So in that process—call it globalization, neoliberal capitalism, the Anthropocene, the water boarding, what have you—the Second Pulse became just an unusually clear signal that it was time for capital to move on. Rate of return on all coastlines having been definitively hosed, capital, having considerably more liquidity than water, slid down the path of least resistance, or up it, or sideways—it doesn’t matter, money being so slippery and antigravitational, with no restraints on capital flight or any other such impediment that the feeble remnant nation-state system might have thought to apply, if it had not already been bought and now owned by that very same capital saying bye-bye to the new backwater.
So first you get off the coastlines, because they are a mess and an emergency rescue operation. Poor old governments exist to deal with situations like that. Capital goes immediately to Denver. Although Denver being Denver, snoozefest beyond compare, a fair bit of New York’s capital just shifted uptown, where Manhattan Island still protruded from the sea with a sufficient margin. That was important locally, but globally speaking, capital went to Denver, Beijing, Moscow, Chicago, et cetera; just as the list of drowned cities could go on forever, such that certain awesome writers fond of lists would have already inflicted this amazing list of coastal cities on the reader, but for now please just consult a map or globe and make it yourself—yet another great list could be made of all the wonderful inland cities that were untouched by sea level rise, even if located on lakes or rivers, as they so often were. So capital had lots of better rates of return to flow to, indeed almost anywhere that was not on the drowned coastlines would do. Places competed in abasing themselves to get some of what could be called refugee capital, though really it was just the imperial move to the summer palace, as always.
This is not to say things didn’t get weirder after the Second Pulse, because they did. The flood caused an unprecedented loss of assets and a cessation of trade, stimulating a substantial recession, or let’s say a pretty big little depression. As always in moments like this, which keep happening every generation to everyone’s immense surprise, the big private banks and investment firms went to the big central banks, meaning the governments of the world, and demanded to be saved from the impacts of the floods on their activities. The governments, being long since subsidiaries of the banks anyway, caved again, and bailed out the banks one hundred cents on the dollar, incurring public debt so huge that it could not be paid off in the remaining lifetime of the universe. Oh dear, what a quandary. Ten years after the end of the Second Pulse it looked like the centuries-long wrestling match between state and capital had ended in a decisive victory for capital. Possibly the wrestling match had always been professional wrestling and completely staged start to finish, but in any case it looked to be over.
Because the bailout of banks following the Second Pulse crash was huge. They always are. The bailout of the 2008 crash, which served as the model for the two that followed it, was calculated by historians at somewhere between 5 and 15 trillion dollars. One careful guess said it was 7.7 trillion dollars, another 13 trillion; both added that this was more than the cost (adjusted for inflation) of the Louisiana Purchase, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the 1980s savings and loan bailout, the Iraq wars, and the entire NASA space program, combined. Conclusion: wars and land and social programs must not be very expensive. And compared to rescuing finance from itself, they’re not.
But wars too are good for finance, and a few more happened in the twenty-second century, sure. Hundreds of millions of people were suddenly refugees, and that’s a lot of terrorists to suppress. This was a continuation of the surveillance state that had been growing through the twenty-first century, what an earlier time would have called a police state, but at this point that term would have been aspirational. That this permanent war on terror could have remained a police action and had more success in its stated goals than it was achieving when waged as a pseudo-war was a view only mentioned by radicals whose words encouraged the terrorists.
Meanwhile this aspect of things also created new financial opportunities. Governments, being hollowed out by debt, couldn’t properly fund the security adequate to deal with potential opposition, nor were they good at small-scale asymmetrical warfare (meaning police action, which in fact they used to be good at). Since there was a need for more police but no funding for it, private security armies stepped in to fill the need. Lots of them. The rich, being people too, doing all they could to cope with the night sweats and zombie terrors of making fourteen hundred times as much money as the people working for them, made sure to finance the best personal and corporate security that money could buy, and mercenaries from all the refugee wars were numerous and available. This was good: when you are a small minority and you own the majority’s wealth, security is naturally a primary consideration.
So private security armies were everywhere, from Denver to upper Manhattan. This new industry seemed to challenge a principle that used to be called the state monopoly on violence, but then again if finance had taken over the state, possibly the state was in effect already a kind of private security force, so that there was no conflict there, but just an infilling of a market, a supply fulfilling a demand. Alas, as always happens, there were very many quite incompetent new companies in this new business. And an incompetent security company is a scary thing. Hard to know if the mystery of whether the state was still a force opposed to these private armies could be answered in any way one would actually want to see in the real world. A state revolt against global finance? Democracy versus capitalism? Could get very ugly.
That said, we must revert to the concept of soft power, and the Pyrrhic defeat, on which more later. In the meantime, along the drowned coastlines themselves, interesting things happened. There existed now a very long strip of newly useless but still strategic shallows, all over the world. No one could do much in this strip in the immediate aftermath, except get away from it, then get shipping ports operational again. People retreated inland, capital decamped. Governments too left the coastlines, relieved to be done with relief, as the remaining problems were intractable. Further salvage and repair was a job for market forces, they declared, but in fact market forces proved not to be interested. The drowned zones were not only not the highest rates of return, they were the lowest; they were labeled “development sinks,” meaning places where no matter how much money you pour in, there is never a profit to be made. The same thing had been said of Africa for centuries now, and lo and behold look how truly that prophecy had self-fulfilled. Recall the requirements for the highest rate of return: a stable hungry populace; good infrastructure; hot money; access to world markets; compliant and uncontested government. None of these obtained in the intertidal.
So, first looters and salvage crews and displaced residents all paddled in and out with what could be taken away. Then the squatters and the stubborn were left in possession. Others came in from elsewhere, immigrants to disaster. The narrow but worldwide strip of wreckage that they occupied was dangerous and unhealthy, but there was some infrastructure left standing, and one immediate option was to live in that wreckage. Though many stretches of new coast were more or less abandoned, New York, the great blah blah of the blah blah, with uptown still high and dry—yes, people returned to the drowned parts of New York. There is a certain stubbornness in many a New Yorker, cliché though it is to say so, and actually many of them had been living in such shitholes before the floods that being immersed in the drink mattered little. Not a few experienced an upgrade in both material circumstances and quality of life. For sure rents went down, often to zero. So a lot of people stayed.