Pittsburgh-Paris Climate Rhetoric Returns

As is now tradition in American politics, the first days of the Biden administration have brought the initial efforts at reversing Trump-era policy positions. Many of these opening salvos have to do with signaling a recommitment to acknowledging climate change. The president has issued several executive orders related to environmental concerns, and the White House website has reinstated mentions of the climate crisis. These measures have also sparked the return of Pittsburgh-Paris climate rhetoric.

Last week Ted Cruz tweeted that the Biden administration’s climate policies signaled allegiance to the citizens of Paris rather than those of Pittsburgh. In response, Pittsburghers took to social media to lambast Cruz’s pandering, and Greta Thunberg congratulated America for rejoining the “Pittsburgh Agreement.”

This discourse stems from 2017 when president Trump justified his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accords by asserting his responsibility “to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” Trump’s invocation of Pittsburgh’s industrial legacy is at odds with the city’s contemporary economy. The city reached its economic and population peak in the industrial era, and this period of the city’s history remains the age most associated with its image and identity. In the 21st century Pittsburgh sought to reinvent itself as a center of post-industrial technological innovation. The city has since attracted technology-oriented entrepreneurial investment and been a site of many smart city policies and technological innovations. Trump’s reference to Pittsburgh had less to do with the actually-existing city than with its place in U.S. urban imaginaries.

(Trump’s evocation of Pittsburgh may ultimately be the result of a speech writer’s inclination toward alliteration, a proclivity to which I am prone myself.)

Back in 2017, I absorbed Trump’s announcement of leaving the Paris accords with mixed emotions. I was visiting New York at the time, and caught the press conference live on TV in my Midtown hotel room. On the one hand, the willful aversion toward any environmental action filled me with an abiding existential dread. Yet when Trump uttered the now infamous “Pittsburgh-not-Paris” bon mot, I jumped for joy: I knew the president’s remarks would make a great anecdote for the Pittsburgh-centric dissertation I was writing.

The resurgence of the Paris-Pittsburgh kerfluffle also gives me occasion to relate my favorite personal anecdote about Pittsburgh mayor William Peduto. Peduto had positioned himself as a progressive mayor pursuing policies of technological innovation, environmental sustainability, and economic modernization throughout his mayoral tenure. His political vision for the city received global attention after Trump’s Paris accords press conference. Trump’s apparent invocation of Pittsburgh’s industrial legacy prompted Peduto to distinguish the city’s modern economy from its polluted past, and to distance his own political commitments from those of the president. In a New York Times interview conducted in the wake of the president’s address Peduto promoted a range of environmental and innovation initiatives in Pittsburgh including the city’s medical centers, research universities, and local renewable energy industry.

That New York Times article also contained an off-hand aside about a neighborhood bar in Shadyside where Peduto reportedly went for a drink every day after work. A few days after the article was published I happened to be running an errand in Shadyside. When I realized that the errand would be finished shortly after 5 PM, I suggested to my partner that we have dinner in that bar so that I could verify the Times’ reporting. Sure enough, there was Peduto sitting at the bar. This must have been a Monday, because the local evening news playing on the bar TV did a story on the previous evening’s John Oliver program, which had dedicated a segment to the Paris-Pittsburgh exchange and to Peduto’s public response. From our table in the corner I watched Peduto watching news coverage of another TV show’s coverage of Peduto...it remains one of my favorite Pittsburgh memories.

TENET: Christopher Nolan vs. Entropy

TENET is a preposterous film. The central conceit of the plot, the rapid-fire delivery of exposition through muffled dialogue, and the mixed-chronology action set pieces are all jaw-droppingly confounding. The fact that it functions as a movie at all is a testament to something, though I’m unsure how much that something has to do with Christopher Nolan’s intentions. I think it has much more to do with the intrinsic narrativization of the human species, the spontaneous application of story to organize a chaotic experience into coherent reality, and of course our conditioned reception of visual storytelling. Yet Nolan has earned enough good will from me as a viewer that I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Nolan is a paradoxical filmmaker. He’s an IMAX Auteur: his films evince a recognizable artistic vision with clearly telegraphed thesis statements, while also being inextricably rooted in big budget, blockbuster myth making. Nolan has garnered a reputation for making films with overly complex, even inscrutable plots, yet that really isn’t fair. It is true that Nolan is fond of high concept stories that explore big ideas through intricately plotted narratives. Yet Nolan is also unabashedly a popular filmmaker, and he goes to great pains to carefully communicate each twist and turn so that the plot points won’t be lost amongst the popcorn noshing. The tendency to over-explain plot points in Inception was widely noted when that film was released (I love Inception, but the ratio of expository to other dialogue in that film is deliriously high...this is not a bug, however, but a feature of Nolan’s particular style of filmmaking). Inception so cemented the public perception of Nolan’s films as labyrinthine mindbenders that when Interstellar was released the perfunctory reactions that it was “hard to understand” seemed baked in to the film’s reception. Yet like Inception, Interstellar also featured ample exposition to help keep the audience on track (i.e. the characters explain the concept of time dilation, then provide their temporal position relative to Earth at relevant points).

It is fitting, then, that Nolan has consistently engaged with the notion of paradox in his films. Logical, ontological, and temporal paradoxes are lampshaded in both Inception and TENET. Memento explores paradoxes of free will through the unreliable memories and self-perpetuating delusions(?) of Leonard Shelby. The duality of vigilante superhero and anarchist supervillain forms the thematic crux of The Dark Knight. Nolan himself came to embody the tension between hero and villain in the controversy surrounding TENET’s theatrical release. Nolan has positioned himself as a stalwart defender of traditional cinema, both of the medium itself in his insistence on shooting on celluloid, and his dogged determination to preserve the theater-going experience. Why wouldn’t he: after all, his preferred aspect ratio is IMAX; his movies aren’t just made to be seen on the big screen, they’re meant to be projected 7-stories high. And the stakes for TENET’s release were just as towering. With the film’s original release date impeded by the coronavirus pandemic, Nolan’s self-appointed status as cinematic savior was no longer framed by the debate between 35mm versus digital but rather an actual existential crisis for moviegoing as we know it. It was not a question of audience preferences or consumer trends, but whether the traditional system of theatrical distribution and exhibition would be either economically viable or ethically defensible in a world where social distancing is a public health imperative. Nolan’s unwavering commitment to a theatrical release was derided as quixotically misguided at best to dangerously irresponsible at worst (i.e. “to save cinema, Nolan will kill his fans”). With the less-than-stellar box office performance commentators are suggesting that TENET didn’t just fail to save cinema it outright killed theaters for good. Some of this seems like unduly harsh criticism, some of it seems like plain old schadenfreude, but it’s also understandable that Nolan opened himself up to these reactions.

In many ways TENET seems like the most “Nolan” movie yet, a distilled concoction of the filmmakers defining thematic and technical proclivities. Nolan’s preoccupation with time and chronology has been present since his debut film Following, which employed a non-linear narrative intended to keep the audience on unsure footing. Memento upped the stakes considerably, intercutting a reverse order central narrative with forward-moving vignettes, tying the two threads together in the final sequence. Inception introduced the notion of variable time scales running parallel to one another, culminating in a climax where several temporally distinct set pieces are stacked up and then collapsed. 

Interstellar played with the idea of time dilation but also revisited the nested parallel timeframes of Inception, to greatly diminished effect. The intercutting of Coop’s travails in space and Murph’s earthbound crisis simply does not produce the intended degree of tension and suspense, in part due to the in-universe logic that Nolan had established by that point of the story: as an audience, we know that the events of Murph’s story have already played out years before the events of Coop’s story that they are intercut with. Nolan tries to create a sense of urgency through intense editing and music but it just falls flat because, unlike Inception, there’s no interdependence among the plot threads. This disconnect is only compounded by the extreme temporal and narrative distance between the two stories: the fate of humanity hinges upon Coop’s mission, and he is operating in a timeframe where Murph is likely long dead and gone, so intercutting with Murph dealing with local effects of the corn blight just doesn’t resonate. Frankly, the attempts to establish high stakes in the Murph segment feel silly (“These people are coughing...we have to get them away from the corn immediately!!”).

Nolan took another crack at nested timescales and intercutting across parallel chronologies in Dunkirk. Essentially, Dunkirk is an attempt to build an entire movie out of the climactic falling-dominoes-of-collapsing-dreams sequence from Inception. It’s a cool idea, taking one of the most exciting and dazzling scenes from his filmography and expanding it to feature length. Dunkirk is technically impressive, of course, and mostly succeeds at creating and sustaining tension for its entire runtime. Yet ultimately the movie left me cold, and I found it to be a disposable entry in Nolan’s canon rather than essential. Dunkirk contributes nothing new to the War Film genre, it merely recapitulates the same bombast and patriotic bromides that we’ve seen countless times before.

If Dunkirk can be seen as an attempt to expand the Inception dream collapse climax to feature length, then TENET represents the effort to build an entire movie from the opening credits of Memento. Those credits culminate with a reverse motion scene of a bullet casing rolling along the floor before jumping back into Leonard Shelby’s handgun. In TENET, Nolan takes this most basic of cinematic special effects techniques, along with Memento’s essential structure of dueling forwards-and-reverse narrative threads, and spins a yarn about a generational temporal cold war waged across a series of spectacular action set pieces. It’s not particularly heady stuff but rather visceral, marrying the most fundamental of narrative stakes with the oldest techniques of photographic trickery in the history of the medium.

As was the case with past Nolan films, TENET’s release was met with a chorus of complaints that the movie was “hard to follow.” In this case the criticism centered not only on the convoluted plot and loopy linearity, but also on the sound mixing. Issues with audibility had cropped up in previous Nolan releases (i.e. Bane’s mask-muffled dialogue in The Dark Knight Rises, and Michael Caine’s deathbed confession being drowned out by bass reverberations in Interstellar). A preponderance of TENET reviewers reported that the confusing nature of the film’s high concept plot was compounded by dialogue being overtaken by the score or drowned out by other audio elements. Nolan’s sound design choices were alternately dragged as a careless lack of attention to detail or an exacting application of the director’s idiosyncratic auteur instincts. One of Nolan’s longtime sound editors described the filmmaker’s audio aspirations as a dense “punk-rock kind of vibe.” A Dunkirk sound designer suggested that the barely-audible dialogue was a calculated maneuver intended to force audience members to pay attention:

Although he concedes that “small dialogue details” may be difficult to catch as a consequence, he likes the fact that everything isn’t “served up on a plate” for the viewer. “You have to be on your toes to really get all the details,” he says.

I must admit, I love the idea that Nolan is deliberately trying to instill the effect of a McLuhanesque cool medium, as conveyed in the quote from this blog’s About page:

“A cool medium, whether the spoken word or the manuscript or TV, leaves much more for the listener or user to do than a hot medium. If the medium is of high definition, participation is low. If the medium is of low intensity, the participation is high. Perhaps this is why lovers mumble so.” – Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

Perhaps this is why Nolan’s characters mumble so. If Nolan really is designing the sound mix so that the audience has to more actively listen in order to follow the plot, or to prioritize visceral or emotional engagement with the story rather than intellectual comprehension, then I have to commend the ambition purely on principle. At the very least, Nolan’s divisive sound design does seem to accord with another McLuhan maxim, that “art is what you can get away with.”

I’ve already mentioned that I’m predisposed to grant Nolan ample leeway with his filmmaking choices. I’m inclined to interpret his output generously based on his consistent track record, and in spite of more recent efforts that fell flat for me personally. I struggle to muster the same generosity of spirit toward Jonathan Nolan, his brother and frequent co-collaborator. Jonathan has contributed his screenwriting talents to several Nolan films, and received an Oscar nomination for his “based on a short story by” Memento credit, but his latest industry credits are as showrunner of HBO’s Westworld series. Westworld is a bad show, and has been bad from the beginning. But the third season of Westworld is an audacious exercise in empty spectacle. Westworld season three answers the question: what would a television show look like if it had no real characters, merely a semblance of dialogue, and only the barest suggestion of plot? It is a stunning realization of style over substance. It has all of the superficial trappings that we’ve come to associate with prestige television -- a stellar acting ensemble, exorbitant production values, cinematic presentation -- and none of the compelling character study or storytelling that defined the greatest examples of the latest television renaissance. Westworld season three seems almost avant garde in its decision to eschew traditional characterization and dialogue in favor of cardboard cut-out caricatures spouting cliches and claptrap. 

Now, a more generous interpretation of Westworld, one more willing to grant the creators the benefit of the doubt, might consider the series’ apparent shortcomings outlined above as some sort of savvy meta-commentary on contemporary culture and entertainment. Perhaps the paper-thin characters and meandering narrative are intended to critique the banalization of cultural expression in a media-saturated world. They may even betray an implicit deconstruction of the series’ origins as a re-imagining of a 1973 science-fiction movie, a subversive dig at the Hollywood trend of recycling existing properties and established brands. The show clearly seems to want to engage with genre conventions: the debaucherous amusement parks at the heart of the first two seasons are based around fictional worlds as presented in Western, Samurai, and World War II films. The third season even introduces a recreational drug called “Genre,” a plot contrivance that is both laughably insipid and frustratingly under-developed (like the proverbial restaurant whose food is terrible and portions too small). The writers also make obvious attempts to connect the escapism of genre entertainment to historical legacies of exploitation and colonialism (one of the amusement parks is themed around the British Raj). 

The problem is that Westworld simply doesn’t seem that smart. The narrative arc of the third season feels like the creators read Shoshanna Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and decided to ham-handedly insert her core ideas into their story about Audio-Animatronics gone wild. Yet these ideas -- along with the ideas about sentience and artificial intelligence from the first two seasons -- have been explored better in other works. Just as the series can only mimic the style of prestige visual media without being able to deliver the goods, it also can only suggest the form of critique without providing the requisite content. It’s a glittering simulacrum whose ostentatious superstructure belies its underlying insecurity that it has nothing to say. 

Christopher Nolan’s films have received similar criticisms to those I just levied against his brother Jonathan’s work, namely that they are pseudo-intellectual spectacle with pretensions to profundity. Yet I think that Nolan has demonstrated the ability to engage with ideas and evince a coherent thesis in his films. To be fair, the singular and self-contained nature of a movie allows for this sort of thematic focus much more so than an ongoing television series. Yet when Nolan pulls off his particular blend of big ideas and big budget action, the results are among the most engaging escapism that mainstream cinema has to offer. I saw Inception at a midnight opening day screening, and even on that initial viewing it was evident that the film was operating at multiple levels. The surface level story functioned as a slick fusion of high-stakes heist theatrics and mass consumption mindbender. The film’s psychological elements offer surprising breadth, from a dream-bound staging of the primal domestic drama, to blurring the line between perception and creation, along with admonitions against an overreliance on memory when dreaming up potential futures. Inception represents Nolan’s most successful synthesis of cerebral speculation and populist pyrotechnics. I think that the film’s most significant contributions to the Nolan canon concern the author’s attitudes toward his own artistic endeavors. This can be delineated by comparing the moviemaking metaphors of Inception with those offered in The Prestige.

Whereas Inception imagines the filmmaking process as dream weaving, Prestige poses the metaphor of “moviemaking as magic trick.” Here the stage magician’s tripartite illusion sequence of pledge-turn-prestige corresponds to the traditional three act structure of narrative filmmaking. Read in this way, Prestige suggests that in both cases an artist stages an illusion for the purpose of dazzling and delighting the audience. Yet there’s something unsatisfying about this formulation, it seems incomplete or even disingenuous. When Hugh Jackman’s Angier intones at the film’s conclusion that his obsessive pursuit of magical one-upmanship was motivated by “the look on their faces,” the moment feels unearned. It comes out of left field like a last minute retcon of the preceding plot. Throughout the film Angier’s and Borden’s rivalry is evidently fueled by passion, resentment, and personal ambition. At no point does the story convey that the dueling magicians derive a significant sense of satisfaction from the audience’s response. I don’t believe that Angier was driven by the looks on audience members' faces, and I don’t believe Christopher Nolan is either. He puts far too much effort into provoking thought when mere spectacle would be sufficient for eliciting wide-eyed gawking.

Inception expands the meta-fictional thesis statement from The Prestige beyond an emphasis on ephemeral audience reaction to a suggestion of enduring emotional impact. Nolan’s thesis evinced by Inception is that the filmmaker’s work is to create an immersive and convincing dream world which the audience populates with their own subconscious projections and leads themselves to cathartic release and personal revelation. When Fischer experiences atonement with his father and realizes that his perceived failure to live up to Senior’s expectations are a self-imposed limitation of his own potential, the moment lands with the full weight of all the momentum accumulated by the film up to that point. The moment feels justified not only by the preceding plot but also within the broader context of Nolan’s filmography. Nolan is arguing that even though the melodramatic chills and thrills provided by the movies are objectively artificial -- illusory dream worlds -- the affective responses they stimulate in viewers are just as subjectively real as those triggered by real life events.

If The Prestige envisions pop cinema as an audience-enchanting illusion, and Inception explores the medium’s potential as a psychological dreamscape for working through personal emotions, then TENET stages the cinematic experience as a battleground between competing futures. I was immediately intrigued by the revelation that John David Washington’s character name in TENET was “Protagonist,” as it signaled Nolan’s intent to double down on his meta-investigations of film’s cultural facilities. After seeing the movie I am unable to discern a cohesive mission statement like his earlier films seemed to present. The Prestige suggested that the deeper justification for Angier’s covetous pursuit of the “look on their faces” was to make the audience forget the inherent misery of their daily lives through a temporary suspension of belief. TENET ups the ante to a war with the fate of the entire world at stake. 

So how might we go about disentangling the text of the film from the subtext? I’ve seen several reviews of TENET that suggest the character name of Protagonist is an indication of Nolan’s lack of attention to the human element in his films, evidence of his preoccupation with conceptual and visual acrobatics at the expense of grounded characterization. As if he couldn’t be bothered to come up with a name for his main character because he was too busy choreographing the special effects sequences. This is ludicrous. The main character of TENET is not called “Protagonist” due to some oversight or laziness on Nolan’s part. It’s a deliberate (and rather brazen) choice. It communicates that Nolan aims to draw attention to the artifice of the story at the level of the text itself, perhaps even to boil the story elements down to the most fundamental narrative components. It suggests an interrogation of traditional story construction, or a more psychologically inflected examination of how individuals are interpellated into subject positions within their personal narratives.

The significance of the Protagonist gambit is further muddled when trying to discern a political proposition in the film. On an ideological level the film recapitulates standard tropes of clandestine government agencies and elite military operatives working tirelessly to preserve the world as we know it. The central antagonist of TENET is a billionaire Russian arms dealer, and the film flirts with class consciousness when the Protagonist infiltrates the insular world of tax evading art collectors. Yet the film offers no explicit comment on economic inequality beyond repeated assertions that the 1% are much better dressed than the hoi polloi. A single line of dialogue delivered in the plot’s third act seems to suggest that the future’s war-on-the-present is retribution for the catastrophic effects of man-made global warming. This nominal gesture to the climate crisis could either be a key to unlocking the story’s political implications, or a banal and perfunctory concession to one of this generation’s great existential threats. On the Why Theory podcast Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley offer an extremely intriguing appraisal of the film’s philosophical merits vis-à-vis imagining a politics premised on re-interpreting the past to create the future.

Reviewers often approach Nolan’s films as a stark contrast between cerebral storytelling and slick special effects, but TENET’s narrative complexity is compounded by a corresponding confusion in its action scenes. The staging and editing of Nolan’s action scenes has been a noted weak point in the director’s repertoire since Batman Begins. The choreography and shot composition of fight scenes in particular has steadily improved across Nolan’s subsequent films. On paper, TENET’s ambition to build action setpieces around a forwards-and-backwards ballet composed of pieces moving in opposite directions through time is eminently alluring. Yet in execution these sequences are often frustrating and befuddling. The “freeport” fight scene that occurs twice during the film pits two opponents with inverse-entropy into close-quarters combat, an escalation of the shifting-gravity hallway fight from Inception. Again, the set-up is exhilarating but the execution is almost impossible to follow. It is a sort of visual corollary to the audio mixing issues mentioned earlier, requiring audience members to strain in order to make sense of what is unfolding.

As I stated at the beginning of this essay, TENET is a preposterous film. It represents a pinnacle of Nolanesque puzzle-making where the complexity of its narrative is matched by the inscrutability of its spectacle. Regardless of the issues I have with the film, I remain charmed by the fact that Nolan framed the stakes of the storytelling as a battle against entropy. There is something irresistibly romantic about waging a war as foolish and futile as a fight against entropy. It is far easier to tear things down than to build them up. And I think that this thematic element of TENET offers wide-ranging resonance with our contemporary culture. We are inundated with opportunities for attempting to reverse entropic processes, however fruitless those efforts may ultimately be. There are many potential battlegrounds for these struggles to play out, whether we are talking about climate catastrophe, personal decrepitude, pernicious political plots, or our ubiquitous online culture of cringe posting and hate tweeting. It’s a battle that I’ve attempted to recapitulate throughout this essay, attempting to avoid reactionary critiques and instead search for redeeming qualities in the works I’ve discussed. If TENET ultimately falls apart in its endeavor I am inclined to consider it a commendable failure. I also think it is significant that TENET establishes entropy not only as the basis of the struggle but also as the means of engagement, the weapon with which the war is waged. Several commentators have noted that TENET offers greater rewards upon subsequent viewings, that it is a magic trick that works better once you know how it was done. I like that idea and I hope that further contemplation will yield deeper insights. As it stands currently, TENET might just represent a tantalizing puzzlebox whose ultimate confoundment is the utter lack of underlying mystery. 

Oh, and the soundtrack slaps.

Shots from the Block: writing on the ground/underground

It’s January (again). As the new year begins I continue my self-imposed exile in suburban Nashville, extending the indefinite holding pattern initiated by the pandemic just a little while longer. It has largely been a favorable transition. Life is quieter here on the cul-de-sac.

One of the major changes the new year has brought to our street is a revised recycling policy. The ancien régime of clear categories and orderly collection has been upended. It’s caused a bit of confusion in our daily routine, but it also precipitated my visiting the local garbage dump. I think it was my first time visiting a dump, and I now believe it is essential. Everyone should see where their trash goes, should glean some surface knowledge of the material and procedural infrastructures involved in processing your refuse.

This past Sunday was clear and cool, so I went for a walk and some fresh air. The country here is quite beautiful, though this ostensibly exurban area seems as prone to transformation as any city center. Subdivisions are rapidly developing, roads are constantly being widened. Our immediate neighborhood is both sans sidewalks and situated along a busy traffic corridor, which can make walking quite perilous. 

A few nights ago the family dog got loose in the neighborhood. I spent a half hour trudging about with a flashlight before finally cornering the capricious canine. During my search I surveyed the creek that runs behind the house and discovered an unexpected cache of graffiti within a culvert that carries the roadway over the stream. It was such a shock to see the spraypaint starkly illuminated by the flashlight’s beam, because it was an irruption of urban street culture in an area that is invisible and nearly inaccessible from the street (the aforementioned lack of sidewalks).

Yet where there’s a wall, there’s a way. The ample planar concrete provides a generous canvas, and the semi-seclusion of the stream-side embankment is evidently a chill place to hang out. Most of the writing seems freeform aerosol, though there are some bubble letters and a few stencils. The prevailing sentiments are split between anti-racist police violence messages (“Hands up don’t shoot,” “I can’t breathe,” ACAB), and LGTBQ iconography including rainbow patterns, various iterations of the word “Pride,” and an ostensible commemoration of the Pulse nightclub. One concrete outcropping bears the archetypal enunciation: “I exist.” The entirety of one wall is dedicated to a solitary, scrawled, half-hearted apology: “Sorry, this blank wall was boring me.”

Virtual Horizons & Futurology for 2021: Žižek on The Great Reset

With much ballyhoo and bellyaching about the absurdly miserable year of 2020, our collective calendars have finally turned to 2021. The year-end was marked by effusive declarations of relief and hope, even though these admissions of optimism were often tinged with cynical self-awareness reflecting the continuing complexities of our current moment (i.e. coronavirus vaccines are officially being rolled out, although infections are currently exploding in the U.S., and a new strain of the virus has been discovered; and it remains likely that Trump will leave office soon, despite ongoing efforts to delegitimize the election outcome, and nevermind what sort of policies we can reasonably accept from a Biden administration). 

In an essay published on New Year’s Eve by Jacobin, Slavoj Žižek considers the prospects of the immediate future in terms of a dichotomy between a socialist reset and a corporate “great reset”:

“When we try to guess how our societies will look after the pandemic will be over, the trap to avoid is futurology — futurology by definition ignores our not-knowing. Futurology is defined as a systematic forecasting of the future from the present trends in society. And therein resides the problem — futurology mostly extrapolates what will come from the present tendencies. However, what futurology doesn’t take into account are historical “miracles,” radical breaks which can only be explained retroactively, once they happen.”

The phrase “great reset” has proliferated through think-pieces and professional publications to describe the ways in which the effects of the pandemic will shape social reality and rearrange policy priorities for the foreseeable future. It is also the title of a proposal by the World Economic Forum for how the global economic recovery should be directed. The proposal thus represents the dissemination of managerialist and technocratic visioning statements on the behalf of an aristocratic elite who assume the mantle for guiding civilization’s progress. Žižek addresses some of the most visible exemplars of this group:

“The human face of this ‘leading with transparency, authenticity, and humanity’ are Gates, Bezos, Zuckenberg, the faces of authoritarian corporate capitalism who all pose as humanitarian heroes, as our new aristocracy celebrated in our media and quoted as wise humanitarians. Gates gives billions to charities, but we should remember how he opposed Elizabeth Warren’s plan for a small rise in taxes. He praised Piketty and once almost proclaimed himself a socialist — true, but in a very specific twisted sense: his wealth comes from privatizing what Marx called our ‘commons,’ our shared social space in which we move and communicate.”

[...]

“We are thus facing a horrible false alternative: a big corporate reset or nationalist populism, which turns out to be the same. “The great reset” is the formula of how to change some things (even many things) so that things will basically remain the same.”

[...]

“So is there a third way, outside the space of the two extremes of restoring the old normality and a Great Reset? Yes, a true great reset. It is no secret what needs to be done — Greta Thunberg made it clear. First, we should finally recognize the pandemic crisis as what it is, part of a global crisis of our entire way of life, from ecology to new social tensions. Second, we should establish social control and regulation over economy. Third, we should rely on science — rely on but not simply accept it as the agency which makes decisions.”

The distinction that Žižek makes between relying on science and delegating agency to techno-scientific forces is a crucial one. This past November I participated in a workshop organized by the Communicative Cities Research Network on the topic of urban communication in the pandemic era. My brief contribution to the proceedings comprised my musings on urban responses to the pandemic in light of prevailing trends in “smart city” policies. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic initially seemed to reinforce ways of envisioning cities and urban space that characterizes “smart city” urban imaginaries. The propagation of smart city frameworks, particularly those promoted by corporate firms and technology vendors, has been characterized as a “techno-utopian policy mobility” and expression of a “technoscientific urbanism” in which infrastructural packages are sold to beleaguered municipalities as technical “solutions” for intractable urban problems.

One of the problems with these approaches is that by foregrounding technological formulations of urban life, these programs function to depoliticize practices of city planning, obfuscate the social inequalities inherent to urban development, and foreclose opportunities to formulate an emancipatory or oppositional urban politics. The smart city imaginary of transposable technical solutions as promoted by technology vendors has emerged from the conditions of entrepreneurial urbanism and neoliberal policy approaches. The technoscientific tenor that characterizes many smart city discourses is especially amenable to neoliberal applications as it addresses urban problems through a veneer of objectivity, neutrality, and ideological agnosticism. These technocratic approaches attempt to depoliticize what are in actuality politically charged development and governance programs.

The COVID-19 pandemic makes clear the need for science, technology, and engineering to solve urban problems and maintain quality of life. However, it is crucial to be wary of the ways in which a technocratic veneer obscures the ideological underpinnings and inherent value judgments that direct policy programs, as well as the ways in which technocratic imaginaries limit the scope of our potential urban futures.

Žižek concludes his article thusly:

“Futurology deals with what is possible, we need to do what is (from the standpoint of the existing global order) impossible.”

In regards to urban futures and imaginaries, my response to Žižek’s distinction between the possible and impossible draws on a particular notion of virtuality understood not as absent or imaginary but as the potentiality for change, as the as-yet-unrealized. 

The emancipatory potential of virtuality in urban imaginaries is deeply implicated in the Lefebvrian right to the city. Lefebvre's call for a "right to the city" extended beyond access to housing and public space to advocate for spontaneity, sociability, and the utilization of urban environments based on use rather than exchange value. While the formulation of “the right to the city” is effectively an empty signifier, it signals the struggles of urban denizens to exert influence over the shaping of their built environment, to exercise autonomy in their communities, and to realize the use value of public space as a common good in the face of homogenizing capitalist development that aims to render and remake space only on the basis of exchange.

A common rejoinder to urban rhetoric invoking the “right to the city” is to ask for examples of cities or communities that have successfully realized the right. While the phrase has been adopted as a by various activist groups, and has appeared in certain government policies, there are no obvious examples of how the right has been actualized. Yet the virtuality of the right to the city is essential to its continued functioning as a rallying cry of radical urban politics.

The right to the city represents a virtual horizon of urban life and a radical vision for the city to come. Lefebvre’s call has been taken up by urbanists and activists as a rallying cry for expanding urban imaginaries beyond the actual to the possibilities offered by invention and processes of becoming. The right to the city therefore renders the realms of imagination and virtuality as key battlefields for urban struggles. Among the many crises facing cities today - ecological catastrophes, yawning social inequality, infrastructural breakdown, etc. - we might accordingly refer also to a crisis of imagination.

Smoke Signals: Buda’s Wagon and Infrastructure Terrorism in Nashville

“The car bomb, in other words, suddenly became a semi-strategic weapon that under certain circumstances was comparable to air-power in its ability to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as terrorize populations of entire cities. [...] It is the car bombers’ incessant blasting-away at the moral and physical shell of the city, not the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bioterrorism, that is producing the most significant mutations in city form and urban lifestyle.” - Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon

When the sun dawned over Nashville on Christmas morning the day’s first light illumined dark tufts of smoke above downtown. Like many other Nashvillians my Christmas morning began with local news coverage of a powerful explosion on Second Avenue. Some aspects of the initial details seemed familiar and inherently plausible (an RV transformed into a Vehicle-borne Improvised Explosive Device), while others strained credulity (early rumors of an audio countdown message emanating from the vehicle smacked of Internet hoaxery, though these reports have since been confirmed).

Indeed the early morning attack does seem to have included a warning message that prompted people in the area to evacuate. Remarkably it appears that no one but the perpetrator was killed in the blast. The bombing site in downtown Nashville was in the proverbial shadow of the city’s iconic AT&T skyscraper -- colloquially known as the Batman Building as the tower’s twin antennae somewhat resemble the pointed ears on the caped crusader’s cowl -- yet more significantly the RV was positioned directly in front of an AT&T switching station. This is a building dedicated to housing telecommunications infrastructure; the 15-floor windowless red-brick structure in Nashville bears some superficial resemblance to 33 Thomas Street in Manhattan, the AT&T “Long Lines” building whose 29 stories of windowless brutalist concrete have long sparked observers’ imaginations. 

Considered as an instance of infrastructure terrorism the bombing was quite effective. The explosion didn’t seem to jeopardize the overall structural integrity of the switching station, yet enough damage was done to disrupt critical services. Many areas around the city -- including here in Brentwood -- lost 911 emergency phone services. The Nashville Airport ceased all flight operations due to the telecommunications issues, and the city’s COVID-19 community hotline was also knocked out of commission. Communications were affected throughout the region including in Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Louisville. 

Infrastructure terrorism became a key concern for U.S. authorities following the 9/11 attacks. In 2003 the Department of Homeland Security published a National Strategy for the Physical Protection of Critical Infrastructures and Key Assets. The report details the vulnerabilities inherent to maintaining national and transnational networks supported by critical nodes:

“The facilities, systems, and functions that comprise our critical infrastructures are highly sophisticated and complex. They consist of human capital and physical and cyber systems that work together in processes that are highly interdependent. They each encompass a series of key nodes that are, in turn, essential to the operation of the critical infrastructures in which they function. To complicate matters further, our most critical infrastructures typically interconnect and, therefore, depend on the continued availability and operation of other dynamic systems and functions.” (DHS, 2003, p. 6)

The Nashville bombing thus reveals in spectacular fashion the intrinsic vulnerabilities of infrastructural networks. This vulnerability is not just a threat to urban centers: the use of car bombs to terrorize city populations has a long history, and recent attacks in New York, Toronto, and Nice have demonstrated that a vehicle doesn’t need to be equipped with explosives to cause mass destruction and death. Rather, the apparent target of the Nashville bombing and the subsequent communication disruptions that resulted illustrate the oft-invisible yet overlapping infrastructural entanglements of our networked world. An attack centered on one building in Nashville can produce institutional breakdowns not only throughout the entire city but also in neighboring states. Network resiliency and redundancy was of course the primary goal of ARPANET, the technological foundation for the modern Internet.

The bombing also indicates one of the central paradoxes of our increasingly interconnected technological apparatuses: as the infrastructures of our daily lives become “smarter,” more integrated and networked, they also become more vulnerable to distributed disruption and systemic failure. The implementation of “intelligent” infrastructures in urban environments is often motivated by official imaginaries of omniscient visibility and pervasive control, and accordingly produce attendant anxieties over authoritarian encroachment and the specter of a stifling panoptical security state. Yet the increasing complexity of administrative infrastructures and technologies simultaneously gives rise to greater systemic precarity and emergent opportunities for breakdown.

Mike Davis charts some of the interplay between vehicle-based terrorism and urban governmentality in his book Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007/2017). Echoing the DHS quote above, he situates the spread of car bombings in an “open source” era of terrorism marked by “a seamless merger of technologies: the car bomb plus the cell phone plus the Internet together constitute a unique infrastructure for global networked terrorism that obviates any need for transnational command structures or vulnerable hierarchies of decision-making” (p. 11, emphases in original).

Davis also notes that car bombs are “‘loud’ in every sense,” as these explosions are “usually advertisements for a cause, leader, or abstract principle” (p. 9).

“In contrast to other forms of political propaganda, from graffiti on walls to individual assassinations, their occurrence is almost impossible to deny or censor. This certainty of being heard by the world, even in a highly authoritarian or isolated setting, is a major attraction to potential bombers.” (ibid.)

Davis cites Regis Debray’s observation that such attacks are “manifestos written in the blood of others.” Yet the Nashville bombing has thus far failed to yield an explicit political motive or ideological agenda. The Christmas-day confusion was compounded not only by the revelation of the audio warning announcements, but also by the lack of any corresponding media manifesto or claims of responsibility. The volitional vacuum prompted news and social media discourse to project possible motives onto the perpetrator: perhaps the bomber was a right-winger who targeted the AT&T building because of the 5G-Coronavirus conspiracy, or maybe a leftist seeking retribution for the telecomm company’s complicity in domestic spying programs? Personally, I felt the technological elements of both the target and the weapon evoked Unabomber vibes, although the preliminary evacuation notice evinced a greater concern for collateral damage and human life than Kaczynski’s methods.

The impulse to apprehend an underlying motive behind an act of mass violence is understandable, yet ultimately no explanation for terror or mass murder can ever be satisfying or even elucidating. Our current political climate produces knee-jerk responses to inciting events that seek to assign ideological complicity to the “other side,” casting preemptive blame to our imagined opponents (i.e. “this is surely the work of a MAGA anti-masker,” or “this must be a BLM assault on the police” ) such that our own ideological position is affirmed and our cognitive maps cohere. Rituals of scapegoating have long provided essential support for both group and personal identities. Yet no declaration of intent can truly explain wanton destruction, just as no ideological rationalization can justify mass murder.

In recent history the Las Vegas massacre perpetrated by Stephen Paddock epitomizes the unfulfilled search for an explanatory motive. The question of what circumstances led up to Paddock raining bullets on a crowd of concert-goers has fueled futile speculation and conspiracy theory. When police photos of Paddock’s hotel-suite-turned-sniper’s-nest appeared online, viewers seized upon a piece of paper visible on a side table as a critical clue. Surely this was the killer’s suicide note, or personal manifesto, some explanation for the attack! It turned out the paper bore only mathematical equations for calculating trajectory, the killer’s calculus for maximizing mortality.

The lack of a clearly defined motivation can be experienced as a secondary shock to the initial trauma of the attack itself. It seems to deny some semblance of resolution or closure. So far no underlying explanation for the Nashville bombing has been unearthed. It remains an explosive enigma rendered all the more inexplicable by the bomber’s choice to broadcast a warning message prior to detonation. Yet the police have revealed that the vehicle-based speaker system not only conveyed a verbal countdown notice, they also played music:

“Police in the area moments before the blast said the speakers also played the wistful 1963 song ‘Downtown’ by Petula Clark. The lyric, about going to the city to seek refuge from sadness, echoed down Second Avenue just before the blast: ‘The lights are much brighter there.’”

Without reading too much into the song choice as a potential clue, the reported musical selection does seem to suggest that the perpetrator saw some significance to the location of his attack beyond the mere tactical position of the apparent target. The use of the song “Downtown” conveys a striking concession to the particularities of place in comparison to the considerations of extended networks and distributed effects offered earlier. And while the ramifications of terror attacks may resonate across geographic distance and within virtual spaces, every ground zero occupies material as well as mental territory.

Hiroki Azuma's General Will 2.0 and Urban Planning

The Japanese cultural critic Hiroki Azuma has contributed some of the most inventive contemporary propositions for the use of information and communication technologies for democratic practice. In General Will 2.0 (2014), Azuma argues that democratic ideals should be “updated on the basis of the realities of information society” (p. iii). Simply stated, the proliferation of myriad media channels and messages disseminated by networked communication has made modern society too complex to accommodate traditional notions of the public sphere and practices of democratic political participation. Azuma proposes the “creation of a completely new public sphere” (p. x) supported by the use of ubiquitous computing technology. His prescription for a model of governance informed by ubiquitous computing and social media draws on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of “the general will.” The general will refers to the collective will of a people that aims toward common well-being and “creates the standards for good and for the public sphere” (p. 23). This will is distinct from the will of the government or the sum of individual wills, and arises from a community of people joined through a social contract, regardless of whether communication or political deliberation occurs between them. Azuma’s interpretation of Rousseau leads him to the provocative proposition that “politics does not require communication” (p. 34). That is to say, spaces for communication and deliberation are not only unnecessary but are in fact “an impediment to the emergence of the general will” (p.33), as citizens need only be provided with adequate information in order for the general will to emerge. It is here that Azuma locates the potential for data aggregation and information visualization to inform political procedure. 

Azuma introduces the term “democracy 2.0” to describe a model of democratic governance supplemented by data aggregation and information visualization. Such a system, he argues, would provide “a mechanism to visualize what we truly need without the mediation of roundabout systems such as elections, hearings, and public comments” (p. 86). He points to internet-based communication behaviors and social media usage in particular as fertile resources for assessing the collective thoughts and attitudes of a populace. Azuma thus relates the general will to concepts such as “collective intelligence” and the “wisdom of crowds” (p. 12). Under the democracy 2.0 model, the public realm would be shaped by the aggregate of private actions in a way that challenges traditional distinctions between the public and private spheres. Azuma contrasts this notion of democracy 2.0 with Arendt’s and Habermas’ conceptualizations of the private and public realms. Crucially, Arendt and Habermas both stipulated that the public realm is created through speech or communication whereas Azuma is proposing democracy 2.0 as politics without communication. For Azuma, the inherent complexity and fragmentation of contemporary society precludes the realization of an Arendtian or Habermasian ideal public sphere such that modern citizens “are not able to believe in a shared space for discussion” (p. 69). Declaring these formulations of the public sphere as “impossible to establish” (p. 87), Azuma calls for taking “our current social situation and technological conditions” to bring about “something like a public sphere” (p. 87). This approach calls for abandoning both traditional notions of politics as “conscious communication mediated by language” (p. 75) as well as “abstract frameworks that differentiate between private and public” (p. 77). 

In addition to the political philosophy of Rousseau, Azuma’s formulation of “democracy 2.0” is further informed by the Freudian psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious. Social media again functions as a significant touchstone for Azuma, who describes tweets, check-ins, and other social media activities as constituting a vast trove of information enabling “the extraction of patterns of unconscious desires that go beyond the intentions of individuals” (p. 57). Azuma thus defines incidental yet observable online activity as “unconscious communication” and proposes the use of data monitoring in democracy 2.0 for “collecting and systematizing the wills and desires of people without the need for conscious communication” (p. 56). The realization of democracy 2.0 involves not just data aggregation but also data visualization, as Azuma notes “the internet is not only an apparatus for documenting the unconscious but also for actively visualizing it” (p. 95). Revisiting the earlier formulation of the general will as “politics without communication,” Azuma specifies that the “visualization of the unconscious of the masses” (p. 122) should not be understood as a replacement for deliberation but rather as a supplement to deliberation. He proposes that a democracy 2.0 framework should consist of “on the one hand extracting the unconscious of citizens and on the other invigorating conscious communication among citizens” (p. 102). Azuma proposes that the aggregate unconscious communication of the citizenry should shape the contours and define the limits of public policy-making in a fashion that is “neither direct democracy nor indirect democracy but something that might be called unconscious democracy” (p. 143). Such a model reflects the democracy 2.0 ideal that “all deliberation must be exposed to the unconscious of the populace” (p. 144), whereafter the database citizens’ unconscious communication “and harnesses it as a power to restrain deliberation” (p. 153). 

In order to illustrate what such a system would look like in practice Azuma turns to the field of urban planning and design. Azuma’s argument is scaled to the level of the nation state, and he is concerned overall with practices of national citizenship rather than regional or municipal governance. There are, however, significant points of intersection between the theory of democracy 2.0 and urban studies. For instance, Azuma (2014) often employs spatial metaphors in theorizing how to “design an architecture” that would support the democracy 2.0 model (p. 80). His theory also bears correspondences with the urban visualization literature, as he describes the general will 2.0. as “the record of action and desire carved into the information environment” (p. 71). Yet the most substantial connection between urban studies and general will 2.0 is the invocation of Austrian-born urban designer Christopher Alexander. Azuma’s prescription for unconscious communication is not that it be ignored or blindly followed but rather that states should “harness it through visualization via information technology” (p. 136). The unconscious desires of the masses, aggregated and visualized, would then be used to inform public deliberation and policy-making. Azuma cites Alexander’s urban planning work as a prototype for such a model. In the classic planning text A Pattern Language (1977), Alexander and his colleagues outlined an index of urban settlement shapes or “patterns” inspired by the then-emerging fields of network theory and computer science. Alexander’s systems approach to urban design is captured in his well-known aphorism “a city is not a tree” (1965). What Azuma highlights, however, is a method Alexander developed for determining the design of highway routes. 

Alexander and his team identified twenty-six factors that influence planning decisions such as construction costs, economic impact, and environmental issues. The list of factors also included not typically taken into account by highway planners such as air pollution, eye sores, and noise (Lystra, 2016). The planners then examined the site under consideration to determine what the least and most desirable locations were for each influencing factor. They then visualized the distributions of these factors by superimposing shades of color onto a map, with least desirable locations colored lighter and most desirable areas colored darker. Using a combination of photographic and hand drawing techniques they composited multiple overlays to create a final path map. The resulting distribution did not necessarily plot the optimal route, and would not always determine the final planning decisions, but it did provide a method for visualizing a range of options based on aggregated data. Azuma thus cites Alexander’s approach to planning the highway route as “the budding form of an urban design based upon collective intelligence” (p. 152). He also sees in this technique “a method for providing limits to design rather than determining the design” (p. 124). This is a crucial takeaway for Azuma: Alexander’s method is a model for imposing limitations on deliberation via a database. Alexander and his fellow planners did not automatically implement the routes that emerged from the composited path maps, but they rather used the maps to delimit the best areas for potential action. Democracy 2.0 may therefore be seen as “an application of a theory of urban planning” (p. 125) and “a mechanism that restrains the arbitrary wills of planners” (p. 153). As Azuma notes, planners today have access to a wealth of information and communication technologies from which to draw a “map of user desires” (p. 125). The democracy 2.0 framework is thereby applicable to not only national politics but is particularly relevant for e-governance initiatives in smart city programs.

The Soul in Cyberpunk: Consciousness, Higher Selves, and the Tarot of 2077

“The tarot will teach you how to create a soul.”

- Jodorowsky, The Holy Mountain

Cyberpunk 2077 released last week, and like so many others I’ve been exploring the game (to the best of my ability considering the performance issues on my console hardware...but that’s currently being discussed ad nauseum across the Internet, and I am not interested in filing consumer reports). I’m still in the early stages of the narrative, and so far the game has delivered the aesthetic re-mixing of cyberpunk cultural influences in a neon-streaked metropolis run amok that I was expecting. But there have also been some more compelling surprises that get at a deeper level than the standard sci-fi trappings and veneer of Blade Runner pastiche.

Very early on in my time with the game I was frequently having to pause and investigate the various menu screens to get a handle on the mechanics and inventory systems (as well as to adjust the graphics settings in an attempt to optimize performance, but I already said that we’re not going to get into that). Among the inventory options I noticed a greyed-out/non-selectable tab labeled “Tarot.” This immediately piqued my interest. What did this reference to Tarot portend? Were there going to be collectible tarot cards scattered throughout the open world? Was there going to be some sort of Tarot minigame, similar to the Gwent card game that the developer included in their Witcher series? And, much more tantalizingly, what thematic resonance might the Tarot have for this futuristic cyberpunk story? Whether considered as a forerunner to traditional playing card decks, a tool set for divination and cartomancy, or simply an enduring example of medieval symbolism and Western archetypal images, the typical associations with Tarot seem incongruous with the cyberpunk universe populated by rocker boys and netrunners.

These musings were not idle for long. One of the first significant locations you encounter in the narrative is Misty’s Esoterica, a sort of spiritual emporium or New Age bookshop tucked away on a Night City sidestreet amongst various other storefronts. The shop’s proprietor, Misty herself, seems clearly modeled on the final appearance of Daryl Hannah’s replicant character Pris from Blade Runner (Misty goes lighter on the eye makeup). In initial dialogue interactions Misty will lament the diminishment of spiritual connection that she sees in the world. The storefront advertises chakra harmonization and the shop interior is filled with books, statuettes of vaguely Vedic deities, and one can only imagine the crystals and associated paraphernalia on hand; you can practically smell the incense burning. And Misty seems to always be handling a certain deck of cards.

At the end of the game’s first explicit tutorial section the trainer character evaluating my performance said something like “you have mastered the way of the fool.” I wondered whether this was another nod to the Tarot, and then shortly afterward I unlocked my first achievement in the game. The notification bore the name of the achievement: The Fool.  Not long after that the second story-related achievement unlocked: The Lovers. The game was clearly tying the major arcana to its main narrative, and what I had been considering a mystical Tarot subtext was quickly becoming just plain text.

Themes of higher consciousness and spirituality remained prevalent even in the game’s ephemera and environmental set dressing. Religious iconography is omnipresent on Night City’s streets in the form of billboards and pedestrian garb. A scrap of lore text that I encountered in the open world offered thoughts on bio-augmentation and cybernetic implants from the perspective of a Buddhist monk. And some mysterious entity keeps texting my character’s phone with obscure messages like: “the only opposition to capitalism is uninterrupted meditation.”

Needless to say, I have found this incorporation of Tarot specifically and spirituality more generally to be one of the most compelling aspects of the game so far. In what follows I will broadly explore how similar themes manifest in notable examples of cyberpunk fiction, as well as the role that these considerations play in the cyberpunk genre.

Questions of Consciousness in the Cyberpunk Genre

Let me clearly state at the outset that I am not proclaiming authoritative knowledge of the cyberpunk genre (such as the true defining elements of cyberpunk fiction, or whether such-and-such example really qualifies as cyberpunk under certain requirements), nor am I invested either way in efforts at gatekeeping genre boundaries. I am also not going to attempt an explanatory history of cyberpunk ideas or artworks. The examples I cite below are drawn from my personal experience with cyberpunk literature, and I believe they are sufficiently representative for my purposes.

While it is possible to quibble over the definitive features of the cyberpunk genre, such as whether cyberpunk fiction is necessarily rooted in a particular political ethos (i.e. is it distinctly anarchist or merely anti-authoritrian?, etc.), I will argue that one of the central themes in cyberpunk fiction is the question of what it means to be human in a world transformed by technology. Prominent exemplars of the cyberpunk perspective typically explore this question via two main routes: consideration of quality of life in the material world, and more philosophical investigations into the nature of consciousness. We might further categorize these two aspects as complementary poles on an axis of outer life and inner life.

1. The World

Cyberpunk fiction seems inseparable from urban sprawl. For example, much of the action of William Gibson’s Neuromancer takes place in the virtual matrix of the Net, yet equally integral to the setting is the Sprawl, a vast conurbation stretching the U.S. eastern seaboard from Boston to Atlanta. The external environment of sprawling metropolis and city-without-end is not simply a futurist projection of civilization’s inevitable course, but is intimately connected with the genre’s concern with exploring inner states of consciousness. A central insight of urban literature, from Baudelaire to Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver, is that alienation is experienced most acutely (if not exclusively) in the midst of the crowd. Travis Bickle can only experience himself as “God’s lonely man” amongst the teeming masses of Manhattan. Being alone should not be mistaken for loneliness, and vice versa. So just as the frontier settings of Western literature tie the genre to primal themes of brutality and lawlessness in the project of “civilization”, the metropolitan settings for cyberpunk stories are linked to themes of alienation and dehumanization beneath the surface level aesthetic affordances.

Cyberpunk aesthetics remain closely associated with the 1980s era in which some of the most prominent genre exemplars emerged, and this is further represented by the particular perspectives of postmodern globalization that continue to predominate. The bustling market streets - whether in Blade Runner’s Los Angeles or Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City - portray the postmodern collapse of traditional metanarratives and distinct cultural cartographies via a polyglottal potpourri of floating signifiers (these two examples also share a strong orientalist aesthetic, a relic of 1980’s anxieties over Nipponese economic influence that the latter has merely inherited from the former [although 2077 updates this with Sino-corporate representation). Yet even the prominent appropriation of Japanese cultural markers in Western cyberpunk is ultimately window dressing for larger concerns over corporate capitalism. Corporations are the dominant powers in many cyberpunk stories - more so than nation states or any particular government agencies - and the symbols of their status dominate cyberpunk skylines through various corporate logos, advertising icons, and assorted sigils and glyphs of contemporary consumer culture. The denizens of this multicultural melting pot may lack a common language, but everyone understands the meaning of the golden arches.

The unremitting urbanization and caustic commodification that typifies cyberpunk worlds is often also correlated with destruction of the natural environment. This may be inferred or explicit. Natural degradation is often implied in the lack of vegetation or green space in the cityscape. Blade Runner establishes the scarcity of natural-born animal life, and even the artificial specimens are quite expensive. When Agent K takes a shower in 2049 an automated announcement states that this is “99.9% detoxified water”; this film also broadens the extent of ecological extinction to include living trees, making natural wood a rare commodity. Often this seems to function as an implicit critique of unchecked capitalism: food, air, and water having been irreparably poisoned as collateral damage of the profit motive. It furthers the question of what it means to be human in a world made uninhabitable to organic life. What place is there for biological organisms in an entirely artificial environment? It also further suggests the imperial conquest of the world by corporations. The domination of corporate entities is evident by their omnipresence in the built environment, their commodification and destruction of the natural environment, and even their near-monopolization of the semiotic landscape, the symbolic environment. In Cyberpunk 2077 Johnny Silverhand -- terrorist anti-hero (?) and rocker boy anarchist -- wages a crusade against what he terms “corporate colonization” of the lifeworld. In one optional dialogue interaction he roots his hatred of the corporations in their encroachment into the inner world, their colonization of the soul. This leads us to the second element of cyberpunk’s inquiry into the nature of humanity: the question of consciousness.

1. The Chariot

So far we’ve delimited two central avenues through which cyberpunk literature interrogates the essence of the human experience: elaboration on transformations of the outer/material environment, and investigation of inner experiences of consciousness. The body is the nexus between these two worlds. Thus the corollary to the outer-directed question “what does it mean to be human in an artificial environment?” is the inner-directed question “what does it mean to be human in an artificial body?” One of the well-worn topoi of cyberpunk fiction is the distinction between hardware and software. Applying this metaphor to the human organism, hardware corresponds to the physical or material body while software refers to the spookier, more metaphysical aspects of the human experience. Cyberpunk characters regularly experiment with altering their hardware through augmenting, implanting, and replacing their body parts. They also often leave their body altogether by inserting their consciousness into some sort of virtual construct, typically via a bio-technical interface provided by their augmented bodies.

In a sense, the science fiction trappings of cyberpunk fiction employ new metaphors to explore very old questions. Emerging technologies merely provide instigation for revisiting well-trod philosophical ground. For example, take the Ship of Theseus (Wikipedia link): this ancient thought experiment posits a hypothetical sailing ship that undergoes repairs and replacement of parts over time. Eventually every component, every single plank of wood, has been replaced: nothing on the ship is original. The philosophical query thus posed is: is this the same ship as it was in the beginning, or is it an entirely new ship as a result of the total transformation? A similar notion is explored in Ghost in the Shell (I refer here to the 1995 anime, I am not familiar with other entries in the franchise). The central metaphor alluded to in the title hits upon the aforementioned cyberpunk distinction between hardware and software (ghost = software/consciousness, shell = hardware/body). The protagonist, Major Motoko, seems ambivalent and even alienated from her augmented shell body. This itself raises questions about the continuity of consciousness and personal identity across physical transformation. A key issue at the film’s conclusion concerns transformations within consciousness itself, and the degree to which the self is changed through encounters with others.

Ghost in the Shell also features the distinct cyberpunk trope of uploading one’s consciousness into a virtual space, a sort of neural interlinking with the Internet. William Gibson popularized the term “cyberspace” in Neuromancer, and that novel also concerns one of the other great engagements with consciousness in cyberpunk fiction: Artificial Intelligence. Part of the core plot of Neuromancer involves A.I. that are seemingly sentient, having achieved self-awareness. These A.I. develop their own volition, hatching plans and experiencing desires that are beyond (and oftentimes in conflict with) those of their creators. A.I. thus introduces another wrinkle in the cyberpunk exploration of consciousness: what does it mean to be human when consciousness is no longer the privileged domain of human beings? How does our understanding of humanity change when artificial beings (i.e. our technological creations) claim sentience? This question is of course at the heart of Blade Runner, one of the most singularly influential entries in the cyberpunk canon.

1. The Hanged Man

What is Blade Runner about? Renegade replicants on the run in the dystopian urban landscape of Los Angeles in the not-too-distant future. Replicants are artificially created humanoids, a sort of biological A.I., with enhanced physical capabilities designed to make them more efficient laborers. Yet some replicants are not satisfied spending their entire lives as humanity’s disposable workforce. A group of replicants escapes their off-world colony and infiltrates L.A. in order to petition their creator -- the head of the Tyrell Corporation -- for more life. They are not seeking immortality, mind you: merely an extension on their programmed four year lifespan. Rick Deckard is an LAPD blade runner assigned to track down and kill the replicants (blade runner = assassin, i.e. someone who draws [runs] a knife [blade]; I’ve seen so much confusion about this simple point). As the narrative unfolds the lines between cop/killer and human/replicant blur to the point of indistinction. Deckard carries out his grim task with a palpable sense of ambivalence, except for in cases when his life is immediately threatened. His moral position toward the replicants is further complicated when he becomes romantically involved with Rachel, another Tyrell replicant. And the replicant leader Roy Batty commits cold-blooded murder, but also quotes poetry and expresses profound compassion for his companions. Even the replicants’ central quest is eminently understandable: who could blame them for wanting to escape servitude and seek to preserve their lives?

So Blade Runner engages the core cyberpunk question of “what does it mean to be human?” at multiple levels. The most obvious concerns the status of replicants as human beings. Are they human? Does their status as artificially created beings preclude them a priori from the full spectrum of the human experience? Essentially the question is: Do the replicants have a soul? (Blade Runner 2049, despite being a film I greatly enjoy, bluntly makes this point with a lack of nuance or poetic subtlety that typifies much of that production). Beyond posing a mere metaphysical thought experiment this question raises immediate ethical dilemmas for the fictional world of the film: if replicants are sentient beings like humans, then how can society justify condemning them to short lives spent in servitude in dangerous slave labor? Obviously this conundrum poses an ethical challenge for our real world, not just the fictional universe of the film: how can we justify condemning sentient beings to short lives spent in servitude in dangerous slave labor? The affluent societies of the so-called “developed” or “first” worlds are sustained by such exploitation. Indeed, human civilization has always been sustained by systems of slavery, savagery, and the instrumentalization of human beings as fuel for the fires of “progress.” (There are many other issues raised by the film that I will not be getting into for the purposes of this essay; one particularly pertinent thread that I will leave un-pulled for the time being concerns the notion of consciousness as an emergent property of matter, and not necessarily organic matter but even so-called “dead” matter; this idea could be understandably anxiety-inducing from a human perspective.)

This ethical dilemma begins to get at the deeper levels at which Blade Runner questions “what does it mean to be human?” Past a certain point, the question of the replicants’ sentience is irrelevant. By all outward appearances they are identical to human beings: they communicate, they form bonds, they pursue self-preservation, they express fears, they show compassion, they laugh, they love, etc. Any speculation about the presence or absence of a replicant soul is an empty exercise in theological theorization. But more than that, focusing on the issue of the replicants’ humanity misses the larger and much more profound question of humanity itself. The world of Blade Runner (in many ways an archetypal cyberpunk world) depicts the visual markers of environmental degradation and dystopic urbanization, yet the broader theme to be discerned is an attendant dehumanization. Deckard, like the replicants, is in his own way also instrumentalized as a tool by the larger systems that depend on exploitation, subjugation, and various structures of control. The question is not, “what does it mean to be human?” but rather, “what do we mean by human?” In other words, the important issue is not whether replicants have souls, but whether we have souls, and the broader implications of even positing the existence of a soul in the first place. To put it yet another way: the question is not “by what criteria do we demarcate human life” but rather “what is the value of human life?” What does it mean to be alive, and how do we attain to the higher notions of spiritual being that seem stubbornly recalcitrant in the face of banal drudgery and inevitable entropic encroachment in daily life? The debate over whether Deckard is an authentic human being or a re-programmed replicant with implanted memories represents a step in the right direction but ultimately misses the greater point. It doesn’t matter whether he is secretly a Tyrell creation or not: in what way does his daily existence as presented in the film display an essential humanity beyond what is demonstrated by the replicants? And more importantly, what does this ostensible acceptance of the “facts” of human existence reveal about the limits of our imagination when it comes to answering that abiding cyberpunk inquiry: what does it mean to be human?

1. The Lovers

I’ve already suggested some of the ways that Cyberpunk 2077 is engaging with the aforementioned genre tropes of cyberpunk fiction. And I’m still in the early stages of the central narrative, so it remains to be seen what new topoi may be incorporated into this particular story. But I am far enough along in the game to have a handle on one major element (this isn’t really a spoiler, by the way, as it has featured prominently in marketing materials and the overall promotional campaign): the incorporation of the Johnny Silverhand character as a virtual personality construct within the player character’s mind. This situation is presented as a case of dueling psyches: V (the player character) is said to be experiencing two distinct personalities in their mind simultaneously. In terms of gameplay this mostly manifests by the Johnny figure randomly materializing within V’s field of vision to comment on whatever is transpiring at the moment, and engaging in dialogue with V that none of the other characters are able to hear. This aspect of the narrative overlaps with many of the cyberpunk themes and topoi already discussed: biological augmentation, speculation on the nature of consciousness (to what extent can this virtual engram or simulacrum of Johnny Silverhand be considered to be an actual personality? Johnny’s physical body is long gone, so is this his soul? Is he a ghost?), and the blurry boundary lines between hardware and software. V is told that the implantation of the Silverhand construct is irreversible and terminal: slowly but surely the Silverhand personality will override V’s psyche, his own personality will be erased and Johnny will for all intents and purposes be resurrected inside V’s body.

OK, so let’s get back to the role of the Tarot in Cyberpunk 2077: just what might the game be trying to get at by prominently incorporating the major arcana into its science fiction action-adventure story. Is it simply a cosmetic contrivance, just one more example of the game’s profligate plundering of existing iconography and pop culture references to fashion its fictional world? I don’t think it is mere window dressing, or “cool for cool’s sake” like so much of what has come to define the popular imagination of cyberpunk as a visual aesthetic. I am being generous toward the developers here (a somewhat unconventional, almost contrarian position considering the current state of Cyberpunk 2077 discourse online). Rather, I think the incorporation of Tarot and other allusions to esoteric spirituality is part of a good faith effort to meaningfully engage with the philosophical undercurrents that have always undergirded the best examples of the cyberpunk genre.

We’ve already covered how the inclusion of the Johnny Silverhand virtual construct correlates to perennial cyberpunk ideas and themes, so how might it relate to this overarching consideration of consciousness and the notion of the soul? In a sense, the characters’ souls are precisely what is at stake: Johnny has been resurrected from the dead, and now his only hope for a new life rests in V’s body. V is understandably reluctant to surrender himself as a vehicle for the consciousness of a long-dead rocker boy. In another sense Johnny seems to fulfill the role of a spirit guide: he is incorporeal, and can only be seen or heard by V. He offers V guidance, even though he often seems to be pursuing his own agenda. The relationship between Johnny and V, a struggle played out internally within V’s mind, also offers a metaphor for personal struggle and self-overcoming. Johnny could represent a lower self, the more base aspects of the psyche or personality that must be brought into awareness and under conscious will. Alternatively, Johnny could be correlated with a Guardian Angel, or a notion of a higher self to be integrated rather than transcended. Ultimately Johnny’s intrusions into V’s waking consciousness may be as inscrutable or open to interpretation as the reimagined Tarot images that appear throughout Night City: just one more shadow on the path.

1. Judgment

I am curious to see how the spiritual themes and symbolism of Cyberpunk 2077 unfold as I progress in the game. Thus far I have appreciated how the designers have incorporated the esoteric as well as exoteric elements of cyberpunk fiction, the consideration of both outer and inner worlds. Irregardless of any technical limitations the game may be suffering at the moment, the overall design of Night City certainly captures the visual aesthetics and dystopic tone that one would expect from a cyberpunk environment. 

Each day our waking reality seems more resonant with the speculative realities dreamed up in cyberpunk fiction. This year we have witnessed the desertification of cityscapes in the wake of global pandemic, eerie scenes that evoked imaginaries of urban apocalypse so familiar from pop culture portrayals. In our isolation and atomization we interface ever more with virtual spaces. Corporate colonization of the lifeworld, of both physical and virtual spaces of daily living, has exceeded previous hypothetical horizons. Longstanding issues of economic disruption, labor precarity, and housing crises are likely to only be exacerbated by the fallout of coronavirus. In such times the central question posed by cyberpunk stories remains one of the most worthwhile to ask and answer: what does it mean to be human?

Watch_Dogs: Legion, part 1: Open Worlds

I love the Watch_Dogs franchise. Or rather, I want to love it. I certainly love the overall concept. The distinguishing features of the series incorporate some of my favorite elements from video games in general, as well as more particular niche interests. For one thing, the games  are set in contemporary urban open worlds that can be experienced in “sandbox” style, which is one of my personal favorite video game genres. The game worlds are also based on real world cities, which is another plus for me that I will talk more about later. The second defining feature of the  Watch_Dogs franchise for me is the thematic focus. The game's primary thematic concern, as indicated by the franchise name, is technologically-enabled surveillance in modern society. The narrative and gameplay address obvious concerns surrounding intrusive technology in terms of the erosion of privacy. A related major component, particularly in the first game, involves urban infrastructure, as well as how the implementation of emerging technology for city management produces augmented spatialities and governmentality. Now, as I said earlier I definitely love the concept, but how the games execute these concepts can be more difficult to ascertain. I have looked forward to the latest entry in the series, Watch_Dogs: Legion, for the past couple of years and have enjoyed playing it over the past month or so. Now that I've had some time to think about the game, I wanted to offer some thoughts before my scant video game time becomes occupied with Cyberpunk 2077 next week. I am going to organize my thoughts and comments around the two themes I have already identified that appeal to me most about these games: the urban open-world play environments, and the thematic engagement with the issues of surveillance capitalism and imaginaries of resistance.

Open Worlds: Exploring Virtual Spaces

My love of open world games, and in particular urban sandbox style games, began with Grand Theft Auto 3. Driving around the three islands of Liberty City sowing discord while listening to Chatterbox FM was unlike any video game I had ever experienced.  Nearly 20 years later, open world exploration remains my favorite video game pastime. Self-directed exploration of a virtual environment provides me with a surefire circuit for relaxation, recreation, and escapism. I have thus far been focusing on the particular sub-genre of urban open world games, although I certainly have great appreciation for other varieties as well. For example, my experiences exploring the worlds of Oblivion and Skyrim remain pinnacles of fantasy role-playing. 

Now, even when limiting our purview to the subgenre of modern city environments, we can distinguish urban open worlds in video games between those that are based on actually existing cities, and those that are wholly fictional or imagined. I enjoy both types for their unique qualities and appreciate them in different ways. For instance, an entirely fictional virtual city offers the potential to explore an environment that is totally unknown and surprising, largely free from the baggage of preconception and expectation. Furthermore, a virtual city created from scratch is not necessarily bound by the constraints of real world geography and can therefore endeavor to prioritize a game space optimized for play and creative mobility. An example of this category might be the city of Steelport from the Saints Row series, although clearly even this fictional city bears evidence of association and allusion to real-world urban centers. Another example that comes to mind is the setting of the Crackdown games. In this case it is an extremely generic near-future urban environment; I don't even recall the name of the fictional city from the first two games... Port Town? Star Union? Megalopolis? However, the game world is designed to accommodate what for me is the key feature of the Crackdown series: bounding from rooftop to rooftop collecting power orbs, increasing agility stats so that you may reach increasingly higher peaks. Indeed, I was always somewhat taken aback to be walking or driving along a street in Crackdown-town and notice all of this superfluous level of street level detail that the designers had included, such as signage for shops and other businesses with punny names as if this was a Rockstar game. 

Speaking of Rockstar, the Grand Theft Auto series provides a perfect point of interconnection between the categories of fictional virtual cities and those based on real world locations. The aforementioned Liberty City from Grand Theft Auto 3, for example, is a fictional city: the name suggests a link to New York by evoking one of that city's greatest landmarks, yet the design of the game world itself does not incorporate much in the way of specific iconography or virtual re-creations of specific places. Vice City, the subsequent game in the series, declares a setting in Miami of the 1980s beginning with its titular allusion, yet that is only the beginning. This game furthers the funhouse-mirror-view-of-America-as-seen-by-Brits-through-the-lens-of-American-popular-culture that began in Grand Theft Auto 3. Yet in addition to drawing from gangster films and other pop culture of that era the game also incorporates limited recreations of iconic Miami locations. San Andreas represented an even further evolution, not only further in time to the 1990s where the game draws heavily from pop culture and media depictions of Los Angeles from that era, but also to the scale of the environment and the degree of verisimilitude attempted in its recreation of real world cities. Grand Theft Auto V extends this trajectory to an exceedingly ambitious simulacrum of Southern California that is simultaneously a parody of contemporary America, a condensed impressionistic depiction of Greater Los Angeles, as well as strikingly accurate recreations of actually existing locations. Of course, the metropolis of GTA V is Los Santos rather than Los Angeles, because while the game dips its toes in nearly simulation level depictions of LA, it's other foot remains firmly planted in the satirical and cartoonish Grand Theft Auto alternate universe. 

Further along the spectrum of realistic video game depictions of actual cities we find more grounded portrayal of real world sites. Some of the best examples come from the Assassin's Creed series, where some of the great cities of the world are recreated based on previous historical eras. Now, one of the reasons that I love accurate representations of real world cities is that they provide a novel way of interfacing, in a mediated and imaginative way, with an existing location. This offers rich benefits whether you have personal experience of the place, or if you have never actually visited. When you are familiar with the place depicted you can test the designed world of the video game against your personal knowledge and memory. You can, for instance, go seeking for a particular location or landmark to see if it has been included in the game world, and if it has been included you can compare the accuracy with your own experience or recollection. However, a detailed re-creation of a real city can be a wonderful means of learning more about that place. This is why one of my all-time favorite video game cities is the re-creation of Manhattan in True Crime New York City. The play space of True Crime NYC is a GPS-accurate block-by-block re-creation of the Manhattan grid. Because the game was released in 2002 it obviously does not offer the level of detail or graphical fidelity that we are spoiled by in more recent video games. However, True Crime New York City does offer the distinct pleasure of being able to race along every Avenue on the island of Manhattan while crossing every real-world street and encountering none of the real-world traffic. One of my favorite things to do in True Crime NYC was to think of a prominent building or other landmark, look up the cross streets on a map, then go to that intersection in the game to see if the landmark was included. Most of the time I found that it was. I remember playing the game after returning from a brief visit to Manhattan where I had stayed in Midtown for an academic conference. In the game I was able to re-create the route of my daily walk from the hotel to the conference venue, finding satisfying details such as the inclusion of a church right on the street corner where it had been during my stay. I also discovered landmarks that had been previously unknown to me, and learned things about New York City history from playing the game. For instance, one time while racing down 3rd Avenue I was stopped in my tracks by the appearance of a massive building with an attached tower. I brought my virtual car to a screeching halt in the intersection to face this distinct structure. The building stood in such contrast to the more generic streetscapes that fill in the spaces between more customized locations in True Crime NYC that I felt compelled to look up the cross streets online to discover whether this was indeed a re-creation of a landmark that I was not familiar with. It turned out that this structure was the mosque and minaret of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York. Yet another time I was speeding along through lower Manhattan. As you are driving in True Crime NYC, the names of streets that you are crossing are displayed at the top of the HUD. I saw in quick succession the street names “Duane” and “Reade” flash by at the top of my screen. I went back to confirm what I had seen, and upon further investigation learned that the Duane Reade convenience stores which are so ubiquitous in Manhattan are indeed named for the location of the company's original warehouse which was situated on Broadway between the streets of Duane and Reade. Moments like these are a large part of why I continue to feel such fondness for the New York City presented in the True Crime series even after so many subsequent games have presented more dynamic representations of the Big Apple. 

Watch_Dogs’ London: Virtual Horizons of Urban Life

The London of Watch_Dogs: Legion straddles the boundary line between realistic representation and fanciful imagination by virtue of its near-future setting. The city is unmistakable, rendered with a plethora of recognizable landmarks and significant amount of granular detail. However, the London-as-we-know-it is also augmented by certain science fiction trappings: landmarks such as Big Ben and Tower Bridge are emblazoned with massive holographic projections indicating a general threat level for terroristic activity along with the logo of the private military company overseeing local security. The other major deviation concerns traffic through the city, both at street level and in the skies above. The road traffic consists of an assortment of cars, trucks, and motorcycles, along with iconic London vehicles like black cabs and double-decker busses. These more familiar conveyances are joined also by fleets of autonomous taxis or self-driving ride-share vehicles (the in-game lore establishes that all personal vehicles are legally mandated to have autonomous driving capability). One gameplay change that this introduces is the ability to commandeer vehicles on the move without “stealing” the car and inconveniencing a driver. The autonomous taxi vehicles in fact have no separate driver compartment or steering wheel, and are instead designed like a commuter train passenger carriage with two benches of seats facing each other (they are incredibly similar to the autonomous taxis featured in the execrable third season of Westworld).

Self-driving cars represent one element of the near-future technological projections featured in the game. One of the other major additions (and more significant in terms of gameplay impact) is the ubiquitous drone presence in the city. Above the ground traffic buzzes a constant stream of autonomous drone vehicles, flying quadro-copters that largely follow the terrestrial street routes. Drone devices are mostly confined to a number of vehicle categories: delivery drone quad-copters ferrying packages; slow-moving cargo drones hauling crates and construction materials; CToS surveillance drones hovering around to monitor goings-ons in the city; news drones filming footage for GBB reportage (the in-game alter ego of the BBC); and assorted anti-pursuit and riot control militarized drones. The constant stream of drone traffic adds a distinctly cyberpunk element to the city (while also resonating with contemporary culture and directions of technological evolution), but it also introduces one of the most substantial gameplay innovations into the Watch_Dogs formula. One of the fundamental gameplay elements in Watch_Dogs has always been “hijacking” security cameras, i.e. “hacking” into them with your mobile device to gain a new perspective on a particular location, scout enemy positions, and leapfrog from camera to camera to solve puzzles (as long as you have line-of-sight you can progress along a chain of CCTV installations). I’ve always appreciated this aspect of the Watch_Dogs gameplay loop in part because it is (usually) not reliant on combat encounters and offers novel approaches to platforming segments. In Legion, if you are struggling to get line-of-sight on a particular CCTV position or need to gain access to a harder to reach area, you are often able to hijack a passing drone, grabbing it out of the sky and piloting toward your objective. As you gain proficiency with this practice it affords some creative platforming and puzzle solving, as well as emergent approaches to clearing enemy encampments.

The London of Watch_Dogs: Legion is often quite beautiful; it is also often buggy, glitchy, and bizarre looking, owing to a host of persistent graphical issues. Yet at its best, when all the environmental elements are working in concert, you can get some dynamite scenes of Regent Street illuminated by a late afternoon sun, or a magisterial Westminster across the Thames (the Thames, on the other hand, is real rubbish: the river traffic is a ridiculous procession of pop-ins and low-texture polygonal watercraft). Aside from the near-future aesthetic embellishments the Legion designers largely leaned in to a realistic re-creation of London. The game’s map and designated districts bear close cartographic correspondence to its corporeal counterpart. I last visited London in 2016, and I have successfully recreated certain walking routes from that trip in Watch_Dogs’ London (as is my custom in these sorts of games...it may seem silly, but it’s how I prefer to play). Crossing the Golden Jubilee Bridges from Charing Cross to Southbank, or walking from the base of BT Tower to BBC Broadcasting House, provide pleasing pretensions of previous perambulations. While we’re on the subject of pedestrianism: One of the other street-level innovations that I think is worth mentioning is the addition of building access doors that open onto the sidewalk. These are one-way portals (you cannot use them to access a building interior, and indeed the only interior space that can be glimpsed through one of these open doorways is a black void), but they allow NPC figures (perhaps we should designate these PPCs...potentially playable characters?) to step out onto the street. It’s a neat feature that adds to the sense of a busy, bustling streetscape and adds to the immersive illusion of navigating a densely populated city sidewalk.

(A brief sidenote regarding transportation options: the Underground system is well represented throughout the map in the form of tube stations that function as fast-travel transit nodes. There are no functioning, ride-able metro trains, which is understandable [the Tube is wonderful but not really known for the excellent views it offers] while also a bit of a disappointment [I’m a sucker for functioning public transit in games...I rode every inch of rail track in GTA IV and V, and thoroughly appreciated views of the Chicago skyline while riding the L train in the original Watch_Dogs]. Also, while acknowledging the technical limitations and risks of feature creep or bloat, bicycles would have been a wonderful option for engaging with the rich cyclogeography of London  [maybe even for limited, dedicated courier activities?])

OK, so London is (mostly) beautifully rendered, but how can you engage with the game space? What opportunities are provided for exploring and interfacing with the environment through gameplay? Watch_Dogs: Legion is a bit of a letdown in this area, as the presence of environmental activities seems to have been scaled back in comparison with the earlier games in the series. This will surely be a trivial concern for some players, but I really enjoyed how side activities were embedded into the game world of the original Watch_Dogs’ simulacra of Chicago. You could encounter a shell game on a busy street corner; play chess in a coffee shop or have a drinking contest  in a bar. There were various augmented reality activities such as timed platforming challenges or fantastical virtual reality battle modes. My favorite side activities in the original Watch_Dogs were the QR code puzzles: portions of QR codes were painted along the sides of buildings throughout the city, so that viewing the completed image required a combination of exploration, platforming, and CCTV hijacking in order to discover a vantage point from which the code could be viewed from the right perspective. 

As I’ve already mentioned, the availability of side activities in Legion seems greatly scaled back. There are pubs where you can drink beer (triggering temporary audio-visual distortions) and play a game of darts (which I have found to be far too tedious and aggravating to be worth the effort). Most pubs also feature slot machines, but unlike the first Watch_Dogs where slot machines functioned as a playable gambling minigame, in Legion slot machines are hackable (meaning you can siphon a small amount of money with the push of a button) but are not playable. There are Parcel Fox delivery missions, which are OK: assorted A-to-B courier assignments with varying prerequisites for success, such as a countdown timer for parcel delivery, limits to the amount of “damage” a package may receive en route to the destination, and degrees of “wanted level” that will activate police pursuit of your contraband cargo. These activities are decent and provide a fun way to explore alleyways and other alternative routes around the city, particularly as you try to avoid automated checkpoint stations that will alert the police force to your location.

The other substantial environmental exploration activity is represented by “paste-up locations”: particular spots dotted across the city where you can apply a large-scale wheatpaste poster. These are typically located above street level (sometimes quite high up on a rooftop) and therefore require some figuring out how to reach the location.  I found this to be a fun diversion for a while, but the novelty wears off rather quickly. They are nowhere near as fun or satisfying as the QR codes from the first Watch_Dogs. The available designs or “stencils” that you can apply are limited to the point of feeling monotonous once you’ve used them all, I was extremely frustrated at the lack of a “checkmark” icon or some other signifier on the game map to indicate when a paste-up location had already been completed.

That leaves collectibles. There are hundreds of collectibles scattered across the game world. Seriously, there are just so many. I’m familiar with the general criticism of Ubisoft’s approach to open world design, that it offers exhaustive and repetitive collecting, but I don’t play many video games so I don’t have much firsthand experience with this phenomenon. I get it now. Look, I played all three Crackdown games solely for the joy of bouncing around the cityscape hunting agility orbs. This element of the Crackdown experience provides a wonderful “mindless” gameplay loop where you can just put on some music or a podcast and bounce around for dopamine hits and scratching the completionist itch. In Watch_Dogs: Legion this translates to commandeering a cargo drone that you can (slowly) ride around the city picking up collectibles one by one. It also lends itself to a similar experience to the above mentioned Crackdown approach, but after a while it is agonizingly tedious. I also appreciate having loads of content in a game, but Legion takes this to the point of absurdity. The amount of collectibles across the map seem self-replicating and endlessly proliferating. I’ve nearly maxed out all the available tech upgrades: how can there possibly be so many tech point icons on my map? Ultimately the most rewarding outcome of this gameplay experience are the aerial vistas it affords and the new areas of the city that you can discover while hunting for easter eggs (often leading me to research particularly interesting locations to discern the degree to which they were inventions of the designers or faithful re-creations of London locales).

There are some further notable examples of environmental storytelling that contribute to the overall atmosphere and accord with my personal experiences of London. For example, visible homelessness is pervasive in this virtual version of London. This is not an innovation in urban open world design (the Grand Theft Auto series has had unhoused NPCs since at least GTA 3...oftentimes these have been deployed as jokey “bum” characters or as exemplars of urban eccentrics [GTA IV had some notable examples of the latter], although GTA V adds a sharper political edge to these depictions with its frequent allusions to economic recession and the pointedly politicized Dignity Village encampment), but these depictions feel like an integral component of Legion’s world rather than isolated dioramas or window dressing. This is accompanied by explicit activist installations and political slogans (some have more teeth than others). The game also directly addresses Brexit and broader issues of immigration and refugee populations. An arena in the game’s Lambeth borough (I think the closest real world analogue is London Stadium, but I’m not sure...incidentally, I have particularly enjoyed the inclusion of baseball stadia in the previous series entries...the first Watch_Dogs begins in a baseball stadium during a night game [although it doesn’t resemble either of Chicago’s real world major league ballparks], and Watch_Dogs 2 features a fictional San Francisco ball club with its own stadium based on Oracle Park) has been re-purposed as a deportation detention facility called the Eurpoean Processing Center. 

These more politicized elements of Legion’s London lead us to a consideration of how the game engages with the ideological dimensions evoked by its thematic trappings. In the second part of this commentary I will focus on this aspect of the game, in particular how Watch_Dogs: Legion gamifies class solidarity and commodifies culture jamming.

City Space as Projective Medium: From Coronavirus Quarantine to Urban Uprisings

The current confluence of the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic and popular political demonstrations has provided strikingly urgent examples of how city space may be actualized as a projective medium. By “projective medium” I mean to describe a repurposing of urban environments wherein public space serves as a canvas not only for the circulation of artistic representations or political slogans but for the staging of interventions of imagination, a testing ground for potential futures. Within the past few months we have seen dramatic and unprecedented reconfigurations of public space: first in the widespread “lockdown” and “stay at home” measures designed to mitigate the viral transmission of COVID-19; and secondly with irruption of mass protests against police brutality and extrajudicial killings of people of color. Both of these “moments” have offered profound illustrations of the social production of space, as well as ways in which the physical infrastructure of the built environment is an inherently politicized terrain. 

In the early days of the Coronavirus quarantines reconsiderations of urban space focused on absence and withdrawal. Photographs of unoccupied Los Angeles freeways and deserted downtown districts circulated widely online. At the end of March the New York Times published a photo essay documenting quietude throughout the five boroughs with the title “New York Was Not Designed For Emptiness.” The fascination with emptied city spaces is certainly linked to visual tropes of apocalyptic fiction and representations of humanity’s end depicted so often in popular culture: the silent streets and vacant plazas served as visual confirmation of the otherwise “unseen” virus, and visceral reminder of our ultimately precarious civilization. The allure of these images may also be linked to a desire for (psychological) distance from the biological threat. Writing in the Verso Books blog, Rob Horning credited such photographs with reinforcing a sense of “exemption” from the vagaries of the natural world and from the virus itself:

“Our ability to appreciate these images doesn’t underscore our ultimate harmony or interconnection with the natural world and the life that purportedly re-emerges when the highways are finally vacated. Rather it lets us use mediation (our ability to consume representations) to rearticulate our exceptionality. We can assume the subject position of the camera and pretend that makes us immune to being objects in the world.”

The onset of “social distancing” induced an attitudinal shift in how we related to the shared spaces of everyday life. The withdrawal from public places to the atomistic dwelling of self-isolation created a sort of vacuum, opening up a space in which new meanings and relations could be introduced. In many cities around the world residents rediscovered the balcony as a link between the individual and communal worlds. Balconies have always served as liminal spaces between the publicity of the street and the privacy of the home. During quarantine these sites gained renewed significance as spaces for performance and communication. Neighbors socialized from across their respective railings, and a new routine developed where residents would gather to applaud medical workers from their balconies at appointed shift-change times.

The mass migration indoors prompted rediscovery of the built environment as communication medium in other ways. I am particularly fond of the various projects that involved projecting films onto the sides of buildings. In Rome the cinema organization Alice nella Città began scheduling regular projections of classic films, and encouraged any citizens with the ability to do so to implement their own screenings. In Berlin the Windowflicks project hosted screenings by projecting movies on the walls of residential courtyards. (On a somewhat related note, I was disappointed to learn that Vulcan Video, a beloved DVD rental business in Austin, TX and one of my most frequented locales when I lived in that city, did not survive the Coronavirus outbreak.)

At the end of May the insular isolation of “stay at home” measures reversed into a dramatic reclamation of the streets. In the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands police, residents of Minneapolis turned out en masse in the neighborhood where he was killed. The initial days of the demonstrations saw vandalism and destruction of corporate businesses in the neighborhood beginning with an AutoZone store. (In addition to semiotically presaging the eventual advent of “autonomous zone” in popular discourse and U.S. urban imaginaries, the prominence of the AutoZone and other automotive businesses in the subsequent unrest throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul testifies not only to the dominance of car culture in U.S. spatial design, but also to the legacy of highway expansions and car-centric development that decimated predominantly Black urban communities throughout the 20th Century.)

During the first two days of protests a Target store nearby the site of Floyd’s death was thoroughly looted and vandalized. In addition to the store’s interior being effectively gutted, the exterior walls were blanketed with spraypainted messages. In the days that followed political graffiti and anti-police slogans became a ubiquitous visual element of the demonstrations unfolding in cities throughout the United States, even occupying part of the backdrop for Donald Trump’s infamous bible photo-op in Washington D.C. Here again the latent potential for the built environment to serve as a projective medium was dramatically actualized. The pervasive presence of political graffiti messages recalled the spraypainted slogans of the May 68 demonstrations in Paris, just as the scenes of civil unrest evoked the 1968 U.S. urban riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Over the past three weeks the urban uprisings have continued to spread throughout the U.S., perhaps reaching their temporary apogee with the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). The CHAZ designation refers to the occupation of a six-block area in central Seattle centered around the vacated East Precinct police headquarters. Since it’s emergence in popular discourse the message and meaning of the CHAZ has been the subject of public debate. Authoritarian discourses have demonized the occupation as a terroristic takeover, while more amicable readings of the space have characterized it in terms of a festival atmosphere with arts and music. Several early accounts featured images and accounts of a film screening in the CHAZ: participants watching Ava DuVernay’s “13th” on a projection screen set up in an occupied intersection.

As with the aforementioned outdoor cinema projects implemented under Coronavirus quarantine, the urban reimagining of the CHAZ features film screenings in urban space, a repurposing of city streets as movie theaters. It thus offers another opportunity to consider the built environment as a projective medium. Again, this sense of “projective medium” extends beyond merely repurposing urban infrastructure as a material support for communication. Yes, the occupied urban space of the CHAZ features murals, spraypainted slogans, and other forms of artistic and political representation. But the greater “message” of the occupation is a radical rethinking of the logics underlying the organization of urban life itself. The various artistic interventions launched in response to the COVID-19 outbreak similarly call into question certain unspoken assumptions undergirding collective dwelling.

 (In distinguishing between the “form” and the “content” of these creative repurposings of urban space it is important to recognize that the content in the respective cases is obviously significant. The CHAZ occupiers were screening a documentary about racial inequality in the United States, a subject clearly connected to the broader socio-historical context and political intent of Black Lives Matter protests. Would we interpret the scene differently if the CHAZ audience was watching “The Wizard of Oz,” or “Trolls 2”? Similarly, how would our understanding of the outdoor screenings in Rome and Berlin be altered if the organizers were projecting political documentaries instead of classic films?)

Both the Coronavirus pandemic and the urban demonstrations have prompted a reimagining of the structures that shape our daily lives. Rather than idle speculation or “mere” philosophical musings, the emergent issues underlying these provocations present themselves as urgent and unavoidable. They reveal the necessity of the radical reassessment of social reality.

Most of the questions prompted by the Coronavirus have to do with resuming “business as usual” in a way that will prevent another outbreak. What will work and schooling look like after the lockdown? Will telecommuting become the new norm? Should theaters and concert venues reopen to full capacity? Will any area of life return to its pre-pandemic state? The questions and demands voiced in the ongoing anti-racism protests feature a different focus, but they also call for sweeping structural reforms. Calls to “defund the police” have been explicated as a “reimagining” of what public safety and community-oriented state initiatives can look like. These twin crises thus raise awareness of infrastructural and social failures (of the healthcare system, of adequate preventative measures, of policing procedures, of systemic racism, etc.), but they also draw attention to failures of imagination. Questions about what kind of world we want to live in are increasingly superseded by questions of what kind of world will enable us to survive.

While the twin events represented by the global pandemic and anti-oppression uprisings therefore share significant similarities, they may be productively differentiated by the directional orientation of their respective inciting elements. The shock and disruption of the Coronavirus outbreak can be characterized as a movement inward driven by an outside impetus, whereas the protests represent an outward movement compelled by inner antagonisms. Social distancing and “safer-at-home” self-isolation measures were restrictive responses to an outside foreign force (foreign or alien in the sense that the virus is not human, not in any sort of xenophobic or Sinophobic sense as conveyed by the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu” dysphemisms). The mass occupations of city streets and other urban spaces was an expansive outwardly-directed response to failures and contradictions within the society itself, including inherent racial injustice, class antagonisms, and a generalized precariousness engendered by neoliberal capitalism. The two movements thus represent two imperatives to reimagine our world: one compelled from without, the other incurred from within. (There were, of course, many interrelated and exacerbating factors connecting the pandemic response with the protests, such as the economic disruption, soaring unemployment, disproportionate health outcomes along racial lines, etc.)

One way to interpret the sudden transition from vacant, socially-distanced public spaces to massively occupied city streets is to view space as a blank slate onto which various forces or groups project their politicized messages. However, it would be misleading to consider the urban as an empty signifier, or city space as a neutral container subject to contestations over who gets to fill it with meaning. The built environment is always already a politicized terrain, shaped by value-laden design decisions and governed by policy and force. Urban space emptied of content does not reveal the material landscape as a merely objective fact or value neutral background for social life. Instead, both the images of emptied city streets in the time of Corona and the scenes of massive demonstrations in public space attest to a fact that the urban form shares with all communication media: the medium is the message.

Sick of Serial Killing: The Virulence of Hate in a Time of Contagion

The following reflections were originally written several years ago for a graduate seminar. I’ve decided to share these thoughts here because they seem highly resonant with the current moment. For one thing, the essay links metaphors of contagious disease with activist rhetoric deployed against public apathy and racialized violence. These connections take on a renewed relevance in the context of the massive ongoing demonstrations against police violence which are occurring amidst the COVD-19 global pandemic. Secondly, the brief essay develops the connection between virulence and hate by thinking through the polemical rhetoric of Larry Kramer’s AIDS activism. This provides another confluence with current events in light of Kramer’s death two weeks ago on May 27th.

Larry Kramer’s association with AIDS activism stems not only from the duration and determination of his involvement, but also from his impassioned rhetorical style. Erin Rand identifies Kramer’s style as polemical, and identifies four rhetorical features unique to the polemical form: alienating expressions of emotion, non-contingent assertions of truth, presumptions of shared morality, and the constitution of enemies, audiences, and publics (p. 301). Rand distinguishes Kramer’s polemical style from other uses of anger in rhetoric or public address in that Kramer does not “attempt to elicit anger from the audience, unite the audience through their shared sense of anger, or move them to action based on emotion; rather, Kramer performs his own anger at what he perceives to be the audience’s failure to behave in the way that he desires” (p. 302).

Rand cites as characteristic of Kramer’s polemics the building through a succession of factual statements that culminate in “a climactic display of fury and frustration” (p. 302).

“Hence, polemics refute dominant ideologies and modes of thinking by rejecting the primacy of reason and invoking explicitly moral claims. In polemics a moral position is not simply advanced through rhetoric, but morality actually does rhetorical work.” (p. 305)           

Similarly, West considered the function of emotion in productions of the Kramer-penned play The Normal Heart:

“To realize a future different from the past, the producers had to take steps to motivate their audiences to translate their emotions into action once they had left the show. If the play was merely cathartic and enjoyed as a terrible chapter of history, then surely they had failed.” (p.100)

“Through the explicit targeting of younger audiences and distributing Kramer’s plea for help, the producers enabled rage, anger, and outrage.” (p. 101)

Feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde also saw anger as potentially productive. According to Olson: “Lorde distinguished between anger and hatred, and she salvaged the former as potentially useful and generative” (p. 287). Lorde’s distinction between anger and hatred is developed in a quote from her remarks: “Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change” (p. 298).

In a quote from her “The Uses of Anger,” Lorde uses the metaphor of the virus to describe hatred:

“We are working in a context of oppression and threat, the cause of which is certainly not the angers which lie between us, but rather that virulent hatred leveled against all women, people of Color, lesbians and gay men, poor people - against all of us who are seeking to examine the particulars of our lives as we resist our oppressions, moving toward coalition and effective action.” (emphasis added)

Other authors have connected hatred with disease. This thematic link is made, for example, in Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing. While the film’s characters never state the distinction between anger and hatred as explicitly as Lorde does, the film makes many associations that establish a difference between the two. The action of the film takes place in a roughly 24 hour period, during the hottest day of the summer in Brooklyn, New York. The temperature is referenced throughout the film, and the link between the heat and character’s emotions is made early on. Anger is associated with heat: characters talk about “getting hot” as a euphemism for getting angry. By extension then, the hottest day of the summer could also be understood as the angriest.

Hatred, on the other hand, is continually linked with sickness and disease. Early in the film, when pizzeria owner Sal arrives with his two sons to start business for the day, his son Pino says of the pizza shop:

“I detest this place like a sickness.”

Sal admonishes his son, saying: “That sounds like hatred.”

This connection returns at the end of film, again in front of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, which at this point has been reduced to a smoldering shell. Mookie seeks Sal out to ask for the wages he is due from the previous week’s labor. Angrily, Sal throws $500 in $100 bills at Mookie, twice as much as he is owed. Mookie leaves $200 on the ground, telling Sal that he only wants what he has earned. There is a stalemate as the two men stare off, the $200 between them, and each of them waiting for the other to pick it up. Apparently not understanding why Mookie would leave the money lying on the ground Sal asks him:

“Are you sick?”

Mookie: “I’m hot as a motherfucker; I’m alright, though.”

Mookie’s response here should not be understood merely as a comment about the weather. Yes, he is hot because of the summer heat, but the associations presented by the film make clear the deeper meaning of this exchange. Mookie is angry, angry as a motherfucker; having endured the ordeal of the hottest day of the summer, culminating in his throwing a trashcan through a shop window, and now he finds himself the following day with his various responsibilities still in place, but now without a source of income. But he does not hate Sal. He is not infected by hatred. He is not sick.

If the film associates hatred with sickness and disease, how does it relate or portray love? The radio DJ character, Mister Senor Love Daddy, seems like an obvious connection. Another important component is the name of Senor Love Daddy’s radio station: We Love Radio 108 (“Last on your dial, first in your heart.”). The name of the radio station not only presages Clear Channel Communications’ eventual rebranding to I Heart Radio, it also establishes a connection between love and another of the film’s characters: Radio Raheem.

Radio Raheem is arguably the character most closely associated with the concepts of love and hate. Raheem has custom brass knuckles on each hand: the word “LOVE” on his right hand, and the word “HATE” on his left. Through the presence of these words on his knuckles, and his performance of the accompanying story about the struggle between love and hate, “the story of life,” Radio Raheem recalls Reverend Harry Powell from the 1955 film Night of the Hunter. Reverend Powell has the words “love” and “hate” tattooed on his knuckles: love on the right hand, and hate on the left. He also tells “the story of life,” which, although using different language than Raheem, tells essentially the same account of a struggle between hate and love, where hate has the upper hand for a while but is eventually beat out by love.

In Night of the Hunter, Reverend Powell’s performance of pious geniality conceals a dark secret: he is a serial killer, traveling the country seducing widows whom he soon murders before absconding with what wealth he can steal. In Do the Right Thing, Radio Raheem is not revealed to be a serial killer, but he is done in by a sort of serial killing: the recurring killing of men of color perpetrated by police officers. The characters of the film react to Raheem’s death in a personal way (“They killed Radio Raheem!”), but it is clearly also a reaction to this serial killing of black men that contributes to the crowd’s reaction (someone is heard exclaiming, “They did it again!”). The rage at serial killing is evident also in Larry Kramer’s AIDS activism, as seen in his essay “1,112 and Counting,” and his exhortations to audience members at his plays that their inaction was responsible for the real life deaths of the characters portrayed.

A final question: Is Do the Right Thing a polemic? I find it interesting to consider the question in light of the definitions offered by this week’s featured authors. Rand traces the meaning of “polemic” to the Greek polemikos, meaning “warlike,” and when Lee’s film was released many reviewers and commentators were concerned that it amounted to a call for violence. I am not sure the film satisfies Rand’s four elements of rhetorical form, but I do believe it satisfies the rhetorical move that Olson calls shifting subjectivities:

“An advocate articulates a shift in the second persona of an address, wherein the auditors or readers occupy one kind of role initially and then, drawing on what is remembered or learned from that position, are repositioned subsequently into a different role that is harder for them to recognize or occupy, but that might possess some transforming power.” (p. 284)

As film critic Roger Ebert recounted in an essay about the film:

“Many audiences are shocked that the destruction of Sal's begins with a trash can thrown through the window by Mookie (Lee), the employee Sal refers to as ‘like a son to me.’ Mookie is a character we're meant to like. Lee says he has been asked many times over the years if Mookie did the right thing. Then he observes: ‘Not one person of color has ever asked me that question.’ But the movie in any event is not just about how the cops kill a black man and a mob burns down a pizzeria. That would be too simple, and this is not a simplistic film. It covers a day in the life of a Brooklyn street, so that we get to know the neighbors, and see by what small steps the tragedy is approached.”

Some critics and audience members objected to what they interpreted as Lee’s call for violence, and at least an implicit approval of property destruction. We heard similar rhetoric in the last year, when protests in response to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner became characterized by media emphasis on incidents of property damage and looting. The state response to protests is always characterized by a tolerance so long as demonstrations are peaceful and “civil,” and when this line is broached it functions to demonize and dismiss the “protestors” at large. Is this not evocative of the white woman who purportedly said to Audre Lorde, “Tell me how you feel, but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you”? 

References

West, Isaac. "Reviving Rage." Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (2012): 97-102.

Olson, Lester C. "Anger Among Allies: Audre Lorde's 1981 Keynote Admonishing the National Women's Studies Association." Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 3 (2011): 283-308.

Rand, Erin J. "An inflammatory fag and a queer form: Larry Kramer, polemics, and rhetorical agency." Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 (2008): 297-319.

Shots from the Block: It's January

Fair Housing Act: 50 years later

Today is the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act. In Pittsburgh, the occasion is marked by a day of speakers, panels, and other events at the August Wilson Center.

From CityLab: How the Fair Housing Act failed black homeowners.

King Assassination: 50 years later

On April 4th 1968 Martin Luther King Jr was killed by an assassin's bullet. In the immediate aftermath African Americans took to the streets of several U.S. cities in a wave of riots and unrest that lasted for days. The killing of the most visible and influential figure of the civil rights movement provoked an irruption of anguished anger which was further stoked by years of simmering tension and resentment in America's disinvested and disenfranchised urban black communities. Pittsburgh was among the U.S. cities to see significant tumult, with nearly a week of riots erupting in the Hill District, the city's center of black life and culture. I still occasionally encounter Pittsburghers citing the Hill riots as an example of blacks "irrationally" destroying their "own" communities as a historical rationalization for longstanding social and economic plights facing Hill residents, as well as implicitly justifying the American apartheid of residential segregation and uneven spatialization. The King assassination riots became emblematic of what came to be known as the "urban crisis" in the United States. A young Richard Sennett responded to the urban unrest of the late 1960's in his classic work of urban sociology, "The Uses of Disorder." Sennett's timely and prescient text presaged the advent of affluent "gated" communities and other emerging forms of social stratification and segregation. Defying the forces of entropy, Richard Nixon made the urban crisis a substantial element of his 1968 presidential campaign as the "law and order" candidate, a rhetorical strategy echoed in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential run.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has created an excellent interactive retrospective titled "The Week the Hill Rose Up." Another Post-Gazette story explores the history behind August Wilson's play Two Trains Running, which dramatized the fallout of the Hill riots.

From CityLab: "Cities on Fire 1968 - Urban America after MLK"

The Washington Post has marked the anniversary with an article on how then-mayor of Cleveland Carl B. Stokes "helped save his city from burning" following the King assassination.

Writing for the ACLU, Jeffrey Robinson reflects and observes that fifty years later "we remain two societies, 'separate and unequal.'"

• Addendum (4/6/18): How the Pittsburgh Pirates persuaded the MLB Commissioner to postpone opening day in the wake of King's death.

2001: 50 years later

2001: A Space Odyssey had its world premiere 50 years ago today. I plan to have much more content commemorating the Semicentennial of this masterwork throughout the year, but in the meantime and in order to mark the anniversary of the premiere, check out 2001: A Book Odyssey from Paolo Granata which showcases 2001 book cover designs  created by more than 180 students from the University of Toronto. 

Of course, my take on the Clarke book is summed up by Heywood Floyd in the film: "More specifically, your opposition to the cover story..."

Reflections and Reverberations of 1968

Since this past summer I've been immersed in my dissertation project, and this increased workload has not only affected my overall output on this blog but has diminished my ability to draft content based on its mere timeliness. I was photographing the Monroeville Mall (of Dawn of the Dead fame) the day before George Romero died last October, and failed to seize that kairotic moment to observe his passing and my personal history with his films. I had a second opportunity around Halloween when there were a series of zombie-related events in Pittsburgh, including a screening of Day of the Dead and discussion with cast and crew. I've also been planning on writing up my thoughts on Blade Runner 2049, yet this still hasn't materialized more than five months after the film's release. Now that we're seven weeks into 2018, I'm trying to at least mark some historical significance before the whole year passes.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the myriad soul-stirring, heartbreaking, and perennially radical events that transpired worldwide in 1968. A time in which, amongst other things, the war machine seemed to rage out of control and a peace movement formed to meet it. A time when revolutionary leaders emerged to galvanize collective action and imagination, and assassins rose up to cut them down. A time of unprecedented protests and street demonstrations which were often subdued with violence. It's the revolutionary energy of the late 60s zeitgeist that Hunter S. Thompson beautifully eulogized in his famous "wave speech."

“And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

I was born nearly three decades after these seismic cultural shocks, and am still trying to grasp the sheer scope of the various events. Many of the movements and moments associated with 1968 involve irruptions in media and urban culture, and so have great resonance with my own area of inquiry. I began my dissertation last year, which was the 50th anniversary of Lefebvre's writing on "The Right to the City." Lefebvre was of course a significant intellectual influence for the May '68 events in Paris. The year is also a watershed date for U.S. cities and the country's "urban crisis." My current home university, the University of Pittsburgh, is hosting a series of events through April considering the impacts and lessons of 1968 from global perspectives. Throughout the year I have the opportunity to engage with speakers, texts, and places connected to this legacy, and will be remarking on them in as timely a fashion as possible. I will try not to squander too much felicity. As expressed in a May '68 slogan: "If we only have enough time..."

Filmic Vision in Blade Runner: A Montage

I haven't had time to write my thoughts on Blade Runner 2049. I've seen the film three times now, and I'm still digesting the film and its implications. In the meantime, however, I've made a short montage of scenes from the original Blade Runner (though set to a piece of the new movie's score). It's something I've had in mind for a long time: a compilation of all the eye imagery, representations of vision, and related elements in the film. There's nothing worse than an itch you can never scratch, so I'm relieved to have finally scratched this one. It's about five minutes long and you can watch it below.

Also, last week I successfully tracked down the IMDB user review of Blade Runner from back in high school. I wrote it in 2003 when I was 17 years old. The review title declares Blade Runner the "epitome of film as an art form". It was cringe-inducing for me to revisit after all these years, but I'm glad IMDB has maintained the reviews. You can read my Blade Runner review (and all my other IMDB user reviews) here. 

Thoughts on Pittsburgh's "Parts Unknown"

News came out this summer that Anthony Bourdain was in town to film a Pittsburgh-based episode of his Parts Unknown program. I like Bourdain and his tv shows, and I am weirdly passionate about Pittsburgh, so I was eagerly awaiting the episode, especially after we learned of his visit to our favorite local bar (I say that like it's some overlooked hole-in-the-wall; I'm talking about the Squirrel Hill Cafe, aka "The Cage," which is an East End institution and deservedly so). Ahead of the episode's premiere last night I saw several articles online calling Bourdain's trip to Pittsburgh "inevitable." Pittsburgh was an inevitable stop, they argue, because the city's booming food scene and consistent ranking as a most-livable city has put it in the national spotlight. Pittsburgh has gotten a fair bit of national attention the last few years, but let's not kid ourselves. Bourdain and crew came to Pittsburgh because he's on the 10th season of his show and they've already gone to the exciting cities, so the only thing that made a Pittsburgh-centric Parts Unknown inevitable was the show's continuation.

When word broke last June that Bourdain's crew was filming around town user rockandrollcityplan posted this forecasted episode rundown on the Pittsburgh subreddit:

"Once downtrodden steel town (que shot of the Carrie Furnace) now changing in the face of gentrification that is creating a burgeoning food scene based on tradition (visit to Pierogies-Plus and then Apteka). Talk about a tradition of pushing out the city's African American population with a visit to the Hill District (shot of the arena site and then new construction in East Liberty as a juxtaposition). Walk around Squirrel Hill and remark how one of the country's largest Jewish enclaves is filled with a new Asian population (Everyday Noodles) but some vestiges of old Pittsburgh remain in its dive bars (Squirrel Cage). Something, something, filler in the Strip District... interview with Fetterman."

Aside from Everyday Noodles and the Strip District, which did not appear in the episode, this prediction ended up being pretty spot-on. Now, the basic narrative beats of the episode can be inferred from Bourdain's approach across the last 9 seasons of his show. I would characterize the overriding theme of Parts Unknown as old-vs-new: how places have changed, what has emerged, what has disappeared, and what it all means to the people who live there. And within this overriding theme I think there are 2 sub-categories that an episode of PU can fall into: (1), charting the (ostensible) erosion of local culture and tradition in the wake of globalization ; and (2), defying audience expectations about a place by showing that their stereotypical views are outdated and do not reflect modern conditions. There are other threads that run through many of the shows, like "the price of success" (new local businesses are doing well but they're sowing the seeds of gentrification!) and "accepting the transience of existence"  (tradition diminishes but a new generation emerges). 

So now that I've seen the episode, what do I make of it? Overall I was very impressed with the episode, and by the people and places the producers' decided to include. I have to qualify my take on the program by saying that I am not a native Pittsburgher, have only lived here for four years and will likely move away in the not-too-distant future. But I have loved this city from my first day here, embracing its wonders and its flaws, and a great deal of my scholarly research centers on the city's past, present, and future. Based on my experience here I thought they did a decent job of representing Pittsburgh, showcasing scenes of everyday life along with glimpses of the extreme ends of the economic divide, and was ultimately a more nuanced portrayal than I anticipated (not that I expected much in the first place). My criticisms of the presentation have to do with what was included rather than what was left out (Pittsburghers will surely argue endlessly about the episode's grievous omissions), so let me run through some of the things I did and did not like about the show. 

• The opening teaser featured hand-made pierogie production, which might seem hackneyed to Pittsburghers but it's also unavoidable.
• The first sequence took place in Bloomfield, the neighborhood nearest and dearest to my own heart. I spotted some familiar neighborhood characters in the background and the sausage and peppers are all-too-familiar. Coming home across the Bloomfield Bridge I see the bocce players there regularly, even late into the evening. As I said I like the neighborhood, but a table of meats and sauce being overturned and spilling onto the ground seems like an apt representation of Bloomfield.
• Wasn't sure they would feature the Hill District, very glad that they did. An integral part of this city's history and character that far too many Pittsburghers pass by unawares on a daily basis. 
• Bourdain's ride-along with Sala Udin captured one of the most characteristic aspects of the Hill District: the neighborhood's vocality, the call-and-response culture of friend and neighbors acknowledging one another on the street (even when passing in cars, as was seen in the episode). 
• The Hill District sequence also featured my favorite image of the entire episode: a woman ordering lunch at Grandma B's wearing a Penguins jersey and a hijab .
• The neon lights of Kelly's at night seemed particularly telegenic.

Gripes and omissions:

• No Liberty Tunnel shot. This is the biggest omission for me, way more than any bar or restaurant that went unmentioned. Arriving in Pittsburgh through the Liberty Tunnel is one of the great unique experiences that this city offers. From my first time careening through the tunnel in a U-Haul truck, to every time I return home after a trip, it is always a spectacular sensation to have the world open up upon exiting the tunnel as the city and river valley bursts into being all around you. 
• A small pet peeve, but Fetterman's addressing Bourdain as "chef" is anachronistic considering Bourdain's current full-time gig. If anything his honorific should be "TV Producer Tony," or is it like the Presidency where you carry the title even after you leave office?
• Other folks seem very upset at the wrestling sequence's inclusion; it didn't bother me, as a non-native Pittsburgher and non-wrestling fan I recognize the wrestling angle as an idiosyncratic quirk of the local culture.
• The demolition derby, on the other hand, seemed out of place and served as a particularly weak ending to the episode. After traveling well beyond the Pittsburgh city limits, the show closes with scenes of automotive carnage underneath some banal closing narration from Bourdain. I'm paraphrasing from memory but this captures the gist:

"What will become of Pittsburgh? How do we welcome the promise of change while preserving what we love about our past? There are probably no easy answers, so for now, let's just wreck some cars."

I mean, I get that this show is essentially 'food & place porn' that airs on the wince-inducing middle-of-the-road CNN, but even with these measured expectations in mind, that's a strikingly sophomoric and flippant sentiment to go out on. You're already equivocating, so why use even more unnecessary weasel words? I mean, "probably" no easy answers? Why not just say that there are no easy answers? Would that risk offending the viewers who believe that there are easy answers, whatever their personal brand of myopic small-mindedness might be?

I've watched all of Bourdain's tv series and enjoy each of them to varying degrees (Cook's Tour is a grainier grungier early cut and The Layover is the underappreciated peak-travel-tv Bourdain), and his Zero Point Zero crew do excellent work but their reliance on certain templates becomes evident once you've seen enough of their productions. One of their favorite go-tos (more evident lately in their non-Bourdain projects) is the technique of editing around a big laugh. Need to transition to the next scene? Insert a clip of everyone having a nice big laugh then cut. And the derby finale sequence represents this sort of "big laugh" thinking on a larger scale: throw up some noise and spectacle to distract the viewers so we can make the big out. And Bourdain's perfunctory closing narration plays a part in this as well, since who's going to notice the utter vacuity of your parting words with all that slam-bang car crashing and little-kid-American-flag-waving going on?

I get it: Pittsburgh is so uninteresting the film crew had to drive 30 miles outside the city to film an *ahem* rural, all-American crowd enjoying a demolition derby. Television is a visual medium, after all, so perhaps they couldn't find sufficient visual spectacle within the city limits. It is important, too, to recognize that Pittsburgh can't represent all of the greater region, and the rural population is an important part of the contemporary political condition as indicated in the episode's discussion of the state turning Republican in the last presidential election. But without any semblance of full-circle denouement or contextualization within all that had preceded it, this closing sequence was muddled and disappointing.

After the episode aired I went back to the Pittsburgh subreddit to gauge reactions. Initial responses were overwhelmingly negative, which is perhaps to be expected. Every place means many different things to the people who live there, and it is impossible for a 40 minute TV program to fully capture and represent the essence of a city from even a single individual's perspective. The user-base of reddit probably skews young, and a number of the negative comments seemed to be responding to perceived attacks upon their generation and lifestyle choices. Among the perceived slights were dispersions cast on millenials, bicyclists, craft beer aficionados, and suburban residents who travel into the city for sports and other entertainment. What these commenters are overlooking, and others in the forum have pointed out, is that the show is called Parts Unknown and aims to represent the sort of lived experiences that are usually absent from mainstream media discourses. I mean, people actually expected a Rick Sebak-style milquetoast promotional showcase of the city? The bottom line is that if these self-identifying millenials want to be constantly catered to and reassured in their lifestyle choices they have no shortage of outlets. 

Another theme in the negative reactions, and one I find much more troubling, is indignation that the Hill District was even featured in the episode at all. Apparently this historic neighborhood "doesn't represent our city." One commenter particularly criticized the depiction of the deleterious effects that the Civic Arena's construction had on the Lower Hill. This person characterizes the Hill District's development as sacrificing "a dying neighborhood in exchange for economy". Ignoring the obvious vapidity and implicit racism of this statement, I have to ask what "dying neighborhood" this person is invoking? The vibrant Hill District of the 40s and 50s that was destroyed by this malign urban renewal scheme? The neighborhood which was among the most culturally verdant African American communities in the country? The neighborhood that produced August Wilson, Teenie Harris, and Gus Greenlee's Crawford Grill? Or is it the Hill District of today that is "dying"? The one that remains cut off from the rest of the city (spatially, racially, economically, etc.) 60 years after the Civic Arena project? The one that is so far removed from the eyes and minds of most Pittsburghers we are angered when it appears on our television screens?

Make no mistake: the history of the Hill District, both good and ill, is integral to Pittsburgh's identity and to its place in the history of this country. Pittsburgh mills may have contributed to the building of skycrapers and the defeat of tyrants, but the razing of the Hill District is just as significant to the history of our national consciousness. It is a history of residential segregation, uneven development, the destruction of black homes and neighborhoods, racial ghettoization, concentrated poverty, and discriminatory policing. More than 100 years ago the journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote about political corruption in Pittsburgh in his book The Shame of Our Cities. Pittsburgh's industrial production and pollution may have earned the city's nickname of "hell with the lid off," Steffens said, but the city's political landscape was "hell with the lid on." The sprawling parking lot on the former Civic Arena site that once connected the Hill District to downtown Pittsburgh, and the bungled attempts at redeveloping that land, are continuing sources of shame for this city.

As Anthony Bourdain has pointed out, there are no easy answers. But who needs answers when we can go watch the demolition derby? Let’s go wreck some cars.

McLuhan birthday gets doodle

Today's Google doodle honors Marshall McLuhan's 106th birthday. Traditionally these commemorative doodles use images and designs based on a historic event or person's life to "spell" out a version of the Google logo. This animated doodle consists of scenes depicting the successive eras of communication media as outlined by McLuhan. Beginning with oral culture in tribal society, the subsequent images progress through: written language and alphabet; the assembly line industrialism of "typographic man;" an animated McLuhan speaking on a TV screen; a human figure drumming in a village scene (perhaps evoking "second orality" or the return of acoustic space); and finally village huts arranged around a circuit board node to represent the Global Village. Clicking the doodle brings up the McLuhan estate web site and his Wikipedia page, along with several news articles and editorials calling McLuhan "the man who predicted the internet." This is extremely reductionist, of course, but what more can you expect from a Google search? Happy birthday, Herbert.

Take the Movie and Run #2

The second episode of Take the Movie and Run is now available on PodBean. In this installment Caroline and Curry delve into Woody Allen's Celebrity. Visit the podcast site here!

City Scenes: shots from around the block

Demolition of the last building in Penn Plaza started late last month. When I stopped by the site this weekend I noticed light poles along the perimeter had been plastered with stickers reading "Homes not Whole Foods." A lot of ambivalence surrounds the development, with many housing activists and other concerned Pittsburghers seeing Whole Food's abandonment of plans to build on the site as a victory. If it is a victory, it's perhaps a Pyrrhic one, as it came to late to save the homes of hundreds of displaced residents. The re-development will continue regardless of whether the anchor tenant is Whole Foods or another company. Also, now that Whole Foods is under new ownership following the purchase by Amazon last month, maybe the high-end market will be back in the mix. Scenes like this are not unique to Pittsburgh, of course, but once again affordable housing has been demolished in the city without replacements or alternatives being prepared. 

Notorious Pittsburgh graffiti artist Daniel Montano, known by his writer's alias MFONE,  died on June 11. Montano was among the most prolific and high-profile writers active in the city, and was seen as the successor to MOOK, another notorious local artist who left his mark on the city's graffiti culture (as well on several city landmarks, as can still be seen on the 10th street bridge). This picture shows a memorial next to mural along Penn Ave between Bloomfield and Garfield. 

Development continues along the Penn Ave corridor through Bloomfield-Garfield, although I haven't seen evidence of the "phase two" road reconstruction project beginning in earnest. This stretch of Penn has been among my favorite areas in the city for the past two years, and for that same period of time I have been meaning to photograph the area as it is now because I know it's going to change drastically and soon. Long-standing local businesses like bike shops and tattoo parlors stand alongside art galleries and cafes. This environment is of course conducive to certain patterns of gentrification. The influx of high-end retail will eventually begin along Penn, with the residential developments bound to occur on the Garfield side of the avenue. I've been saying to my wife since we moved here, "Just watch: this whole area is going to change." Last week I spotted a boutique underwear store as well as a sign advertising a forthcoming smoothie and juice shop. The area is home to robust community organizations and several beloved local businesses, so it remains to be seen how these changes are handled.