Post-bubble is a way of life
As anyone who even glances at newspapers will have seen this past week or so, we're in the middle of a "correction" -- big money is being wiped off share values. It's said to have started with rumours that the Chinese government were planning to make a tougher business environment in order to slow down the country's overheated, bubble-style growth. Anyway, today shares continue to slide, amidst conflicting noises: Correction: this could become a crash after all, thinks The Guardian's chief economics journalist. But Treasury chief feeling good about economy, contradicts Reuters. Gung ho hum!
Now, a lot of the selling we've seen this week represents typically irrational capitalist behaviour -- hunches, worries, fears, projection and paranoia trigger more hunches, worries, fears, projection and paranoia . This storm in a rich man's bone china teacup needn't really concern the rest of us. The huge sums of money being lost are largely imaginary, purely notional, and concentrated, anyway, in very few hands.
But what might a big crash mean to the rest of us? Might it even be rather good news? I think the answer to that depends on the answer to the question "How big?" The kind of crash people call a "correction" would mean very little to me, personally. I own no property, no house, no car. I have no dependents. Neither do I have any debt. I could live on a quarter of the sum I'm currently earning, and it wouldn't honestly make much material difference to my life. A crash would only start to impact my life if it made air travel more expensive, or made the internet somehow stop working.
Berlin isn't just a city well-protected from rising sea levels, earthquakes, and so on. It's also well-protected from financial instability. This is a city with incredibly cheap prices, a city populated by people who manage to live well on little money, a city of renters rather than owners, a city pretty familiar with post-materialist lifestyles.
But a warning on just how wrong things can go here, in other circumstances, comes from Kafka's experience of the city in the early 1920s. High inflation and unemployment led to such poverty, misery and civic unrest that Kafka, already seriously ill with tuberculosis, didn't dare buy newspapers or venture into the centre of town. He stayed in a rather dull suburb with his girlfriend, Dora Diamant. Then again, the same conditions of instability attracted the younger, tougher Bertolt Brecht, who came to the city to agitate for communism. He later described Kafka as "a man too much trapped under the wheels" of the capitalist system rather than someone looking for alternatives. But even Brecht had to flee when the Nazis used instability to grab power. They eventually murdered Kafka's sisters in concentration camps.
The big fear, should a big crash come, isn't so much the immediate economic effects, but the political ones. What would a desperate America do if and when it realized that, as The Guardian thinks, what we're seeing now is its supremacy crumbling away? Might the empire lash out with more ill-advised military adventures, try to take the world down with it?
It's easy to get apocalyptic, though. I prefer to think that what's been happening this last week or so -- and seems set to continue this week -- might actually be a bit of a boost, a filip, an incentive to people to start looking at their basic priorities in life.
My own brand of post-materialism matches Berlin values with Japanese ones. Here, for instance, is Kyoichi Tsuzuki, in the afterword to "Tokyo Style", his documentation of the way ordinary Tokyoites live in small spaces:
"Today, amidst Japan's unprecedented devotion to money, even after property and fame and desires have all been attained, somewhere in the backs of our minds lingers an altogether Asian vision of the quiet life in a thatched hut deep in the mountains.... There's a Buddhist adage that says: Half a mat to sit, one mat to lie down. No matter how huge a mansion you may build, there's no need for more than one-meter by two-meters when you sleep; no matter how many dishes are set out before you, there's no eating what will feed ten. Sure, given the choice, who wouldn't like more space instead of less? Still, if it comes down to working extra hard just to pay high rents and mortgages, then there are people who would rather spend that time surrounded by their favorite things."
Atelier Bow Wow have followed their interest in "pet architecture" -- basically the design ingenuity of poor people responding to vastly over-valued real estate -- with a book about the Post-Bubble City, in which small, sustainable private houses become a metaphor for the body, and for local personal survival. Post-bubble is a way of life.
It isn't just Japanese in Japan who feel this way. David Duval Smith of design group Namaiki really impressed me with a lovely interview he gave Theme magazine. Namaiki do just enough work for corporate clients to follow their own interests, which have veered recently into guerilla gardening -- the greening of spaces in the city and outside it.
"The model for my farms," says Smith, a New Zealander, "is Masanobu Fukuoka’s seed ball project and Bill Mollison’s Permaculture system of sustainable agriculture. (Fukuoka is the pioneer of natural farming and sustainable agriculture in Japan who now gives lectures abroad. Mollison is an Australian researcher.) Basically, the idea is to spread the seed and let nature go. It’s about living in an edible jungle. You don’t need to pay 100 yen to buy a few pieces of lettuce or herbs. You just plant some seeds, the rain falls and they grow, and you get hundreds of leaves and thousands of seeds the next year.
"People have been calling them “guerilla farms” or “green graffiti,” I guess because it is done without permission. But I believe it is a victimless crime, if a crime at all. No one profits [financially], there is no damage, no loss of anything. A gross and a net gain.
"I came to a realization that nothing was more miraculous than soil and seed. They are positive in every sense, right up to the massive real profit in seeds at the end of the plant’s life, clearly sustainable, and essential to human existence.
"The project also was started as a reaction to the car, which I believe is a true villain in communities. Cemented roads are unproductive, as is parking. Yes, personal mobility is important, but I think that can be addressed more intelligently. And also, yes, goods and delivery systems are important, but only in commerce and the consumer market, which is quite unsustainable. At present, it takes 100 calories to make 10 calories of food, not to mention petroleum-based fertilizers, machine harvesting, plastic, and the worldwide delivery involved. This is unsustainable, unhealthy, and unintelligent. Vegetables are best fresh, and so I thought that they should be grown locally.
"People sometimes use the expression “going to seed” to refer to something in the process of declining or decreasing, but I think going to seed is a necessary part of life."
Now, a lot of the selling we've seen this week represents typically irrational capitalist behaviour -- hunches, worries, fears, projection and paranoia trigger more hunches, worries, fears, projection and paranoia . This storm in a rich man's bone china teacup needn't really concern the rest of us. The huge sums of money being lost are largely imaginary, purely notional, and concentrated, anyway, in very few hands.
But what might a big crash mean to the rest of us? Might it even be rather good news? I think the answer to that depends on the answer to the question "How big?" The kind of crash people call a "correction" would mean very little to me, personally. I own no property, no house, no car. I have no dependents. Neither do I have any debt. I could live on a quarter of the sum I'm currently earning, and it wouldn't honestly make much material difference to my life. A crash would only start to impact my life if it made air travel more expensive, or made the internet somehow stop working.
Berlin isn't just a city well-protected from rising sea levels, earthquakes, and so on. It's also well-protected from financial instability. This is a city with incredibly cheap prices, a city populated by people who manage to live well on little money, a city of renters rather than owners, a city pretty familiar with post-materialist lifestyles.
But a warning on just how wrong things can go here, in other circumstances, comes from Kafka's experience of the city in the early 1920s. High inflation and unemployment led to such poverty, misery and civic unrest that Kafka, already seriously ill with tuberculosis, didn't dare buy newspapers or venture into the centre of town. He stayed in a rather dull suburb with his girlfriend, Dora Diamant. Then again, the same conditions of instability attracted the younger, tougher Bertolt Brecht, who came to the city to agitate for communism. He later described Kafka as "a man too much trapped under the wheels" of the capitalist system rather than someone looking for alternatives. But even Brecht had to flee when the Nazis used instability to grab power. They eventually murdered Kafka's sisters in concentration camps.
The big fear, should a big crash come, isn't so much the immediate economic effects, but the political ones. What would a desperate America do if and when it realized that, as The Guardian thinks, what we're seeing now is its supremacy crumbling away? Might the empire lash out with more ill-advised military adventures, try to take the world down with it?
It's easy to get apocalyptic, though. I prefer to think that what's been happening this last week or so -- and seems set to continue this week -- might actually be a bit of a boost, a filip, an incentive to people to start looking at their basic priorities in life.
My own brand of post-materialism matches Berlin values with Japanese ones. Here, for instance, is Kyoichi Tsuzuki, in the afterword to "Tokyo Style", his documentation of the way ordinary Tokyoites live in small spaces:
"Today, amidst Japan's unprecedented devotion to money, even after property and fame and desires have all been attained, somewhere in the backs of our minds lingers an altogether Asian vision of the quiet life in a thatched hut deep in the mountains.... There's a Buddhist adage that says: Half a mat to sit, one mat to lie down. No matter how huge a mansion you may build, there's no need for more than one-meter by two-meters when you sleep; no matter how many dishes are set out before you, there's no eating what will feed ten. Sure, given the choice, who wouldn't like more space instead of less? Still, if it comes down to working extra hard just to pay high rents and mortgages, then there are people who would rather spend that time surrounded by their favorite things."
Atelier Bow Wow have followed their interest in "pet architecture" -- basically the design ingenuity of poor people responding to vastly over-valued real estate -- with a book about the Post-Bubble City, in which small, sustainable private houses become a metaphor for the body, and for local personal survival. Post-bubble is a way of life.
It isn't just Japanese in Japan who feel this way. David Duval Smith of design group Namaiki really impressed me with a lovely interview he gave Theme magazine. Namaiki do just enough work for corporate clients to follow their own interests, which have veered recently into guerilla gardening -- the greening of spaces in the city and outside it.
"The model for my farms," says Smith, a New Zealander, "is Masanobu Fukuoka’s seed ball project and Bill Mollison’s Permaculture system of sustainable agriculture. (Fukuoka is the pioneer of natural farming and sustainable agriculture in Japan who now gives lectures abroad. Mollison is an Australian researcher.) Basically, the idea is to spread the seed and let nature go. It’s about living in an edible jungle. You don’t need to pay 100 yen to buy a few pieces of lettuce or herbs. You just plant some seeds, the rain falls and they grow, and you get hundreds of leaves and thousands of seeds the next year.
"People have been calling them “guerilla farms” or “green graffiti,” I guess because it is done without permission. But I believe it is a victimless crime, if a crime at all. No one profits [financially], there is no damage, no loss of anything. A gross and a net gain.
"I came to a realization that nothing was more miraculous than soil and seed. They are positive in every sense, right up to the massive real profit in seeds at the end of the plant’s life, clearly sustainable, and essential to human existence.
"The project also was started as a reaction to the car, which I believe is a true villain in communities. Cemented roads are unproductive, as is parking. Yes, personal mobility is important, but I think that can be addressed more intelligently. And also, yes, goods and delivery systems are important, but only in commerce and the consumer market, which is quite unsustainable. At present, it takes 100 calories to make 10 calories of food, not to mention petroleum-based fertilizers, machine harvesting, plastic, and the worldwide delivery involved. This is unsustainable, unhealthy, and unintelligent. Vegetables are best fresh, and so I thought that they should be grown locally.
"People sometimes use the expression “going to seed” to refer to something in the process of declining or decreasing, but I think going to seed is a necessary part of life."