Squatters. The dispossessed. The water rats. Denizens of the deep, citizens of the shallows. And a lot of them were interested in trying something different, including which authorities they gave their consent to be governed by. Hegemony had drowned, so in the years after the flooding there was a proliferation of cooperatives, neighborhood associations, communes, squats, barter, alternative currencies, gift economies, solar usufruct, fishing village cultures, mondragons, unions, Davy’s locker freemasonries, anarchist blather, and submarine technoculture, including aeration and aquafarming. Also sky living in skyvillages that used the drowned cities as mooring towers and festival exchange points; containerclippers and townships as floating islands; art-not-work, the city regarded as a giant collaborative artwork; blue greens, amphibiguity, heterogeneticity, horizontalization, deoligarchification; also free open universities, free trade schools, and free art schools. Not uncommonly all of these experiments were being pursued in the very same building. Lower Manhattan became a veritable hotbed of theory and practice, like it always used to say it was, but this time for real.
All very interesting. A ferment, a tumult, a mess. Possibly New York had never yet been this interesting, which is saying a lot, even discounting all the bullshit. In any case, pretty damned interesting.
But wherever there is a commons, there is enclosure. You can bank on that. You can take that to the bank. So to speak. And with things going as well as they were in lower Manhattan, such that some people even complained it was getting back to the same old shabby garbled expensive bourgeois wannabe mess that it had been before the floods, there began to rise into visibility a newly viable infrastructure and canalculture—the intertidal, the SuperVenice, occupied and performed by energetic people who were hungry for more. In other words, taken all in all, a place that might make for a very high rate of return on investment! So a situation was developing. Push was coming to shove. And when push comes to shove—well, who knows? Anything can happen.
PART FOUR
EXPENSIVE OR PRICELESS?
Property becomes a claim to the yield.
The invisible hand never picks up the check.
a) Franklin
By the time I got back from rescuing the two little drowned rats with the building’s super, I was late to pick up Jojo. “God damn you guys,” I said as we gurgled into the boathouse, “you’ve made me late.”
“For a very important date,” Vlade added heavily.
“Thank you, Mr. Garr,” Roberto said. “You saved my life.”
I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.
“Gowan witcha, get outta here,” I said. “Scraminski. I’ll see you in dining and we’ll celebrate your survival then. I gotta get going.”
“Sure thing boss.”
I dumped them on the dock with their stuff and got back out to the river to get to the office as quickly as possible. In fact I wasn’t so late that I couldn’t duck in and see how things were going before picking up Jojo. Since I was already a little late, a little later wasn’t going to matter.
I paid the dockmaster at our building to give me a half hour and ran to the elevator. In my office the screens were on as always, and I sat down and started reading in a state of extreme interest. Because the thing about bubbles is that when they pop, they pop. The metaphor is extremely apt, because the speed of a bursting bubble is its salient aspect. There, and then not there. If you’ve got skin in the game when that happens, that skin is gone. Very important to get out before that happens.
So I did not want this particular bubble of submarine bonds playing off the IPPI to pop, as I didn’t quite have all my ducks in a row. Bubbles, skin, ducks, yes it was a morass of mixed metaphors, a veritable swamp one might say, adding another one to the ones already there, but this is what all the recomplications of the game have led to: it’s gotten so complex that it can’t be understood, so everyone resorts to stories from a simpler time. Part of my job was sorting through all the metaphors to see if I could grasp the real thing underneath them all, which was not exactly mathematical, thank God, but more a system, like a game. In the various inflows of information that my screens gave me, the system was revealed in parts (like jigsaw puzzle pieces, yes, but not) and that system in the end was not like anything but itself. A vast artificial intelligence, yes, but as to whether it was really intelligent, I think that too is another metaphor, like Gaia, or God. In fact no one is really home, so all the intelligence in this system, such as it was, was really in the people participating in it. Which meant there might not be very much intelligence there. And it was definitely massively fragmented. So, many fine or not-very-fine intelligences had in effect combined to make a team, but with no coherence and no way to get purchase on the situation. Schizophrenic but not crazy. Hive mind, but no mind. The stack, as in stacked emergent properties, but really stacked emergencies. Really best to think of it as a kind of game. Maybe. A game, or a system for gaming things.
Anyway, on this afternoon my screens showed things were fine. No crash in the last two hours. I would have thought the Chelsea wreck would have dragged the local IPPI down a little more. There had been a shiver, a shock wave resembling the little tsunami that had radiated from the collapsed building itself, but stop that; it was a drop of about 0.06 in the global IPPI, 2.1 in the New York regional. That was one indicator of how much New York still tended to stand for The City everywhere. But the Hong Kong exchange had taken in this news and damped the shudder, no doubt because buildings in Hong Kong were always melting and so they were used to it. So in less than a week the situation had gone through news of the collapse, negative reaction, and investment reuptake, and on it went without further fuss, trending upward as usual. I saw what it was: people didn’t want the bubble to burst. It would take far more than any one building or neighborhood, because too many people were still making money going long.
Just time for a sigh of relief, and a note to my friend Bao in Hong Kong to keep up the good work of giving me his take on trends there, and the closing of a couple of deals, and I could shut down and hustle over to Jojo’s office. At that point I was only forty-five minutes late, and only a little hyped up by all the day’s events.
“Sorry I’m late,” I began as I was allowed in and entered her office, and I could see by the look on her face that it was good I began that way. “Vlade requisitioned me as I was leaving the Met, we had to zip up to the Bronx and rescue those two little squeakers who saved the old man, it was their turn to be saved.” And I explained how they had managed to get Roberto stuck on the bottom of the south Bronx, with Stefan up in their boat holding his oxygen bottle and nothing else.
“Jesus,” Jojo said. “What were they doing up there?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Fooling around like they do.”
She gave me a look I couldn’t read, then started shutting down her screens and gathering stuff into her bag. “Okay I’m ready. Where do you want to go?”