Sharing letters

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.¹ 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.² 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.³ 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,⁴ 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.

1Chain stores and restaurants, expensive coffee shops with clinical interiors, gentrified street markets that all sell the same selection of “worldwide cuisines”

2Lime bikes are expensive to hire electric rental bikes. Lime bikes have become a ubiquitous mode of private transport in London, sometimes rivaling the number of bikes owned by individuals on my morning cycles to and from work.

3Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind, 7.

4David Harvey and the City (2020), dir. Brett Story, prod.Antipode Foundation, YouTube video, 16:19, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPGvXhicF2M.