In modern times the Americans tried introducing a one-dollar coin, the dismal failure known as the Susan B. Anthony dollar, named after a suffrage campaigner who, when you see her face on the coin, looks as if she wants nothing more than to administer you an enema. What was the mint thinking?
I mean, if you’re trying to wean your citizens off expensive-to-replace paper currency, give them something they might prefer having in their pockets: Marilyn Monroe, Joan Jett, Wilma Flintstone. I’m not a marketer but I can tell you those three would have been infinitely more successful out in the world.
After the Susan B. Anthony fiasco, the mint was left with a populace scarred and wary of further tampering with their day-to-day currencies. To get a one-dollar coin off the ground in the United States today would require nothing less than a full reunion of Fleetwood Mac (circa Rumours) with a real-time holographic depiction of the band’s reunion tour. Let’s not forget that people are demanding more from their currency these days. The new Canadian twenty is a high-tech marvel: one-quarter transparent, it contains no culturally offensive references of any kind, and features a stern photo of the Queen contemplating having to eat Christmas dinner at the Middletons’.
And then there’s bitcoin. Should it ever get fully off the ground in a material way, all I ask is that they focus-group a little bit and then, having gone through the motions, just put Elvis on the damn thing.
Grexit
Okay, just look at the following words: Grexit. Syriza. Tsipras. Merkel. Austerity. At first glance they don’t even look like words; they resemble, I don’t know…launch codes—or maybe the names of recently FDA-approved osteoporosis medications—and yet at the moment these words are some of the most freighted in the language. Unlike most new words, they have the potential to demarcate the end of one era and the start of another.
Let’s have a quick peek at the Greek economy. Greece is odd because it’s an ostensibly middle-class place with a twist: it’s a warmer, slower-paced version of other middle-class societies in the liberal democratic West. Miami? Not quite. Santiago? Too young. San Antonio, Texas? Nope. Greek citizens still pretty much do normal middle-class things and they live middle-class lives, and yet when you look at the Greek economy, it turns out Greece doesn’t really do anything. There’s no tech or manufacturing or large-scale agribusiness; it’s just islands and hotels and many, many people with pensions, and ATMs that only dispense cash to non-Greeks. This is not meant to be disparaging, and if you read further, you’ll understand this. It also makes you wonder, Well then, just how were these people filling their days?
“Hi! I’m Greece! I’m the happy, sunny Shirley Valentine country, where the living is easy and your days are filled with nothing if not the absence of labour. There’s ouzo. There’s outdoor chess. And for tourists there’s an ever-present whiff of the possibility of sex with people out of your league.”
Okay then, Greece doesn’t really make or do anything the way other European nations do…but there’s definitely large-scale tourism, and a bit of agriculture. And what’s wrong with that? Light drinking. Outdoor chess games. Political arguments. Men dancing together. Sun. Life in Greece has always sounded great, and when we think of retirement, Greece’s dolce far niente is often what springs to mind. Doing nothing all day? Life in Greece isn’t even utopia; it’s heaven. So then, what’s the problem?
During Argentina’s 1998–2002 financial crisis, vast chunks of its middle class were violently burped out of the nation’s economy. At the time it happened, these people didn’t realize that they were being permanently burped out of the middle class. The years rolled on and all those Brooks Brothers button-down shirts from the 1997 trip to New York grew ever more threadbare. The leather Coach handbag from the 1996 trip to Miami faded. And eventually: “Honey, I think it’s over.”
And it was.
The social devastation in Argentina never fully registered in the northern hemisphere, but now Greece is one Grexit away from Argentinian-style demiddleclassification, and this time it’s registering the world over. Greece is sort of like a social terrarium from which all the money, like oxygen, is being extracted. The folks putting the lid back on top of the terrarium are giving each other guilty looks while hoping that the ensuing slow, protracted death of Greece’s financial ecosystem won’t be overly filled with audible screams of angry, dying little Greeks.
Another metaphor: Greece is a financial car crash that’s blocked traffic for miles, so when you finally drive past, you’ve earned your right to rubberneck, and in your head you’re also thinking, God, I’m glad it wasn’t me. And the seemingly inevitable Grexit makes us all ask ourselves, “Who’s next?” But not just in a short-term Portugal-Spain-Ireland domino-effect way. Our pondering is existential, more like, When does the overall system that supports middle-class democracy eventually end? Just why is it that only the existence of a large, complacent middle class represents both the health and validity of a society? We seem to equate middle-class existence with existence itself.
Greek society is intricate and complex, and it would appear one must be born into it to comprehend its intricacies, but just because it can’t meet fiscal benchmarks established in Brussels doesn’t make it less of a society. Since when is the value of any society judged by the robustness of its capitalism? Why can’t we look at Greece’s reasonably comfortable, mildly underoccupied life as a sort of utopia instead of The Death of Western Society? Maybe what we see in Greece is actually a dark precursor to what we envision for ourselves down the road.
To be discussed.
So okay then, Greece leaves the euro zone, or the euro zone leaves Greece. In that scenario would Athens become the new New Delhi? Would everyone have to hand in their Lacoste shirts and iPhones to receive a box of Nestlé tinned meal-substitutes, and sit in communal theatres to watch TED talks projected onto bedsheets? Does Greece enter class warfare? But wait—Greece doesn’t really seem to be a one-percent-y country; Greeks all seem to more or less be in the same boat, so there aren’t that many heads you can chop off and put onto stakes.
What would it mean for Greece to no longer be middle-class? It wouldn’t be really blue-collar or working-class either, because there’s no work available in which to be working-class. Would everyone sit around all day, nursing a single cup of coffee while discussing Marianne Faithfull’s vocal tracks in Broken English? Would everyone go out and riot? But riot for what? More money? There is no more money. More respect? You’ve got respect…You just don’t have any more money. Do you put your entire country up on eBay? Do you Airbnb every single residence in the country? Emigrate to England or Denmark, where they still have a Middle-Class Classic™?
The global middle class, just like Alaskan glaciers, is melting away at an extraordinary rate, and we very much need to rebrand the successor of the middle-class society as utopian—or at least suck the dread out of it and strip it of horror vacui. Greece is telling us this. Greece is the new template for the rest of the Western world. Greece forces us to worry about the new world order where an invisible high-tech conveyor belt relentlessly replaces formerly middle-class workers with machine intelligence, taking us all into a world of perpetual clicking, linking, embedding and liking. Greece forces us to worry about the abrupt vanishing of a social structure so old we don’t even see it as a social structure but, rather, a universal right. But it’s not. It’s as artificial as aspartame.
The Greeks are now involuntarily moving from the position of being a society of tacit off-the-books euro-subsidized leisure into a culture of borderline mandatory inactivity. That’s a subtle shift. Until recently Greeks were able to spend their days doing nothing, which was nice; now they have to spend their days with nothing to do, which is scary. Greece is beginning to feel, if anything, like a J.G. Ballard novel about a dystopian future in which leisure becomes a cruel monkey’s-paw curse. You’re still doing basically the same nothing as before, except now, instead of being pleasant, it becomes terrifying. I mean, really, how
is it that something as wonderful as life in Greece has become a new definition of societal hell? The Adriatic weather’s great, and potatoes and lamb ought to be reasonably cheap and readily available. Add booze and it’s fantastic. Do you really want a massive Siemens optical fibre facility in your neighbourhood? And would Siemens ever conceive of building one there? I mean, really, think about it. Would they? And would the Greeks in-their-bones actually want it?
Let’s discuss doing nothing. Doing nothing means doing nothing. It means being offline and walking down a street and…simply walking down the street. It means sitting on a bench for ten minutes, or however long, without crumbling and looking at your latest electronic whatever. It sounds simple, but almost nobody does nothing anymore; the hallmark of our age is the impossibility of doing nothing. Our attention spans are so thoroughly colonized by the cloud that even brief separation from the linked universe causes dread and something akin to homesickness. Maybe twenty years ago people were good at doing nothing. These days people are hopeless at it.
Now let’s discuss “having nothing to do.” It means waking up, thinking about the day ahead and realizing that you have, well…nothing to do. No job. No way of earning a living. Maybe you’ll go out with friends in similar straits, and maybe you’ll do a massage for a foreign hotel guest at the Athens Marriott. Torch an Uber Mercedes. The night goes on. You have a drink back in your apartment. Then maybe some Netflix.
Sleep.
Repeat.
Until recently you either had something to do called a job and you did it—or you were unemployed and had nothing to do and you more or less meditated all day, possibly about being unemployed, but maybe also wondering about the seagull that just flew over your head, or maybe about the meaning of the end of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Being unemployed twenty-five years ago wasn’t so much a capitalist state of being as it was an existential state of being: “Hi—I’m unemployed, and because of this I’m probably more contemplative than people who are employed.”
Enter the cloud.
Let’s discuss earthly paradise. Let’s discuss utopias. Utopias don’t have to be all about comfort and luxury. Growing up on the west coast of Canada, I saw group after group of hippies head up the coast to create utopian communes, which almost always went kaput the moment the women figured out they were doing all the work while the guys were out smoking weed in the hammocks. Or look at ISIS. They took a desert and its aging cities and rebranded the place as a form of utopia, generating meaning in a place where little existed before. It’s hardly life onboard a Carnival Cruise liner, but people seem to be flocking to join. Meanwhile, migrants are swarming the Chunnel entrance at Calais, Africans are drowning trying to reach the Sardinian coast, Syrians are arriving by the tens of thousands like migrating birds, and Afghans are walking thousands of miles to reach the cabbage fields of Hungary—their jumping off point to the rest of Europe. Most of the world still sees Europe as a utopia, but the Europeans don’t. They see themselves as stagnant and somewhat rudderless, but at least they’ve got something to do.
Having something to do seems to be an important aspect of a utopia being a utopia, whether it’s building Airbuses or beheading people. At least you know what you’re doing when you wake up in the morning. British novelist Susan Ertz said, “Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” It’s true. Busy is better.
Tourism, which is an engineered short-term utopia—as well as Greece’s strongest business card—now also fosters a great irony for the Greeks. It enforces confrontation between people who come to the country to do nothing, and those locals who now have nothing to do—which has to be galling. But remember, Greece is just now reaching a place where we’re all going to be sooner or later, a world of massive labour obsolescence where unless you actually know how to do something useful, you’ll become one more piece of middle-class space junk. Don’t forget, while people in the West see the erosion of the middle class as downward mobility, for most of the world, getting online with Android devices to comparison shop for Martha Stewart towels is proof positive they’re on the way up. It’s just that everyone on Earth is reaching a new middle, and we’re still unclear where that middle will be and what it will look and feel like.
Rich people especially want to know what the remains of the middle class will morph into, but in the end they won’t get there first because they have access to the same information that you and I do. If Bill Gates can be blindsided by search engines and mobile devices, then anyone can be blindsided by anything.
Modern people are largely incapable of doing nothing the way we discussed earlier—walking down the street and simply looking at the world around us. Omnipresent cloud-fuelled devices devour our attention spans. We’re all deeply, deeply into the shredded-attention-span paradigm and, let’s face it, it’s not going to go away—nor do we want it to.
At the same time, we inhabit an age of massive and extreme unknowns, lurking in time and space both nearby and far away. Look! Mr. Putin is dangling a clump of grapes over the mouths of austerity weary Athenians. Look! China wants to turn Greece into a Double Lucky Golden Prosperity Node. Look! Global warming just destroyed this year’s grape crop.
Our new world is defined by a duality of fear and diversion. Non-stop online diversion is palliative; it manages to make a world of extreme unknowns bearable. Diversion, in turn, makes having nothing to do okay. Diversion has become our new solace.
And all those tourists who came to Greece to do nothing? They’re not doing nothing. They’re just as trapped in the new duality as anyone else. It’s irony squared.
The twentieth century? Those were the days, my friend. Enter, please, the twenty-first-century schizoid man.
World War $
Here follow a few thoughts that, in the end, link together to form a chain…
(1) Last weekend I realized that I’ve played the board game Monopoly maybe twenty or thirty times in my life, yet I don’t remember anyone actually winning a game. I don’t remember anyone ever saying, “There. I have officially won and the game is now officially over.” Instead I mostly remember bored, irritated people drifting away to get a snack, answer the phone or what have you, and never returning. In the end there’s the last person at the board, counting money and feeling fleetingly rich, but of course the game is over and the money and its thrill are void.
(2) A few months back a Canadian semi-trailer loaded with oil drilling equipment was driving south along Washington’s Interstate 5, halfway between Seattle and Vancouver, Canada. The over-height truck struck a critical steel span on the Skagit River Bridge in the town of Burlington, causing a section of the bridge to collapse, shutting down Interstate 5 for a month until a temporary bridge was erected. Interstate 5 is a critical trucking link between Canada and the United States, and its entry point into Canada is the second-largest road freight link between the two countries. The collapse of the bridge foregrounded the often embarrassing state of much of North America’s infrastructure, which is, by any standards, one of the biggest elephants in the rooms of power.
(3) In the world of optical fibre communications, there is a phenomenon called “latency.” Latency describes the fact that if an optical fibre goes from Chicago to New York, it probably travels not in a straight line but rather in a series of right angles and switchbacks and zigzags. An optical fibre cable travelling in a nearly straight line between the two cities would, however, allow the signals it carries to arrive in New York a few millionths of a second faster than the zigzagging line. This is latency. Those few millionths of a second would, in the computerized world of stock sales, give a minuscule but distinct advantage to the people with the straighter cable. Michael Lewis wrote a wonderful book, Flash Boys, on this topic.
(4) There has been in our culture, in the past decade in particular, a group of reasonably smart people who hired incredibly smart people—mathematicians mostly—to design algorithms that exploit time-space phenomena such as latency,
as well as other small yet distinct phenomena, in order to vacuum insane amounts of money out of the economy by doing absolutely nothing except exploiting systemic flaws in the digitized financial world. We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, simply from hiring bright grad students, hurling some cash and some lap dances at them, and then hitting the return key.
(5) We all remember the night of the crash of 2008, especially when the Dow went below seven thousand, when it seemed like money was going to actually stop working. And by saying “stop working” I don’t mean simply “not going to be worth as much as it once was”; I mean that money itself would simply cease to function. It would be not just damaged but broken beyond the point of fixability. For a day or two there, more people than just me were mentally picturing well-dressed, seemingly healthy adult human beings walking the world’s streets like zombies, trying to buy gasoline, groceries, sofas, plane tickets and what have you, except money no longer works. It’s over.
Bit Rot Page 24
