After writing briefly about cycling through the city and returning to Black Audio Film Collective last week, I've been rereading a collection of letters I wrote to friends and imagined readers as part of my time at DAI last year. I thought it could be nice to share some of those letters here, starting with the following that began from cycling a visiting friend around town.
Dear
A.,
I
have been struck by the profound feeling of boredom. Every bad
interaction I have, I have started saying "boring!" in my
head. Yesterday when I cycled you on the front of my bike, acting as
your tour guide through East London, you noticed how much attention
we were getting, some pleasant, some more antagonising. Some smiles,
some looks of disbelief. You were surprised that anyone paid any
attention at all. A delivery driver exclaimed "Well that’s a
new one!" Two women cycling on a cargo bike is apparently
outside the realm of the possible or the expected. I was less
surprised – but yours helped me see something that had been staring
back at me for some time. The shrinking of people's ideas of leisure,
of inane but still meaningful pleasure, of what people might do with
their time and how they might travel around together, one caring for
the other as precious cargo. I replied to your question "why are
people so surprised" with a theory "people are really
unhappy." Later, we sat on Telegraph Hill, you got the train
back east and I picked you up at the other end, taking you the last
stretch to save a train transfer and a 20-minute walk back to the
flat. In the dark, we were less noticeable, or less surprising.
Perhaps we were drunk, or there was something less embarrassing about
having fun at night.
I
know
that to you it is no surprise that we live in extremely regressive
times. In a city so overexposed with experience – people's
expectation of the possible in public life has never felt narrower.
Socialising outside of one’s home is expensive, over policed and
the experiences on offer are homogeneous.
The
atmosphere is tense on the streets, especially in the summer, when
the summer heat clogs the pavements and clouds the mind. What is the
affect of collapse? Dissociative rage, constant shock?
There is much pressure to conform, often framed through right wing
rhetoric that redirects rage at economic inequality onto cultural
difference.
“Why are you different, you should be the same as me, I don’t
want you to have something I do not have, you should be punished for
your difference.” Acceptable difference
reduced
to consumer choice. Through rhetoric about individual expression, or
access to the supposed “world at your fingertips” through smart
phones, difference and novelty have been siloed and privatised. On
the train if I glance at someone watching endless algorithmically
curated short videos I’m often disturbed – confronted by hyper
tailored cultural references for which I have no context. Despite
sitting next to each other it feels our worlds do not touch, that
there are fewer and fewer shared experiences other than consumption
and dependence on technology.
I
will never forget how S. replied to my shock and delight at them
riding a rental bike down a set of stairs in the Netherlands last
year "the dutch superego is too strong - it needs puncturing."
On my estate there are piles of semi-abandoned Lime rental bikes.
Where
I live, the repeated bleeping alarm that plays when a Lime is ridden
without payment is the soundtrack as teenagers finish school. In
many ways they seem indicative of a society where time truly is money
(Lime bikes charge by the minute). There are no social rules that
cannot be broken, except for the ones that are instilled by force.
"The app won't let me park my bike here." Of course, you
see these bikes strewn everywhere. People always find a way. There
are two people who ride Lime bikes, poor teenagers and yuppies with
more money than sense. The sight of a child hacking a bike (in order
to ride for free) and driving through every red light is a far more
expected outcome than our ride together yesterday.
Why
does reading the political and cultural history of the 1960s-1990s
fill many of our generation with sadness, or even confusion and
surprise? It’s like we know we’ve lost something, even if we
can’t place it. Sarah Schulman described how young queer people are
told that their lives are better than they actually are.
It’s internalised, the notion that we are accepted in society and
our flourishing is our and ours alone. Homophobia always shocks me
for that reason. My whole life I was told that it was no longer okay
for people to discriminate like that, that younger people were
progressive, that values in cities were shifting. Every experience to
the counter disturbs that idea. At what point does it become clear
that experiences of hostility, or ridicule are not random acts by bad
people, but rather indicative of a deeply conservative society hiding
behind the falling veil of liberalism. Managed decline is a slow
violence but right now it feels particularly pointed. The social
contract put forward– conform with society's norms and it will
accept you in return, is starting to seem like a very bad deal. This
internalised repression of difference might offer an answer to the
question - why is everything so boring? If, as Schulman claims in her
book of the same title, that in cities there has been a
"gentrification of the Mind," how might one de-gentrify
one's mind? Is such a process even possible when going backwards is
in itself a conservative act. And if the pre-gentrified mind is gone,
what might a "post-gentrified" look like? Cycling you
through several of London's most hyper developed districts, London
Fields, Shoreditch, Spitalfields and Farringdon, I try to remind
myself that this is the landscape we inherit and that something must
come after. If going back to some imagined innocence is impossible,
it’s important to begin thinking of where glimmers of a freer world
might be found in the city as we encounter it. What will we do with
the shopping malls when they are no longer relevant in our society?
Will we tear them down? Open them to be used as spaces to meet,
restaurant kitchens repurposed to feed the collective? A game I used
to play with friends when walking – every empty shop you see,
imagine what we could use that space for instead. In a short film on
David Harvey and the redevelopment of New York City,
he points to a cluster of towers behind him and states that we need
to think about what we will do with these towers after capitalism,
because they will be there.
