Noticing VaporSpace in Melbourne's 2023 'post pandemic' CBD
in ways that show how global capitalism and our control by Tech Titans is producing a future different to the one we thought we were heading towards, five years ago.
Well, it's Tuesday, school holidays, Jesus has survived crucifixion once again, and the rabbit has laid and hidden chocolate eggs about our homes, for our children to consume in remembrance of ‘this’. A very probable causal chain. For a strange confluence of reasons probably obvious to this blog's readers but that would take some explaining to Jesus and his nailer upperers, this means I'm under the pump as I try to juggle work with three children around the house, who need to be driven to activities, and are looking for diversions, or some kind of father who figures. Given this, I thought I'd pause in my pursuit of involutions, rifts, and extrapolating Gorz' CER, and take my own pulse – to clarify and refine where you and I are going here, if you're still coming with. This post follows from this one, from the end of last year... I feel like six months' worth of stuff has happened since then, although it's only four or so months ago. The compression-distension of time, once again, marking my experience of passage over the last few years. Far out, is it April 2023 already? In fact, with this in mind, let me begin with a long block quote by William Gibson, which I won't tackle directly now, but will return to next week or so.
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“Alvin Toffler warned us about Future Shock, but is this Future Fatigue? For the past decade or so, the only critics of science fiction I pay any attention to, all three of them, have been slyly declaring that the Future is over. I wouldn’t blame anyone for assuming that this is akin to the declaration that history was over, and just as silly. But really I think they’re talking about the capital-F Future, which in my lifetime has been a cult, if not a religion. People my age are products of the culture of the capital-F Future. The younger you are, the less you are a product of that. If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.
The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive postnuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely... more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.
Please don’t mistake this for one of those, “after us, the deluge” moments on my part. I’ve always found those appalling, and most particularly when uttered by aging futurists, who of all people should know better. This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else’s past, every present someone else’s future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now” (Gibson, for Book Expo, 2010, Distrust that Particular Flavour, 44-45).
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postscript: I sat down and started writing what follows below, and immediately, the post veered in its own direction, like a bad shopping trolley. In line with the ambient injunction of this blog, I've let 'what follows' stay, although it's meant forgoing the other questions I addressed to myself, which I've now placed in this footnote1, and will return to later in the week. Be aware that this post will kind of ‘end’ abruptly, in a couple of thousand words’ time.
You mentioned in the intro you feel like six months’ water under the bridge since late last year (only four months ago)? What's happened for you since then?
At the end of last year, I felt this surging impetus toward getting stuff out. Partly that’s an end-of-year neurosis of mine, as my introspective stocktake of ‘the year that was’ tends toward summative lists and ruminative thoughts. Gets a bit obsessive. Yet in late 2022, with living together, somehow as an outlet, a lot of that blue-noted annual weighing up and judging away of stuff was channelled through the posts, which was fresh, for me. It was cathartic, and I think I got somewhere (for myself... what do you think?) By the end of several in that spray, I could finally discern a clear commitment to something I wanted to build – for a year or two. There was nothing like this when I began.
Looking back, the purpose of the blog’s first year has its own ‘final’ shape I can retroactively bestow back on it (one never intended at the time). Initially, it was a repository for stuff had been writing since 2020 that didn't yet have its audience or outlet.
As it progressed, the practice of writing it out was generative and unblocking, and this entrenched my commitment to thinking by writing, and striving for spontaneity with discipline (just write whatever, but each Tuesday morning, then hit publish, especially when you don't feel quite ready). Then by doing this, by trial and error, I moved from confusion, out of ignorance, and toward a basic, clear sense of what might work – with the format and my constraints and idiosyncrasies.
And then also: 2023 already seems like a radically different year – for me, to me, for us – compared to 2022. This difference induces different kinds of thoughts and feelings, which, in turn, necessitate a different approach to writing them out.
How does 2023 seem different?
Well, remember if you will: it was only January ‘22 when things were still radically disrupted by Omicron. In the January summer holidays of that year in Melbourne, it got to be you had to phone ahead2 to see if any given venue was open, because of staffing shortages. Shaun the Sheep was cancelled; North Melbourne pool was iffy (some days too crowded to get in, with the quotas; some days just totally closed).
Only a little more than a year on, we've largely repressed these all-too-recent social facts of the pandemic. Yet as Freud reminds us: in the absence of working through our past by facing and thinking about it, it is bound to haunt us as we act out its repetitions, without full conscious awareness.
Think also: by November of 2022, Chinese students were crawling on campuses, literally crawling, protesting their despair. We still have not yet caught up with this, I think, although it was (only) six months ago. Another month another world, it seems.
As of April 2023, covid is still circulating and killing people, but the ‘global pandemic’, as an existential and socio-culturally patterned shared situation ‘we’ are ‘in’, feels over (as a ‘structure of feeling’, as Williams would put it). It’s not long ago, but it’s another world, a tense past tense with its own terse torsion (coiling inward, unconsciously). We have shed viral load.
And this 2020-2 pandemic ‘era’, in turn, seems another ‘nother world to the dire pre-covid and early 2020 world of gaping socio-political liquefaction in the Anglosphere by way of Brexit, Trump, and (here), Morrison. As recently as 2020, ‘we’ still seemed to be trapped inside the prolapse of stage four neoliberalism, however much it couldn’t help but just keep shitting the bed.
If we go only two years back from that long descensus of the North Atlantic's post ‘89 project, in 2018, the Party still had a Presidential Term Limit, and the West (and many in China), hadn't clocked the rise of Xina and its full range of implications.
(Another (another (another))) world.
Consider the last five years (2018-23) in this nested light.
By 2019, we have Xina, and (thus) the end of the post-Deng reform era;
2020, Wuhan (pangolin sneeze or lab spill, take your pick);
2021, China able to 'do' things to protect its population (that the US failed to, or was incapable of doing);
2022, China crushed its own 'win' (and its population's spirit) with the harshest possible application of covid zero, as Xina was double rubber stamped;
2023, ‘we’ ‘suddenly’ seem locked in a geopolitical struggle between China and the US, with Ukraine turning into a (US-Xina) proxy war and Taiwan looking like a powder keg for a WWI-level 'stupid, avoidable, inevitable' conflict that, like Fuji for Tokyo, could erupt sometime soon and, when it does, will fuck everything and everyone. And in all this, covid 'appears to have disappeared'.
Wow, what a half decade.
At the same time, in my tiny corner of the 2020s Anglocapitalist world, consumerism and global capitalism have come roaring back. This is starkly visible in Melbourne's central business district (CBD), via a new aesthetic and its atmosphere, which is broadly that of global capitalism in the hoary grandeur of its containerised involutions.
If 2010s urban gentrification was dominated by AirSpace aesthetics, 2020s CBD Melbourne has gone full VaporSpace: a bad impersonation of Singapore trying for early 00s Ikebukuro3, but under Tech Giant attentional control. The city is full of an endless set of vape shops, bubble tea, drunk young people careening down slippery footpaths on e scooters, Deliveroos in the rain, discarded green e scooter helmets in shopping trolleys, all-too-established encampments of the visibly homeless, and sad herds in hour-long queues to photograph having had the noodles with the 4.7+ ratings. A city of waitings and ratings and ships in the night; indicatively, I saw a woman sleeping rough in the lee of the crowd, on the porch of a closed bubble tea shop, scrolling on her phone. She seemed pretty comfortable. Just scrolling.
Swanston was always a zoo and a PT Barnham shit show4. What’s more conspicuous in the post-pandemic 2020s is the way most people move through space and (almost completely fail to) regard one another. The street is more and more a space of narrow avoidances crowded with the frenetic distracted, asocial congregation of phone-following throngs who do not notice those around them: the paradox of everyone in their own personal bubble, yet with nil spatial awareness. The 19 and 20C feared the crowd; we may yet long for its return.
Prevalent styles of tech usage seem an obvious and increasing factor. Nearly everyone I close pass is on headphones or stroll scrolling into a huge phone (quite often, with improbably huge fingernails). And/or no one seems to notice anyone around them, or the bigger picture of the trashscape corners,
because everyone’s all caught up unlocking a scooter with their phone, or avoiding a scooter while texting on their phone, or sitting in generic food-and-beverage outlets ordering through Q codes, or scrolling alone together with their dining partner while their food arrives, or taking pictures of their steaming pile that just did.
Why do so many people want to photograph and post their meals – so much?
2020s VaporSpace Melbourne is also, overwhelmingly, a ‘consumption experience’ oriented retail space, and nearly nothing but. The facades of the CBD have come to be almost completely dominated by garishly lit shop fronts, generic shop fit outs that try to look like corporate-owned franchises, even when they're not, and reified, highly rated consumer ‘experiences’ that are all surface, all hat (and no pants). Nothing tastes amazing, but a lot of it pops on Insta, and maybe it tastes better because you queued for an hour, and the rating says it’s a 4.7.
Rating-based reification ‘mirror halls’ aside, the whole environment is held together by a relentless airport-mall food court aesthetic consisting of hard block colours, hard bright lighting, hard shiny surfaces, hard Gorilla glass, and the hard clacking mandible textures of single use plastic and fake nails on teeth.
Everything is somehow heading towards a JC Deceaux bus shelter, and to that extent, hardened against its abuse by teen taggers or its use by people sleeping rough. I think Space Afrika's Honest Labour and Actress’ Dummy Corporation, capture aspects of this VaporSpace aesthetic and atmosphere, while DJ Stingray's FTNWO pops the hood on American stylings of the paranoid psychoses that might be under it all.
In the 'background' of this VaporSpace: exploited hospo labour, large and increasing numbers of people paying >600/week to live in one-bedroom apartments, a rental crisis involuting so profoundly that not even rentiers are winning, while my students pay >400/week for rooms in share houses (when they earn <700/week) – and global logistics.
For all of this space – this urban consumer space of hard surfaces, touchless transactionality and mutual nonregard – is brought ‘in’, flat packed, containerised, manufactured somewhere in industrial conurbations of the Pearl River Delta and Mekong Delta. Nothing of what appears ‘here’ is from ‘here’ (and this is increasingly true of ‘everywhere’). At the same time, everything is globally generic, and the same as everywhere else. It’s a strange inversion of Gertrude Stein’s Oakland: ‘there’s no there, there’.
Counterfactually, if you had seen Melbourne in 2020-1, during those years of lockdown, the hard global generic surfaces of 2020s VaporSpace Melbourne is the lesser of two evils. In those two grim years the city quickly became bleak, full of limping trade, grafittied ‘for lease’ stickers, and even larger numbers of visibly homeless, looking like they were having a really dismal time (while, just down the road, 8400+ Docklands apartments lay empty).
At least it’s pumping again, right? Yes, I'll take 2023 CBD over 2020-1, that was even worse. All the same, it’s kitsch, and kitsch, if you ask Broch, is evil, vacuous. I have two key thoughts of Hermann Broch right in my ear here, both of which are in these block quotes, that book end the opening chapter of his Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and His Time:
"The essential character of a period can generally be deciphered from its architectural facade, and in this case of the second half of the nineteenth century... that facade is certainly one of the most wretched in world history. This was the period of eclecticism, of false Baroque, false Renaissance, false Gothic. Wherever in that era Western man determined the style of life, that style tended toward bourgeois constriction and bourgeoise pomp, to a solidity that signified suffocation just as much as security. If ever poverty was masked by wealth, it was here (33).
The ultimate meaning of poverty masked by wealth became clearer in Vienna, in Vienna’s spirited swan song, than in any other place or time. A minimum of ethical values was to be masked by a maximum of aesthetic values, which themselves no longer existed. They could no longer exist, because an aesthetic value that does not spring from an ethical foundation is its own opposite – kitsch. And as the metropolis of kitsch, Vienna also became the metropolis of the value vacuum of the epoch (81).
What does it mean, then, that we are now well into a decade whose aesthetic tries to project prosperity and hide its poverty precisely through the VaporSpace aesthetic? Whose ‘look’ is this, and how could it possibly conduct our spirit and produce any kind of investment, any kind of value? What is this future; whose future is it?
Secondly, what does it mean that the rich texture of Melbourne’s laneway bars and cafes that striated the hard main drag with lamp-lit shadows seem to be receding under the hard light and high rent5, and that there's nearly nothing in this set of experiences which is great for people <18 or >376, and that most of it totally sucks and is inappropriate for young kids or elderly people7?
Who, in the final analysis, are the many-mirrored, 4.7+ star experience of this city for? Queuing for food in the rain, e scooters in the dark, 24/7 vaping, avoiding your dinner partner by scrolling: none of it is excellent, most of it is of no enduring value, all of it produces masses of landfill and excrement, and is purchased off the back of invisible exploitation. Even directly under the light, even if you’re fortunate enough to have a phone that can read Q codes and pay for dinner, global capitalism, and this Vaporspace aesthetic – it sucks.
– is this the capital-F future, the eternal Now, or just ‘more stuff'?
…and what does it mean that so many people are on their phones so much?
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To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing's pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly ... but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets' checkouts, airports' gates, SUVs' backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everybody knows it's about something else, way down" (David Foster Wallace, The Pale King, 85).
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Recursive thinking, thinking by writing, momentum from discipline - you say you’re not fully in control of this process… is that a good thing?
How is this obliquely a conversation with Chris’ Imperfect Notes… ?
What else have you been reading and thinking about, and where might that crop up?
What's happened to Austria-Hungary?
What's happened to psychoanalysis?
What do you think you can get to by the end of the year, what can readers expect for all their patience, and what is it about this that interests or excites you right now?
And like: actually phone. Texting and/or checking Google Maps or Facebook/Instagram often yielded ‘false positives’. Interesting how voice calls still work best here, analogous to how well live FM radio worked for me and others during lockdown, or how important AM radio is during bushfires (when cellular networks are the first to fuck out).
Yes, you heard me: not Shinjuku, and not even Shibuya – Ikebukuro.
Even then celebrity chef Gabriel Gaté noticed this in some Sunday Life interview I read with him. When asked: what could Melbourne do better? He replied: Swanston St. We can do better.
At this point: is this just a socio-cultural ‘milieu’ thing? Is it just that none of ‘my’ places exist anymore, or that all the hip – white – places have moved to Brunswick and Thornbury Preston?
And is this just middle age and midlife crisis, a la Madonna’s ‘this used to be my playground’? Best to keep an eye on one’s own nostalgia… mine is also rampant, and if there’s one thing worse an ageing capital-F Futurist, it’s an ageing techno dad. Mea culpa.
This is something I’ve taken from Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, which I’ll return to, and also ‘rhymes’ with some of Didi-Huberman’s interesting ideas about lighting in Survival of the Fireflies.