Last Stop on the Anthropocene

Riding to the end of the planetary landscape

Note: this was originally posted on my Substack on Nov. 30, 2021. I deleted that Substack several months ago and I’m reposting these blogs here so they won’t be lost.

Embarking

It's November: the breezes blow chill, the trees stand bare as needles, and I've been riding the train again. November is Leaf Season here in east-central Massachusetts. When enough wet leaves carpet the train tracks, they cause slippery rail, or "low railhead adhesion" -- with not enough friction between the wheels and the rails, the will skid across the tracks when the 144-ton engine tries to start or stop. I've ridden the train enough that my body's center of gravity remembers the regular rhythms of the stations on the line. When I hear the train brake and anticipate the shift and we slowly, slowly skid past the station, I feel the disquiet in my chest. Through the window I see the dismay on the passing faces before the brakes finally seize the rails. There's a metaphor somewhere, the great symbol of modern industry defeated by a few wet leaves, but as far as the engineer is concerned it's just aggravating.

As I wool-gather at the window my eyes project the illusion of a migratory landscape onto the glass. The train window is the oldest type of glass interface -- predating the film projector lens, the television screen, the computer monitor, the smartphone. Always the deceit of movement on the other side of the border; but the landscape on the other side of the train-window glass exists in our material world. The window cuts an edge between my train seat and the world outside, as if the landscape is moving around me while keeping its distance. Like the movement, this separation is an illusion. Me, the window, the train, the rails, the trees and their wet leaves, the metal fences lining the tracks, the crumbling back-of-the-building parking lots, the yards hosting scattered plastic furniture and children's toys. The city and the wild, the human and the unhuman, all of us clasped together in the Anthropocene.

First stop: Human Landscape

The landscape flickers in my window, humans flicker in and out of landscapes. The landscapes interlock and overlap. Always moving into and across them, that's our personal experience of Planet Earth. As individuals we receive the whole as a series of smudged pieces, as we are received in them. Fragments among fragments, the human and the unhuman marking each other. In the Anthropocene the human marks are everywhere and indelible.

I live in north-central Massachusetts, where the indigenous Pennacook peoples ("the People at the Bottom of the Hill" in Abenaki) also lived. They were sometimes called the Pawtucket or the Merrimack, and were made up of several kin-groups -- the main being Agawam, Nashua, Naumkeag, Pentucket, Wachuset, Wamesit and Weshacum, with some of these having smaller sub-groups. The groups dwelled near each other in something neighborhoods crossed with collectives, where they would negotiate with each other over the rights to gather and use resources on their various plots of land. Families like to quarrel, so Pennacock society was mostly level in order to keep the kin-groups from fighting each other over supplies.

There were two features of the landscape that the Pennacook truly venerated: rivers and forests. Rivers like the Merrimack were lined with fertile soil to grow their squash, corn, and maize. Waterways were also the fastest travel routes -- allowing for long-distance trade by cutting through the rocky domes and sharp eskers of quartz and granite and clearing a path through the marvelous, immeasurable forests.

To explain about the forests, I have to quote from George H.W. Foster:

The extent to which the Massachusetts forest governed Indian life is hard to imagine today. It contributed food directly - fruit, seeds, and acorns and other nuts - and also indirectly, by furnishing habitat for wildlife, headwaters for fish and shellfish, and nutrients for crops grown in forest clearings. Medicines were derived from the forest, as well as housing, which consisted of frameworks of saplings covered by sheets of bark held together by tree-root lashings. Strips of the inner bark of cedar or basswood were used for mats and baskets. Canoes were built from trees felled with stone axes; hollowed out with fire; finished with stone, bone and shell scrapers; and propelled with ash and maple paddles. … Fire was an indispensable tool of the Indian culture. The friction of wooden drills and spindles sparked "touchwood" (often the Polyporus fungus found on tree roots). Cooking fires were fueled with windfalls and deadwood gleaned from the forest. Wildfire was the principal instrument used to maintain clearings for crops, obtain ash for fertilizer, and create conditions favorable for wildlife. … The forest also yielded the primary instruments for taking game: deadfalls were used for making snares; ash, for longbows; elder, for arrows; and tree bark, for quivers.

Those deep rivers and spacious, abundant forests were also the places of the Pennacooks' juxtaposition with the unhuman. For thousands of years the Pennacook painted their dead in red ochre and buried them in cemeteries full of great earthen mounds at the mouth of the Merrimack River. In the wooded swamps, "the abode of owls", the shamans -- the pauwaus -- congregated to seek guidance from beyond. They lived only by the grace of the landscape, reading the rhythms of seasons and migrations, grieving the dead, attending signs and portents. Someone in the twenty-first century might say the Pennacook were "in harmony with nature" as a way of comparing them favorably to our society of late-industrial blight. But nature isn't harmonious. Every ecosystem is a roiling mass of inert and vital matter caught in a throbbing web of birthing, eating, dying, decaying, eroding, invading, evolving. The Pennacook were like the other indigenous people of the Americas: technologically advanced enough to both read and manipulate their terrain in order to thrive in that landscape.

Before the European settlers arrived, there were about 100,000 indigenous Americans in New England, and around 12,000-16,000 of those were Pennacook. In 1524, they encountered a French expedition led by the Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verranzano. He had been working his way up the East Coast from North Carolina to Narragansett Bay, looking for a sea route to the Pacific Ocean on behalf of King Francis I. He went back empty-handed, and the Pennacook, in their inland villages by the Merrimack River, had no direct contact with Europeans for the next 90 years.

The Pennacook thrived in their landscape, but the Europeans had struggled in their own landscape for many centuries. Their roads and cities were strata of ruins upon ruins laid by decades of warfare, the land deforested and over-farmed. And of course they had the immunity left behind by generations of plagues, the germs of which they bore from their landscapes in France, Spain, and England all the way to the shores of the Merrimack.

The European diseases started to affect the Pennacook in the 1560s. An epidemic of typhus in 1586 was devastating. As the years went on there were waves of measles, influenza, and diphtheria. A terrible epidemic of what was probably smallpox in 1616-1619 killed hundreds, perhaps thousands. In 1620, the survivors met the English settlers who claimed the land of Plymouth. The Pennacook then numbered about 2,500.

The English settlers spent the 1600s claiming more and more land for themselves. Seeing no alternative, and raised in a society built around defusing conflicts, the sachem Passaconaway left his seat at Naumkeag at the falls of the Merrimack to meet with the English. In 1629, Passaconaway signed a formal treaty of alliance with the colonists and tried to appease them. But the English and the Pennacook had completely discordant ways of existing within their landscapes. To the European settlers the terrain the Pennacook had cultivated for thousands of years was a vast ocean of commodities, with land the most precious of all. The settler is defined by their insatiable appetite for land above all.

Relations with the English kept deteriorating. In 1642 forty Englishmen tried to arrest Passaconaway; when they couldn't find him, they took his son Wonalancet hostage. To see his son again Passaconaway agreed to a "treaty" in 1644 giving the Massachusetts colony claim over the Pennacook landscape. Between more waves of disease and attacks by the English-allied Mohawk, there were about 1,200 Pennacook left by 1660. Colonization made them refugees from their own landscape. They merged with the surviving Abenaki and moved north into Canada where their descendants have lived since. Their home was no longer a human landscape, it was part of a global landscape, claimed and ruled first by the global British Empire and later by the global hegemony of the United States.

Second stop: Globalized Landscape

What happened to the Pennacook has never stopped happening since. Human landscapes remade into global landscapes through colonialism, a combination of theory -- greed, racial bigotry, religious and nationalistic fanaticism -- and practice -- violence. Colonialism is at the core of the modern world, the engine driving the train we're on. Without colonialism, there can be no industrialized Anthropocene, and thus no human-made climate crisis.

I couldn't possibly say anything about the legacy of colonialism and/or industrial society that hasn't been said repeatedly by many people much more intelligent and educated about these topics than I am. So I'm just going to make a few observations about how we as a species got shunted onto our current track, with huge apologies for how over-simplified this is.

Obviously there's been something like a global economy for thousands of years. That economy was based on long-distance trade between people living in localized human-scaled landscapes. Colonialism changes that equation by demanding the mass production of particular commodities so they can be traded between nation-states, empires, and corporations in order to generate vast profits. In order to do this colonizers need land, and to take it, they will dispose of the people already living there. They will kill them, displace them, or violently compel them to produce their desired commodities. This terrible cycle might have somehow slowed or even stopped after, say, a thousand years when all the colonizable land on Earth was taken or the amount of labor and profit wrung from colonized people hit its maximum possible output. But industrialization swapped the old wood-fired steam train with a coal-burning engine. Industrialization dramatically increased productivity and output with almost no upper limit, as long as the factories could be built and staffed and the fuel to run them was extracted. Computerization put us on a diesel train by increasing productivity per output even more, and finally in the Internet Age we're on a modern high-speed railway.

After the era of colonialism seems to end -- in, say, the 1970s -- there's no going back to a pre-colonizer economy. Every human landscape on Earth is somehow, some way touched by the global economy. (On the train I ride the conductors work for Keolis Commuter Services, part of a multinational transportation company based in France; the engines and cars were mostly built by Kawasaki Rail Car, Inc. (Japan) then rebuilt by Alstom (Germany). The steel in the rails could have come from numerous countries, maybe more than one.) This has been so commonplace to everyone in the US since the 1990s that we no longer think much about it. It's too large to really comprehend, we just assume that most non-perishables in the US are assembled somewhere in China, a country that most Americans no essentially nothing about except that "it's where COVID came from" and a lot of think-tank types want us to go to war with them for some reason. It's impossible to truly grasp the idea that your landscapes, the particular spaces you call home, don't really belong to you. They don't "belong" to anyone -- they're part of an invisible, incomprehensible ever-shifting mass of globalized landscapes. Zoom out far enough to the singular massive unseen global landscape and that is the essence of the late Anthropocene.

Twenty years ago this was Our Exciting Future. In the 2000s this was there was a lot of "borderless world" propaganda about the global economy, how it had the potential to make everyone in the world into an entrepreneur or startup CEO if they are savvy enough. Instead we got the Walton Family, seven people collectively worth $244 billion in 2021 US dollars. A little less than it would take to wipe out hunger for the entire world, but not by much. The world's richest people are $5 trillion richer than they were in 2020. As of this writing 5,207,634 people have died from COVID since the WHO started counting. A bit less than a trillion dollars per death. This is part of the "late" in the late Anthropocene.

The other part of what makes this moment the late Anthropocene is our climate. As you probably know: "2020 was the second-warmest year on record based on NOAA’s temperature data, and land areas were record warm. Averaged across land and ocean, the 2020 surface temperature was 1.76° F (0.98° Celsius) warmer than the twentieth-century average of 57.0°F (13.9°C) and 2.14˚F (1.19˚C) warmer than the pre-industrial period (1880-1900). Despite a late-year La Niña event that cooled a wide swath of the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2020 came just 0.04˚ Fahrenheit (0.02˚Celsius) shy of tying 2016 for warmest year on record. The 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2005."

The Earth's climate is by definition a global phenomenon, what changed is the legacy of colonialization tethering all of human civilization and culture to a global landscape as well. The debates and the anguish around climate change almost never touch on colonialism, maybe because the descendants of the colonizers still hold the commanding heights over the global economy and landscape. But the suffering of the Pennacook show that colonialism is both the genesis and the apotheosis of the Anthropocene. The Pennacook people were at ground zero of colonization, and they were forced to move far north to preserve their lives and their culture. As every environmentalist has been saying at the top of their lungs since at least 1970, homo sapiens has nowhere else to go, no landscapes to migrate to, just the global human and the planetary unhuman clenched together. We're headed down these rails together.

Last Stop: Planetary Landscape

The conversation around global climate change in the West is always about saving the future. Most of the popular discussion in the US -- where about 5% of the world's population still uses up 25% of the world's resources -- has to do with the possible effects on our quality of life. The people all over the world who are suffering the most from climate change don't talk about the future, they talk about saving their present. About In July 2005, the 100 or so residents of the South Pacific island of Tegua, part of the Torres Strait islands, were the first people to be declared climate change refugees when flooding caused by the risen sea level forced everyone on the island to evacuate permanently. Their landscape was no longer a human landscape, or even part of the global landscape. It had reverted to the unhuman, part now of the planetary landscape. On the level of the human and even the global landscapes, human matter at least a little, but the planetary landscape is totally indifferent to the existence of life itself. The planetary landscape will be the Anthropocene's final stop.

The current level of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere will, in the next several years, result in the temperature of the entire globe rising between one-half and one full degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. You might not notice a difference of one degree Celsius when you walk outside, but you’ll definitely notice as the various ecosystems of the Earth begin to change. Huge parts of the western and mid-western US will dry out and become vast deserts, blowing dust and sandstorms across thousands of miles. Worldwide, the amount of fresh water available will start to dwindle away as once-mighty rivers vanish into hot mud banks or even miles-long sand-dunes. The permafrost in the tundra and the mountaintops has already begun to crumble and melt, leading to large-scale landslides and destabilized infrastructure. The melting permafrost will eventually dump massive amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, intensifying the warming effect. The people and animals living in the arctic zones have begun to move southward as their living space melts away around them. Since there’s less and less snow to melt, the summer heat hangs in the air and enters the ground, eventually to return into the energy loop. And less snow means less reflection of the sun’s light back into space, adding to the heat absorbed by the land and sea. As the glaciers retreat, the surface of the ocean gets larger. Since that surface is dark, it absorbs more of the solar energy, raising temperatures even more, which makes it harder for the arctic ice to reform, which in turn raises the temperature still more. And of course all the extra water from the melted ice and snow means islands submerged, coastlines flooded, and hurricanes that are stronger and more frequent. When the globe warms by a full two degrees, summers will be marked by large numbers of deaths from heat stress and wildfires, not to mention the famines from desiccated crops with no water to irrigate them. The forests that don’t burn will stop growing, and the heat-stressed trees will release yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The lack of snow melt runoff from the Himalayas will leave the entire Indian subcontinent desperate for fresh water. Masses of people will start to move across the globe in search of food and water, sparking conflicts with the military forces of wealthier nation-states determined to hoard their own resources. Those masses will also be searching for higher ground as coastal cities flood with sea water. Animal species, especially those that migrate, will also be displaced. By 2050 more than a third of all living species will be facing possible extinction.

As the global temperature passes two degrees of warming from pre-industrial levels, more and more people will go hungry. Mass starvation will eventually become inescapable, as even the crops that can survive in hotter climates begin to die out. The Amazon rain forest will begin to die, depriving air-breathing animals of much-needed oxygen at the worst time. Trees will grow again in the arctic for the first time in three million years as Greenland melts and all the continental glaciers in the northern hemisphere vanish. As the soil gets warmer, bacteria in that soil break down more and more dead vegetation, releasing thousands of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, where it adds to the greenhouse effect. Also adding to the effect is the warmer ocean water, which absorbs less CO2. Around the year 2050, as the global temperature goes up by three degrees, the Earth’s carbon cycle will finally reach a crisis point and throw itself into reverse. Instead of absorbing carbon dioxide, the Earth’s soil and vegetation will release it. This will dump even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so much that it pushes the global temperature up by another 1.5 degrees Celsius within 50 years. So-called super hurricanes will slam into the flooded coastlines of the world, laying waste to what remains of the coastal cities. Salt water will seep first into rivers and then into the ground water, making farming impossible, while reservoirs evaporate and the global droughts worsen. Wildfires will burn constantly in the dried-out forests and grasslands of the world. Masses of people will roam the land searching for food and water, especially as the Indian subcontinent becomes a dust bowl, triggering larger and more frequent deadly conflicts over precious fresh water and food. The remaining governments will stay in power by promising to repel the starving and parched masses at all costs.

When the global temperature gets more than three degrees higher than pre-industrial levels, the fabric of society will truly start to fray. Antarctica’s ice will be steadily melting, raising the sea level about a meter every 20 years. That may not sound like much, but it will, for example, reduce the UK to a series of tiny drought-ridden islands in the North Sea. The larger coastal cities will transform into island nations. The sheer number of displaced people moving north will overwhelm attempts to provide for them, even in the richest nations, leading to massive, crowded refugee camps. China’s farms will fail, leaving at least a billion people without a regular source of food. Summers will get longer and harsher, making some cities unbearably hot. But air conditioning will be difficult to find, since the rivers powering hydroelectric dams will have fallen, and ramping up fossil fuel power plants would only add to the problem. But that problem will be getting worse anyway, as the arctic permafrost melts away, dumping at least 500 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere and raising the global temperature another full degree Celsius at least. This means that if the Earth warms by three degrees, it will inevitably warm by at least four degrees, and probably five.

When the global temperature moves upwards past four degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, the planet starts to become unrecognizable. The ice is gone from both poles, and even in the far Canadian and Siberian north, the summers are long and hot, making agriculture difficult if not impossible. The amazon rainforest has finished its transformation into a vast desert. It’s hard to imagine the massive migrations not triggering military conflicts, rendering even more of the Earth’s surface uninhabitable. Sea water has begun to flow into some continents’ interiors. We might see Mediterranean algae growing in the Arctic Ocean, and palm mangroves growing in the UK and Belgium. When the temperature hits five degrees of warming, the industrialized world will start to revert into hostile tribes jealously guarding their scarce resources. As farming becomes impossible, humans will try to eat whatever they can catch. But hunter-gatherers take up many times the amount of land to sustain themselves, making conflict even more inevitable. Most of the human population might resemble the groups in modern day Somalia and Sudan, where the nation-states have collapsed into constant internal warfare. There is a decent chance that a five degree warmer world will melt the remaining permafrost in the sea beds of the world. If that happens, the global temperature is guaranteed to continue to increase.

If the Earth surpasses five degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels, it will resemble the end of the Permian period. We won’t have the Siberian volcanoes this time, but we will have sea water which is so warm less oxygen can dissolve in it. As with the Permian extinction, this anoxic water will suffocate everything from plankton to sharks. Warmer water also expands, raising the sea levels even higher. And of course the warmer water would lead to even stronger hurricanes, causing massive flash floods across any land still above sea level. Gases long trapped in the sea bed will be released, creating shock waves as huge bubbles of methane hydrate shoot up through the water and hundreds of feet into the air. The shock waves from these exploding gas bubbles will trigger yet more gas eruptions. Methane is a greenhouse gas, but unlike carbon dioxide, methane is flammable, and will ignite in the air at concentrations of 5 percent or more. Lightning would ignite the methane in the atmosphere, sending giant fireballs shooting through the sky. A single methane fireball would have the power of a tactical military explosive. A larger fireball might have the power of 108 megatons of TNT, one hundred thousand times more powerful that the entire global stockpile of nuclear weapons. Anyone who survived these hellish explosions would eventually find themselves unable to breathe as silent, invisible clouds of hydrogen sulfide, released from the stagnant ocean, rolled in from the coasts and slowly across the remaining continental surfaces. And perhaps that’s just as well, for soon they would be riddled with cancerous tumors, as the ozone layer disappears completely and the radiation from the sun bathes the entire Earth in a deadly glow.

Disembarking

If I wanted to lie to you, this would be the part where I say: it's not too late for us to hit the brakes, fix the climate, and stop the Anthropocene. But you know that's not possible. 2008 was the year most climate scientists recognized that even if all greenhouse gas emissions on Earth could be halted immediately and simultaneously, it was already too late to stop the greenhouse effect from kicking in. The earth’s temperature will continue to rise for thousands of years to come. The protest movements and international discussions have come to nothing. Wealthy individuals, with wealthy nations following their lead, have already begun to make their own long term strategy evident. Rather than engage with the global community and treat climate change as a problem common to all humanity, one they mostly caused, they're building massive infrastructure projects like walls and other barriers, investing in powerful military forces, and popularizing rhetoric that excludes and demonizes refugees, immigrants, and other outsiders. The plan is to make their nations into fortresses. The super-rich are investing in what one observer called detachable infrastructure, like ships, submarines, planes, and space craft, which they can use to escape from the environmental and social impacts of the climate crisis. But there's no "outside" of the global landscape. Nobody gets to exit the Anthropocene train until it's reached its destination, wherever it ultimately ends up.

However: if we're honest about how colonialism is at the root and the heart of the Anthropocene -- how it put us on these rails in the first place, which were always going to lead us to this destination -- that provides us with a place to start as we try to imagine an alternative. Colonialism has the effect of defining all relations between humans, and between the human and the unhuman, as essentially property relations -- selfishness as the core of human nature. Systems of legality, governance, even morality are founded on concepts based in property relations, in order to, for example, limit the power of the state. This is a total oversimplification of course but you get the idea. The Pennacook didn't subscribe to this view of human nature. They adjudicated their disputes by collectively agreeing to maintain equitable access to resources. Doing this allowed them to maintain a democratic, stable society for centuries. They're not the only people who imagine a different kind of human nature. It means thinking past the Anthropocene, not just stopping the train or changing tracks but getting on a whole new train altogether. If there is hope for the human landscape after the Anthropocene, and I wouldn't have written all this if I thought otherwise, this is it. If that sounds impossible, consider that the colonial era only started in 1500 and the industrial era only started around 1800. In September 2021, scientists found human footprints in White Sands National Park, New Mexico, that are about 23,000 years old.

You and I might not be there to see it, but the train rolls on.

I Hope This Well Finds You

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Going to the well for redemption and revolution

Note: This was originally posted to my old Substack back on November 13, 2021. I deleted that Substack a few years ago so I’m reposting these old blogs so they don’t get lost.

Disclaimer: most of this text is about Martin Luther King, Jr., and racial justice in America. I’m a middle-aged White man who has never experienced racial discrimination and never will. I would understand if you think it’s presumptuous or misguided of me to write about these topics as someone whose role should be primarily to listen, not talk. So I have grounded my thoughts in the words of Dr. King. You will judge if I succeeded in speaking with humility and in a spirit of amplification, not self-importance.

Hello and Holla

The word "hello" always bothered me because no one seemed to know what it meant. Every time I answered the phone or greeted someone a little language-imp perched on my shoulder, wrinkling its nose. What was I saying? I finally asked my seventh grade English teacher what hello meant. She was both faintly amused and vaguely pained. It's just what people say when they greet each other, she said. But what did it actually mean? We went around for a while until she understood that I wanted to know what the content of hello was. "Rock" means a rock and "red" means a color. So what is a "hello"? At this point my teacher was suddenly very busy, looking down at her papers and shuffling them intently, indicating that she deeply desired me to be anywhere else at that moment. should be headed somewhere else.

Hullo and Ahoy

The etymology of "hello" doesn't help, but it does tell you that the modern English word "hello" comes from an older French form spelled "holla," meaning "hold up" (close to the British "what's all this then"). When Missy Elliot shouts holla! in the middle of Get Ur Freak On she's using old French to say "whoa there!" When we say it on the phone it's because Thomas Edison was once startled by his phone ringing and blurted out something that sounded like "hullo!" and it stuck. Alexander Graham Bell liked to say "ahoy" when he answered the phone. As if the person calling was a vessel passing through thick fog, trying to hail you through the darkness, hoping for a response.

Evocations and Salutations

Some words describe and some words evoke. They can summon powerful and frightening spirits into the world, who cleave reality apart, into what was real before the words were used and what is real in the aftermath. "I now pronounce you wed"; "this has been declared an unlawful assembly"; "you are under arrest"; "I hereby sentence you"; "fire". But some evocations are gentle gestures of affection and friendship, like salutations and closings in correspondence. "Dear X"; "best regards"; "yours most sincerely." Salutations and closings persist in our emails, the way the save icon for MS Word is still a 3.5 inch floppy disk and how fact we call digital objects "files." It's a horseless carriage effect -- misapplying our old familiar words to newborn technology, using our comprehended past to brace ourselves against the incomprehensible present.

I Hope This Finds You Well

Back in the late 1990s, beginning an email with "Dear X" was, I believed, what you were supposed to do if you were writing to anybody over 30. Our Elders disdained email as shabby and informal (or so we heard) so to placate them we wrote electronic mail messages as if they were magical missives washed up from the ocean-sized Information Superhighway. Thirty years later those emails read like they were scribed on parchment by a quill pen daubed in iron-gall ink flitting above a candle-lit writing desk. Finding the right register for an email is somehow distressing and a dull chore. It it's too officious ("X, the memo is attached") it scans as icy or angry; too effusive ("Hi X!!") and it looks close to madness. So we compromise with standard openings. And there is one of these that everybody hates: "I hope this finds you well." Maybe because it's 2021 and no one who isn't unbelievably rich and powerful is physically and/or mentally well. Maybe because it feels like it goes even farther and projects stoicism onto the recipient -- hope you are keeping that upper lip stiff! Maybe the sender has to earn the right to claim hope before they can proclaim it to you in an email salutation.

I Hope This Well Finds You

There's something inherently sacred about a well, and humans have always known it. Every culture on earth has a version of holy wells, going back farther than we have written records. The most dried-out, used-up well keeps enough magic for itself that people use it to make wishes. Even the roots of the word "well" are tangled up with the word "wish" because both words meant abundance and satisfaction. There’s something mysterious about a well, a straw piercing the rind of the earth. Isn't it nice to think that we each have a well somewhere? Waiting to bring us abundance and satisfaction? Maybe you already found yours and draw from it every day. If you haven't found yours yet, I hope your well finds you. I hope this well finds you.

I am an Archivist

I've been a professional archivist at Boston University for about 20 years. My official title is Assistant Director for Manuscripts, which my daughter likes because it "sounds witchy." An archival repository consists of collections, aka papers; these collections can be made up of almost anything: drafts, notes, letters, journals, media (photographs, audio/video etc.), artwork, textiles, newspapers, even digital objects. Archival collections are enchanting because their contents are usually unique and irreplaceable in a global economy built on mass production, reproduction, consumption, and disposal. (But even modern garbage can be a historical collection.) What the creator or collector of the material chose to keep in the papers, what they discarded, and how they arranged everything — all these choices are also unique to that collection. Researchers treasure archival collections because they offer access to things that are hidden, insights into the process. Archives aren’t for information retrieval, they’re for knowledge production. That’s a rare thing in a data-science-society that values aggregation not inspiration.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers

The collection I work with the most is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers. I was the project supervisor on a major re-cataloging project on the papers in 2007-2009, and I'm the only staff member from that project still remaining at BU who worked on it. The finding aid (which is what archivists call inventories or catalogs) for the King papers describes every scrap of paper in the entire collection. The papers only go from the early 1950s -- when he was a graduate student studying for his doctorate at the BU School of Theology -- to about 1963. They're not comprehensive, and there are other major King collections out there, especially at Morehouse College in Atlanta. BU's King Papers stop right before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, held on August 28, 1963 in Washington, DC. Which is what I really wanted to talk about.

Improvising the Dream

Part of my job is to answer people's questions about our collections, and one of the most common questions I get is: do you have Dr. King's original draft of the "I Have a Dream" speech he gave at the March on Washington? Imagine if we could unveil his thought-process on that! We don't have it; nobody has it because it doesn't exist. No single draft survives. The March was such a huge undertaking that MLK barely had any time to prepare any remarks at all. What everyone really wants to see is the original draft of the section that starts with "I have a dream," but one of the greatest feats of oratory in American history was improvised. A common story about how it happened: as he approached the end of his written text, the voice of the legendary Mahalia Jackson rang out. One of the greatest gospel singers of all time and a close friend to MLK, she had preceded his speech singing an old, old spiritual, "I've Been 'Buked and I've Been Scorned," about holding on to your faith and hope against an entire world whose fuel is your sweat and blood. "Tell them about the dream Martin!" she cried. Some words describe and some words evoke. Speeches and sermons are obviously forcible evocations.  “I Have a Dream” was so powerful American space-time has curved itself around it ever since.

Inward and Outward Prophecy

IHAD is a prophecy. Prophetic language is an ancient method of evocation, in two styles: inward and outward. Inward prophecy addresses the self and the past, calling the people who have fallen into faithlessness back to the principles they have forsaken.

In an early section of IHAD, MLK says:

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

This is MLK’s inward prophecy: The state and the citizens of the United States strayed from the justice promised at the moment of national creation. His demand is redemption.

Outward prophecy looks to society and the future; it widens the horizon of possibility to brings the principles into our shared material reality — the dream of making a just world in our present life.

MLK immediately follows the section above with this:

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

This is MLK’s outward prophecy, a new world that won’t be delayed or denied any longer. His demand is revolution. MLK had recently made this demand already in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, published two months before the March on Washington. (Another text with no surviving original draft, probably because there was no single original draft.)

Dr. King was a preacher of the Christian gospel, he knew this prophetic language down to his bones. Like any good sermon, IHAD blends the two kinds kinds of prophetic language together, alternating between the past…

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

… and the future:

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

That last sentence is the most misused, misappropriated text in the United States since at least 1980. How and why did that happen?

Redemption and Revolution

The ideology of racism and the brutality of enslavement and its aftermath are obviously woven through the entire history of the United States going back to the colonial era. Racial oppression has always been an essential part of the American economy. MLK wasn’t naive about this history. Despite the liberation rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, he knew there was no true promise of universal equality and justice intended there. So MLK is careful to make his inward and outward prophecies inseparable: no revolution without redemption, no redemption without revolution. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up [revolution] and live out the true meaning of its creed [redemption]: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” [transforming the meaning of the original language].

The work of the US civil rights movement has always been both redemptive and revolutionary. Trying to redeem American democracy through equal access to the ballot, for example; trying to revolutionize American society through equity in the streets, public spaces, trains and buses, hospitals, shop floors, boardrooms, everywhere. Revolutionary because it would mean justly reclaiming everything withheld by the enforcers of our old national ideology: housing, wages, education, health care, freedom of movement, safety from violence by the state and its permitted vigilantes. In other words, a revolution in wealth.

Neither Redemption Nor Revolution

Wealth has always equated to power in American society, so to equalize American wealth the ruling class would have to relinquish their absolute control over the existing political economy. A just share of wealth, and thus power, would be an unassailable birthright of the people. Can you imagine living in such a moral society? (It’s not hard to understand many conservatives since the 1950s thought MLK was obviously a communist.) American wealth and power is more concentrated in an untouchable group of White aristocrats and their families than it has ever been. Republicans are shrinking access to the ballot. Our horizon of possibility is chased into remoteness. And one of the great paradoxes of US politics since 1968 is how MLK’s words played a role in bringing this about.

IHAD was shorn of its redemptive, revolutionary demands by White aristocrats, their politicians, and their followers in the US of the 1980s. Their mission was to reframe MLK’s rhetoric so it appeared to support White supremacy instead of attacking it. They disregarded the historical context of three hundred years of injustice and microscopically focused on the phrase “…not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” This is what it looks like, from an address by Ronald Reagan in January 1986, where he was defending himself against critics pointing out that his administration had tried to roll back civil rights laws, poverty relief, and affirmative action :

We are committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, and so we oppose the use of quotas. We want a color-blind society.

And again, from February 1986:

We want what I think Martin Luther King asked for: We want a colorblind society. The ideal will be when we have achieved the moment when no one--or when nothing is done to or for anyone because of race, differences, or religion, or ethnic origin; and it's done not because of those things, but in spite of them.

In 1991, Senator Alan Simpson said this during the US Senate hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court:

[MLK was the] greatest . . . civil rights leader. . . [who] asked only that he and his children be judged, quote, 'based on the content of their character and not on the color of their skin,' unquote. Isn't what he was asking for was [sic] a colorblind judgment, and isn't that exactly what Judge Thomas is advocating?

There are too many examples to quote them all.

None of this is news to anyone who is familiar with the history of US civil rights since 1970. But it’s worth repeating just to point out how insidious it is that colorblindness became the mainstream interpretation of IHAD for generations of White Americans.

Equivocation and Counterrevolution

Because of MLK’s status as an unimpeachable martyr for civil rights, one whom baby boomers and their parents felt bound to respect, the “colorblind” framing of IHAD obtained moral weight in the White imagination and was passed on as the correct reading. Conveniently for the status quo, colorblindness assured the favored that their elevated status was not the symptom of a morally sick society. According to colorblindness, racism was not a hateful ideology incarnated by violence, injustice, poverty, and exploitation; it was simply bigotry. Pointing out the historical context of three hundred years — that was the real racism.

To complete the rhetorical reversal, in the 1980s-1990s American politicians shifted their language away from addressing racial inequality in society in order to talk about crime. Talking about the “race problem” went out, talking about the “crime rate” and “superpredators” came in. The terminology of crime, safety and property rights allowed Americans to embrace racist sentiments without overtly using racist words. By this logic tough-on-crime rhetoric and mass incarceration were not ideological projects designed to ruin the lives of thousands of Black Americans, they were initiatives intended to make the entire nation “safer.”

The phrase Black Lives Matter came into common usage after the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012. Echoing MLK it declares the value of the lives of Black Americans against the constant threat of violence and oppression. The conservative backlash to this righteous declaration was the phrase “All Lives Matter,” descended from colorblind rhetoric. It weaponizes the abstract concept of equality in order to neutralize any shift towards justice in our material reality. The ultimate mutation is the perverse phrase “Blue Lives Matter,” an advertisement of American police’s aggressive opposition to anything that might restrain their capability to terrorize not just Black Lives but All Lives.

The Giant Triplets

By the time of his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam,” MLK had shifted his prophecy towards the outward, revolutionary posture:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin... we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Racism, materialism, and militarism are the pillars of American dominance and hegemony across the planet. To attack them is to undermine everything that keeps America “strong”. Acting against them is taboo. That’s why true activism provokes an extreme reaction by the ruling class and their media and military wings. Activism stakes out a place of power, refuses to relinquish it, and uses that power on behalf of the people against injustice.

I Hope This Well Finds Us

In IHAD, Dr. King says: “we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The roots of the world “well” and “wish”, abundance and satisfaction, are also connected to the word “will”. Is abundance and satisfaction, in the form of justice in our society, something we can both wish for and will into reality? Is there such a generous well somewhere waiting to bring us abundance and satisfaction? Maybe we will find it and draw from it every day. I hope this well finds us.

Archives Against the World

Vint Cerf, the vice president of Google, recently spoke at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, California.  Most of his remarks were devoted to the fragile nature of digital information and the peril that fragility poses to the historical record: he warned of “bit rot” and “a forgotten generation, even a forgotten century.”  The main problem: most digital data is inextricable from the hardware and/or software needed to access it.  The necessary tapes, programs, disks, hard drives, platforms, operating systems, etc., are mostly obsolete, so vast amounts of data from the last forty years or more remain trapped inside aging, degrading physical media, perhaps never to escape.  Several news outlets shaded Cerf’s remarks with the tone of a dire prophecy from one who has seen our dark future and come to warn us of its immanent arrival.  

 

This was all deeply annoying to archivists, most of whom have been with the problem of digital obsolescence -- cleaning up the mess left behind by people just like Vint Cerf -- every day for the past twenty years (at least).  Cerf’s warning comes late for those of us who have stacks of unlabeled 5 ¼” floppy disks from the 1980s sitting in boxes in our vaults, their contents a total mystery.  In addition, as Luciana Duranti pointed out on the Archives and Archivists listserv, Cerf was selling something: “digital vellum,” a way of storing information via cloud computing that would bundle together the digital data with the information needed to access that data, ensuring that future systems would always have what they needed to keep the data available.  Coincidentally, would this be a service that Google might provide?  Friends, are you tired of dealing with the heartbreak of bit rot?  Is your data outdated?  Your hardware gone soft?  Now there’s Google Vellum, the new product that everyone’s talking about!  Your data will stay fresh for years...

 

You can see why archivists met Cerf’s remarks with a collective shrug.  But what no one reacted to was the very last thing (according to the news reports) that Cerf mentioned during his talk.  “To do this properly,” he said, “the rights of preservation might need to be incorporated into our thinking about things like copyright and patents and licensing.”  Cerf is talking about “digital rights management,” or DRM.  I want to discuss DRM and its long-term implications for archives, but I don’t want to call it DRM because the phrase “digital rights management” is a maddening euphemism.  The producers of digital consumer goods exercise varying amounts of control (but always some control) over the goods they produce after those goods have been purchased; this leads necessarily to exercising control over the behavior of the consumers themselves.  That’s what DRM actually means.  It represents the linguistic shift away from “consumers” towards “users,” away from “goods” towards “apps” and “services,” away from the notion that those who purchase products have any meaningful claim of ownership over those products and towards the legal reality of “content” temporarily “licensed” to an “end-user.”  “DRM” is also misleading because it contains the word “digital.”  DRM can be applied to analog objects that interact with digital devices, the way Green Mountain Coffee applied DRM technology to its Keruig coffee pods and brewing machines to prevent other companies -- and more significantly, its own customers -- from creating their own pods for Keurig machines.  

 

To make the issues at stake clearer, I’m going to swap the phrase “digital rights management” for “consumer control” -- ConCon for short.  ConCon has been embraced by every corporation in the world as the way of the future.  The governments of the world have followed their lead.  The WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996 requires participating nations to enact legislation making it illegal for consumers to even attempt to circumvent ConCon.  The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act was the U.S.’s version of that legislation.  It’s easy to see why ConCon is the dominant paradigm for corporations selling digital products or offering digital services.  Those companies are essentially information brokers, whether that information takes the form of movies, music, books, games, polling data, traffic patterns, news reports, housing prices, or dating profiles.  In order to protect their revenue streams, these companies have to protect their particular information and the wrapper it comes in from being copied and distributed for free.  That’s why, despite the fact that consumers universally loathe ConCon, it’s only going to get more common.  Almost universal.  But as strange as that world is going to be to live in, I’m more concerned about the implications of that ConCon-saturated world for the future of archives.

 

This is the part where I will sound paranoid to some of you.  Sorry, but here goes:  I believe ConCon will eventually pose an existential threat to archival institutions as we now understand them.  Not digital preservation.  Consumer control measures.  Long-term digital preservation is essentially a technical problem, no matter how complicated and difficult the solution.  There are excellent tools being developed at this moment to help solve the digital preservation problem.  ConCon measures are not just a technical problem, they are a legal problem, with the full force of private property and governmental interests devoted to preventing that problem from being solved.  Not only are information brokers totally uninformed about and uninterested in the (relatively) open access to information archives offer; they’re openly hostile to it, as that access represents a potential threat to their profits.  As more and more digital information is encased in proprietary formats with ever-more restrictive use licenses, that access -- which archives depend to deliver useful information to their patrons -- will dwindle away.

 

Maybe some technology companies will offer archives to purchase licenses to access specific types of proprietary digital files and/or media.  That would make any archive that purchased such a license yet another revenue stream for that company, with obvious ethical, legal, and financial complications following.  Perhaps other tech companies will decide to cut out the archival middle man and offer their own services for migrating old data into new formats, as with Google’s digital vellum, for the price of either financial compensation, some form of ownership/rights over the data, or both.

 

Or maybe archivists will decide to do what the owners of those Keurig machines did: figure out ways to get around the ConCon restrictions.  Archivists could simply hack their digital media to disable or circumvent ConCon.  This would obviously put them on the wrong side of their institutions’ administrators and any legal counsel they might have.  Even hacking non-commercially available software and hardware for preservation purposes puts archivists in a legal gray zone at best.  In our ConCon future, it’ll be impossible to present most digital information without either legally and financially acquiescing to ConCon or illegally defying it.  

 

But what would defying ConCon institutionally look like?  Would those archives be quasi-legal institutions, or even outright outlaws, based on free and open access to digital primary sources?  Will the archives of the future -- not the “licensed” archives, but the archives with information that patrons actually want to use, the archives with actual original documents -- for all intents and purposes end up looking something like a better-curated Wikileaks, with finding aids?

 

I argued in my first blog post that archives are, by their very nature, subversive institutions.  I think ConCon will eventually force each archivist to decide for him or herself he or she wants embrace the subversive aspect of archives’ cultural imperative.  That, in turn, will change the face of the field of archives as a whole.

 

But who knows?  Nobody can predict the future.  I might be wrong.

 

I might be.

 







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