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.
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.
—Maurizio Lazzarato, Governing by Debt
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.”