DOUGALD HINE

Tag: newsletters

  • The View From the Kitchen Table

    When it got to the end of the year, we took two weeks offline, to rest and be with family and take long walks, and to talk over the beginnings of this thing we call a school. Often, when you make time to reflect like this, there’ll be a moment, a particular memory that surfaces, a story with something to tell you. This time around, it wasn’t anything from the week in June when we held our first course, but a conversation a month or so earlier. And if I’m going to tell you where we’ve got to, what we’ve come to see about the work that lies ahead, then — like Janus, the old god of the threshold — I need to start off looking back as well as forward.

     *   *   *

    The first Saturday in May, seven in the evening and the door to the back garden is still open. A month earlier we had snow on the ground; this weekend will turn out to be the prelude to a strange hot summer, a season of droughts and wildfires. For now, though, we are here, seven of us around the table, serving each other from a huge dish of spaghetti. There’s red wine and a lit candle. Some of us only met this afternoon, but we are in the company of friends.

    It’s Karim who turns the conversation to our plans for HOME. He’s caught an echo of his own project, the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences: a pocket-sized community of scholarship and conviviality, born in the shadow of a failed revolution, dedicated to ‘reassembling the social’ on a human scale. Anna used to live in Egypt, running a children’s literature project, and it doesn’t take long to find mutual connections, but Karim is here in Sweden as the guest of another of the friends around the table. This is Isak, deputy director of the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala, a student-led centre inside the otherwise conventional structures of Sweden’s oldest university. He’s also organising Climate Existence, the conference where Karim and I are to hold a session in a few days’ time. Besides Alfie — who’s nearly three and up past his bedtime — the final members of the company are Shelagh and Peter, old friends from London; they both have long histories working on the boundaries of arts, education and policymaking, and they are two of the kindest and most generous people I met in the years when I moved in those borderlands.

    ‘So I want to hear about this school you’re starting!’ Karim says. ‘What is it going to be like?’

    ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I hope it will be like this, only a little bigger. An extension of the conversations that come together around this table.’

    It’s this answer that hooks me back, at the end of the year — after the intensity of that first course; after the fairground mirror weirdness of reading about ourselves in a glossy magazine; after the decision to slow down, to go deeper into why we’re doing this, to wait for a while — and its simplicity brings the sense of direction we’ve been waiting for.

    *   *   *

    Anna was ahead of me, as usual. It’s there in the name — and the name was her idea, something she said years ago, when we started to talk about creating a hospitable place for bringing together these conversations: ‘It’s not a centre. We’re not starting a community. It’s our home, and everything else is going to start from there.’

    If HOME is a school that starts from the conversations that happen around our kitchen table, then it doesn’t just exist on those weeks when we hold a public course: it happens the rest of the time, as well, in all the work that goes on in between, all the people who pass through this household, all the living and learning together. This is obvious, but it’s not the way we’ve been telling the story — and the way we tell stories has consequences.

    For a start, if I look at things this way, it gives a different picture of the work we did in 2018. Those five days in June become part of a patchwork of activity that wasn’t all building up to or coming down from the course itself.

    Among the other pieces in the patchwork, there are shared meals, like that evening in early May — and guests like Shelagh and Peter who come to stay for a while, to take a step back from the busy-ness of their work, to talk and think together, to make connections which go forward into what they do next.

    There’s the theatre-maker Luca Rutherford who came in August, funded by the Arts Council, to spend a week with us working on the script for her show about escaping from political paralysis.

    There’s Vanessa Andreotti, Professor of Race, Inequalities and Global Change at UBC, who I met at Climate Existence in May, whose ideas became a touchstone for the June course — and who came to stay with us in December and do some writing together.

    Here’s what I see now: this network of kitchen table conversations and collaborations is the heart of what we are up to at HOME. And recognising this, we get to go about it more deliberately.

    *   *   *

    So what does this mean for those weeks when we open up and make a public invitation to this school? Here’s where we’ve got to: the invitation we can make isn’t to a one-off course, it isn’t to a retreat that we are leading, and — despite what you may have read — we’re not in the business of offering group therapy.

    What we can offer is a chance to come and spend time around the ongoing work of the school; to hear from and talk with some of the artists, thinkers and doers who are part of this network; and to take part in the everyday home-making, the practice of hospitality and conviviality, without which the wild ideas we sometimes throw around would have no hope of coming to life.

    What worked best last June were the parts of the week that had this quality: the space that Anna and I can hold when we work together, the fellowship of the friends who were there to help us. Meanwhile, the places where things didn’t work, or where it got needlessly difficult, were the ones where we came adrift from this way of being.

    I think of the pressure it puts on a group of people who have only just met, to tell them: ‘By coming here, you’ve made this school a reality.’ I think of the pressure it puts on a friend and fellow teacher who finds himself playing the role of a workshop leader, trying to summon an experience intense enough to live up to the powerful language with which we’ve called this group together. I think of some wise words from Anthony McCann, years ago: the greater the emotional intensity of a situation, the wider the gap will tend to be between the experiences that the people present are having.

    So my hunch is that an invitation which doesn’t place the weight of being the school on those who turn up will give us all more breathing space, the chance to make some fresh mistakes, to take ourselves more lightly and take care of each other.

    *   *   *

    We could have scheduled six courses in 2019 and filled them — given the amount of interest in that first course, given the number of those who came who tell us they are keen to come back, and given the flow of enquiries we are getting.

    Instead, right now, we’re not sure whether there will be any public courses at HOME this year. It depends on practical considerations — which I’ll come to — but it’s also a question of the order in which to do things.

    If we’re going to make a public invitation to spend time around the ongoing work of the school, then we need to ground that work: to make more time and space for it, to share more of what’s going on, to tell the story of what we are doing here and why.

    In that spirit, here’s an outline of what we see ahead of us in 2019 — assuming we are spared that long…

    1. Focusing on the heart of what we do and doing it more deliberately. This means convening conversations and collaborations around the kitchen table where I’m sitting as I write this: bringing together particular combinations of people for a few days, gathered around a theme, often with the intention of publishing something together afterwards. It will include strengthening our immediate network of close collaborators, as well as making new connections — and developing a rhythm for this way of working, leisurely and fruitful. And some of this work will need to be fundable, without us going off-track in pursuit of funding.
    2. Framing the conversations we intend to bring together and the themes we are working on. Since the autumn, we’ve arrived at a new clarity and urgency about a kind of work that is called for around climate change. In the next few posts, I’ll set out what we’re seeing, the implications as we understand them, and the role that a kitchen-table operation like this might play. (This is also a chance to be clear about the difference between the work I’ve done over the past decade as co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and the work that Anna and I are setting out on here.)
    3. Publishing and co-publishing to share the work we’re doing. Ideas arrive in conversation: glimmers of possibility, new ways of seeing a familiar landscape. Where it’s useful, we want to get these written up and out there swiftly — on our school blog and through other routes. I won’t always be the one doing the writing, but writing is a thing I do, and just now most of what I write is an expression of the themes around which this next phase of HOME is taking shape. This includes writing together with others around our network — I’m currently working on texts with Vanessa Andreotti, David Abram and Duncan McLaren — as well as finding new places to publish. And publishing won’t always mean writing: in November, I had a go at making a HOME video, talking about Extinction Rebellion, and there will be more of these.
    4. Experimenting with ways to connect over distance. One reason we were hesitant about running six courses this year is the distances from which people want to come to connect with this work — and the implications this has for who gets to be involved, as well as the resulting carbon footprint. There’s a conviviality that requires being around the table together, breathing the same air, sharing the season and the hour of the day. But we need ways of connecting up the many tables around which people gather, without hopping on and off planes as if there’s no tomorrow. So we’ve been kicking around some ideas with friends: slow travel networks, corresponding societies, a monthly online Assembly that would offer another way of connecting with this school. Watch out for news about these experiments as 2019 goes on.
    5. Going on tour. Between now and April, we’ll be at home in Västerås, moving on into some of the above — and then we’re taking this on the road for three months, or rather on the rails. Anna, Alfie and I will be making the trip to the UK, with some stops along the way. It will be the longest visit I’ve made since I left England in 2012 — and along with a couple of gatherings to mark the end of my ten years at Dark Mountain, we’re planning various events at which we open out the work we’re doing at HOME. So far, it looks like we’ll be coming to Brussels, The Hague, London, Glasgow, South Yorkshire, Devon and Cornwall — and we’ll put together a detailed announcement soon — but if you’re interested in doing something with us, please get in touch. (Also, while we don’t have any public courses at HOME scheduled right now, I will be teaching one final Dark Mountain course at Schumacher College in early May, together with Charlotte Du Cann.)
    6. Finding a place to call HOME. Yesterday we sold our house, the place that has been home to us for the past three years in Västerås. We’d known all along that it was home for the time being, not home for good — and the first decision we took in 2019 was to put it on the market. Where we’ll end up next, we don’t know yet, although our assumption is that it will be on this side of Sweden. We’re looking for a place that we can call HOME, that’s got a little bit of land and enough space to host smaller and larger gatherings.

    How soon we find the right place and how long it takes to make it ready will determine when we’re in a position to host further public courses — though, as you’ve gathered, we’ve plenty to be getting on with in the meantime.

    *   *   *

    For that first course, we hired a hostel in a village that’s 45 minutes from here by train — and this turned out to be the hardest part of what we’d taken on, to recreate something of our home in a set of borrowed buildings. Those buildings looked idyllic in photographs, but it was a while since anyone had shown them any love. (When my fellow teacher Andrew arrived on the Sunday, his first task was to help me do a deep clean of the hostel fridge.)

    If you’ve read the GARAGE article, you might guess that there are parts of it we’d quarrel with — but life’s too short and there’s enough vanity in the world already, right?

    There was one bit that properly pissed me off, though — and that’s when their reporter writes about Anna being ‘relegated’ to the kitchen and how we ‘glamorized… a gendered division of labour’. He did three months of interviews for that piece — before, during and after the course — and he knew that Anna was a full partner in the school, but he never spoke to her. Unless you count the one time he directed a question to her over email — he wanted to know how the two of us met and what her first impression of me had been.

    Now, let me fess up: when it comes to gender, there was stuff we did that week that deserved calling out. In fact, Anna and I talked about this with the group on the final morning. Partly, it came down to having a course that was fronted by two guys — and partly, having a set of buildings where the kitchen was shut off, behind a door and up a set of stairs from the room where the eating took place.

    On the other hand, if the GARAGE guy had actually talked to Anna, he might have learned that her CV includes professional kitchen experience, cooking for everyone from anorexic women to kindergarten classes to weddings — so if she takes the lead in the kitchen when there are thirty people to feed, it’s because she has the skills and the experience for the task. (He might also have learned that she was about to take on the role of gender equality strategist for Sweden’s fifth largest city — and that she’d had a hellish year in the job she was just leaving, which is why she’d opted for a backstage role that week.)

    This seems worth saying, because I’ll often be the more visible half of this partnership — for the time being, because Anna is holding down a full-time job, while I work day-to-day on developing HOME — and probably beyond that, since I’m the one who has spent twenty years talking into microphones and in front of audiences, writing essays and manifestoes, and generally wrangling words in public.

    As a straight-ish white dude, I’m not wholly oblivious to the structural reasons why people-who-resemble-me are disproportionately represented among the public wranglers of words. I’m still on a path of wising up to my personal blind-spots and the habits acquired from growing up in a world that’s structured this way — and when it comes to me and Anna, you can bet that this shit trips me up, more often that I want to tell you, in the everyday undertaking of making a life together.

    But anyone who spends time around us is going to see Anna’s strength and single-mindedness, the deep mutuality of this partnership, and the way we come together to shoulder the work that needs to be done.

    *   *   *

    What got me about the layout of that hostel last June is that it was so totally the antithesis of the way of being together that I’ve learned from living with Anna — and to wrap up these kitchen table reflections, I want to tell you one last story about that.

    Two weeks before we met, Anna had bought a flat. Forty square metres on the south side of Stockholm — one room, a bathroom and a kitchen — it wasn’t a whole lot of space, especially when I gave up my rented room in London and moved in with her. It was the first place she’d ever owned and her first move was to knock through the kitchen wall, so that the space where the food was made opened onto the space where we ate and lived and slept. That also meant that you could get twelve people round the table for dinner, no small thing in a flat that size.

    Four years on, we’d moved to Västerås with Anna’s new job, I was commuting back to Stockholm three days a week to work at the national theatre — and we bought our first house, a suburban row-house built in 1957. The old guy we bought it from had lived there since it was built and to say it needed work would be an understatement.

    Well, I don’t look at a physical space and see how it could be remade — that’s not how my mind works — but Anna has the gift of seeing such things. Once again, her first decision was about the kitchen: when the house was built, they’d stuck it in a room at the front, shut off from the living quarters, but with a view out over the street, presumably so the housewife could see her husband coming home from work and get his coffee on. That became Alfie’s bedroom and the kitchen moved to the back of the house, opening straight onto the living room and sharing the view out over our neighbours’ gardens, where the sunlight streams in over the treetops for a few hours, even in the darkest days of winter.

    I don’t mean to go all House & Garden on you — believe me, I don’t take this middle class idyll of home ownership for granted. It’s not what I grew up with and not something I just assumed would happen in my life. I’m wearing this privilege, sharing these renovation stories, because the only reason Anna or I have for living in anything larger than a cell is to have a place that we can share, a place where we can welcome people. (Though if we did live in cells, hers would definitely be more stylish than mine.)

    Before I met Anna, I held hospitality and conviviality high among the things worth living for — but in making a life with her, I’ve learned vastly more about how to embody this, how to ground it in practical decisions and in how you use the privileges life throws your way.

    When we got back from the estate agents last night, I could feel the house gently slipping away from being our home, readying itself to welcome the excited young couple with whom we’d just been signing papers. On the last day of April, we’ll hand over the keys, then leave to catch the night train south.

    Whatever is coming after that, whichever kitchen this table lands in next, the experience of these past seven years allows me to trust in our ability to make a home together that’s capable of being HOME.

    Meanwhile, the January work is done, the new and the old are joined, the threshold of the year is safely crossed — and that will do for tonight.

    To find out about our current activities, visit the HOME website. You can sign up for future issues of Crossed Lines here.

  • It’s Time to Start a School

    An hour’s drive northwest from here, you take a turning off the two-lane highway, near the bottom of a steep hill. After that, you’re on an unpaved road, heading into the woods. At first, there are red wooden houses dotted to either side, but then the scattered township thins out and for the last couple of miles, there’s just you and the trees, a glimpse of lake somewhere off to the left, and this single-track road.

    I’m doing my best, but it’s hard to reproduce the unexpectedness of what comes next. When I bring people here, however much I’ve told them, there’s always an audible expression of amazement as we round the last corner and this huge white Bauhaus structure comes inexplicably into view. It gets better, because as we park and climb out, the newcomers peer through the glass in disbelief, starting to make out a building within a building: the old red wooden schoolhouse, two storeys high, which served as the first home for the gang of theatremakers who dreamed this madness into being, still stands where it always did, inside one wing of the new structure.

    Back in November, the day after I turned forty, this is where we came. Eight grownups and two small kids, cars slithering down the icy road: a little gang of friends and collaborators who had taken up my invitation to spend a weekend at the impossible theatre in the woods, thinking about the years ahead and what we might do together.

    The idea didn’t arrive while we were out there – they keep their own time, ideas like this, and mostly they show up sometime after you let go of your expectations, really let them go, with no promise that anything will come along to take their place. You have to give up. And then, if you’re lucky, something shows up, and it doesn’t look like what you were expecting, but maybe it is the thing you didn’t know you were looking for.

    So yeah, something showed up. In the days afterwards, nurtured in conversations around our kitchen table, an idea took shape. And here it is – it’s time to start a school.

    This year, Anna and I are starting a school together. It’s a school called HOME, a school for culturemakers. Over the past few months, we’ve been figuring out how to talk about it, starting to tackle the practicalities – and today it’s time to share where we’ve got to and make an invitation.

    Here’s one way that we talk about it:

    HOME is a school where we study the mess the world is in, not as a set of discrete problems to be solved, but as a tangled and humbling predicament.

    We follow the roots of this predicament deep into history, uncovering the buried assumptions which have shaped our ways of seeing and being in the world, catching sight of the possibilities those assumptions hid from view.

    We learn from artists, philosophers, community builders, improvisors, historians and poets. Looking for a term to bridge these worlds, we call ourselves a school for culturemakers. We cultivate the art of invitation, hospitality and friendship, finding here the seeds of other ways of being human together.

    It starts quite simply with a one-week course this summer. The course will run from 4-8 June in the village of Ängelsberg, a couple of hours train ride west of Stockholm. I’ll be teaching alongside my friend Andrew Taggart, a practical philosopher who weaves webs of conversation, enquiring into the gaps within our present ways of life. We’re calling the course Finding Our Way Home and it starts with a question: ‘What if the culture you grew up in was broken in ways that you didn’t even have words for?’

    We’ve already taken a few bookings before we got as far as launching a website, but today the site is launched and open for enquiries. You can read the rest of the invitation that we’ve made – and, given that the last residential course I taught sold out with two months to go, should you find that the invitation speaks to you, then I’d encourage you to send us an enquiry without delay.

    Meanwhile, in the spirit of these letters, I want to head a little deeper into the woods, to think aloud about what it means to start a school, where this has come from and where it might be heading – and, for those with long memories, to say a word or two about that time when I was going to start a university.

    There are books that matter to you immensely at a certain moment in your life and a few years later you can hardly remember why – and then there are pieces of writing, often no more than a few lines, that you know you’d carry with you to the ends of the world. One of mine is a passage from The Cultivation of Conspiracy, an address given by Ivan Illich in Bremen in 1998. He is looking back on the places of convivial learning that he had created with his friends over the previous forty years – from a ‘thinkery’ in a one-room shack on a Puerto Rican hillside, to the Centre for Intercultural Documentation at Cuernavaca, Mexico, to the hospitable household at Kreftingstraße, where on Fridays after Illich’s lectures the spaghetti bowl would feed two dozen guests around the table, with sometimes more spilling out to sit on the Mexican rugs in the next room. In all of these places, he says, they have sought to foster a particular atmosphere:

    Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.

    I’ve carried those lines for years, like a navigational instrument, looking for the places which have that atmosphere, seeking to cultivate it in the spaces where I’ve worked. So when I think about what it means to start a school, it doesn’t start with a course or a curriculum or a building, but with the way of being together that Illich is talking about.

    There are people whose work you discover at the right moment. The year I discovered Illich, I was twenty-five and I’d just walked out on what looked like the beginnings of a successful career at the BBC. I’ve heard stories like this often enough now to know the pattern: sometimes you have to give up, to turn down the offer no sensible person would refuse, to walk away without any explanations that will satisfy your friends’ parents or your parents’ friends, because that’s the price of entry to a different kind of life. At the time, all I knew was that I’d exchanged a staff job in the newsroom for temping in warehouses and call centres, a new sense of freedom, and the realisation that the university careers service didn’t have any lives my shape. If I wasn’t going to contort myself into one of the careers on offer, I would have to make a life of my own. 

    Books were my friends that year and I read with a focus that surpassed anything I’d had as a student at Oxford. I was reading for my life and the writers I discovered became my companions.

    Four years down the road, I would travel to Cuernavaca, to a gathering of Illich’s friends and collaborators, where the atmosphere he spoke about in Bremen still lingered in the late night conversations. I remember sharing a taxi through the city with one of them, Carl Mitcham, and telling him that I was working on an internet startup inspired by Deschooling Society. At this, he burst out laughing. ‘I remember Ivan telling me, “People are saying I invented this internet!” The thought was enough to make him throw up his hands in horror!’

    School of Everything – the startup I co-founded in 2006 – took its inspiration from Illich and the ‘free universities’ of the late 1960s, but the path it went down was summed up by Cory Doctorow, who wrote that we were building ‘the eBay for learning’. What’s strange is that we knew better. The five of us who started it had met in a room where learning was understood as a matter of relations, not transactions. It was one of a series of such rooms, spaces with names like the University of Openness, the Temporary School of Thought and the Really Free School. On a good day, they too had that atmosphere, and they were spaces in which people seemed to come alive.

    Out of those experiences came a desire for something more-than-temporary. And I had been learning the art of talking projects into reality: after School of Everything, I started Spacemakers, and the same year, Paul and I launched Dark Mountain. I’d grasped something about how to tell a big story and invite people to step inside that story and make it real together. I was just past thirty, and making up for lost time, running off the raw red energy that comes with discovering your own abilities. I didn’t know much yet about limits, or about failure.

    So in the early spring of 2011, I threw out my biggest story yet. First on the internet, and then in talks at places like the Royal Society of Arts and TEDx London, I asked for help to start a new kind of university. I’d pulled off enough wild schemes by then that people gave me a hearing, and all kinds of conversations and connections came about as a result – but as summer turned to autumn, the plan unravelled, while the pace at which I’d been living finally caught up with me. Within a year, I would leave London.

    It was a humbling time. Soon after I arrived in Sweden, I remember my old friend Charlie Davies – he was the one who had brought together the temporary school where the founders of School of Everything first met – handing me a small coin, looking me in the eye, and saying, ‘I give you failure.’ There are journeys for which no other currency is taken.

    The luckiest stroke I ever had was that, just as my London life fell to pieces, I met someone who could see past the mess I was in and who chose to make a life with me. Anna and I had been travelling different routes, but steering by the same stars. In her case, the route had led from connecting cultural foundations around Europe, to setting up children’s libraries in the Middle East and supporting women’s organisations in Israel and Palestine. At the heart of it was a commitment to conviviality: her tiny flat in Stockholm was dominated by a table large enough to seat fourteen; the wall between the kitchen and the bedroom had been taken down to make room for it.

    As I said goodbye to London, having given up on the idea of starting some kind of university, I remember an unfamiliar sensation of patience. Whatever mattered about that idea would come back in a different form when the time was right.

    If the time seems right now, that’s firstly because I’m not doing it alone. Over the past six years, Anna and I have made a home together that is a place of friendship, hospitality and intercultural encounter. We knew from the start that we wanted to make a wider invitation and create a shared foundation for our work. In the idea of a school called HOME, that intention has found its form.

    Then it’s because I have things to teach. Looking back, those earlier free universities and temporary schools were a source of fellowship, a meeting point for an invisible college in which I found my contemporaries – and bringing people together like that still feels vital. But in the past couple of years, I’ve found that the teaching I do is moving to the heart of my work. Walking into a room, sharing stories and ways of thinking that I’ve found helpful, letting the questions that follow lead us deeper. (As I write this, I remember a recent visit to the Kaospilots school in Aarhus, Denmark: for a month afterwards, most days my phone would ping with mails and messages from students who had been in that room, still resonating with the ideas we’d talked about.) So I want to create the conditions where I can do that well.

    Finally, the time seems right because I’ve come to see another way of making projects happen. Sometimes telling the biggest story you can and getting hundreds or thousands of people to step inside it is the way to go – but the best work often happens more quietly. I’m prouder of the West Norwood Feast, the community-owned streetmarket that Spacemakers helped start in south London, than the project that we did at Brixton Village, which is the one that got all the attention.

    For several years now, I’ve been teaching residential courses at places like Schumacher College, so the first step in starting this school is to take that kind of course and organise it on our own terms.

    Beyond that, Anna and I are inspired by the example of small schools that offer longer programmes – places like the Westcountry School of Myth and Story, run by our friend Martin Shaw, or Stephen Jenkinson’s School of Orphan Wisdom. So before long, we want to create something along those lines, making an invitation to be part of a learning community that comes together several times a year.

    In the longer-term, our intention is to find a permanent location, a place we can call home in all senses of the word, with the further possibilities that would offer. A few years from now, I’d love to be holding a yearly summer school, a little like what I’ve heard tell of the summers in Cuernavaca, half a century ago. 

    In the meantime, we’ve found a beautiful setting in which to get started, working with a family-run hostel in Ängelsberg. It’s a village of 150 people with its own railway station, there’s a lakeside sauna and all the other things you’d want in Sweden with midsummer around the corner. And going by the first few people who are on board, it will be quite a special gang that gathers there this June.

    There was a time when I was launching projects left, right and centre – throwing out ideas, some of which took on a life of their own, while others left no trace. Writing this, I realise that it’s been a while since I launched something new, and rarely have I put as much of my heart into a project as with this little idea for a school.

    It won’t be a school of everything, and it doesn’t promise to reinvent the university. We’re not out to build a grand highway to the future. This is a little road heading into the woods. Maybe you will join us on that road. I hope so.

    Published as Issue 16 of Crossed Lines, my occasional email newsletter, to mark the launch of a school called HOME.

  • When the Maps Run Out

    I have been thinking about the slipperiness of history, how it escapes our grasp. When we study a war in school, the first facts we learn are the last to be known to anyone who lived through it: when it was over and which side won. Those who do not remember the past may be condemned to repeat it, but hindsight is very nearly the opposite of memory. To remember is to be returned to a reality that was not yet inevitable, to recall the events which shaped our lives when they might still have gone otherwise.

    ‘The Dark Shapes Ahead’ (2012)

    The world is in flames and if you think it’s all the fault of those people — the uneducated, the bigoted — I urge you to think harder.

    When the values of social liberalism got hitched to the mercilessness of neoliberalism, it kindled a resentment towards the former among the latter’s losers. The deal was summed up in Alan Wolfe’s formulation: ‘The right won the economic war, the left won the cultural war and the centre won the political war.’ He said that in 1999. It was under Bill Clinton’s presidency that the ‘centrist’ settlement between progressive cultural values and There Is No Alternative economics was consummated. Two decades on, that made Hilary Clinton the dream opponent for a candidate running on the fuel of resentment.

    Here’s a stony truth to stomach: today, across the western countries, the culture war to defend the real social achievements of the past half century is grimly entangled with a class war against the losers of neoliberalism.

    If we now lose many of the unfinished achievements of the struggles against racism, sexism and homophobia, the Clinton generation of politicians will share the responsibility.

    I came home on Tuesday thinking Clinton was going to win, just like I came home in June thinking Britain was going to vote Remain.

    It turns out you can spend the best part of a decade talking “collapsonomics”, writing about the dark shapes ahead and the unravelling of the world as we have known it, and still let yourself get lulled into believing the status quo will hold a little longer.

    It helps that I voted Remain. I would have voted Hilary if they gave the rest of the world a vote.

    Still, the day after the referendum, when everyone was sharing that chart that showed that Remain voters were better educated, it filled me with an anger that stopped me writing. Were so many of you really so blind to the link between education and privilege?

    Back before I was that Dark Mountain guy, I worked as a local radio reporter in a city in the north of England. In the newsroom one day I saw a set of figures that are fixed in my memory: among 19 year olds with a home address in the leafy suburban southwest of that city, 62% were in higher education; on the council estates and terraced streets to the northeast, where my sister lives, the number was 12%. A kid from the right side of town was five times more likely to get to university than a kid from the wrong side of town. That’s when I got it: for all the other things it does, the major social function of higher education today is to put a meritocratic rubberstamp on the perpetuation of privilege.

    All those posts pointing out that graduates voted Remain, they seemed to imply that the higher you climb the ladder of education, the further you can see, the better equipped you are to make important decisions. But there are truths that are seen more clearly from below. Which side of town would you imagine has a clearer picture of the link between education and privilege?

    On Twitter right now, pundits who seem unhumbled by all the ways they didn’t see this coming throw around snapshots of exit polls to prove that this was or wasn’t about misogyny, racism, or a working class revolt.

    Start with a different set of numbers.

    Last September, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published a study that showed that the death rate for middle-aged white Americans had started rising back in 1999. For every other group in the population, the death rate continues to fall. Among middle-aged white Americans, it is those who left education earliest who are doing most of the dying. They are dying of suicides and overdoses, alcohol poisoning and liver disease. The number of deaths is on a par with the AIDS epidemic at its height, but the causes bring to mind another historical parallel, to Russia in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet this American fall has taken place uneventfully, almost unnoticed, even by the gatherers of statistics: by their own account, Case and Deaton stumbled on their findings by accident.

    In March, after Super Tuesday, the Washington Post plotted the death data against the primary results. In eight out of nine states, they found a correlation: the counties where death rates for middle-aged whites were the highest were the counties where the vote for Trump was the strongest.

    I don’t know how you can look at that and say that Trump’s election is only about racism and misogyny, that it is not also a consequence of something that has been going terribly wrong in the lives of those white Americans with the lowest cultural capital.

    All year I’ve been watching sensible respectable well-paid commentators flailing to catch up with the collapse bloggers: these fringe thinkers off the internet, narrators of America’s long decline, people I’ve been reading (and occasionally publishing) for a decade or so, were the one group whose models of reality could handle what was happening.

    John Michael Greer lives in the Rust Belt and writes The Archdruid Report, a blog that rolls out every Wednesday, a kind of midweek sermon on nature, culture and the future of industrial civilisation. He called the election for Trump back in January. He is an actual archdruid, as it happens — as well as an SF novelist, a freemason and a self-described ‘moderate Burkean conservative’.

    In a series of posts this year, he sketched out a take on the long backstory to this election which goes something like this:

    Politics is about how a society deals with the collision between the interests of different groups. The great contribution of the liberal tradition was to show that politics can also be about values — but the corruption of that comes at the point when values are used as a cover for interests.

    The policies of globalisation, the deindustrialisation of the US economy and its increased reliance on illegal immigration as a source of cheap labour, were the result of political choices. These choices served the interests of those Americans with salaries and a higher education, while going against the interests of wage-workers. But instead of this collision of interests being negotiated within the political sphere, the results of these policies were presented as inevitable and universally desirable. In particular, any attempt to talk about whose interests were served by the role of illegal immigration was immediately derailed into an argument about values where anyone questioning immigration was accused of racism.

    Trump’s campaign played on this in two ways. First, by deliberately outraging the socially liberal values which had become so entangled with the interests of the salariat, he could build a rapport with other parts of the electorate. Then, by focusing on immigration, jobs and protectionism, he gave those voters a sense that their interests might actually have found a political vehicle.

    The danger of this kind of analysis is that it downplays the uglier forces on which Candidate Trump fed for his success, the forces which President Trump will embody. But it gives you a sense of how the election can have looked in the Rust Belt towns, to the low income white Obama voters who swung to Trump, in the places where all that dying is going on.

    More than anyone else I’ve read this week, Greer seems persuaded that the dangers of a Trump presidency have been overstated. It’s possible to hope that he is right, I suppose — and, meanwhile, to assume that he is wrong and prepare accordingly.

    The blogger who goes by Anne Tagonist (or sometimes Anne Amnesia) is less sanguine. ‘What Trump’s boys have for me is a noose,’ she wrote, back in May, ‘but that’s the choice I’m facing, a lifetime of gruelling poverty, or apocalypse.’

    Yeah I know, not fun and games — the shouts, the smashing glass, the headlights on the lawn, but what am I supposed to do, raise my kid to stay one step ahead of the inspectors and don’t, for the love of god, don’t ever miss a payment on your speeding ticket? A noose is something I know how to fight. A hole in the frame of my car is not. A lifetime of feeling that sense, that “ohhhh, shiiiiiit…” of recognition that another year will go by without any major change in the way of things, little misfortunes upon misfortunes… a lifetime of paying a grand a month to the same financial industry busily padding the 401k plans of cyclists in spandex, who declare a new era of prosperity in America? Who can find clarity, a sense of self, any kind of redemption in that world?’

    When I interviewed Anne for the last Dark Mountain book, I learned a little more about her background in zine writing and travelling and roads protests, working as a street medic, then on ambulances, and from there to medical school and research. She doesn’t write so often, but when she does, what I appreciate is her willingness to puzzle through a question, to include her uncertainties, rather than making a neatly rounded argument.

    And that post in May was scorching. It starts with the Case-Deaton death rate study, but seen through the eyes of someone living in one of those counties, someone who has been sitting in with the Medical Examiner:

    A typical day would include three overdoses, one infant suffocated by an intoxicated parent sleeping on top of them, one suicide, and one other autopsy that could be anything from a tree-felling accident to a car wreck (this distribution reflects that not all bodies are autopsied, obviously.) You start to long for the car wrecks…

    Unlike the AIDS crisis, there’s no sense of oppressive doom over everyone. There is no overdose-death art. There are no musicals. There’s no community, rising up in anger, demanding someone bear witness to their grief. There’s no sympathy at all. The term of art in my part of the world is “dirtybutts.” Who cares? Let the dirtybutts die.

    You know, I could just repost every other paragraph of that piece here, but really you should go read the whole thing.

    From where I live, the world has drifted away. We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that.

    Is this OK, I wonder, just bombarding you with a reader’s digest of the apocalypse?

    It’s not the apocalypse, of course, it’s just history, but if you thought the shape of history was meant to be an upward curve of progress, then this feels like the apocalypse.

    Midway through the night, when the New York Times projection had slipped from Likely to Leaning to Tossup, as I broke open the whisky and let rip on Twitter, my friend Chris T-T replied, ‘I love that your reaction to fear is a splurge of analysis.’

    There’s a rawness in the aftermath of nights like that, a sense that the callused outer skins of our grown-up selves have been ripped off. For a day or two, maybe longer, we can feel things with the intensity of children again. (Or as someone in my timeline wrote, ‘The OH FUCK! comes in waves.’)

    It reminds me of the conversations that sometimes happen in the last days of a life, or on the evening of a funeral. In the underworld of loss, we don’t get to bring our achieved identities with us, so there’s a chance of getting real.

    The morning after last year’s unexpected Conservative election victory in the UK, I wrote some notes on how to make sense of the loss. As political bereavements go, it looks quaint now by comparison — don’t you feel nostalgic for when the worst thing that could happen was waking up to find David Cameron was still prime minister? But one thing from that post sticks out, the part where I was building on a line from the mythographer and storyteller Martin Shaw: ‘This isn’t a hero time, this isn’t a goddess time: it’s a trickster time.’

    When people like John Berger (one of my heroes) were young, it was a real thing to believe in the heroic revolution that Marx had seemed to promise. Today, the only kind of revolution that is plausible is a foolish one, one where we accidentally stumble into another way of being human together, making a living and making life work. (And whatever that might look like, it doesn’t look like utopia.)

    I wrote that thinking of the weird cameo role that Russell Brand had been playing in British politics: not thinking of him as a candidate to lead a trickster revolution, only as a clue to the motley in which change would need to come in a time like this.

    I’m pretty certain it was Ran Prieur, another of the collapse bloggers, who put me onto the idea of Trump as trickster, but the best treatment of that thought I’ve found is Corey Pein writing for the Baffler.

    He starts with the story of Allen Dulles, later the director of the CIA, who recruited Carl Jung as an agent during World War II to provide insights on the psyche of Hitler and the German public. ‘Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof. Jung contributed to the Allied cause during the war,’ Dulles wrote afterwards. We do know that, in an essay in 1936, Jung had written, ‘the unfathomable depths of Wotan’s character explain more of National Socialism than all [proposed] reasonable factors put together.’ (As Pein goes to some lengths to acknowledge, such thoughts are quite a stretch for the early 21st century western imagination: if you’re struggling, try telling yourself, ‘Obviously Jungian archetypes are just metaphors,’ and then remove the ‘just’ from that statement.) If Wotan could be awoken in the collective psyche of a nation, Jung added, then ‘other veiled gods may be sleeping elsewhere.’ Which is how Pein comes to Trump:

    Just as Hitler was not known to crack wise from the podium, Trump’s stump speeches do not call to mind ‘storm and frenzy.’ Trump is no Wotan, no berserker — he is a wisecracker, adept in the cool medium of television. He represents an entirely different Jungian archetype — namely, the pan-cultural mythological figure of ‘the trickster,’ who arrives at moments of uncertainty to bring change, often of the bad kind.

    Pein is being a little unfair on the trickster here, I think. Lewis Hyde gives a subtler account in his marvellous book, Trickster Makes This World. He identifies trickster as a low status character within the local pantheon of a culture, a mischievous messenger boy, a nuisance under normal circumstances, but who takes on an altogether more important role in moments of deep cultural crisis: when those who hold high status within the existing order of things are helpless, trickster can shift the axis, find the hidden joke that allows the culture to pass through into a new version of itself.

    If you’ll grant that such uncivilised ways of thinking could help us make sense of political events, I’ll tell you that Donald Trump is a shadowy parody of a trickster. That takes me to something the poet Nina Pick says in a conversation in the latest Dark Mountain:

    We’ve lost the power of metaphor. You can see it in American politics at the moment for example; there’s a deficit of imagination, of the imaginal life, of myth… and without that level of myth and of metaphor I think we start to get lost as a culture.

    When we lose sight of myth and metaphor, we don’t leave it behind, we just become unaware of the ways in which it is still at work in our culture.

    Or, as Martin Shaw, who set me thinking about all this, would put it:

    The stories that we are being fed now are not myths. They are what I would call, toxic mimics. But when we are deprived of the real thing, we will take even an echo and grab on to it. So in other words, the most horrible lies always have a little bit of truth in them.

    So there you have it, that’s my hot take: Donald Trump is a toxic mimic of Loki.

    At this point, there are a couple more things we need to talk about, before I try and leave you with some blessing for the dark times that are gathering around us.

    There’s something more to say about the work that lies ahead, if it’s seriously the case that we are in territory where archdruids and zine writers and collapse bloggers and mythtellers are the ones who still have maps that seem to make sense.

    But first, we need to talk about Hitler.

    If there is any meaning left in a word like fascism, then let’s call Trump a fascist.

    Heck, even John Michael Greer’s first take on the Donald’s campaign, back in the summer of 2015, was that it ‘is shaping up to be the loudest invocation of pure uninhibited führerprinzip since, oh, 1933 or so.’

    But it’s worth lingering over that ‘if’… Words like ‘fascist’ are mostly used these days as a stop to thinking, a shorthand that saves us the work of knowing our enemy.

    Anthony Barnett walked this line in an essay for Open Democracy, the night before the election:

    It is essential to be able to distinguish between different kinds of evil and judge them accordingly… As a rule, therefore, never talk about ‘fascism’ or ‘Stalinism’ in political or polemical writing… They are used to mobilise an attitude that pre-empts scrutiny. And even interest. If something is fascist we should be able to ask what kind it is and how bad it might be, but the concentration camps make such an approach taboo.

    ‘For the first time,’ he goes on, ‘I break the rule.’

    And if the hesitation adds force to his doing so, it also leaves room for a qualification. Trump is a fascist, Barnett writes, but unlike Hitler, he does not have financiers, storm-troopers or an organised movement. What he now has is the office of President of the United States and a seemingly compliant legislature.

    Another line of caution about the Hitler comparison comes from another of Anne Tagonist’s essays — written just after Super Tuesday, when she was already taking the likelihood of a Trump presidency seriously — in a genre she calls ‘clumsy writings about why history doesn’t work the way you think it does.’

    The systematic study of mass behaviour, she points out, is largely a post-World War II phenomenon.

    In 1945, Germany was in ruins, the world had entered the atomic age and the cold war, Americans were starting to realize exactly how many civilians had been exterminated in “labour” camps, and yet no consensus narrative had emerged how such an unthinkable sequence of events could have happened… The Third Reich was a very good reason to go out and learn more about how humans behaved in groups.

    And so, with the contributions of Adorno, Arendt, Milgram and others, within twenty years, an intellectual consensus emerged about how Nazism had come about, how it had achieved such adoration and power, and how it enlisted so many Germans in the systematic perpetration of horrors.

    We had a system custom-built to explain the Nazis, that explained the Nazis. A side effect is that now, every large-scale bad social movement looks a bit like the Nazis.

    Remember, she is not making this argument to tell us there’s no need to worry, this is Anne who also wrote that ‘What Trump’s boys have for me is a noose.’ What she is getting at is the danger of readying ourselves to fight the last war. Literally.

    Actual historians don’t tend to think history repeats itself, or if they do, they find celebrated yet incomplete examples that don’t assume the world began a century ago and only one bad thing every happened in it.

    But OK, let’s say that this is our January 1933.

    We don’t know the shape of the war that could be coming, nor how that war will end, and not only because we cannot see the future, but because it hasn’t happened yet: there is still more than one way all this could play out, though the possibilities likely range from bad to worse.

    Among the things that might be worth doing is to read some books from Germany in the 1920s and 30s, to get a better understanding of what Nazism looked like, before anyone could say for sure how the story would end.

    Another thought, from that post I quoted at the start, written four years ago, on a journey I made in search of cultural resilience:

    If someone were to ask me what kind of cause is sufficient to live for in dark times, the best answer I could give would be: to take responsibility for the survival of something that matters deeply. Whatever that is, your best action might then be to get it out of harm’s way, or to put yourself in harm’s way on its behalf, or anything else your sense of responsibility tells you.

    Some of those actions will be loud and public, others quiet, invisible, never to be known. They are beginning already. And though it is not the bravest form of action, and often takes place far from the frontline, I believe the work of sense-making is among the actions that are called for.

    I notice that there is a part of me that would like not to be serious, that would like it to be secretly a bluff, a puffing of the ego, when I say that it feels like there’s a new responsibility landing on the ragtag of thinkers and tinkers and storytellers at the edges, one edge of which I have been part of over these last years. And for sure, this is only one map I’ve been sketching, others will have their own that may or may not overlap.

    But the way it looks from here tonight, the people who are meant to know how the world works are out of map, shown to be lost in a way that has not been seen in my lifetime, not in countries like these.

    I am thinking of one of the smartest, most thoughtful commentators on the events of this year, whose analyses have helped many of us make sense of what Brexit might mean, the director of the Political Economy Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London, Will Davies. In an article for the Washington Post, a week after the referendum, he drew the parallel to the Republican primaries. He too had picked up on the Case-Deaton white death study and the correlation between mortality rates and Trump support.

    ‘Could it be that, as with the British movement to leave the EU, Trump is channelling a more primal form of despair?’ he asks. But as the article approaches a conclusion, the despair seems to have spread to its author. ‘When a sizeable group of voters has given up on the future altogether… how does a reasonable politician present themselves?’

    All of this represents an almost impossible challenge for campaign managers, pollsters and political scientists. The need for candidates to seem ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ is as old as television. Now it seems that they also need to give voice to the private despair of voters for whom collective progress appears a thing of the past. Where no politician is deemed ‘trustworthy,’ many voters are drawn toward the politician who makes no credible pledges in the first place. Of course government policy can continue to help people, and even to restore some sense of collective progress. But for large swaths of British and American society, it seems best not to state as much.

    As I read them, these are the words of a person who is running out of map, though one who gets closer than many to seeing how deeply the future is broken, how far the sense of collective progress is gone.

    While the victorious political centre of the Clinton and Blair era has gone on insisting that everything is getting better and better, some of the smartest thinkers on the left have recognised the breakdown of the future and responded by setting out to reboot it, to recover the kind of faith in collective progress that made possible the achievements of the better moments of the twentieth century.

    If their attempts have struggled to gain traction, one reason may be that the left is better at recognising the economic aspects of what has gone wrong than the cultural aspects, which it tends to ignore or bracket under bigotry. There are great forces of bigotry at work in the world, they will have taken great encouragement from Trump’s election and they need to be fought, as they have been by anti-fascist organising in working class communities, again and again. As a teenager in the northeast of England, my first activism was going out on the streets against the British National Party with Youth Against Racism in Europe. Still, without pretending that they can be neatly disentangled, there are other aspects of what has gone wrong that belong under the heading of culture, besides racism and xenophobia.

    In the places where it happens, economic crisis feeds a crisis of meaning, spiralling down into one another, and if we can only see the parts that can be measured, we will miss the depth of what is happening until it shows up as suicide and overdose figures.

    Without a grip on this, the left has struggled to give voice to those for whom talk of progress today sounds like a bad joke. And yeah, maybe Bernie could have done it — he’d surely have been a wiser choice for the Democrats this year — but the thing is, we’ll never know. Meanwhile, across the western countries, too often, the only voices that sound like they get the anger, disillusionment and despair belong to those who seek to harness such feelings to a politics of hatred.

    This is where I intend to put a good part of my energy in the next while, to the question of what it means if the future is not coming back. How do we disentangle our thinking and our hopes from the cultural logic of progress?For that logic does not have enough room for loss, nor for the kind of deep rethinking that is called for when a culture is in crisis. But that is another story, and a longer one even than this text has become, and I must get up in a few hours’ time to go talk about that story with a conference full of hackers.

    On Wednesday morning, the snow was falling hard. Before I finally got to bed, I had given my son breakfast and taken him to kindergarten, pushing his buggy through the snowstorm. Last time we had snow, he was still a baby wrapped inside a pram: now he is fifteen months and discovering everything. After dinner that night, he danced with me and we laughed together like fools.

    I want to say that this is also history, though it doesn’t get written down so much: the small joys and gentlenesses, the fragments of peace, time spent caring for our children, or our parents, or our neighbours. These tasks alone are not enough to hold off the darkness, but they are one of the places where we start, one of the models for what it means to take responsibility for the survival of things that matter deeply.

    Fifteen months and every day now he is playing with new words in his mouth. I can see the time coming when the words become sentences and questions, when he starts to want the world explained to him.

    ‘How can I get through it?’ a friend asked.

    This was earlier that morning, before the snowstorm.

    ‘We’ll get through because we have to,’ I wrote, ‘the way we always have, one foot in front of another. Hold those you love tight. Be kind to strangers.’

    ‘I’m really not looking forward to telling my kid he lives in President Trump’s country,’ another friend wrote.

    ‘Our kids are going to be the ones who get us through this,’ I told her. ‘That’s how long this journey will take.’

    What am I doing here, I wonder now? I don’t even live in America. Though somehow we all live in America, because it fills our ears, spills out of screens and teaches us to dream. But also because we can feel it coming, see the same gaps widening in our own societies, watch the same complacency or helplessness on the faces of the old leaders and the ugly smiles of those who are sure their time is coming.

    Everyone who said they knew what they were doing has failed. How badly things turn out now, we can’t say for sure. But there is work to be done.

    First published as Issue 11 of Crossed Lines, my occasional email newsletter.

  • The Moment When the White Rabbit Goes Past

    This letter comes to you from a hotel room in Kiruna, north of the Arctic Circle. The hotel is called the Arctic Eden. From the window, I can see the mine buildings that crown what’s left of Gironvarri, the mountain the city came here to devour.

    The way I was told it, the Swedes knew there was a mountain full of iron ore, somewhere in this landscape, but the mountain was sacred to the Sami and they had no intention of letting the Swedes find it and tear it apart. Until eventually some prospectors got an old Sami man so drunk that he let out the secret.

    The history section of the website of the company that owns the mine that tore apart the mountain is headlined: ‘Faith in the Future since 1890’.

    In the foyer of the Folkets Hus is a scale model of the city. A red line loops across from the mine, taking in the whole downtown and chunks of the surrounding neighbourhoods. On the underside of the model, a reef of ore slants downwards more than two kilometres into the ground. As they keep following it, digging it out, the city itself will be undermined. The red line marks the zone in danger of subsidence. The answer is to take down the city and rebuild it three kilometres to the east.

    You can take a bus from the current city centre that drives straight into the side of the mountain, the road spiralling down into the mine to a depth of five hundred metres, but that will have to wait for next time, because this time I came here to see a play.

    Jag Kommer Härifrån is a story about what it means to come from a small place, to grow up with the idea that everything exciting in life is waiting for you somewhere else, somewhere bigger and brighter and more open-minded. Watching it, I was back in Darlington, twenty years ago, full of the desire to escape. There’s nothing wrong with that desire, it seems to me now, but there is a problem when it hardens into a claim about the objective superiority of life in the big city, held to be an obvious truth by people old enough to know better. This is the attitude I think of as ‘urban supremacism’ – what Anders Duus, who wrote Jag Kommer Härifrån, calls ‘metronormativity’.

    The train from Stockholm to Kiruna takes seventeen hours. That’s a lot of time for talking – and the other reason I am on this trip is for the luxury of that time together with Anders and my new boss, Måns Lagerlöf, the director of theatre for Riksteatern. I still struggle to get my mouth round words like ‘boss’ and ‘job’, but for the first time in a decade or so, I have both of these things. Since January, I have spent much of my time in an office in a tower block in the concrete surroundings of outer Stockholm, trying to work out what it means that I am now the Artistic and Audience Development Lead for Sweden’s national theatre. If this job had been advertised in the newspaper, it would never have occurred to me to apply, but it came to me by one of those chains of coincidence which I have learned to trust.

    I guess if you grew up in Sweden it probably seems normal to have a national theatre that is also a grassroots movement, a network of over two hundred volunteer-run local associations that own the national organisation and arrange performances in smaller and larger places, up and down the country. To me, this sounds like the start of some extraordinary story: the moment when the White Rabbit goes past, staring at his pocket-watch, muttering to himself, and you know that you have left behind reality as you knew it.

    So, when the laughter and the applause have died away, the staging for Jag Kommer Härifrån is packed and loaded onto the tour bus, ready to head on down the road to the next town on a forty-date tour that stretches the length of the country. And having seen one of our productions out on the road for the first time, the organisation I’m working with just got a little more real to me.

    I’ll be writing more about what I’m actually doing, as these newsletters get going again, and as I get further into the process of figuring it out. I should say that I’m working 70% (as we say in this part of the world) which means I still have 30% of my time available for writing, speaking and other freelance projects. Most importantly, I’ve wound up here because the things I’ve been thinking, writing and speaking about seem to resonate with what they want to do over the next few years, so this is a chance to put some of my ideas into action.

    Jag Kommer Härifrån has fun at the expense of the hipsters of Södermalm, buying their organic groceries at Urban Deli on Nytorget. That bit reminded me of Venkatesh Rao’s essay, ‘The American Cloud’, where he suggests that today’s America consists of a Jeffersonian simulation, an imagined version of small-town life, running on a Hamiltonian platform of mechanised processes the scale of which is uncomfortable to think about. He starts with the example of a Whole Foods store, its pre-distressed wooden fittings connoting authenticity, while behind them is the concrete and steel of which the building is actually made. Steel that came out of a mountain like the one outside my hotel window.

    The deposit of iron ore under Gironvarri is one of the largest and richest ever found. When mining began, there were 1.8bn tonnes of it down there. As part of the project of moving the city, the municipality held an architectural competition. The winning design was called ‘Kiruna 4-ever’. Today, less than half of the original ore remains to be mined. It seems that Kiruna has accepted the need to dismantle and re-mantle itself with little complaint. I imagine that only a city whose existence was this bound up with a single industry could be so accepting. The current rate of extraction of iron ore is over 25m tonnes a year. The new city hall will open next year and by 2021 the beautiful wooden church will have been rebuilt on its new site. The full project of moving the city will be complete sometime in the mid-2030s. By my reckoning, that is about when the ore will run out. I suppose that’s what they mean by faith in the future. Still, ‘4-ever’ seems an ambitious timescale.

    Sent as Issue 5 of Crossed Lines, my occasional email newsletter.