Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism
edited by Mike Davis & Daniel Bertrand Monk
First reviewed September 2014
2014 was a pivotal year in my life, and not just because I did not know what “neoliberalism” was when I read Evil Paradises. I don’t think I knew quite what it meant even after finishing the book, and though everything may have changed for me in late 2014, the concept of neoliberal dystopias didn’t; they broke into the mainstream, and this book—though I didn’t grasp it completely—set the stage for my understanding of our current brand of political unrest.
I feel like there is a before and after for my brain and this book. The antidote to the ennui engendered here was likely The Mushroom at the End of the World, which unfortunately for me I was three years away from finding. I also find it quaint that I reference books I read before I started writing about books online—that rarely happens anymore.
Everything is a wreck. Is this even hyperbole anymore? We, as a global society, are constantly piling atop our monocultural hegemony a thick framework overloaded with ever-more-tenuous social constructs—what good were the currently marketable skills of search engine optimization or self-actualized life coaching one hundred years ago? Fifty? Ten? How many thousand unstable technologies do these skills depend upon, and how many more ephemeral, transient, or simply foolish threads can be spun upon our improbable Babel-spire of modernity before it collapses from its own weight.
Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism takes this point and runs it through a scrim of voices, perspectives, and examples that all point to the same thing: society is broken, and getting worse. Trust is proven ever more foolish; populism or ecology are bound up in lobbyist supremacy as much as anything else:
Since natural gas prices have more than quadrupled in the last few years, [Ted] Turner’s New Mexico land is potentially worth more than his media holdings ever were. So in 2004 he signed a deal with El Paso Natural Gas to develop more than 1,000 wells in his wilderness. To help assure the future of natural gas, two of Turner’s charitable foundations fund the Energy Future Coalition, which is lobbying Congress to mandate more smog-reducing vehicles—such as city buses that run on natural gas.
The green-leaf iconography and pleasing homeliness of “natural gas”—signifiers of ecological foresight or pluralistic promise—are still based on money; a wealthy man with connections happens to own a lot of natural gas. Now that resource will be sold as environmental to a society hungry for a veneer of change that doesn’t require any sort of sacrifice—pretty pictures, pretty thoughts, dirty world.
The Metropolis-like phantasmagoria of Dubai’s super-skyscrapers or the Olympic megastructures in Beijing arise from the toil of migrant workers whose own homes are fetid barracks and desolate encampments. In the larger perspective, the bright archipelagos of utopian luxury and “supreme lifestyles” are mere parasites on a “planet of slums.”
The beauty of the American dream is the same self-delusional destruction that traps citizens into voting against or not demonstrating for their current interests: you’re not super-rich yet, but you could be, and won’t those megastructures and tax breaks and supreme lifestyles be glorious once you get yours? That the essence of Neoliberalism—allow all of the rules to be broken in hope that one day you’re in the power position that gets to reap the benefits through connection, deception, or luck.
Nearly the same bug infests libertarianism:
...by contrast, [libertarianism] is a theory of and for those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent, or insufficiently connected to win the Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy....libertarians are political dissidents only in attenuated and narrowly selfish directions.
A society that allows the winner to take all because each person thinks they have a shot to be the winner is either broken or just plain stupid—if the winner is already taking all, why would they ever unentrench themselves? Why would Ted Turner announce that ripping natural gas out of the earth is just as caustic to the environment as drilling for oil, when he owns a fortune—provided he can “chow at the state trough” —in natural gas? Who gives up a livelihood built around a corrupt system voluntarily?
Lawrence Lessig does. Copyright is a system so paradigmatic to the bloat and corruption that even as the preeminent copyright attorney in the country, Lawrence Lessig threw up his hands and walked away. His life now is advocating the removal of money from politics [edit from 2023—rootstrikers.org is a functionally dead website. Bleak]. It’s a crushing indictment of the entire system, akin to the finest sushi chef in the world shuttering his or her restaurant—in recognition of the deleterious effects of overfishing—to found a reform movement showcasing the environmental benefits of veganism. It is Ted Turner saying, “Natural Gas is not as clean as our iconography suggests. Go bike more.” I am always so impressed by Mr. Lessig’s ability to give up all the trappings of success and prestige to do what he felt was needed. Read How to Fix Copyright. Then read So Damn Much Money. Then go protest. Or cry. Or both. Everything is so broken.
It isn’t simply government corruption or high-ideal social justice that is being obliterated by the steady encroachment of neoliberalism:
In fact, looking back, the brief dominance of MTV in the 1990s might be seen as a sort of pop rendition of the then (and still now) triumphant “no alternative” economics of neoliberalism, all outsides being subsumed into the “flat world” logic of market globalization, whether they were geopolitical, economic, or pop cultural. [edit from 2023—I don’t think I would add my own hyperlinks to blockquotes anymore]
There isn’t anything but mainstream any longer—fragmented, sure—no way to truly live outside of the system since the system encompasses everything. The whole of the western social world has been connected; even if you are “off” facebook or twitter like you might not have “been into” Nirvana, you’re still living in a society in which each nightly news program requests tweets, each article has a comments section, and each autonomous adult is available to contact invariably:
Why must one travel hours in the car and spend days away from home to escape gadgets that are entirely under our own control? The answer, of course, is that they are not. Information technology is central to contemporary society; integral to the goal of providing the “comfortable and “safe” family that is our society’s primary social value. Without e-mail, Internet, and telephone, few of us could teach our classes, do our homework, write our reports, plan our meetings, contact our customers, track our assets, pay our bills, or, for that matter, reach our friends and family.
We bring the globalized world and its expanded work demands into our family homes well beyond work hours so as to be able to pay for those homes and yet still be “with” those families. The price we pay for our affluence-through-unfettered exchange is allowing the outside world unfettered access into our lives. And, in turn, televisions and ever more elaborate media centers that generate still more noise have become the primary means by which our hard-acquired wealth is displayed, and through which it is enjoyed.
The prevailing zeitgeist seems to be one of increased interdependence; interconnectedness; surveillance. Why—in our digital age: where intrusive police-state tactics such as unmanned aerial drones and NSA eavesdropping via planned backdoors—are we, the voting public, slathering over the concept of putting constant video recording devices on police officers? What happened to the rights carved out by the Handschu Agreement?
None of the answers to these questions will be found in Evil Paradises, which is not new text; it just feels like it.