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Notes -
Mind you I'm talking about literal ruins here. Curtis had clips of Patty Smith roaming around a bankrupt New York and pointing out how cool and edgy being destitute is, but you can get this experience in most western countries if you're willing to go to the places people don't like to talk about.
Of course there's a larger metaphorical sense in which we're living in ruins. It's hard to count the amount of social institutions that existed for centuries that are now barely recognizable derelicts whose only value is in the name. Like fortifications of ancient civilizations that are now so vestigial they have no strategic value whatsoever and remain mere talismans connecting us to a quasi-mythic past.
I think it is a good shorthand image for the general concept I'm evoking actually: a crumbling derelict council house in the north of England that's supposedly worth hundreds of thousands of pounds through sustained 8% inflation because people would rather be deluded than to admit their standards of living are declining. Complete with knife wielding drug addled ethnic strife and rainbow wearing bobbies who arrest only complainers.
Truly, it's hard to look at the "YooKay", remember the British Empire, and think of anything but the concept of ruin.
To quote Baudrillard himself:
To add to that point about the ruins, I've had that feeling many times. I don't know about American infrastructure as much, but in my city, infrastructure is such a problem that just maintaining it becomes a bigger project (more expensive, more disruptive, longer, more divisive) than building it was in the first place. They've been renovating a bridge-tunnel built in the 60's. It cost 1 billion dollars ajusted to inflation to build and took 4 years. The renovation costs (so far) 2.7 billion and it's been 4 years already with no end in sight. There's a metro station that I remember when I was a teen looked alright, then when I started working as a young adult they had to temporarily take some wall panels out to deal with water infiltration. That was 20 years ago, the panels are still off and the walls keep looking worse and worse and you can see the precarious fixes they just kept applying, chicken wire holding pipes and gutters, funnels to move leaks and hastily bolted corrugated metal sheets patches over cracks. It's like we're children playing in the ruins of a more advanced civilisation.
In my area we've got the new Tappan Zee Bridge, and the (under construction) Portal North railroad bridge. The New Jersey Turnpike keeps getting wider. They raised the deck of the Bayonne Bridge so larger ships could get under it. We can build infrastructure -- it costs more and takes longer largely because of red tape (mostly environmental impact stuff) and cost disease, but we can still do it. When we can't -- as in the NYC subway system -- it's not that we lack the technical ability but that someone powerful doesn't want it. In that subway's case, the unions don't want to allow anything that would reduce the number of employees needed to run the system.
I know, we are also building some new stuff sometimes, at enormous cost and effort. It's just that sometimes, when I snap out of the stupor of familiarity and actually look around at some of the infrastructure that we take for granted I'm appalled that we're okay with the state much of it is in, even for infrastructure that is clearly vital.
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