by hand

SUMMARIZE
The strongest character of the environment of radical monopoly is that it is completely cut off from your memory or anything you’re familiar with. You’re in total isolation. And you don’t know how long you’re going to be there, but you truly believe they can do anything to you. There’s no way to even question it. You’re not protected by anything. Why am I here? Your mind is very uncertain of time. You become like mad. It’s very hard for anyone. Even for people who have strong beliefs[1]. Life is externalized, environments cannot learn and eventually become meaningless. Impotence in independent decision-making affects expectation structures resulting in frenzied rituals of menu-based consumption: a park, a city pool, a cycling lane, a therapy, a court case, a curriculum (Illich, 1973). Impotence of shelters disguised as home, of cities disguised as places (Cacciari, 1980:2). The promise that city planners + science will = affluence (according to objectively verified merits/metrics by elites, and always forever postponed[2]) deprives the individual of personal conflict and thus creative legitimacy – resulting in the organization of participation in something in which it is impossible to participate (Vaneigem and Kotányi, 1961). The spirit may no longer dwell, it has become estranged from dwelling and so mere building cannot make the Home[3] “appear” (Cacciari, 1980:2). Community dissolves into competing monads pervaded by spiritual mediocrity. Enslaved, insecure, one-sided (Bookchin, 1974:28), people who have unlearned how to decide about their own rights on their own evidence become pawns in a world game operated by mega-machines[4] (Illich, 1973:54) and their cities reflect this.

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[1] Ai Wei Wei (2011) on Beijing’s Nightmare City

[2] Swyngedouw (2011:33)

[3] Dimora

[4] Pawns who exist partly on the dole, partly on crime, and partly on the sick fat of the city (Bookchin, 1974:67). And do not forget that this is not something new – an increasingly capitalist form of agriculture (Highland enclosures etc) in sixteenth century England expropriated and enclosed common pasture land and private holdings, dispossessed occupants, wiped out urban master craftsmen and journeymen and eventually shattered the sacrosanct puritanical values of the Reformation era in a single generation. Resultant: Drunkenness, profligacy, moral blight, population overdrive and the deformation of London into a monstrous urban cancer before the end of the nineteenth century. See also examples in medieval Flanders, Sweden, and the effects of agricultural mechanization in France, Asia, Latin America, and Africa over the last half of the twentieth century (Bookchin, 1974:53-59). Machinery and chemistry arrived on the cotton plantation in Southern USA as the sheep did in the Highlands and drove people north to factories and/or welfare checks (Galbraith, 1977:291). See also Fromm (1955, esp. Chpt5 ‘Man in Capitalistic Society’).