be otherwise.

So is this a byproduct or a non-product?

I think it’s a byproduct – something produced by these processes, but not necessarily an undesired one. If you read through Rebecca Solnit’s Paradise Built in Hell, or any related piece on elite panic, and you can understand why. Any of the structures that limit the freedom and behavior of the great seething mass of humanity are fundamentally good from the perspective of these elite, because the elite always seem to develop the same theory of human nature: that the average person is selfish, dishonest, and one small shock away from descending into savagery and barbarism.

Looking at it this way, this explains (to an extent) the phenomenon of bullshit jobs, described in the eponymous book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, as described by Graeber – the definition given, early in the text, is that, “a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” Which fits together with the discussion of the “big Other” that I first happened upon in Capitalist Realism — it isn’t possible to pretend to a person that you like your job, but it’s possible to convince people that you like your job: because the mass is stupid.

These jobs exist, seemingly, to occupy the attention and time of the average person and burn up their excess energy – a sort of psychic accursed share. If the average person is worried about fiddling around with the specifics of a report that will never be read, then he won’t be able to closely examine the very large, very slow-moving disaster that is everyday life.

This also explains the emergence of the shock doctrine: if people are venal, stupid, and cruel, then it’s possible to change their behavior with an overwhelming initial display of force that puts them in a stupor, over which you can write the new society you wish to build. Of course, what Klein ignored in The Shock Doctrine is that this largely doesn’t work when implemented in the way she describes: Iraq didn’t become a model capitalist nation in the middle east, and Chile is no longer the beating heart of neoliberalism: the people were beaten down but not reshaped.

What does all of this have to do with the social zamboni that I described earlier?

Simple: it’s all the same thing. It’s an apparatus that emerged as a way of flattening out society – it relates to the overwhelming shocks applied to Chile, elsewhere in Latin America, the Eastern Bloc, and Iraq the same way that climate change relates to nuclear apocalypse or lung cancer from secondhand smoke relates to a shotgun blast: you’re just as dead, it’s just a matter of spectacle.

This is also, largely, why so many of the biggest and most well-advertised movies of the contemporary period are reboots, remakes, sequels, and the like. Popular modernism – whether in the terms of the British-style government program or the American-style Weird Town – expands the field of who can participate in the arts: who can bring in new ideas. Right now, there’s a major problem in that the different artistic fields are somewhat incestuous: the fact that it seems like half of all working actors are part of the Coppola family is a problem. I love the work of Nick Harkaway, but the fact that he’s John le Carre’s son probably had something to do with him getting published – ditto for Joe Hill and Stephen King.

This isn’t to say that none of these people are talented artists and performers, but they’re a safe bet: they were raised by people who could do this, and know – presumably, generally – how to do it in the same or a similar way.

But who else is going to do it? They’re the only ones who can make it through the gauntlet of internships and PA gigs to be actors, or who know who to talk to so that they can get published (here’s a secret: there’s no class in MFA creative writing programs about how you go about getting published. You’re just supposed to find that out through the hidden curriculum, if at all.)

How do we know that someone with the natural ability to – with training – become the greatest painter of her generation isn’t working for Chicago Public Transportation? Or the – potentially – most gifted poet of the century isn’t collecting garbage in Essex? Or the – with support – greatest musician to ever live isn’t currently waiting on an aid package in the rural Congo?

We don’t. But we casually accept – alongside all of the other cruelties – the ideas that these people should have their options foreclosed upon. That they have no value beyond the rents that they can pay and the debts that they can service. That the places they live should be gentrified, capitaliformed, and flattened out.

Of course, we have to acknowledge that this is hardly a new problem. Only the specifics and the middlemen have changed.

It is our belief that the purpose of society is to allow the greatest number of people to squeeze the greatest amount of meaning out of their lives. This means that people don’t just need food and shelter and medical care – which we strongly believe that they need – but they need the time and space in which to not simply enjoy life but also to grow bored.

My firm belief is that inspiration strikes out of the blue, and that it often does so while we’re bored and our minds are wandering. And I can think of no better argument for this than a stroll through any healthy American weird town on a warm-but-not-hot evening, listening to people loudly play music or watching them ride art bikes slowly through back streets.

These are people that had the time and space to grow bored and to feel inspiration strike, to decide that there was something different that they want to do. With the opportunity, any of them could become working artists or could develop new theories of how the world works and – and I stress even if they’re not necessarily true or particularly engaging – that is fundamentally a good thing.

Because the alternative is just an endless world of 9-5 jobs, five-over-one apartments, bitter craft beer, ennui, and loneliness.

Frankly, I’m tired of that sort of thing.

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