Post-bubble is a way of life
Mar. 5th, 2007 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusAs anyone who even glances at newspapers will have seen this past week or so, we're in the middle of a "correction" -- big money is being wiped off share values. It's said to have started with rumours that the Chinese government were planning to make a tougher business environment in order to slow down the country's overheated, bubble-style growth. Anyway, today shares continue to slide, amidst conflicting noises: Correction: this could become a crash after all, thinks The Guardian's chief economics journalist. But Treasury chief feeling good about economy, contradicts Reuters. Gung ho hum!
Now, a lot of the selling we've seen this week represents typically irrational capitalist behaviour -- hunches, worries, fears, projection and paranoia trigger more hunches, worries, fears, projection and paranoia . This storm in a rich man's bone china teacup needn't really concern the rest of us. The huge sums of money being lost are largely imaginary, purely notional, and concentrated, anyway, in very few hands.
But what might a big crash mean to the rest of us? Might it even be rather good news? I think the answer to that depends on the answer to the question "How big?" The kind of crash people call a "correction" would mean very little to me, personally. I own no property, no house, no car. I have no dependents. Neither do I have any debt. I could live on a quarter of the sum I'm currently earning, and it wouldn't honestly make much material difference to my life. A crash would only start to impact my life if it made air travel more expensive, or made the internet somehow stop working.
Berlin isn't just a city well-protected from rising sea levels, earthquakes, and so on. It's also well-protected from financial instability. This is a city with incredibly cheap prices, a city populated by people who manage to live well on little money, a city of renters rather than owners, a city pretty familiar with post-materialist lifestyles.
But a warning on just how wrong things can go here, in other circumstances, comes from Kafka's experience of the city in the early 1920s. High inflation and unemployment led to such poverty, misery and civic unrest that Kafka, already seriously ill with tuberculosis, didn't dare buy newspapers or venture into the centre of town. He stayed in a rather dull suburb with his girlfriend, Dora Diamant. Then again, the same conditions of instability attracted the younger, tougher Bertolt Brecht, who came to the city to agitate for communism. He later described Kafka as "a man too much trapped under the wheels" of the capitalist system rather than someone looking for alternatives. But even Brecht had to flee when the Nazis used instability to grab power. They eventually murdered Kafka's sisters in concentration camps.
The big fear, should a big crash come, isn't so much the immediate economic effects, but the political ones. What would a desperate America do if and when it realized that, as The Guardian thinks, what we're seeing now is its supremacy crumbling away? Might the empire lash out with more ill-advised military adventures, try to take the world down with it?
It's easy to get apocalyptic, though. I prefer to think that what's been happening this last week or so -- and seems set to continue this week -- might actually be a bit of a boost, a filip, an incentive to people to start looking at their basic priorities in life.
My own brand of post-materialism matches Berlin values with Japanese ones. Here, for instance, is Kyoichi Tsuzuki, in the afterword to "Tokyo Style", his documentation of the way ordinary Tokyoites live in small spaces:
"Today, amidst Japan's unprecedented devotion to money, even after property and fame and desires have all been attained, somewhere in the backs of our minds lingers an altogether Asian vision of the quiet life in a thatched hut deep in the mountains.... There's a Buddhist adage that says: Half a mat to sit, one mat to lie down. No matter how huge a mansion you may build, there's no need for more than one-meter by two-meters when you sleep; no matter how many dishes are set out before you, there's no eating what will feed ten. Sure, given the choice, who wouldn't like more space instead of less? Still, if it comes down to working extra hard just to pay high rents and mortgages, then there are people who would rather spend that time surrounded by their favorite things."
Atelier Bow Wow have followed their interest in "pet architecture" -- basically the design ingenuity of poor people responding to vastly over-valued real estate -- with a book about the Post-Bubble City, in which small, sustainable private houses become a metaphor for the body, and for local personal survival. Post-bubble is a way of life.
It isn't just Japanese in Japan who feel this way. David Duval Smith of design group Namaiki really impressed me with a lovely interview he gave Theme magazine. Namaiki do just enough work for corporate clients to follow their own interests, which have veered recently into guerilla gardening -- the greening of spaces in the city and outside it.
"The model for my farms," says Smith, a New Zealander, "is Masanobu Fukuoka’s seed ball project and Bill Mollison’s Permaculture system of sustainable agriculture. (Fukuoka is the pioneer of natural farming and sustainable agriculture in Japan who now gives lectures abroad. Mollison is an Australian researcher.) Basically, the idea is to spread the seed and let nature go. It’s about living in an edible jungle. You don’t need to pay 100 yen to buy a few pieces of lettuce or herbs. You just plant some seeds, the rain falls and they grow, and you get hundreds of leaves and thousands of seeds the next year.
"People have been calling them “guerilla farms” or “green graffiti,” I guess because it is done without permission. But I believe it is a victimless crime, if a crime at all. No one profits [financially], there is no damage, no loss of anything. A gross and a net gain.
"I came to a realization that nothing was more miraculous than soil and seed. They are positive in every sense, right up to the massive real profit in seeds at the end of the plant’s life, clearly sustainable, and essential to human existence.
"The project also was started as a reaction to the car, which I believe is a true villain in communities. Cemented roads are unproductive, as is parking. Yes, personal mobility is important, but I think that can be addressed more intelligently. And also, yes, goods and delivery systems are important, but only in commerce and the consumer market, which is quite unsustainable. At present, it takes 100 calories to make 10 calories of food, not to mention petroleum-based fertilizers, machine harvesting, plastic, and the worldwide delivery involved. This is unsustainable, unhealthy, and unintelligent. Vegetables are best fresh, and so I thought that they should be grown locally.
"People sometimes use the expression “going to seed” to refer to something in the process of declining or decreasing, but I think going to seed is a necessary part of life."
Now, a lot of the selling we've seen this week represents typically irrational capitalist behaviour -- hunches, worries, fears, projection and paranoia trigger more hunches, worries, fears, projection and paranoia . This storm in a rich man's bone china teacup needn't really concern the rest of us. The huge sums of money being lost are largely imaginary, purely notional, and concentrated, anyway, in very few hands.
But what might a big crash mean to the rest of us? Might it even be rather good news? I think the answer to that depends on the answer to the question "How big?" The kind of crash people call a "correction" would mean very little to me, personally. I own no property, no house, no car. I have no dependents. Neither do I have any debt. I could live on a quarter of the sum I'm currently earning, and it wouldn't honestly make much material difference to my life. A crash would only start to impact my life if it made air travel more expensive, or made the internet somehow stop working.Berlin isn't just a city well-protected from rising sea levels, earthquakes, and so on. It's also well-protected from financial instability. This is a city with incredibly cheap prices, a city populated by people who manage to live well on little money, a city of renters rather than owners, a city pretty familiar with post-materialist lifestyles.
But a warning on just how wrong things can go here, in other circumstances, comes from Kafka's experience of the city in the early 1920s. High inflation and unemployment led to such poverty, misery and civic unrest that Kafka, already seriously ill with tuberculosis, didn't dare buy newspapers or venture into the centre of town. He stayed in a rather dull suburb with his girlfriend, Dora Diamant. Then again, the same conditions of instability attracted the younger, tougher Bertolt Brecht, who came to the city to agitate for communism. He later described Kafka as "a man too much trapped under the wheels" of the capitalist system rather than someone looking for alternatives. But even Brecht had to flee when the Nazis used instability to grab power. They eventually murdered Kafka's sisters in concentration camps.The big fear, should a big crash come, isn't so much the immediate economic effects, but the political ones. What would a desperate America do if and when it realized that, as The Guardian thinks, what we're seeing now is its supremacy crumbling away? Might the empire lash out with more ill-advised military adventures, try to take the world down with it?
It's easy to get apocalyptic, though. I prefer to think that what's been happening this last week or so -- and seems set to continue this week -- might actually be a bit of a boost, a filip, an incentive to people to start looking at their basic priorities in life.
My own brand of post-materialism matches Berlin values with Japanese ones. Here, for instance, is Kyoichi Tsuzuki, in the afterword to "Tokyo Style", his documentation of the way ordinary Tokyoites live in small spaces:
"Today, amidst Japan's unprecedented devotion to money, even after property and fame and desires have all been attained, somewhere in the backs of our minds lingers an altogether Asian vision of the quiet life in a thatched hut deep in the mountains.... There's a Buddhist adage that says: Half a mat to sit, one mat to lie down. No matter how huge a mansion you may build, there's no need for more than one-meter by two-meters when you sleep; no matter how many dishes are set out before you, there's no eating what will feed ten. Sure, given the choice, who wouldn't like more space instead of less? Still, if it comes down to working extra hard just to pay high rents and mortgages, then there are people who would rather spend that time surrounded by their favorite things."
Atelier Bow Wow have followed their interest in "pet architecture" -- basically the design ingenuity of poor people responding to vastly over-valued real estate -- with a book about the Post-Bubble City, in which small, sustainable private houses become a metaphor for the body, and for local personal survival. Post-bubble is a way of life.
It isn't just Japanese in Japan who feel this way. David Duval Smith of design group Namaiki really impressed me with a lovely interview he gave Theme magazine. Namaiki do just enough work for corporate clients to follow their own interests, which have veered recently into guerilla gardening -- the greening of spaces in the city and outside it.
"The model for my farms," says Smith, a New Zealander, "is Masanobu Fukuoka’s seed ball project and Bill Mollison’s Permaculture system of sustainable agriculture. (Fukuoka is the pioneer of natural farming and sustainable agriculture in Japan who now gives lectures abroad. Mollison is an Australian researcher.) Basically, the idea is to spread the seed and let nature go. It’s about living in an edible jungle. You don’t need to pay 100 yen to buy a few pieces of lettuce or herbs. You just plant some seeds, the rain falls and they grow, and you get hundreds of leaves and thousands of seeds the next year."People have been calling them “guerilla farms” or “green graffiti,” I guess because it is done without permission. But I believe it is a victimless crime, if a crime at all. No one profits [financially], there is no damage, no loss of anything. A gross and a net gain.
"I came to a realization that nothing was more miraculous than soil and seed. They are positive in every sense, right up to the massive real profit in seeds at the end of the plant’s life, clearly sustainable, and essential to human existence.
"The project also was started as a reaction to the car, which I believe is a true villain in communities. Cemented roads are unproductive, as is parking. Yes, personal mobility is important, but I think that can be addressed more intelligently. And also, yes, goods and delivery systems are important, but only in commerce and the consumer market, which is quite unsustainable. At present, it takes 100 calories to make 10 calories of food, not to mention petroleum-based fertilizers, machine harvesting, plastic, and the worldwide delivery involved. This is unsustainable, unhealthy, and unintelligent. Vegetables are best fresh, and so I thought that they should be grown locally.
"People sometimes use the expression “going to seed” to refer to something in the process of declining or decreasing, but I think going to seed is a necessary part of life."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
finances and flowers
Date: 2007-03-05 11:49 am (UTC)I realized then, that, Louisville being a small american town with hardly one million inhabitants, this list could fill weeks and weeks of newspapers, if all the millionaires in the world were listed on it. I wondered what would happen if all of them decided to go to the bank to ask for their money in cash? I think, there is not so much money. And from this I concluded that a financial crash is a world wide illusion.
About gardening: when I lived in Amsterdam in the eighties and nineties, pavements were full of dog shit and streets were full of cars. An utopian idea enlightened my days. It was to break open the streets and turn them into park lanes. Mix seeds with dog food, so their heaps would become fertilizer and seed bomb at once. What wonderful result it would have if tropical seeds were used. Think of the exotic plants and birds that would arrive.
Meanwhile in Berlin, the palast der republic is almost dismantled. It will leave an open space in town for some years...
greetings from the east of town,
rinus
Re: finances and flowers
Date: 2007-03-05 12:00 pm (UTC)Re: finances and flowers
Date: 2007-03-05 12:21 pm (UTC)Alan Greenspan: "We have a problem trying to define exactly what money is. the current definition of money is not sufficient to give us a good means for controlling the money supply."
Congressman Paul asked "Well, if you can't define money, how can you
control the monetary system?"
Greenspan replied "That's the problem."
Re: finances and flowers
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-03-05 12:44 pm (UTC) - ExpandRe: finances and flowers
From:Re: finances and flowers
From:Re: finances and flowers
Date: 2007-03-05 05:37 pm (UTC)Why Louisville? I grew up there. It has an industrial beauty but the air has some problems.
Re: finances and flowers
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-03-05 07:24 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 12:33 pm (UTC)Human economic behaviour is capitalist behaviour, and there is nothing inherently irrational in anything that's happening on the market right now.
Thing is, an Asian downturn has been in the coming for some time now. The Chinese economy - or should I say economies - have defeated almost insurmountable obstacles to secure economic growth. They've had to tackle the possibility of a southern construction bubble, a dependence on cheap and sometimes irresponsible government credit, a continuing unfamiliarity with the logic of comparatively cautious western capitalist practices, and various structural oddities stemming out of the essentially planned nature of the Chinese economy. But there's absolutely no way an economy, planned or market-based, could actually keep on growing like the Chinese economy has in the last years and expect it to keep up forever.
What this will now do is that, if it does turn out to be a real Chinese recession - corrective or not - it'll reverberate into the American economy and therewith into the European economy. So while China restructures itself, releases capital, fires workers so they can reshuffle into jobs someone actually needs done, and so on, the EU and America are going to have to temporarily write off the benefits that Chinese growth would've offered in terms of exports.
This means capital for the bankers, profits for the businessmen, and jobs for the workers. None of these are "notional and imaginary" because unlike you're sort of arguing here, markets do not actually exist in a Platonic vacuum outside the ken of mortal men.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 12:42 pm (UTC)Now, this is just not the case. Capitalist behaviour is human economic behaviour, but just a small subset of it. Think of communist five year plans, or barter systems.
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Date: 2007-03-06 03:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:I'm ganna get what I want
Date: 2007-03-05 01:17 pm (UTC)Re: I'm ganna get what I want
Date: 2007-03-05 01:24 pm (UTC)Re: I'm ganna get what I want
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From:the filthy rich vs the planning poor
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-03-05 03:50 pm (UTC) - ExpandRe: the filthy rich vs the planning poor
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Date: 2007-03-05 03:11 pm (UTC)Let's all do it--- besides, what could be better than smashing your hands around in some muddy clay? Oh, that's true; fucking over Monsanto and eating the fruits of your la-la-la labors. "It only takes a mustard seed" of faith in keeping things small, and using what we have. Bravo!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 03:30 pm (UTC)I'll cop to Wikipedia here: "Seed bombing, also known as "Seed Grenades" is a technique of introducing vegetation to arid soils or otherwise inhospitable terrains. A seed bomb is a compressed clod of soil containing live vegetation that may be thrown or dropped onto a terrain to be modified. The term "seed grenade" was first used by Liz Christy in 1973 when she started the "Green Guerillas". The first seed grenades were made from balloons filled with local wildflower seeds, water and fertilizer. The seed grenades were tossed over fences onto empty lots in New York City in order to make the neighborhoods look better. It was the start of the Guerilla Gardening movement."
Those of you in New York can see the results of seed bombing (http://www.lizchristygarden.org/) on the corner of Houston and Bowery. Bless you, Liz Christy!
Here (http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ggtips.html) is a comprehensive guide to successfully regreening the orphaned land in urban hardscapes, while avoiding what we call in our circles The Long Gray Arm, if you dig. Naturally, if you are captured, all knowledge of your existence or agency on our behalf will be unequivocably denied. This post will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck.
(no subject)
From:never
Date: 2007-03-05 04:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 04:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 04:54 pm (UTC)Your own brand of post-materialism seems to be ignoring factors like your 'carbon footprint' (i.e constant refering to jet setting) and your inability to contribute to a 'real' local economy, by taking advantage of low rent (due to low wages in Berlin) whilst not bothering to learn the local language.
This is the equivalent of someone working in banking taking advantage of low house prices in the country side because of the economic crisis in rural economies to buy a second home.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 05:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 05:49 pm (UTC)As long as the American green left identifies itself as essentially anti-business, they're never ever going to manage to convince anyone that Green is a real market where innovation and investment could actually produce something other than hard-to-access recycling programs that consume more than they save. So I'm of two minds about Gore and his tactics.
And as far as China is concerned, resource conservation is and will be someone else's problem right up until it becomes marginally profitable.
(no subject)
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From:Re: Get rich with harriet
Date: 2007-03-05 06:31 pm (UTC)Re: Get rich with harriet
From:Re: Get rich with harriet
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-03-05 07:29 pm (UTC) - ExpandGet rich with harriet
Date: 2007-03-05 06:30 pm (UTC)One has to be blind not to see the empire crumbling. Look at the unhappy fatties watching desperate housewives Look at the corporate lawyers who despise themselves because they hate what they do so use their $800k salary to buy meaningless collectibile items that they insist on boring their friends with.
We have enough protections in the market that the collapse will be gradual. It will be like the good earthquakes, the small corrections.
The only way to make money, really in a secure way, is intellectual property: trademarks, copyright, patent. These holdings do not devalue when there is an earthquake or nuclear bomb.
Copyright's no good because the web killed it. To make money on patents you have to actually make something. But to make money on trademark, that's where it is.
I am writing a series on antisurveillance superheros that protect the American populace from inappropriate surveillance. I've got six or seven already, these will commodify nicely.
I'll make superhero number seven named imomus if you like, Momus. S/he can be a good superhero or a bad superhero, your call.
so far i've got
spy: good girl superhero
trademark terrorist: nobody knows his/her gender, in fact it might be a bot
skpp: in north korea,, has shady connections there, may be a bad guy
mauthe: sweet neutral superhero
daiykos: asshole bad guy
therm: explosives expert, bad guy
curly carl: good guy?
I'm thinking collectible chocolate bars, i've already got the trademarks, look out world, harriet's gonna make some dough and get out the country before we strike iran.
(Momus I know I promised I would not mention the dark material of trademarks again on Click Opera but it's been six months since last time, that's not too bad is it? )
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 06:36 pm (UTC)There is a certain point where economic theories become so refined, that they lose touch with physical reality. Talk about Platoland.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-05 08:59 pm (UTC)Now, the world price of oil is almost entirely produced by the quantity produced since it acts as a kind of a global pool. The transportation costs are simply nonexistent. No matter what Mr. Hugo Chávez says, the only way to seriously affect price is to regulate the total quantity of oil produced. If the world price is left untouched by subsidy-happy governments, it will rise steadily as a very slow upwards curve as oil becomes more scarce, refineries die and bidders have to compete more. There will be no sudden apocalyptic crash where oil jumps from $100 a barrel to $8,000,000 overnight.
Now, somewhere at $80-180 per barrel, it simply starts being uneconomical to actually use oil for a variety of things. This effect increases as oil depletes, which alleviates the market problem in small thrusts, but does not eliminate the essential progression of events. The higher the price is, the less demand for oil there actually can be; or at the very least, so much more will the opportunity and business costs of using oil be. Since this will all become more and more evident over the decades at current consumption rates, it would be rather crucial not to start regulating the market in a blind panic so as to make proposed alternatives too costly to actually develop and test.
(no subject)
From:Berlin and economy
Date: 2007-03-05 06:41 pm (UTC)Great art crowd but not as intense as NY.
The whole economy thing depresses me somewhat,
because all those US Presbytarian virtues extol frugality
with emphasis on investment in the future.
In think the social quotient went askew with finances being
so fluid, trancient, and most of all temporally terse.
Re: Berlin and economy
Date: 2007-03-05 11:45 pm (UTC)Philly needs more Quakers.
Re: Berlin and economy
From:Re: Berlin and economy
From:note of caution
Date: 2007-03-05 09:52 pm (UTC)Much as I like your advocacy of 'post-materialism' and a lot of your impulse towards things Asian, I think that the deep conservatism of (Asian) politics that take recourse to "Asian culture" cannot be underestimated (cf. Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, India).
The invocation of culture, roots, Asianness, etc. has been particularly detrimental to sexual minorities in many Asian countries as well as, of course, to ethnic minorities... it's seriously undermined struggles for civil society and many other emancipatory political projects in so many Asian contexts...
So that has to be taken into account also when "Buddhism" or anything related to "Asian culture" is taken up or championed in Western contexts.
Re: note of caution
Date: 2009-07-27 07:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
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