This is everyday life, we’re meant to believe – a geographic stand-in for the true heart and center of the United States. But it increasingly feels to me that presidential politics now deliberately take place in a landscape that the modern world has left behind. It’s a landscape of nostalgia, the golden age in landscape form: Joe Biden visits Pam’s Pancakes outside Pittsburgh, Bush visits a soda shop, Sarah Palin watches ice hockey in a town that doesn’t have cell phone coverage, Obama goes to a tractor pull. […]

They find small towns that, by definition, are under-populated and thus unrepresentative of the United States as a whole; they find “old-fashioned” restaurants that seem on the verge of closing for lack of interested customers; they tour “Main Streets” that lost their inhabitants and their businesses long ago. […]

Further, if political candidates have managed to discover – and to campaign almost exclusively within – an American landscape that seems not yet to have been touched by the trends and technologies of the twenty-first century, then why is that – and is it really a good indication that those candidates will know how to govern an urbanized, twenty-first century nation? (BLDGBLOG)

An interesting question. It recalls another blog entry on the presidential campaign’s orientation towards the future that I posted about before:

The gloss of down-home authenticity - the mooseburgers, “snow machines,” and other rustic tat that figure so centrally in her instant legend. The young-Earther retreat from science and all its methods. The palpable resentment of coastal elites (even as this time around it doesn’t seem that term is shorthand, as it so often is, for “Jews”). The instinctual, immediate recourse, upon achieving even the most local and limited sort of power, to the heavy-handed suppression of free inquiry. The things that endear this onetime nowhere-burg mayor to Americans are, as clearly as can possibly be, indicators that a whole lot of people think tomorrow came too soon. […]

The gobsmacking foolishness of our national discourse, the things which now seem to signify, the very person selected to act out these psychodramas on the national stage - these are all far surer signs that the future is deeply, and I mean pants-shittingly, terrifying to many Americans. (#)

At the time, I tried to connect the arguments this fellow made to some previous discussions of architecture:

Connecting that transmuted “anti-semitic” impulse and a fear or resistance to the future, particularly technological development, is especially interesting. To the extent that continued (post)modernization is unsettling and disrupts our good old ties to the land, of course the technocrats behind it are also the “liberal elite intellectuals who don’t know what it means to work with their hands.” This is the weird reactionary potential I mentioned a while ago, back when this whole pictures of cities thing started happening:

It’s a regression into that facile conviction of standing with the “authentic” against the “alienating” without concern over why which one is (or has come to be) which and whether it has to (or should) be that way. The architects living alone in their towers? Like the fluffy intellectuals left behind with their abstractions by those who are out there “really living their lives”?

Yes, we all know about the political authenticity play, but BLDGBLOG makes the additional observation that the authentic is really not all that typical and is characterized more by nostalgia than anything else—particularly a kind of future-proofness. The post starts out by citing the statistic (dubiously sourced from BoingBoing) that there are more World of Warcraft players in the United States than farmers. Well, how many of those World of Warcraft players wouldn’t still ascribe to the value system that forces candidates to go bale some hay or whatever it is? Perhaps even more so for being alienated from such an experience or the possibility of one.

Remember the movie Office Space? How in the end the guy’s liberating experience is being freed from the confines of a cubical based building and given a shovel to clear away its ashes? Even the demolition impulse in Fight Club and the valorized aesthetic of a reverted culture, freed from whatever evil modern machinations were taking place in those sky scrapers. These are things that the World of Warcraft people probably like. They might not want to be farmers, but what could be more anti-modern than simulating your way into a swords and sorcery collective illusion?

Eventually, I will fully articulate my currently poorly constructed ideas about all this. For now, I do think that public discourse and culture has developed a pathological relationship with the future. Yes, there’s already been plenty of iterated and circular discussion about “the end of history.” But what of the connection between the collapse of a coherent notion of progress and the continued lashing out against “the Jews”? What about ideologies or fantasies of the authentic that can emerge among virtual wizards and dwarfs? Is all of this different in those other, “future-y” parts of the “developing” world that haven’t run up against something that made their world historical consciousness run backwards?

Yes, I’m basically horribly uneducated and should just look these things up. But nevertheless, I’ll make this one point one more time and I hope Eliezer, of all people, is listening: when the robots start taking the jobs, everyone will be a bitter and they will just kill the scientists…

And what is worse: such a thing happening was supposed to be the tipping point to revolution!

Until then, I’ll continue with my stupid gimmick in defense of the architects locked away in their towers…

(#)