It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not, I am with you, you men and women of a generation or ever so many generations hence…
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried—
—Walt Whitman
h) the city
Strategic defaulting. Class-action suits. Mass rallies. Staying home from work. Staying out of private transport systems. Refusing consumer consumption beyond the necessities. Withdrawing deposits. Denouncing all forms of rent-seeking. Ignoring mass media. Withholding scheduled payments. Fiscal noncompliance. Loud public complaining.
The interesting volume Why Civil Resistance Works makes the case that nonviolent civil resistance of various soft kinds is demonstrably more successful than violent resistance when it comes to actually achieving the stated goals of the resistance and changing things for the better. Chenoweth supposes this greater success for nonviolent resistance movements happens precisely because they are less violent, and therefore more likely to win agreement and compliance from the governments being opposed, and from the people whose welfare is supposedly in question. Seizing the state to achieve economic justice is seen as the principal success of these kinds of movements. General strikes and people massing in urban centers are usually understood to be the classic forms of civil resistance, but all the other methods listed above fit the definition, and have been effective in the past.
So, in the summer of 2142 people started doing all these things. The actors were many, as there was no cohesion or agreement on either means or ends. It began spontaneously soon after Hurricane Fyodor struck New York, when the emergency response to that catastrophe did not include the requisitioning of the empty residential towers of the city. This was the spark that lit the train of subsequent events. Riots in New York spread around the world at varying levels of intensity, depending on local circumstances. And in tough times it takes riots, Clover insists in Riot. Strike. Riot, to drive the point into capital’s thick skull that a change is on its way and must occur, indeed is occurring.
The coastlines naturally led the way in this rioting, being most stressed, but even in Denver significant percentages of the population joined the various householders’ unions and refused to pay rents of all kinds, mortgages and student loans especially. This form of resistance was expectedly popular. Purchase of nonessential consumer goods also dropped massively everywhere, crippling business growth by way of a perfectly legal fuck-you, which after all was merely a case of people not spending money they didn’t have for things they didn’t need. So, although there were only scattered mass demonstrations and occupations of city squares, and the results of the fiscal noncompliance were hard to see and report, there was a powerful sense of some underwater current in the global civilization now pulling it out into an unknown sea. History was happening. When that happens you can feel it.
The tug out to sea was naturally felt by the markets, as they are a sensitive instrument when it comes to noting volatility. One element that went into determining the IPPI was householder confidence, widely regarded as one of the fastest and most accurate indicators of housing price change. It had been considered impossible to rig or artificially shift householder confidence measures; polling five million households was standard practice now, and so reported levels of confidence were seen as indicators that could not be manipulated, being so much larger than any manipulation could be. They showed a real thing. But the Householders’ Union grew so big so fast that it influenced the behaviors of about twenty percent of all households, and the mood of a much greater percentage than that. So its calls for financial noncompliance could all by themselves torque the indexes. The IPPI numbers therefore fell sharply, and that dragged down the Case-Shiller numbers, and this caused the previous rapidly rising coastal housing price average to be regarded as a bubble, and that all by itself caused the bubble to burst, in a classic the-emperor-has-no-clothes moment. That bubble’s popping caused all of its derivative bubbles to pop too, which caused all banks and investment firms to call in all their liquid assets and to stop loaning anything at all, even the standard interbank loans that kept the real economy going. Quickly, promptly in fact, one of the largest investment firms collapsed and declared bankruptcy, and the fiscal relationships between all the big financial firms were now so tight that all of the biggest private banks in the United States and Europe then dashed to their central banks to demand immediate relief and salvation, in the form of massive new infusions of money, to ease their panic and keep the entire system from crashing.
All this was reported; everyone around the world was watching it unfold. Finance had once again frozen, as confidence died and trust disappeared, and no one knew what paper out there was good anymore—no one knew what was money and what was dust. The house of cards had fallen again, and the whole world was left standing in the rubble of a crashed economy, looking again at the hapless people running finance and saying Just who the fuck are these guys anyway.
Third time’s a charm. Or fourth. Whichever. Past results being no guarantee of future performance.
PART EIGHT
THE COMEDY OF THE COMMONS
Art is not truth. Art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth.
said Picasso
a) Mutt and Jeff
“I don’t like to see you wielding a hammer. It scares me.”
“You are easily scared. Why, what?”
“You are not a hammer kind of guy. I’m not sure who you will injure first, me or you.”
“Come on. It’s not a complex skill. It’s like typing. It’s like typing with a big thing that whaps the keyboard for you. In fact I’m thinking I may start typing with a hammer.”
“With two hammers, one for each hand.”
“Two for each hand, like a xylophone player. I will type like Lionel Hampton playing the xylophone.”
“Wasn’t it a vibraphone?”
“Not sure. Hand me that bag of nails.”
Mutt hands over the bag and contemplates his partner hefting hammer and nails. With the farm floor’s tall arches so hugely open to the air, it looks like Bartleby the scrivener has exchanged his quill for a riveting gun from the heroic age of high-rise construction. Although currently they are assembling long planter boxes. Eventually they will trundle hods of soil to these boxes rather than hods of cement. Otherwise they’re like Rosie the Riveter. Rosen the Riveter. Roosevelt the Riveter, maybe that’s where they got the name Rosie, sure.
“Or you could type with your forehead, like archy the cockroach,” Mutt says.