The arrival of ChatGPT has placed artificial intelligence at the center of US discourse. Not surprisingly, one touchstone for these debates have been the novels of sci-fi author Philip K. Dick. As it happens, this AI-inspired interest in the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, among many other visionary works, comes at a time when American policy elites are also gripped by a new urban malaiseanother constant motif in Dicks body of work. <\/p>\n
Today, this pair of Dickian concernsthe rise of the AI era and urban declineare assigned different weights by the left and the right. So far, its mostly progressive institutions like The New York Times sounding the alarm about the risks of unhindered AI. The mostly libertarian-inflected right, by contrast, has taken a predictable Let it rip! attitude, the better to punish coastal liberals whose bullshit jobs are threatened by platforms like ChatGPT. <\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Americas urban malaise codes as a right-wing concern, with conservative politicians and media determined to make electoral hay of disorder in the cities, a situation that they charge has been exacerbated by liberal politicos lax approach to lifestyle crimes. Among conservatives, the term blue city is permanently (and not wholly unjustly) linked with needle-strewn sidewalks, homeless encampments, and rampant shoplifting. <\/p>\n
The two issues are, in fact, closely entangled, in a way that Dick saw clearly but that has often eluded both his cinematic interpreters and the elites who have sought to understand the present by examining his imagined futures. A minor episode in the intellectual history of Los Angeles illustrates this. That was the last time American officialdom turned to Dick as a prophet, albeit via Blade Runner, Ridley Scotts cinematic adaptation of Do Androids? <\/p>\n
In 1988, some 150 eminent citizens of LAleaders in politics, business, academe, and philanthropysubmitted a report to then-Mayor Tom Bradley outlining their ambitions for the city as it prepared for the 21st century. In the most notable contribution, the California historian Kevin Starr paid tribute to generations of Angelinos for embracing a headlong futurity: constantly adapting the environment to their visions, natural limits be damned. <\/p>\n
Yet Starr wasnt without his fears. The LA of the 1920san era of dramatic growth, when the city had willed its water, railroads, and housing stock into being and then invited a million newcomershad a dominant establishment and a dominant population. He meant white protestants. Yes, their primacy meant overlooking certain suppressions and injustices, but the old regime had supplied the civic unity needed to sustain cohesion amid explosive growth. <\/p>\n
Where, Starr wondered, will Los Angeles 2000 find its community, its city in common? One answer came courtesy of Dick-inspired sci-fi: There is the Blade Runner scenario: the fusion of individual cultures into a demotic polyglotism ominous with unresolved hostilities that would now erupt in violence, now settle down in negotiated truce. <\/p>\n
Techno-capitalism and urban dilapidation seemed to go hand-in-hand. <\/p>\n
As the Marxist geographer Mike Davis, who died last year at age 76, noted, Starrs offhand remark attested to Blade Runners enduring status as the star of sci-fi dystopias. The film has become a sort of visual shorthand for a set of persistent American anxieties about biotechnology, corporate misrule, and multiculturalism, projected from the California dream factory onto the rest of the country (and the world). For Davis, it was significant that the dream factory, Hollywood, was located nearby other key Golden State industries, not least computing and biotech, whose business was to slingshot our species into Dickian dystopia. <\/p>\n
Yet Davis wasnt very impressed by Blade Runner as a piece of urban futurism. While boasting whiz-bang effects (by 80s standards), the movie presented a retread of a much older old, and racially tinged, picture of the future as Manhattan-style giganticism: teeming masses of culturally mixed and confused human drones huddling under massive pyramids of steel and glass. <\/p>\n
That picture no doubt appealed to the likes of Starr as they sought to place the sole blame for the political-economic dislocations and contradictions of California at the feet of multiculturalism. Lamenting the loss of WASP primacy was a lot easier than facing up to the de-industrialization and middle-class destruction wrought by the neoliberal revolution launched by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. <\/p>\n
For Davis, the Kevin Starr\/Blade Runner vision of Los Angeles (as yellow-peril giganticism) missed something still more crucial: the fact that the advances in technology hatched in California sat next to a great unbroken chain of aging bungalows, stucco apartments, and ranch style homesall decaying as the city entered the third millennium. Techno-capitalism and urban dilapidation, sentient machines and lousy bus lines, seemed to go hand-in-hand. <\/p>\n
This overlapping of high-tech and physical disrepair is by now ubiquitous not just in California, but across the United States. In Gotham, where I live, Wall Streets Masters of the Universe are still at it, deploying unbelievably complex algorithms to squeeze arbitrage out of the real economy and into their own asset ledgers. Meanwhile, the roads connecting New York City to its airports are riddled with cracks and potholes that recall the Third World (except, many developing nations are actually pulling ahead and frequently boast gleaming new infrastructure). The city itself is filthier than I remember in more than a decade. The subway system dates from the 19th century. The mayor has appointed a rat czar. <\/p>\n
America is still the worlds largest and, by some measures, most advanced economy. Yet its headlong futurity coexists with a country where bedbugs quite literally suck the life out of prisoners. New York, LA, Chicago, Seattle, and the Bay Area distill this apparent contradiction in especially concentrated form, but its a national problem. Indeed, Americas Republican-governed states are in some ways worse, since their low-tax, low-spending model fails to attract the sexy futuristic industries. <\/p>\n
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