Constrictor by Iris Lee

For ETHER: INVISIBLE BOUNDARIES

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Ether defines boundaries as the invisible distinctions that are maintained and perpetuated through the social contracts that societies operate on. They form the traditions, infrastructure, and myths that societies abide by. Manifestations of these boundaries are found in everyday functions, institutions, and objects: a restrictive covenant barring the sale of property to minorities in white neighborhoods. The jails that afford us the distinction between free and unfree. The country borders that allow us to distinguish illegal and legal bodies. They are able to designate Us versus the Other. The dichotomies that people currently construct their lives around are not natural or unbiased or accidental. They are very intentional.

INTRODUCTION

“Tierra de huesos” (Soil of bones). Photograph by David Mirete

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Anthropocene 08

Cyborgs & Organics 28

Skin—To—Skin 46

CASE STUDIES

AN THROÂ From country borders to clear skies at the Olympics, human intervention continues to shape the world for better and for worse

PO CENE

What follows is a visual index and archive that I have compiled, composed of writing and images that relate to topics of the Anthropocene. Defined as â&#x20AC;&#x153;relating to or denoting the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environmentâ&#x20AC;?, I look at everything from human intervention in the

physical landscape to how city planning has shifted the space that humans occupy. How have geographical features of the world shaped the world and as a consequence, how have humans subverted space? Anthropocene seeks to gather a selection of case studies that explore these questions and topics.

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1. SHADE BALLS

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power released 96 million black shade balls into the Los Angeles Reservoir to reduce evaporation and deter algal growth.

Photograph by Gerd Ludwig

On Monday Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti supervised the latest onslaught of 4-inch black plastic balls, bringing the total count to 96 million in the 175-acre reservoir. Located in Sylmar, the reservoir holds up to 3.3 billion gallons, enough to supply the city with drinking water for up to three weeks. The city says the balls will shade and cool the water, reducing evaporation from the reservoir and making it less susceptible to algae, bacterial growth, and chemical reactions that can produce harmful substances.

The balls cost 36 cents each, for a total of $34.5 million. The utility has been testing the concept since 2008, reporting that shade balls reduce evaporation by 85 to 90 percent. That should equate to saving nearly 300 million gallons a year, enough to provide drinking water for 8,100 people, said Los Angeles City Councilmember Mitchell Englander. The balls also inhibit microorganism growth, reducing the treatment the water must undergo through other means. That could save the city $250 million over time, said Garcetti.

Made of black polyethylene, shade balls are filled with water so they don’t blow away. A coating resists ultraviolet light and degradation. The manufacturers (XavierC, Artisan Screen Process, and Orange Products) say the balls should last about 25 years. Ed Osann, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Bloomberg that the shade balls probably won’t release any toxic materials into the water supply. (NRDC has not yet responded to a request for comment.)

CASE STUDIES

Why Did L.A. Drop 96 Million ‘Shade Balls’ Into Its Water? Brian Clark Howard

2. COUNTRY BORDERS

The border itself may be of great symbolic significance, like the Berlin Wall; in other cases the symbolism lies rather in the disappearance of the traditional border, as in the European Union today. A border may be a barrier against immigration or the front line between hostile armies. It may reinforce distinctive identities on each side of it, or it may be disputed because it cuts across national identities. An anthropology of borders simultaneously explores the cultural permeability of borders, the adaptability of border peoples in their attempts ideologically to construct political divides, and the rigidity

of some states in their efforts to control the cultural fields which transcend their borders. As noted above, the mission of classic (modern) anthropology was contradictory: it had to humanise while it differentiated. We are all human, but we are all different. This is parallel to the contradiction which the nation-state must resolve. We are all one, but we are internally differentiated into classes, genders and races. In fulfilling this mission, anthropology applied the categories given to it by the ordering of official knowledge, especially the categorical distinction between Self and Other.

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Border identities: Nation and state at international frontiers Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan

3. WIND TURBINES

“Ugly industrial wind turbines are ruining the beauty of parts of the country--and have inefficient unreliable energy to boot.”

Donald Trump @realdonaldtrump 12:40 PM, 11 May 2012

CASE STUDIES

4. FREEWAYS

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There is a widening gap between growing concentrations of blacks and other minorities in the central cities, and whites and the expanding supply of employment opportunities in the suburbs. While exclusionary zoning controls have been seen by many as the most immediate barrier to suburban opportunities, transportation facilities and the lack of them play an important role. The federal highway program in particular, while a powerful stimulus to dispersed development, has, in its implementation, failed to protect equal access to the benefits of development such as housing and employmentâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;benefits often made possible entirely by the provision of highway access

where none existed before. As a result the comprehensive planning of metropolitan areas is seriously undermined, and new barriers are erected which threaten to perpetuate the burdens and disadvantages which a long history of racial discrimination has produced. Regional planning agencies are needed with adequate authority to make and implement integrated land-use and transportation decisions based on a clearly expressed metropolitan development policy that includes the goal of eliminating all barriers to equal access. In the interim the discriminatory aspects of current transportation policies and projects should be challenged.

CASE STUDIES

Highways as a Barrier to Equal Access Yale Robin

5. ATOMIC BOMBS

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The Mosaic warning to mariners included the sentence: ‘All possible precautions will be taken to ensure that no hazard to life or property will occur within the danger area.’ Foreign Office officials argued for its inclusion in the Grapple danger area warning, ‘on the basis that, while such a promise might be difficult to keep and might induce a false sense of security, its omission might be noticed by a legalistically inclined nation’. ...The original version of the danger area was a 400-nautical-mile circle around the drop zone, the estimated

Above: Crater from the 1962 “Sedan” nuclear test as part of Operation Plowshare. The 104 kiloton blast displaced 12 million tons of earth and created a crater 320 feet deep and 1,280 feet wide. (Look to the roads at the bottom-right and the observation deck at the lower-right edge of the crater, for a sense of scale)

area for a surface burst equivalent to 150 kilotons. In reality, even this danger area was too limited. Many of the actual Grapple explosions were much larger than 150 kilotons (three of the tests had yields greater than 1 megaton, and the April 1958 Grapple Y test measured at nearly 3 megatons). Beyond this, prevailing winds tend to carry fallout in long plumes rather than neat circles. The British Government knew this very well, having studied data from recent US hydrogen bomb testing at Bikini and Enewetak atolls, which travelled far beyond 450 miles.

Grappling with the Bomb: Interlude On radiation, safety and secrecy p.117-118 Nic Maclellan

Right: Composite “true color” multispectral satellite image of Enewetak Atoll. Image courtesy of the public domain

Image taken from the National Nuclear Security Administration Nevada Site Office Photo Library

CASE STUDIES

THE GROWING CASE FOR GEOENGINEERING JAMES TEMPLE David Mitchell pulls As climate change accelerates, and whether the world into the parking lot of should risk deploying a a handful of scientists are eager the Desert Research tool that could alter the to move ahead with experiments entire climate. Indeed, the Institute, an environmental science outpost testing ways to counteract warming suggestion that we should of the University of artificially. Their reasoning: we entrust the global thermoNevada, perched in just might get desperate enough stat to an armada of flying the dry red hills above robots will strike many as to use this technology one day. Reno. The campus preposterous. But the real stares over the tops of the downtown casinos into the question is: preposterous compared to what? snow-buried Pine Nut Mountains. On this morning, wispy cirrus clouds draw long lines above the range. Without some kind of drastic action, climate change could be killing an estimated half-million people anMitchell, a lanky, soft-spoken atmospheric physicist, nually by the middle of this century, through famine, believes these frigid clouds in the upper troposphere flooding, heat stress, and human conflict. Preventing may offer one of our best fallback plans for combating temperatures from rising 2 °C above preindustrial climate change. The tiny ice crystals in cirrus clouds levels, long considered the danger zone that should cast thermal radiation back against the surface of the be avoided at all cost, now looks nearly impossible. It earth, trapping heat like a blanket—or, more to the would mean cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by as point, like carbon dioxide. But Mitchell, an associate much as 70 percent by 2050, and it may well require research professor at the institute, thinks there might developing technologies that could suck megatons be a way to counteract the effects of these clouds. of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, according to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate It would work like this: Fleets of large drones would Change. But a growing body of research suggests that crisscross the upper latitudes of the globe during winwe probably will not have the time or technology to ter months, sprinkling the skies with tons of extremely pull this off. Notably, even if every nation sticks to the fine dust-like materials every year. If Mitchell is right, commitments it’s made under the politically ambithis would produce larger ice crystals than normal, tious Paris climate accords, global temperatures could creating thinner cirrus clouds that dissipate faster. still soar more than 5 °C by 2100. “That would allow more radiation into space, cooling the earth,” Mitchell says. Done on a large enough scale, Without some kind of drastic this “cloud seeding” could ease global temperatures action, climate change could be by as much as 1.4 °C, more than the planet has warmed killing an estimated half-million since the Industrial Revolution, according to a sepapeople annually by the middle rate Yale study. of this century. Big questions remain about whether it would really work, what damaging side effects might arise,

“Everyone is looking at two degrees, but to me it’s a pipe dream,” says Daniel Schrag, director of the

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Camels and trucks travel on a main desert road in Abu Dhabi while rain descends in the background. Photograph by James Davis

ANTHROPOCENE

A plane launches a flare to seed clouds over North Dakota. Image by Jim Brandenburg

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Harvard University Center for the Environment, who was one of President Obama’s top advisors on climate change. “I fear we’ll be lucky to escape four, and I want to make sure nobody ever sees six.” The difference between two and four degrees is another quarter-billion people without reliable access to water, more than a hundred million more exposed to flooding, and massive declines in worldwide crop yields, according to a study by the Committee on Climate Change, a London-based scientific group established to advise the U.K. government (see below). The idea that we could counteract these dangers by re-engineering the climate itself, techniques collectively known as geoengineering, began to emerge from the scientific fringes about a decade ago (see “The Geoengineering Gambit”). Now momentum behind the idea is building: increasingly grim climate projections have convinced a growing number of scientists it’s time to start conducting experiments to find out what might work. In addition, an impressive list of institutions including Harvard University, the Carnegie Council, and the University of California, Los Angeles, have recently established research initiatives. Few serious scientists would argue that we should begin deploying geoengineering anytime soon. But with time running out, it’s imperative to explore any option that could pull the world back from the brink of catastrophe, says Jane Long, a former associate director at Lawrence Livermore National

Laboratory. “I don’t really know what the answer is,” she says. “But I do believe we need to keep saying what the truth is, and the truth is, we might need it.”

Dreams of dust Mitchell works in a small, square office on the top floor of the Desert Research Institute. Stacks of scientific papers crowd his desk; journals and binders pack his bookshelf. Close-up images of delicate ice crystals hang from thumbtacks on the bulletin board above his computer monitor. In the spring of 2005, during a sabbatical at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, Mitchell began exploring how the size of ice crystals affects cirrus clouds and the climate system. He and his colleagues found that bigger crystals, the type that tend to form in the presence of dust particles, produced fewer and thinner cirrus clouds. That point stuck in Mitchell’s brain. One morning shortly after returning to Nevada, he had a dream in which that insight morphed into a climate engineering scheme. He awoke wondering if deliberately adding dust in the areas where these clouds form would spawn these larger ice crystals, reducing cirrus coverage and releasing more heat into space. Though he had serious reservations about geoengineering, he decided to explore the idea. In 2009, he and a colleague published a paper suggesting that seeding cirrus clouds with tiny particles of

ANTHROPOCENE

bismuth tri-iodide, an inorganic compound that may break down into the necessary sub-micrometer size, might substantially offset climate change. More recently, Mitchell estimated that it would take around 160 tons of the material annually to seed clouds in the areas he has in mind, at a cost of about $6 million. Not everyone agrees the proposal would work. A 2013 paper in Science, led by MIT atmospheric scientist Dan Cziczo, concluded that the formation of ice crystals around dust, known as heterogeneous ice nucleation, is already the dominant mechanism creating cirrus clouds. That might mean adding more dust would, on balance, create thicker clouds that trap more heat. The larger problem with the idea, Cziczo argues, is that clouds are the least understood part of the climate system. We do not have nearly enough knowledge about cloud microphysics, or accurate enough measurements, to precisely manipulate climate in this way, he says. But Mitchell’s most recent research, relying on observations of ice crystal concentrations from NASA’s Calipso satellite, has further convinced him that cloud seeding could work, as long as it’s done in regions where cirrus clouds form primarily without dust particles. On the monitor in his office, Mitchell pulls up a page of maps from a paper he presented at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in late February. Navy- and light-blue dots, representing Cziczo’s heterogeneous clouds, dominate the mid-lati-

tudes, covering much of South America and Africa. But the higher latitudes are covered in red, yellow, orange, and green dots that indicate the sorts of clouds Mitchell has in mind. The satellite images suggest that in very cold and humid conditions, toward the poles and particularly during winter, tiny ice crystals can form on their own, spontaneously, without dust. That suggests that cloud seeding could work, if it’s targeted to those areas during those months. Mitchell even thinks he’s come up with a way to get nature to carry out a field experiment to test his theory. During spring and winter, strong winds regularly stir up major dust storms in the deserts of Mongolia and the western edge of China. The fine particles blow across the Pacific and run into an atmospheric wave that rolls over the Rocky Mountains. If Mitchell is correct, the dust should promote thinner cirrus clouds in an area where the thicker type otherwise tends to dominate. There was no way to properly observe this phenomenon—until late last year, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched a satellite equipped with some of the most powerful imaging technology ever launched into space, as well as sensors that can measure the temperatures of clouds. The satellite should be able to capture exactly what happens as the dust rides over the Rockies, detecting the subtle shifts under way in cloud microphysics. Mitchell submitted a research proposal to NOAA last year, asking the agency to use the satellite to make such observations. He knows it’s a long shot, particularly in light of the Trump administration’s efforts to slash funding for climate science. But if NOAA agrees, the test could lend weight to his theory—or, of course, contradict it.

Another outdoor geoengineering experiment should occur even sooner. By this time next year, Harvard professors David Keith and Frank Keutsch hope to launch a high-altitude balloon from a site in Tucson, Arizona. This will mark the beginning of a research project to explore the feasibility and risks of an approach known as solar radiation management. The basic idea is that spraying materials into the stratosphere could help reflect more heat back into space, mimicking a natural cooling phenomenon that occurs after volcanoes blast tens of millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the sky (see “A Cheap and Easy Plan to Stop Global Warming”).

280 MILLION MORE PEOPLE WITHOUT ACCESS TO ADEQUATE WATER. 120 MILLION MORE PEOPLE EXPOSED TO MAJOR RIVER FLOODS. 12 MILLION MORE PEOPLE SUBJECTED TO COASTAL FLOODING. Scientists generally believe the technique would ease temperatures, but a lingering question is: what else will it do? Notably, volcanic eruptions have also significantly altered rainfall patterns in certain areas, and sulfur dioxide is known to deplete the protective ozone layer.

Unknown unknowns Full-scale geoengineering would inevitably involve some level of risk. We are likely to face a terrible choice between accepting the clear dangers of climate change and risking the unknowns of geoengineering. Alan Robock, a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers, has published a list of 27 risks and concerns raised by the technology, including its potential to deplete the ozone layer and to decrease rainfall in Africa and Asia.

34% OF PLANT SPECIES LOSE HALF THEIR SUITABLE HABITAT. 24% DECLINE IN GLOBAL MAIZE PRODUCTIVITY. 21% OF MAMMAL SPECIES LOSE THEIR HABITAT. 8% DROP IN SPRING WHEAT YIELDS.

Ultimately, Robock worries that geoengineering may simply be too risky to ever try. “We don’t know what we don’t know,” he says. “Should we trust the only planet known to have intelligent life to this complicated technical system?” MIT’s Cziczo is blunter. “We know the problem is greenhouse gas, so the solution is you take the greenhouse gas out,” he says. “You don’t try to do something that

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ANTHROPOCENE

we completely don’t understand.” The reservations surrounding geoengineering research were on full display in late March as dozens of notable climate and social scientists gathered at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., for the Forum on U.S. Solar Geoengineering Research. Speakers highlighted a long list of unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable, questions about international governance: Who gets to decide when to pull the trigger? How do we determine “correct” average temperatures when the same ones will affect different nations in markedly different ways? Can one nation be held responsible for the negative effects of its geoengineering scheme on another country’s weather? Could these tools be used to deliberately attack a neighboring nation? And could conflicts over these questions tip into war? “I have yet to hear any description of a future solar-geoengineered world that sounds to me anything other than dystopian or highly unrealistic,” said Rose Cairns, a research fellow at the University of Sussex, who joined the morning discussion from England by Skype. But Harvard’s Schrag argued the opposite: that the scariest version of the future may be one where geoengineering is never developed or deployed. “I don’t think people understand just what we’re up against with climate,” he said. “The most likely scenarios for climate over longer time scales are devastating to future generations, absolutely devastating.”

As he flashed slides highlighting the dramatic loss of sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic in recent months, Schrag stressed that climate change is already causing visible impacts faster than anyone expected. He added that it’s difficult to foresee any scenario where we can cut greenhouse-gas levels fast enough to avoid far worse dangers: the amount we’ve already released is likely to lock in another degree of warming even if we halt emissions tomorrow, he said.

The power of fear Mitchell was opposed to geoengineering for most of his career. The idea that humankind should tinker with the finely tuned climate system struck him as impossibly arrogant. But like other researchers who spent decades staring at increasingly frightening projections while the world ignored the loudest warnings scientists knew how to sound, he reluctantly changed his view. It could take decades to learn which geoengineering methods might work, whether environmental side effects can be minimized, and whether it’s ultimately too dangerous to try. The longer we wait to begin serious research, the greater the risk we’ll deploy an unsafe tool in the face of sudden climate shocks, or not have one in hand when we need it. And no one really knows when that might be. Says Mitchell, “The need for climate engineering could be coming faster than we realize.”

“The most likely scenarios for climate over longer time scales are devastating to future generations, absolutely devastating.”

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ANTHROPOCENE

Gods and abstract processes cannot be held morally accountableâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;at least in theory. Thus viewing the social world as fundamentally and explicitly designed by humans for humans while still keeping its nonhuman aspects in play fills a gap in the anthropological imagination by opening up range of uncharted analytic trajectories and conceptual alignments for further exploration. 26

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Above: Satellite image of circular crop fields in Haskell County, Kansas, in late June 2001. Healthy, growing crops of corn and sorghum are green (sorghum may be slightly paler). Wheat is brilliant gold. Fields of brown have been recently harvested and plowed under or have lain in fallow for the year. Image courtesy of NASA

Left: Subsistent farming in Yunnan Province, southern China Photograph by Jialiang Gao 7 April 2008

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The blurred boundaries between organic and

CYBOR & ORGA

mechanic continues to redefine what it means to be human 28

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RGS

ANICS CYBORGS & ORGANICS

Cyborgs & Organics seeks to understand the bodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s relationship with the object. The theory of hylomorphism views objects as inert material, and human intervention an activator. In opposition to this theory and an overarching theme of this book, the morphogenetic model views the maker not as God but as a participant in a world of active materials, centered around

the temporal process of making, existing, and deteriorating. Humans as a species are radically mediatedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;always holding onto technologies that allow us to exist and flow through the world. In the sense that humans constantly design and mold the world they walk through, the objects we create design us right back.

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6. IUDS 7. BRACES

Clearly any description of the boundaries will be implicated in and by culture to the degree that creating boundaries is a cultural identity project, contingent upon language, place, and history. The contemporary version of the questions about human boundaries tends to center on

the relation of humans to their own technologies: on whether the human being can be distinguished from “thinking machines;”1 on whether we can be duplicated through Artificial Intelligence or genetic engineering; on the status of virtual realities that can be experienced through

technological means alone; on whether machines can develop consciousness; on the creation of “impossible” sensations of technological sound and sight that cannot be taken in by the human sensorium but are nevertheless actual in the sense of measurable and present.

CASE STUDIES

Cyborgs and Replicants: On the Boundaries Alice Rayner

8. ANIMAL TRAPS Initially, a trap such as this communicates a deadly absence-the absence of the man who devised and set it,and the absence of the animal who will become the victim...Because of these marked absences, the trap, like all traps, functions as a powerful sign. Not designed to communicate or to function as a sign (in fact, designed to be hidden and escape notice), the trap nonetheless signifies far more intensely than most signs intended as such. The static violence of the tensed bow, the congealed malevolence of the arrangement of sticks and cords, are revelatory in themselves, without recourse to conventionalization. Since this is a

sign that is not, officially, a sign at all, it escapes all censorship. We read in it the mind of its author and the fate of its victim. This trap is a model as well as an implement. In fact, all implements are models, because they have to be adapted to their users’ characteristics, and so bear their imprint. An artificial leg is a model of a missing real leg, a representation that functions as a prosthesis. The arrow trap is particularly clearly a model of its creator, because it has to substitute for him; a surrogate hunter, it does its owner’s hunting for him. It is, in fact, an automatonor robot,whose

design epitomizes the design of its maker. It is equipped with a rudimentary sensory transducer (the cord, sensitive to the animal’s touch). This afferent nervous system brings information to the automaton’s central processor (the trigger mechanism, a switch, the basis of all information-processing devices) which activates the efferent system, releasingthe energy stored in the bow, which propels the arrows, which produce action-at-a-distance (the victim’s death). This is not just a model of a person, like any doll, but a ‘working’ model of a person.

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Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps Alfred Gell

9. PACEMAKERS

CASE STUDIES

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10. CELL TOWERS

Visual pollution is a fascinating example of pollution. Ordinarily, we associate pollution with air pollution, water pollution, and hazardous wastes. But we also worry about hostile work environments â&#x20AC;&#x153;pollutedâ&#x20AC;? by discrimination, claims of cultural pollution leveled against violent entertainment and internet pornography, and political processes polluted by excessive campaign spending. As I have argued elsewhere, a wide range of pollution claims have long appeared in the law and literature, with the idea of moral pollution preceding the contemporary understanding of pollution as a uniquely environmental

phenomenon. Offensive sights fit within this broader understanding of pollution. These offensive sights are polluting agents because their appearance is found objectionable. A polluting agent is placed into the environment by a sign, a tower, a building, or a disorganized pile of materials. The affected environment is the heretofore uncluttered outdoor landscape. The most common harm associated with visual pollution is the annoyance resulting from the perception of something that is judged unsightly. Aesthetic concerns have also been linked to human health and blamed for depriving landowners of the cultural identity of their neighborhood.

Cell Phone Towers as Visual Pollution John Copeland Nagle

CASE STUDIES

MOTORCAR:

THE MECHANICAL BRIDE MARSHALL MCLUHAN By the late 1950s, the automobile began to overtake the home as the American symbol of accrued wealth. Beyond status, it became an extension of the self, an emblem of the masculine sex object.

I was terrific. There I was in my white Continental, and I was wearing a pure-silk, pure-white, embroidered cowboy shirt, and black gabardine trousers. Beside me in the car was my jet-black Great Dane imported from Europe, named Dana von Krupp. You just can’t do any better than that.

Lynn White tells the story of the stirrup and the heavy-armored knight in his Medieval Technology and Social Change. So expensive yet so mandatory was the armored rider for shock combat, that the cooperative feudal system came into existence to pay for his equipment. Renaissance gunpowder and ordnance ended the military role of the knight and returned the city to the pedestrian burgess.

Although it may be true to say that an American is a creature of four wheels, and to point out that American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s-license age than at voting age, it is also true that the car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound. Some observers insist that, as a status symbol, the house has, of late, supplanted the car. If so, this shift from the mobile open road to the manicured roots of suburbia may signify a real change in American orientation. There is a growing uneasiness about the degree to which cars have become the real population of our cities, with a resulting loss of human scale, both in power and in distance. The town planners are plotting ways and means to buy back our cities for the pedestrian from the big transportation interests.

If the motorist is technologically and economically far superior to the armored knight, it may be that electric changes in technology are about to dismount him and return us to the pedestrian scale. “Going to work” may be only a transitory phase, like “going shopping.” The grocery interests have long foreseen the possibility of shopping by two-way TV, or video-telephone. William M Freeman, writing for The New York Times Service (Tuesday, October 15, 1963), reports that there will certainly be “a decided transition from today’s distribution vehicles. . . . Mrs. Customer will be able to tune in on various stores. Her credit identification will be picked up automatically via television. Items in full and faithful coloring will be viewed. Distance will hold no problem, since by the end of the century the consumer will be able to make direct television connections regardless of how many miles are involved.”

There is a growing uneasiness about the degree to which cars have become the real population of our cities, with a resulting loss of human scale, both in power and in distance.

What is wrong with all such prophecies is that they assume a stable framework of fact --in this case, the house and the store which is usually the first to disappear. The changing relation between customer and shopkeeper is as nothing compared to the changing pattern of work itself, in an age of automation.

Here is a news items that captures a good deal of the meaning of the automobile in relation to social life:

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CYBORGS & ORGANICS

Lamborghini wheel arch moldings, front (pair) only. Image courtesy of the public domain

It is true that going-to and coming-from work are almost certain to lose all of their present character. The car as vehicle, in that sense, will go the way of the horse. The horse has lost its role in transportation but has made a strong comeback in entertainment. So with the motorcar. Its future does not belong in the area of transportation. Had the infant automotive industry; in 1910, seen fit to call a conference to consider the future of the horse, the discussion would have been concerned to discover new jobs for the horse and new kinds of training to extend the usefulness of the horse. The complete revolution in transportation and in housing and city arrangement would have been ignored. The

turn of our economy to making and servicing motorcars, and the devotion of much leisure time to their use on a vast new highway system, would not even have been thought of. In other words, it is the framework itself that changes with new technology, and not just the picture within the frame. Instead of thinking of doing our shopping by television, we should become aware that TV intercom means the end of shopping itself, and the end of work as we know it as present. The same fallacy besets out thinking about TV and education. We think of TV as an incidental aid, whereas in fact it has already transformed the learning process of the young, quite independently of home and school alike.

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In the 1930s, when millions of comic books were inundating the young with gore, nobody seemed to notice that emotionally the violence of millions of cars in our streets was incomparably more hysterical than anything that could ever be printed. All the rhinos and hippos and elephants in the world, if gathered in one city, could not begin to create the menace and explosive intensity of the hourly and daily experience of the internal-combustion engine. Are people really expected to internalize live with --all this power and explosive violence, without processing and siphoning it off into some form of fantasy for compensation and balance?

Nobody seemed to notice that emotionally the violence of millions of cars in our streets was incomparably more hysterical than anything that could ever be printed. In the silent pictures of the 1920s a great many of the sequences involved the motorcar and policemen. Since the film was then accepted as an optical illusion, the cop was the principal reminder of the existence of ground rules in the game of fantasy. As such, he took an endless beating. The motorcars of the 1920s look to our eyes like ingenious contraptions hastily assembled in a tool shop. Their link with the buggy was still strong and clear. Then came the balloon tires, the massive interior, and the bulging fenders. Some people see the big car as a sort of bloated middle age, following the gawky period of the first love-affair between America and the car. But funny as the Viennese analysts have been able to get about the car as sex object, they have at last, in so doing, drawn attention to the fact that, like the bees in the plant world, men have always been the sex organs of the technological world. The car is no more and no less a sex object than the wheel or the hammer. What the motivation researchers have missed entirely is the fact that the American sense of spatial form has changed much since radio, and drastically since TV It is misleading, though harmless, to try to grasp this change as

middle-age reaching out for the sylph Lolita. Certainly there have been some strenuous slimming programs for the car in recent years. But if one were to ask, “Will the car last?” or “Is the motorcar here to stay?” there would be confusion and doubt at once. Strangely, in so pro-

Highway 66, located in Nevada.

gressive an age, when change has become the only constant in our lives, we never ask, “Is the car here to stay?” The answer, of course, is “No.” In the electric age, the wheel itself is obsolescent. At the heart of the car industry there are men who know that the car is passing, as certainly as the cuspidor was doomed when the lady typist arrived on the business scene. What arrange-

ments have they made to ease the automobile industry off the center of the stage? The mere obsolescence of the wheel does not mean its disappearance. It means only that, like penmanship or typography, the wheel will move into a subsidiary role in the culture. In the middle of the nineteenth century great success was achieved with steam-engined cars on the open road. Only the heavy toll-taxes levied by local road authorities discouraged steam engines on the highways. Pneumatic tires were fitted to a steam car in France in 1887. The American Stanley Steamer began to flourish in 1899. Ford had already built his first car in 1896, and the Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903. It was the electric spark that enabled the gasoline engine to take over from the steam engine. The crossing of electricity, the biological form, with the mechanical form was never to release a greater force. It is TV that has dealt the heavy blow to the American car. The car and the assembly line had become the ultimate expression of Gutenberg technology; that is, of uniform and repeatable processes applied to all aspects of work and living. TV brought a questioning of all mechanical assumptions about uniformity and standardization, as of all consumer values. TV brought also obsession with depth study and analysis. Motivation research, offering to hook the ad and the id, became immediately acceptable to the frantic executive world that felt the same way about the new American tastes as Al Capp did about his 50,000,000

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audience when TV struck. Something had happened. America was not the same. For forty years the car had been the great leveler of physical space and of social distance as well. The talk about the American car as a status symbol has always overlooked the basic fact that it is the power of the motorcar that levels all social differences, and makes the pedestrian a second-class citizen. Many people have observed how the real integrator or leveler of white and Negro in the South was the private car and the truck, not the expression of moral points of view. The simple and obvious fact about the car is that, more than any horse, it is an extension of man that turns the rider into a superman. It is a hot, explosive medium of social communication. And TV, by cooling off the American public tastes and creating new needs for unique wrap-around space, which the European car promptly provided, practically unhorsed the American auto-cavalier. The small European cars reduce him to near-pedestrian status once more. Some people manage to drive them on the sidewalk.

For forty years the car had been the great leveler of physical space and of social distance as well.

do go, and wherever the automobile goes, the automobile version of civilization surely follows. Now this is a TV-oriented sentiment that is not only anti-car and anti-standardization, but anti-Gutenberg, and therefore anti-American as well. Of course, I know that John Keats doesn’t mean this. He had never thought about media or the way in which Gutenberg created Henry Ford and the assembly line and standardized culture. All he knew was that it was popular to decry the uniform, the standardized, and the hot forms of communication, in general. For that reason, Vance Packard could make hay with The Hidden Persuaders. He hooted at the old salesmen and the hot media, just as MAD does. Before TV, such gestures would have been meaningless. It wouldn’t have paid off. Now, it pays to laugh at the mechanical and the merely standardized. John Keats could question the central glory of classless American society by saying, “If you’ve seen one part of America, you’ve seen it all,” and that the car gave the American the opportunity, not to travel and experience adventure, but “to make himself more and more common.” Since TV, it has become popular to regard the more and more uniform and repeatable products of industry with the same contempt that a Brahmin like Henry

The car did its social leveling by horsepower alone. In turn, the car created highways and resorts that were not only very much alike in all parts of the land, but equally available to all. Since TV, there is naturally frequent complaint about this uniformity of vehicle and vacation scene. As John Keats put it in his attack on the car and the industry in The Insolent Chariots, where one automobile can go, all other automobiles

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James might have felt for a chamber-pot dynasty in 1890. It is true that automation is about to produce the unique and custom-built at assembly-line speed and cheapness. Automation can manage the bespoke car or coat with less fuss than we ever produced the standardized ones. But the unique product cannot circulate in our market or distribution setups. As a result, we are moving into a most revolutionary period in marketing, as in everything else.

When Europeans used to visit America before the Second War they would say, “But you have communism here!” What they meant was that we not only had standardized goods, but everybody had them. Our millionaires not only ate cornflakes and hot dogs, but really thought of themselves as middle-class people. What else? How could a millionaire be anything but “middleclass” in America unless he had the creative imagination of an artist to make a unique life for himself? Is it strange that Europeans should associate uniformity of environment and commodities with communism? And that Lloyd Warner and his associates, in their studies of American cities, should speak of the American class system in terms of income? The highest income cannot liberate a North American from his “middle-class” life. The lowest income gives everybody a considerable piece of the same middle-class existence. That is, we really have homogenized our schools and factories and cities and entertainment to a great extent, just because we are literate and do accept the logic of uniformity and homogeneity that is inherent in Gutenberg technology. This logic, which had never been

accepted in Europe until very recently, has suddenly been questioned in America, since the tactile mesh of the TV mosaic has begun to permeate the American sensorium. When a popular writer can, with confidence, decry the use of the car for travel as making the driver “more and more common,” the fabric of American life has been questioned.

Our millionaires not only ate cornflakes and hot dogs, but really thought of themselves as middle-class people. Only a few years back Cadillac announced its “El Dorado Brougham” as having anti-dive control, outriggers, pillarless styling, projectile-shaped gull-wing bumpers, outboard exhaust ports, and various other exotic features borrowed from the non-motorcar world. We were invited to associate it with Hawaiian surf riders, with gulls soaring like sixteen-inch shells, and with the boudoir of Madame de Pompadour. Could MAD magazine do any better? In the TV age, any of these tales from the Vienna woods, dreamed up by motivational researchers, could be relied upon to be an ideal comic script for MAD. The script was always there, in fact, but not till TV was the audience conditioned to enjoy it. To mistake the car for a status symbol, just because it is asked to be taken as anything but a car, is to mistake the whole meaning of this very late product of the mechanical age that is now yielding its form to electric technology. The car is a superb piece of uniform, standardized mechanism that is of a piece with the Gutenberg technology and literacy which created the first classless society in the world. The car gave to the democratic cavalier his horse and armor and haughty

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insolence in one package, transmogrifying the knight into a misguided missile. In fact, the American car did not level downward, but upward, toward the aristocratic idea. Enormous increase and distribution of power had also been the equalizing force of literacy and various other forms of mechanization, The willingness to accept the car as a status symbol, restricting its more expansive form to the use of higher executives, is not a mark of the car and mechanical age, but of the electric forces that are now ending this mechanical age of uniformity and standardization, and recreating the norms of status and role. When the motorcar was new, it exercised the typical mechanical pressure of explosion and separation of functions. It broke up family life, or so it seemed, in the 1920s. It separated work and domicile, as never before. It exploded each city into a dozen suburbs, and then extended many of the forms of urban life along the highways until the open road seemed to become nonstop cities. It created the asphalt jungles, and caused 40,000 square miles of green and pleasant land to be cemented over. With the arrival of plane travel, the motorcar and truck teamed up together to wreck the railways. Today small children plead for a train ride as if it were a stagecoach or horse and cutter: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Before theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re gone, Daddy.â&#x20AC;?

It exploded each city into a dozen suburbs, and then extended many of the forms of urban life along the highways until the open road seemed to become nonstop cities.

reared. Streets, and even sidewalks, became too intense a scene for the casual interplay of growing up. As the city filled with mobile strangers, even next-door neighbors became strangers. This is the story of the motorcar, and it has not much longer to run. The tide of taste and tolerance has turned, since TV, to make the hot-car medium increasingly tiresome. Witness the portent of the crosswalk, where the small child has power to stop a cement truck. The same change has rendered the big city unbearable to many who would no more have felt that way ten years ago than they could have enjoyed reading MAD. The continuing power of the car medium to transform the patterns of settlement appears fully in the way in which the new urban kitchen has taken on the same central and multiple social character as the old farm kitchen. The farm kitchen had been the key point of entry to the farmhouse, and had become the social center, as well. The new suburban home again makes the kitchen the center and, ideally, is localized for access to and from the car. The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man. Even before the Volkswagen, observers above street level have often noticed the near-resemblance of cars to shiny-backed insects. In the age of the tactile-oriented skin-diver, this hard shiny carapace is one of the blackest marks against the motorcar. It is for motorized man that the shopping plazas have emerged. They are strange islands that make the pedestrian feel friendless and disembodied. The car bugs hm. The car, in a word, has quite refashioned all of the spaces that unite and separate men, and it will continue to do so for a decade more, by which time the electronic successors to the car will be manifest.

The motorcar ended the countryside and substituted a new landscape in which the car was a sort of steeplechaser. At the same time, the motor destroyed the city as a casual environment in which families could be

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The Bahrain International Circuit, a motorsport race track. Bahrain I 2005 by Andreas Gursky

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DEPARTING FROM MARXIAN ACCOUNTS OF INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION IN WHICH FACTORY LABORERS BECOME ALIENATED FROM THEMSELVES IN THE PROCESS OF OPERATING MACHINERY, MICHEL FOUCAULT [CHARACTERIZES] THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HUMANS AND DISCIPLINARY MACHINERY AS ONE OF CONNECTION RATHER THAN ESTRANGEMENT, IN WHICH “A COERCIVE LINK WITH THE APPARATUS OF PRODUCTION” [JOINS] A GIVEN BODY TO THE OBJECT IT HANDLED. 44

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Maintenance worker operating on a new model mecha. Image by Klaus Wittmann

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SKIN â&#x20AC;&#x201D;TO

From one person to the next, how is worth partitioned and striated amongst bodies?

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— SKIN SKIN—TO—SKIN

Skin-To-Skin focuses on the hierarchical nature of the politics that follow human bodies. In Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, she argues that “One of the places where humans have some agency is in the orders that we ourselves impose: our spatial and temporal arrangements, our hierarchies of value and distributions of wealth—our forms.”

What invisible boundaries do certain groups run up against that others do not realize or acknowledge? How have humans built institutions and infrastructure to replicate, reproduce, and reinforce social control over these groups? These borders can be manifested in physical objects—a few examples are archived here.

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11. GLASS CEILINGS

Townley Hall Georgian mansion, Co. Louth, Ireland Photograph by Elena Tatiana 16 March 2017

Imagine a basement which contains all people who are disadvantaged on the basis of race, sex, class, sexual preference, age and/or physical ability. These people are stacked— feet standing on shoulders—with those on the bottom being disadvantaged by the full array of factors, up to the very top, where the heads of all those disadvantaged by a singular factor brush up

against the ceiling. Their ceiling is actually the floor above which only those who are not disadvantaged in any way reside. In efforts to correct some aspects of domination, those above the ceiling admit from the basement only those who can say that “but for” the ceiling, they too would be in the upper room. A hatch is developed through which those placed immediately below can

crawl. Yet this hatch is generally available only to those who—due to the singularity of their burden and their otherwise privileged position relative to those below—are in the position to crawl through. Those who are multiply-burdened are generally left below unless they can somehow pull themselves into the groups that are permitted to squeeze through the hatch.

CASE STUDIES

Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics Kimberle Crenshaw

12. ANGEL ISLAND

Battery Ledyard, near Point Knox, on Angel Island Image courtesy of the public domain

13. ELLIS ISLAND 50

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The need for an immigration facility in San Francisco and for a national immigration bureaucracy was a direct result of anti-Chinese legislation, the Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. These were the first effective pieces of American restrictive immigration legislation; the latter was the hinge on which the legal history of immigration turned. With the passage of the exclusion act, the immigration of Chinese

laborers was outlawed for ten years; this was renewed for another ten years in 1892, and the law was made “permanent” early in Theodore Roosevelt’s administration. Beginning in the 1870s Chinese immigrants in difficulty with the immigration regulations were held in a ramshackle wooden two-story warehouse leased from the Pacific Mail Steamship Company and located at the end of a wharf on the San Francisco waterfront.

The space of Ellis Island circumscribed certain patterns of movement and practices of visualizing the body. The product was, often, the spectacle of Otherness. And all who passed through Ellis Island also became subject to—and then possessor

and executor of—a certain gaze and a certain bodily attitude. Ellis Island functioned as a heterotopic space. And not simply so— always in a tangle of defnitions and as a repository of bad science and overlapping oppressions.

It was commonly called “the shed.” The building, about 100 feet square, held up to 200 people at a time, with men on the first floor and women on the second. Dorene Askin, a historian for the California Department of Parks and Recreation, described it as “crowded and unsanitary,” while a contemporary inspector for the Department of Commerce and Labor reported that it was a “death trap.”

No Lamps Were Lit for Them: Angel Island and the Historiography of Asian American Immigration Roger Daniels

Disabled upon Arrival: The Rhetorical Construction of Disability and Race at Ellis Island Jay Dolmage

Alcatraz in the front, Angel Island in the back. Photograph by Daniel Ramirez

CASE STUDIES

14. REDLINING 52

“This government was made by white men and shall be ruled by white men as long as the republic lasts.” Senator Arthur Pue Gorman Maryland State Democratic boss Fall 1889

Below: Sign with American flag “We want white tenants in our white community,” directly opposite the Sojourner Truth homes, a new U.S. federal housing project in Detroit, Michigan. A riot was caused by white neighbors’ attempts to prevent Negro tenants from moving in. Image by Arthur S. Siegel February 1942

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15. PRISONS

The fact, for example, that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important source of profit helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that the crime

rate was falling. In the context of an economy that was driven by an unprecedented pursuit of profit, no matter what the human cost, and the concomitant dismantling of the welfare state, poor peoplesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; abilities to survive became increasingly conÂstrained

by the looming presence of the prison. The massive prison-building project that began in the 1980s created the means of concentrating and managing what the capitalist system had implicitly declared to be a human surplus.

CASE STUDIES

Are Prisons Obsolete? Angela Y. Davis

16. OVERPOPULATION

A mainland writer, Theodore Schroeder, offered an impassioned piece on “Porto Rico’s Population Problem.” He painted a bleak picture of life on the island and suggested that for a host of ills—hunger, homelessness, lack of eductional opportunity, unemployment, disease (especially syphilis), poor housing—“the largest contributing factor is overpopulation.” (Although for Schroeder this was a timeless condition of the island, it bears remembering that he was writing during the depths of the Depression.) Overpopulation, he suggested, had been exacerbated by U.S. public health interventions, which, he claimed, had lowered the death rate (as we have seen, they had not). His recommendation was

birth control, imposed by force if necessary; he suggested the federal government employ the military. Schroeder warned darkly that the growing population on the island meant that if the alternative was “pillage as the only means of getting food,” then the U.S. army would be forced to restore civil order brutally: “There will be, of course, American soldiers and machine guns to reduce the population. Perhaps this is the best method of solving the problem, but if the time for machine guns should ever come, where will the major responsibility lie?” Sooner or later, he warned, the force of the military might be required to put down Puerto Ricans’ unruly reproduction.

Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico

Above: Architecture of Density, Hong Kong 2003-2014 Photograph by Michael Wolf

Laura Briggs

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Right: Cyber Kowloon Walled City - Warehouse Kawasaki Photograph by Ken Ohyama

CASE STUDIES

17. SEWAGE TREATMENT PLANTS

Several events related to the siting of hazardous facilities, the dumping of hazardous wastes, and the contamination of minority communities led to the emergence of the EJM in the late 1980s to early 1990s. The movement

asserted that minorities and the poor lived in the most degraded environments. Among other things, movement activists argued that minority communities hosted a disproportionate number of hazardous and noxious facilities, were

destroyed for freeways or commercial development, were deprived of amenities such as parks and open space, and were saddled with poor transportation and garbage-removal services. EJ activists coined the term â&#x20AC;&#x153;environ-

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mental racismâ&#x20AC;? to describe processes that resulted in minority and low-income communities facing disproportionate environmental harms and limited environmental benefits (D.E. Taylor, 2000, 2010, 2011).

The Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant for Los Angeles. Also known as the The Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant, it is Los Angelesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; oldest and largest wastewater treatment facility, operating since 1894. The plant has been expanded and improved numerous times over the last 100+ years. Shot from a passenger plane on departure from LAX en route to Newark.

Image by Doc Searls 02 February 2016

Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility Dorceta E. Taylor

CASE STUDIES

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WE T L E F T U O WERE JENNA WORTHAM As revelations of sexual harassment break, women have been discussing the fallout and how to move forward. Here, women from across the working world take on this complicated conversation.

“Revolution will come in a form we cannot yet imagine,” the critical theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney wrote in their 2013 essay “The Undercommons,” about the need to radically upend hierarchical institutions. I thought of their prophecy in October, when a private document listing allegations of sexual harassment and abuse by dozens of men in publishing and media surfaced online.

The list — a Google spreadsheet initially shared exclusively among women, who could anonymously add to it — was created in the immediate aftermath of reports about sexual assault by Harvey Weinstein. The atmosphere among female journalists was thick with the tension of watching the press expose the moral wrongs of Hollywood while neglecting to interrogate our own. The existence of the list suggested that things were worse than we even imagined, given all that it revealed. It was horrifying to see the names of colleagues and friends — people you had mingled with at parties and accepted drinks from — accused of heinous acts.

Left: These sets of eyes are cutouts from a Japanese gravure magazine (equivalent to Playboy). It is never easy for a woman to own an assertive sexuality — there’s always the chance to be misunderstood or blamed. By showing the eyes taken away from the context of sexual pleasures, I would like to open a discussion regarding blurry lines. Image by Ina Jang

A few days after the list appeared, I was in a van with a half dozen other women of color, riding through the desert on our way to a writing retreat. All of us worked in media; most of us had not realized the extent to which harassment polluted our industry. Whisper networks, in which women share secret warnings via word of mouth, require women to tell others whom to avoid and whom to ignore. They are based on trust, and any social hierarchy is rife with the privilege of deciding who gets ac-

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cess to information. Perhaps we were perceived as outsiders, or maybe we weren’t seen as vulnerable. We hadn’t been invited to the happy hours or chats or email threads where such information is presumably shared. The list was F.T.B.T. — for them, by them — meaning, by white women about their experiences with the white men who made up a majority of the names on it. Despite my working in New York media for 10 years, it was my first “whisper” of any kind, a realization that felt almost as hurtful as reading the acts described on the list itself.

It’s still not safe enough for many of us to name our abusers in public. As a young business reporter, no one told me about the New York investor known for luring women out to meals under the guise of work. I found out the hard way. I realized he was a habitual boundary-crosser only after The New York Observer reported on him in 2010. Most recently, after I complained in a media chat room about a man who harassed a friend at a birthday party, everyone chimed in to say that he was a known creep. I was infuriated. That information never made its way to me, and worse, it was taken as a given. Was keeping that secret hidden worth the trauma it caused my friend? The list’s flaws were immediately apparent. It felt too public, volatile and vulnerable to manipulation. But its

recklessness was born out of desperation. It detonated the power and labor dynamics that whisper networks reinforce. Information, once privileged to a select few, became decentralized and accessible to all. And the problem of sexual harassment no longer belonged solely to women to filter and share. Once the list leaked beyond its initial audience and men became aware of it, it was effectively shut down. But who knows what would have happened if it lasted longer? Maybe a better mechanism for warning and reporting harassment could have been finessed; it’s clear we still need one. Even now, amid the torrent of reports of sexual misconduct, women of color are conspicuously absent. It’s still not safe enough for many of us to name our abusers in public. But during the initial hours after the list’s publication, when it still felt secret, for women only, I moved through the world differently. The energy in the air felt charged, like after the siren goes off in the “Purge” movies. A friend compared the feeling to the final scenes of “V for Vendetta.” She liked seeing women as digital vigilantes, knowing that men were scared. I did, too. I wanted every single man put on notice, to know that they, too, were vulnerable because women were talking. Maybe, within that, we glimpsed the possibility of a new world order, like the one Moten and Harney gestured at. The list was not long for this world, but it might have lived long enough to prove its point.

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THE EFFE CTS OF THE ONE -CHILD POLICY IN CHINA

KAREN ZRAICK

China’s one-child policy, once called the Great Wall of family planning, was among the boldest strategies any nation has deployed in modern times to manage the size of its population. But after 35 years in force, experts say, the policy was having undesirable side effects: It upended traditional structures for supporting older adults and led to a widening imbalance in the number of men and women, one that could sow social unrest.

Experts say that China will feel the effects of the One-Child Policy for decades. How has this policy influenced other countries in their efforts to introduce family planning onto the population?

Many in China welcomed the announcement on Thursday that the policy would be changed to allow two children per couple. But experts said that, because having one child has become the social norm in China, the change will have only a limited impact, while the old policy’s legacy will be felt for decades to come.

Fertility Rate May Remain Low Demographers agree that around the world, fertility rates generally fall as wealth and women’s educational levels rise. Hazel Denton, a former World Bank economist who teaches demography and development at Georgetown University, predicted that over the long run, this effect would have more impact in China than the policy change. “Where women have a choice, and they have the opportunity to be educated and employed, they will choose a smaller family,” Dr. Denton said. Many wealthy countries, in fact, are more worried about their populations shrinking than growing. Most

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have fertility rates below the level needed to maintain a stable population — about 2.1 births per woman — and some have tried to create incentives for families to have more babies. Richard Jackson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that China’s neighbors tend to have low fertility rates. In Hong Kong, the rate is about one child per woman, even though Beijing’s one-child policy never applied there. Dr. Jackson said the rate in China was about 1.5 births per woman before the policy change, in part because many exceptions to the onechild rule were made. The rule was most strongly enforced in cities, he said, while families in the countryside whose first child was a daughter were often allowed to try a second time for a son. He predicted that China’s fertility rate would probably climb to only 1.8 children per woman.

A Lingering Gender Imbalance In a society with a widespread preference for sons, the one-child policy led to a significantly skewed ratio of men to women: There are now about 120 boys born in China for every 100 girls, Dr. Jackson said. “China will be living with the pernicious legacy of this gender imbalance for decades to come,” he said. “It should have lifted the policy years ago.” Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute noted that human populations will naturally give birth to slightly more male than female babies,

but because boys are more likely to die than girls, the gender ratio tends to equalize by the time a generation reaches childbearing age. Demographers say there is a social preference for male children across East Asia, though not to the extremes seen in China. It remains to be seen whether permission to have a second child will make China’s families look more like its neighbors’.

Caring for a Rapidly Aging Population While China’s birthrate would probably have fallen as the country developed, the one-child policy brought it down very suddenly. Dr. Jackson, an author of a 2008 report on aging in China, said that brought the unexpected consequence of a dire shortage of younger relatives to care for a rapidly aging population. The median age in China today is about 37, a year younger than the figure for the United States. By 2050, according to United Nations population projections, America’s median age will have climbed to 42 — but China’s will have shot up to 50. “Chinese leaders have probably taken a look at this prospect and decided they need to slow it down,” Samuel Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania, said. Dr. Jackson noted that in China’s Confucian culture, it is the duty of a son to support and care for his aging parents — but as a practical matter, the burden generally falls on his wife. “By not having daughters,” he said of the gender imbalance, “you end up not having daughters-in-law.”

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A woman carrying a child in a basket on the outskirts of Chongqing, China, in 2013. Photograph by Eugene Hoshiko for the Associated Press

SKINâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;TOâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;SKIN

Train traveling up Mount Paektu, the active volcano on the Chinaâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;North Korea border. Image courtesy of the public domain

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Crucially, politics also means enforcing hierarchies of high and low, white and black, masculine and feminine, straight and queer, have and have-not. In other words, politics involves activities of ordering, patterning, and shaping. And if the political is a matter of imposing and enforcing boundaries, temporal patterns, and hierarchies on experience, then there is no politics without form. SKINâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;TOâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;SKIN

ANIMAL TRAPS PLASTIC ENTOMOPHAGY SCIENCE FICTION FAMILY PLANNING REDLINING CASINOS BIRTH CONTROL CONTRACTS FREEWAYS CLOUD SEEDING CITIZENSHIP PACEMAKERS VOTING RIGHTS MAZES SIMULATIONS ANGEL ISLAND ELECTION FORECASTS MAPS ISLANDS PSEUDO-SCIENCE EXTINCTION FIBER OPTIC CABLES BRIDGES MOLDY FOOD THE NINE CIRCLES OF HELL CROWDS