Generation Bubble

Visions of what the future holds come in many shapes and guises. Peak-oil doomsayer James Howard Kunstler and economist Richard Florida offer theirs, and they stand radically opposed. Whatever happens tomorrow results from what happens today, which provides incentive enough for a thorough overhaul of the status quo.

After nearly 40 years of constant upheaval since President Richard Nixon closed the gold window on August 15, 1971, throwing the U. S. dollar into currency markets and the country’s industrial base into a death spiral; after decades of urban decay, white flight, suburbs, exurbs, mixed-use “third spaces” and the mallification of just about everywhere; after “Morning in America” gave way to an “Ownership Society” false dawn and a Götterdämmerung gloaming of “Too Big to Fail,” one fact abides.

Indeed, it abides with such undeniable persistence that to state it strikes one as simply the rehearsal of a banality. Pioneering German sociologist Georg Simmel first observed this fact, which he articulates in his landmark essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”: “The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy.” This seems uncontroversial enough an assertion. Simmel himself seeks not simply to establish the historical validity of this statement (he treats it as self-evident), but to consider the consequences of this eternal fact on the individual for whom the metropolis serves as her social milieu.

One cannot overstate the importance of this consideration of the metropolis’s effect on the human individual, particularly at this historical moment — at this conjuncture, as adherents of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser would please themselves to call it — when so grave a sense of catastrophe, religious, secular or otherwise, inflects current popular discourse. Peak oil, greenhouse gas, war, rumors of war, pandemics and just plain pandemonium represent but a few selections on today’s syllabus of doom. And if each reads from the same text, their construals vary widely. One truth remains, however, upon which they all readily agree: Their way of life as citizens of a developed nation trembles on the cusp of profound and lasting change.

Soothsayers tend to describe the shape of things to come in only the sketchiest free hand; for the embellishment of tone and shadow they inevitably resort to the palette blends of their subjectivities. James Howard Kunstler, perhaps the most vocal and voluble self-styled expert on this profound and lasting change, tends to work in black and muted gray. Even a cursory perusal of Kunstler’s weblog, which bears a title decidedly more colorful than his vision of the future, reveals imaginary landscapes of dreary eighteenth-century monotones — “a world make by hand,” as Kunstler likes to call it, and powered by Lord knows what. Certainly not petroleum (Kunstler, a member of the Peak-Oil vanguard, laughs this off as a priori impossible), not even coal or steam. Water, then? Wind? On such particulars Kunstler remains somewhat vague and noncommittal. He concerns himself solely with the grand theme of inexorable demise, which he gives the evocative name “The Long Emergency.” “American life will just wind down, no matter what we believe,” Kunstler writes:

It won’t wind down to a complete stop. Its near-term destination is to lower levels of complexity and scale than what we’ve been used to for a long time. People will be able to drive fewer cars fewer miles. The roads will get worse. They’ll be worse in some places than others. There will be fewer jobs to go to and fewer things sold. People who live in communities scaled to the energy and capital realities of the years ahead are liable to be more comfortable. We’re surely going to have trouble with money. Households will drown in debt and lose all their savings. Money could be scarce or worthless. Credit will be scarcer.

From Kunstler’s point of view, post-industrial America will eventually look a lot like pre-industrial America, albeit one peppered here and there with some technologically advanced doo-dads, concentrated, of course, at the tip-top of the post-collapse income distribution. (Think OnStar in covered wagons, MacBooks powered by windmills.) Whatever devices the new Olympians deign allow the plebes they’ll limit to only those which allow the lowly clods to perform the new work of nations: the cyberdrudgery of constant tweets, Facebook updates and one-click purchases — sharecropping on an existential level.

Piping a bright counter-melody to James Howard Kunstler’s somber Leitmotiv, economic and social theorist Richard Florida envisions a future in which urban centers go not gently into that good nigh, but go supernova, bursting into the second decade of the 21st century with renewed vigor. Florida’s article, “How the Crash Will Re-shape America” a manifesto of sorts, appeared in the March 2009 issue of The Atlantic and excited ripples of commentary throughout the blogosphere. The article contains Florida’s prediction that the tripartite law of real-estate value — location, location, location — will become a general axiom of the economy to come. “Worldwide,” Florida writes, “people are crowding into a discrete number of mega-regions, systems of multiple cities and their surrounding suburban rings,” a trend resulting in what Florida calls “talent-clustering” — educated worthies flock to these mega-regions to realize their gifts, filling the area talent pool to a point where whole algae-blooms of vibrancy and brilliance issue forth to adorn the cityscape. Out of this talent clustering, Florida claims, arises “the creative class,” who with fiscal reins firmly in hand will steer us toward our manifest aesthetico-techno-utopian destiny.

"We could be heroes": the creative class comes to save the day.

Florida presents New York as a paradigmatic example. Its brisk metabolism and fighter-jet velocity of ideas suggest a happier prognosis, certainly, than Kunstler’s retrograde visions. Out of the current recession the Big Apple emerges bloodied but unbowed — not because of its status as center of finance, but despite it.

Yet a center of finance the Big Apple remains, the current roil in world capital markets notwithstanding. Indeed, a Kunstlerian slide into neo-agrarian desuetude seems inconceivable for the city that never sleeps. As Florida points out, it shelters too richly diverse an economy ever to lead one to think a dark cloud over Wall Street means lights out for everyone. Indeed, perhaps there lurks an even more urgently pressing concerns, one so fundamental as to escape consideration. Which brings me back to Simmel, who follows his statement, “The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy,” with the following observation:

Money economy and the dominance of the intellect are intrinsically connected. They share a matter-of-fact attitude in dealing with men and with things; and, in this attitude, a formal justice is often coupled with an inconsiderate hardness. The intellectually sophisticated person is indifferent to all genuine individuality, because relationships and reactions result from it which cannot be exhausted with logical operations. In the same manner, the individuality of phenomena is not commensurate with the pecuniary principle. Money is concerned only with what is common to all: it asks for exchange value it reduces all quality and individuality to the question: How much? All intimate emotional relations between persons are founded in their individuality, whereas in rational relations man is reckoned with like a number, like an element which is in itself indifferent. Only the objectively measurable achievement is of interest.

Simmel speaks here of a sort of a mission creep on money’s part; wherever money achieves preëminence, it also radically reshapes the perceptions, beliefs, attitudes and behavior in the people who make use of it in their traffic with each other. Karl Marx puts the situation in no uncertain terms. In the Grundrisse he writes, “Where money is not itself the community, it must dissolve the community.” Of course, the dissolution brought about by money does not leave a void. Some residuum endures beyond the event: namely, the aggregation of atomized individuals, estranged by money’s caustic magic, which forces the singular and dissimilar into equivalency. The mind of the intellectually sophisticated metropolitan becomes quite literally a mind of money, his thoughts and judgments the thoughts and judgments money would have, if it could have them.

Because Florida’s prophecies depend crucially on the retrenchment of the metropolis as the center of the money economy in its new ready-for-primetime, fashion-forward iteration as driven by creativity as opposed to finance or industry, there arises the danger that, absent an alternative to the money economy, people of all classes creative or otherwise can expect little besides hearing once again the infernal question, “How much?” If Simmel’s assertion, “Only the objectively measurable achievement is of interest,” has even the slightest validity, then perhaps the weighty task of addressing the question, “Does the money economy measure up anymore?”, lies before every person of good will. They might find, as essayist and social critic Douglas Rushkoff does, that the money economy has outlived its usefulness.

Rushkoff and his fellow technological optimists like to talk about 21st-century replacements to money, which Rushkoff humorously refers to as an “obsolete operating system” — replacements that continue to serve the money’s traditional economic function but that avoid “leav[ing] behind a precipitate at a point in the arena of circulation” that “always sticks to the hands of some third person,” as Marx writes in the first volume of Capital. But these replacements tend to get short shrift in popular discourse, having about them the air of impossibility or, worse, the aroma of pot smoke. For my … er … money, though, I’ll gladly vote for a LETS exchange to supplant the stock exchange, and for a central Whuffie Bank to replace the Federal Reserve. They couldn’t do any worse, and just might do a darn sight better.

Dare to dream…

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