Crack-Up Capitalism

Canary Wharf laid down a marker on London’s future. It was a symbol of the UK’s drift away from where it had been since the Second World War, namely a country defined by manufacturing and even agricultural self-sufficiency. Before the war, Britain had been a trailblazer of globalised trade. At the start of the twentieth century, it imported almost all its food, right down to eggs.⁴⁸ After the war, there was a shift to more production for local consumption. London’s Royal Docks closed down because of containerisation, but also because grain silos weren’t necessary when wheat was being grown at home.⁴⁹ This self-sufficiency faded in the 1980s, as the UK once again began to import more than it exported. The country that had been the ‘most manufacturing-intensive economy in the world’ began to do other things.⁵⁰ Chief among those was the business of finance. By 1991, there were more people in office work than in manufacturing or agricultural production⁵¹ ‘The London that had traded things’ one historian writes, ‘became the London that traded money’.⁵²

The zone may have been a dagger aimed at the heart of socialism, but socialism did not go down without a struggle. The strongest opposition came from the city government itself, the Greater London Council (GLC), which became the standard-bearer for a socialist vision of London after the election of left Labour politician Ken Livingstone in 1981. If Thatcher’s government drew lessons from the economic dragons of the Far East, the ‘new urban left’ of the GLC practiced a different kind of internationalism. They sought to create links between the recent immigrant communities in London with the older working class.⁵³ The GLC saw the neighbourhood as a place where small versions of the future could be made, what are sometimes called prefigurative politics. An early success came on Coin Street, across the Thames from the financial district of the City, where they were able to block the plans of a developer and claim the land for a community trust, given to local residents to develop in their own interests.⁵⁴ The group organised clerical workers in the City of London and even mobilised to have the anachronistic medieval government that ruled the financial district abolished.⁵⁵

Winning the capitalist game globally seemed to have little to do with abstract questions of democratic liberty. People in the industry saw this as no coincidence: centralizing power in a CEO-like head of state allowed for a unity of message.⁸⁸ Democracy was messy. It folded in different visions of a country, left loose ends and dangling, ragged narratives. Capitalism without democracy could hit the target every time. Indeed, if one judged countries the way one judged companies – as everything about the global market was saying we should – then Dubai won in all metrics. What was a dismal Freedom House ranking compared to the world’s tallest skyscraper? Next to land valuations that rose 10 percent a year, what was a place at the bottom of the World Press Freedom list? Concerns over political and civil liberties could seem like sentimental anachronisms of an earlier time, indulgences one could no longer afford in the constant combat of global competition.

The platforms that we log on to are owned by private actors. Our every keystroke (and when we are strapped into a VR rig, our every twitch, bend, and nod) is minutely tracked, traced, sorted, calibrated, and sold onward to advertisers and other developers. It says a lot that one of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies – Uber – did not offer an empty prairie on which to roam and build. Rather, if you were a driver, it pulled you along like a dog on a leash, punishing you for any deviation while preserving the fiction that you were a free contractor. The metaverse, as one critic has astutely observed, is probably best thought of as a cubicle.⁷⁶ The private government of corporations has little space for the alternative visions of collectives, other than those that reproduce its own dominance.

As one of the foundational texts of tech criticism notes, Silicon Valley often forgets its Hegel at its own risk.⁷⁷ The German philosopher taught that the master is always dependent on the slave. Neither island nor cloud can exist without its underclass. Beyond the masses of app-mediated gig workers, even the vaunted artificial intelligence programs work only because of the often repetitive routines and efforts of labor both skilled and unskilled.⁷⁸ From Honduras to Dubai, the waged service class is the easiest for the visionaries to forget and the hardest for them to live without. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, Singapore initially thought it had flattened the curve, until it was hit by a wave of infections from the migrant workers living in cramped quarters away from the public eye. The city’s leaders had seemingly forgotten they existed. The cloud floats because the underclass holds it up. Time will tell if they drop their arms one day and make something new.