No Way Back
Svetlana Boym | Urban Doom Loop In The Heartland | Factoids | Elsewhere: Tara McMullin on Deskilling
Quote of the Moment
Survivors of the twentieth century, we are all nostalgic for a time when we were not nostalgic. But there seems no way back.
| Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia
Aside from her Future of Nostalgia, Boym is also the source of the term ‘off-modern’ intended as a replacement for terms like modernity, postmodernity, hypermodernity, altermodernity, late modernity, and post-postmodernism.
The adverb off confuses our sense of direction; it makes us explore sideshadows and back alleys rather than the straight road of progress; it allows us to take a detour from the deterministic narrative of twentieth-century history. Off-modernism offered a critique of both the modern fascination with newness and no less modern reinvention of tradition. In the off-modern tradition, reflection and longing, estrangement and affection go together.
I think I will think about adopting off-normal to replace postnormal, a term I’ve used extensively for a long, long while.
Welcome to the off-normal, where the new normal is that there is no normal.
Urban Doom Loop In The Heartland
We hear a lot about the low office occupancy rates of the big coastal cities, but that’s not where the worst suffering is being felt. According to the University of Toronto, six of the ten U.S. downtowns with the biggest drops in foot traffic are in the Midwest.
In a recent exposé, Konrad Putzier details the state of downtown St. Louis Mo:
St. Louis’s central business district had the steepest drop in foot traffic of 66 major North American cities between the start of the pandemic and last summer, according to the University of Toronto’s School of Cities. Traffic has improved some in the past 12 months, but at a slower rate than many Midwestern cities.
[…]
This is the future for America’s downtowns if they can’t reinvent themselves and halt the downward spiral.
From Downtown Recovery, of 66 cities surveyed, St. Louis is the lowest ranked:
66. St. Louis MO
65. Louisville KY
64. Minneapolis MN
62. Columbus OH
60. Chicago IL
57. Cincinnati OH
Putzier’s description of the AT&T building’s demise — where the building has become a scene of depredation, as enterprising vandals have stripped parts of the building for copper wiring and pipes — reminded me of science fistion writer Bruce Sterling’s warning:
The frontiers of the future are the ruins of the unsustainable.
As neighborhoods empty out, and glass-strewn streets become normalized and street-level retail and restaurants are a memory of the past, few want to venture there.
Other warning signs across the country include hotel bankruptcies and the declining value of commercial real estate:
Note that Milwaukee WI is actual one of the best recovery stories: 15th in U.S. and Los Angeles CA is 20th. But hotels are closing, reflecting another aspect of the urban doom loop: less business travel.
Exposure to commercial real estate loans has grown to nearly $3T, as David Sommers shares.
Putzier holds out some hope, based on development in an are outside the historical office district:
Some cause for hope is a short walk away. To the office district’s immediate west, the Downtown West neighborhood boasts loft apartments, a new soccer stadium and a train station-turned-amusement park. These developments have revived a once-abandoned industrial area, proving that people want to be in downtown St. Louis if it’s pleasant.
To the south, a cluster of bars and restaurants around the Cardinals’ ballpark is often crowded, especially on game days. Visits to the Gateway Arch east of downtown are up. These neighborhoods show how big developments and apartment conversions can attract residents, which in turn attract bars and restaurants, slowing or even reversing the doom loop.
“Outside of that office zone, it’s never been better,” said Denis Beganovic, a military planner who lives in Downtown West.
The reinvention of Downtown West, full of beautiful old buildings, was made possible in part by massive investments by the Taylor family—owners of Enterprise Rent-A-Car—which spent big to build the soccer stadium and bring a Major League Soccer team to the area.
However, can we expect other billionaires to engineer this sort of rebirth of cities’ cores, some (like St. Louis) have been in decline for decades? And even with the largesse of the Taylors, St. Louis is still the bottom of the list for walking traffic in North America.
(Other writing on the Urban Doom Loop: The Politics of Inflation, A Completely New Kind of Society, An Assemblage of Memories, Long Time Coming.)
Factoids
The Mortgage Spread
Between 1998 and 2020, there was never a time when more than 40 percent of American mortgage holders had locked-in rates more than one percentage point below market conditions. By the end of 2023, as the chart below shows, about 70 percent of all mortgage holders had rates more than three percentage points below what the market would offer them if they tried to take out a new loan. … the F.H.F.A. researchers estimate that this difference was worth about $511 a month to the average mortgage holder by the end of 2023. That’s enough to influence the decisions households make and cause shock waves in the housing market.
| NY Times
What's the impact of business? People won't move to search for a new job, because they have a low interest mortgage, or conversely, people won't accept a transfer because they can't afford to buy or rent in the transfer city. The effective loss for the average mortgage holder is $50,000, to drop a pandemic mortgage for one at today's rate.
How Much Is Too Much?
Four in 10 New York State residents are spending 30 percent of their income or more on housing. More than half of New York City residents are doing the same. Evictions are up nearly 200 percent.
| Mara Gay
How long can this go on?
Bitcoin Carbon Footprint
A research paper found that, from 2016 to 2021, the carbon footprint of mining a single Bitcoin multiplied a staggering 126 times. In that window, Bitcoin mining caused an estimated $12 billion in global climate damages. Researchers also found “no evidence that Bitcoin mining is becoming more sustainable over time”.
| Nature via Dense Discovery
This should be made illegal.
Inequality and Carbon
Between 2020 and 2022, the world’s most affluent 1% of people captured nearly twice as much of the new global wealth created as did the other 99% of individuals put together, and in 2019 they emitted as much carbon dioxide as the poorest two-thirds of humanity. In the decade to 2022, the world’s billionaires more than doubled their wealth, to almost US$12 trillion.
| Nature
The 1% are emitting as much CO2 as the bottom two-thirds.
…
In Germany, we have regulations about handing over business cards at business meetings and whether it’s still allowed.
Here's the regulation:
5) How do you have to inform when exchanging business cards?
When exchanging business cards, you must first distinguish what purpose they are used for:
If business cards are exchanged for purely private purposes , this falls under the so-called household exception. This means that the GDPR is not applicable and there are no obligations to provide information to the data subject.
The second -- probably much more common -- constellation is the exchange in a business environment.
However, you cannot necessarily assume that the business card data should be transferred to a file system. That, or at least the plan for it, would be the prerequisite for the applicability of the GDPR. So if someone receives a business card but does not plan to store their data in an address book, index box, electronic contact file or database, there are no information obligations.
Something different applies, for example, at trade fairs when business cards are handed out in order to receive offers/information (so-called trade fair leads). In these cases, the obligation to provide information arises when the business card is handed over. The obligation can then be fulfilled, for example, through information signs and flyers on the trade fair stand. A sign should contain a link or QR code to make the information permanently available.
If you receive a business card in a business environment outside of a trade fair, the obligation to provide information arises as soon as you process the card data automatically or transfer it to a file system.
Wow.
Elsewhere: Tara McMullin on Deskilling
A powerful commentator on the sphere of work, Tara McMullin has become a key voice for me, and her recent piece on the deskilling of creative work is exceptional.
Deskilling Work
Deskilling simplifies complex tasks into smaller, repetitive tasks that require few skills---a labor process critical to mass production and consumer capitalism. For instance, rather than a single carpenter building a table, management divides the project among several workers, each tasked with one small part of the process (e.g., milling, assembly, finishing, etc.). What was once a product created by a highly-skilled craftsman is now a routinized set of discrete tasks that can be done by low-skill workers on an assembly line — that's deskilling.
Deskilling has several upsides in this scenario. It increases the speed of production, reduces the cost of production, and makes the production process more legible to management. For the consumer, deskilling can lower prices and iron out variations in products and services.
Deskilling has significant downsides, too.
Management leverages deskilling as a control mechanism. Instead of one worker with extensive knowledge of the production process who can demand higher wages and more job security, management gains several workers with little knowledge of the full production process. They're easily replaceable and subject to ever-increasing work intensity. On their own, they have no leverage to ask for better working conditions or higher wages.
In this way, deskilling increases precarity and decreases job security---it gives management all of the power.
Deskilling also fosters a profound sense of alienation. A highly skilled worker who completes a complex task experiences a deeper connection to the product of their labor. They can step back from the table they've been working on with a sense of fulfillment and achievement. In contrast, a worker assigned to a single, repetitive task derives no satisfaction from the final product. They may work hard day in and day out without ever laying eyes on the end result.
It's crucial here to dispel the notion that workers in deskilled jobs are inherently 'low-skilled.' A highly skilled worker can be compelled to take on a lower-skill job when it's the only available option---a common scenario that often leaves individuals feeling underutilized, undervalued, and demoralized.
McMullin manages to sidestep the academic, political science rhetoric, but her viewpoint is totally consonant with those of other theorists who point out that this sort of fragmentation of work is the central tenet of scientific management and its play for political domination in the workplace. Gavin Mueller wrote about it in quite similar terms:
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