How can you reverse such a trend when the mass is so great?
The irrefutable mass of London was evidenced by the decline of the classical modern infrastructures (roads, rail, canal) that did not directly serve it. The density was reduced to a totally London-centric organisation. Despite the infrastructural picture of Great Britain being so optimised, the government sell-off of the remaining arteries to private enterprise led to atomisation as well. More infrastructural branches were shut or fell into disrepair on the grounds of low demand. Atomisation led to a simplified network that was in fact more expensive and more complicated to use, given that one had to negotiate myriad tolls, ticket changes and worsening marginal terrains in passing through each private jurisdiction.
Private enterprise, however well equipped, does not possess the same value systems as a collective in the maintenance of any infrastructural system. The former prioritises value and profit (how can you grow on a fixed railway line?), the latter (theoretically) priorities the general human need. A collectivised institution is less able to shut a branch line of a railway, for example, on the sole basis of waning capacity (isn’t it obvious that branch lines would be used less?).
In theory, it should be politically untenable for any government, if vested with the resources to provide, to preclude anyone from access to a network based on where they live.
-PR-
When the hub is removed, what is the effect on the rim and the spokes? One might imagine collapse. But on our travels in the URE we saw a number of astonishing augmentations of the optimised, atomised infrastructural landscape of the regions. We have split our findings into two sections:
•the physical;
•the (formerly) invisible.
The Physical
Post-apocalyptic or dystopian landscapes are seen as such through a human lens. But these are utopias too. They’re just utopias without us.
Opening lines of the infrastructure refurbishment pamphlet ‘On Informed Neglect’.
To say that travel was simple in the URE would be a lie. It was totally time-consuming. We spent the most time travelling, mainly by MegaBus. It was a joy to take the train – but also a bit of a pain. It seemed nostalgic, but we were told that, in this place of scarcity, the canal is actually being reinvigorated as the most viable means of moving heavy goods from A to B. Some vessels transported some kind of synthetic raw material called Arbetite, using the water as a coolant. At this stage, it’s too hard to unpick directly the difference between the novel and the nostalgic in the URE.
Here, redundant physical infrastructures previously related to the Fatberg have been repurposed for access, cultivation and leisure. Other, lesser-used infrastructure is actually on the rise. But we have little capacity to create new in the URE, we can only adjust what we have.
Geoff, 48, South-West, infrastructural refurbisher. Has a visceral reaction to the sight of an overpass. Loves Roman history. Has never been in love.
Out there, infrastructure is in a time of flux. Lines that lead to London are still being bent in new directions.
The most obvious change we saw was the relative absence of cars on the road. There were some, but mostly they were not moving and being systematically dismantled. Never burnt out. Such hedonistic rejection of physical objects in the URE is really only seen at the Parties, so heavy is the emphasis placed on reuse.
It only took few years before people stopped using cars. It wasn’t really a choice. It was just too expensive, even if it gave freedom. So, after the split, we invested in MegaBus. It has been quite an investment – MBs have to be pretty capable vehicles… The roads ain’t exactly smooth here, and they run out every now and again, but the MB keeps a rollin’!
Rick, 34, engineer, MegaBus. Dismantled his first engine at the age of 11. Racked by what he calls ‘diesel guilt’. Has promised to show us his bike collection.
In the previous epoch, when most insurance products were dominated by the London financial market, the average regional car user was priced out even before the split. Everyone thought that it was oil or software that would spell the end of the autonomous motor vehicle. It was much more mundane than that.
As most roads lead to London, their A–Bness is less useful in the URE than that which their edges rub up against. Vast strips of overpass and motorway lands are being put to productive reuse in the URE. This is managed by groups of infrastructural refurbishers (IRs). The IRs are responsible for ensuring that the swathes of infrastructure attendant to the London-centric model are repurposed in different ways. They operate on a system of ‘informed neglect’ – choosing abandonment of some more marginal areas that are least effective in ensuring connections between members.
IRs travel widely to determine what (re)applications will be of the greatest possible benefit in the formation of bonds now and in future generations, to other regions, other people and the local Absorbist environment. As such, they seem to have abandoned regional identity in favour of a kind of asphalt nomadism.
Tracts of the M1 are now virgin deciduous forest and the M6 Toll seems to be some kind of sports venue. The southern end of HS2 lies in a state of informed neglect (the shortest-lived mega-project ever). We saw a Party on one of the more complicated overpasses in Midland; these towering structures of modernism are being reappropriated in extraordinary ways. We first assumed that infrastructure was a fixed condition, because all roads go from A to B. But, on reflection, that is not the case. As all infrastructural maintenance, reuse or abandonment is coordinated through IRs, it appears that they extract a kind of value from infrastructure when they can effectively repurpose it.
Infrastructure is how we make bonds. It’s not just a carrier of goods, signals or people. This means our arterial network has a kind of footprint; it’s totally up to regional agreement for how it might be most effective in forming strong bonds between members or regions. Spaghetti Junction had some amazing Parties before it became an effective growing site for Midland.
Amy, 19, apprentice IR. Loves to travel. Grew up in South-West. Found herself on the M4.
The (Formerly) Invisible
Invisibility is a technology myth. Information ethereal, clouds.
Consumers rarely stop to think where the other end of their MacBook Airs poke out: faraway places; pins drop on distant horizons.
Our digital technologies disappear like ninjas in the night; they’re inscrutably black and glossy. Their minimalism maximises their potential as tools for the optimised approach. As digital technologies are the windows into limitless worlds; meanings tracelessly slip from smooth surfaces, like water on silicone. We look straight through.
What we saw in the URE was different from (and at times the total inverse of) information infrastructures in London.
London URE
Invisible Public
Smoothness Seamed
Inaccessible Adaptable
Inscrutable Vulnerable
Minimalist Pluralist
Light Heavy
Communication is a key driver in the Absorbist system of bond formation.
Communication and connectivity are revered in a similar fashion to money in London.
We have called our findings ‘the (formerly) invisible’, for communications infrastructure in the URE is the physical manifestation of their connectivity culture and is steeped in a complex, populist narrative.
Form through Function and Back Again
From what we could see – and much of what we saw was pretty hard to decode – there seems to be a ‘connected hyper-localism’ at play in the URE. Individuals are literate in the design and linguistics of digital networks and have created something that defies any kind of standard definition. Communications infrastructure is the bodge-project of a million mass tinkerers.
When we first saw this, we thought it was a total mess.
Adornments and small enactments occurred around objects in the landscape that were totally baffling to us. But the form, marking and position of these objects had a d
eep meaning to the people who made them that went far beyond their practical use.
The Arbiters
The URE regions all organise around a shared infrastructural system that they call the Arbiters. To learn this we spoke to a number of software landscapers, or ‘Java gardeners’, as they are commonly known.
They told us that Arbiters are geo-technological information parsers, constructed from a synthetic crystalline material similar to bismuth called Arbetite. We understand that Arbetite was invented in Manchester.
Jin, a seemingly prominent software landscaper, is responsible for maintaining and communicating directly with the Arbiters. She puts it much better than we can.
An Arbiter decides how best to organise the communication in the part of the network it is responsible for. Or, to put it differently: it’s an enormous plate spinner. As the network became increasingly complex, but all the more central to life in the URE, we decided to cede responsibility of connectivity to machine-learned algorithms, rather than the peer-to-peer ‘net’ condition of before. This leap of faith into these relatively nascent technologies led to improvements to the order of ten in terms of efficacy of connection. Basically, in agreeing to do this, we admitted we had created something that we couldn’t subordinate any more; it was our equal.
Jin. Software landscaper and Arbetite miner, North. Loves to wear fleeced jerkins. Is rarely ever inside. Except when making Arbetite.
Three Arbiter Types
Super-Arbiter The Super-Arbiters are the largest information sorters and manage connectivity between regions and large institutions/organisations. They take the form of large features in the landscape. Super-Arbiters have that muted nobility that only something of such scale can possess. Old men in the mountains.
Sub-Arbiter The Sub-Arbiters manage connectivity at a more local level and have the most curious physical adaptations pertaining to what appears to be local narratives and customs. These are the strangest objects for the foreigner to interact with. You never know in the URE if it’s a log, or an Arbitrary construction humming away, parsing the noise.
Orbiter Orbiters could be regarded as the ‘personal’ gateways into the system. They can belong to small groups, such as families or persons. For mute objects, they engender a great deal of personal identity. They’re very nearly alive. Like the plant you place in the front seat of the van when you move house. They’re that special – like the cat, or the lucky fridge magnet.
-PR-
In conclusion, it appears that the function of these strange, proliferating objects is generally consistent across the URE: connectivity and communication. Their forms have a deep local relevance, however. Communication is the thread that holds Absorbism together, and these objects, the Arbiters, manage all those connections; the methods that URE members utilise to communicate with these things remains unclear to us, and should be the focus of further research.
There isn’t really much talk of the network itself. ‘Network’ is simply our description of the situation we observed. There is evidence that the pseudo-mystical situation, perhaps brought about by the members’ pure faith in the organisational capacity of these algorithms, has empowered the members of the URE to use them in new ways and that their letting go of the net condition has obliterated hierarchy. Members are excited by them to explore the full extent of the network, physically and digitally, but also proud of the small patch of they have cultivated themselves.
The Architectural
Absorbism, at its core, has been brought about by a change in the common mindset rather than by any technological innovation in the physical environment. There are some noteworthy sea changes visible in the built landscape, however.
New approaches to architecture are being developed in the URE. Yet that architecture is not being developed through innovation in construction techniques or materials, but more in the manner of its appropriation.
We saw this in two key examples.
1.New communality – the blurring of the boundaries between private and public space.
2.Sites of Party – an intriguing mass ritual enactment in the URE – that we see as the fleeting icons of the Absorbist world.
New Communality
In towns that were once the product of volume house building, off-the-shelf Architecture and pattern-book profit pads, there is a small revolution taking place. Entire terraced streets have been hollowed out to create enormous elongated cloistered galleries at ground floor that enclose not ecologically dumb lawns but diverse gardens and allotments that teem with life. Trellising and fencing have been removed to create large communal, productive outdoor spaces. In the more overtly augmented towns and villages in the URE, it is clear that members believe that an environment whose management is shared is an environment improved. This is the sinkhole problem made manifest as a benefit: the vacuum of neglected space left much room for activity to grow into.
You feel a kind of awe when you go through a terrace front door to find a whole covered street inside. It’s a magical rerendering of a, quite frankly, defunct typology that the volume builders foisted upon unwitting consumers in some gross re-enactment of nineteenth-century industrialism. Houses used to be a kind of wallet that you live in. And the trick was to make them as cheap as possible, so you could sell them on for loads more than they were built for. But we are working hard, through our adjusting, to undo these buildings a bit. Opening up to each other as we do.
Amelia, architectural theorist, construction adjuster. Used to be obsessed by newness. Thought creativity was about making. Then she knocked down her first wall.
We saw in the URE the creative deconstruction and adaptation of existing building stock. Without previous institutions such as planners and building control inspectors, a kind of DIY frenzy, combined with a kind of mass squatting, had arisen in places.
These sites are moving to a new order in which the ground plan seems to welcome anyone who stumbles across it. This is certainly a theoretical observation – as human nature does generally lead to some form of need for private settlement, however small. And yet it appears that the delineation of demise is loosening in favour of a thinner boundary between persons, their neighbours and their possessions. What is strange is that this collectivised approach is the accidental outcome of the ‘laissez-faire’ attitudes that led to the suffocation of this segment of architectural production before the split. Over-regulation and conservative planning required a convoluted structure of management and enforcement – anathema to a minimised local authority. So when the URE was established there was no one to really stop people from just getting on with finishing these developments however they wanted.
Sites of Parties
To talk of the most evocative monuments in the URE one cannot avoid talking about Parties. Parties expand the horizons of a ‘built environment’ when the control mechanisms developed in the existing system have been lifted.
Architectural capitalism is still an object-oriented system with its attention focused on the invisible. Architecturally speaking, our favourite historical example of the object obsession was in the late postmodern age, when the iconic skyscrapers ruled the urban skyline. It was a moment of real clarity. Literally a pinnacle!
Towards the end of the decade, however, the era of the icon building did eventually fade. As the scale of buildings increased, legible iconography became harder and harder to apply. Therefore, the symbolism transferred to the scale of the master plan rather than the object building. The city is an object after all.
Parties always have a pre-devised site. Their location is the product of a great deal of communication between Arbiters and members. The sites of these mass Absorbist actions were curiously picked at times. We saw some in the Midland Region in the sinkholes created by accidental over-tunnelling of the HS2 project. These massive holes in the ground became the shelters for what appeared to be carefully planned events, at which people gathered to celebrate, meet up and exchange ideas. It was tempting to call these things ‘festivals
’ yet they felt more purposeful than that. For, without the system to kick back against, the Absorbists don’t really require the fraught, desperate hedonism that one might attribute to the festivals we know.
The Party is a collective acknowledgment of what it is to be a member in this new system. Simply put, the Party is a great way to ensure that the greatest bonds are made between members in a meaningful, near-ritualistic way.
There’s a long history of anarchistic inhabitation in what we now call the URE. Like the Essex Plotlands, which are just round the corner from here. Yet the actions of these communities were divergent because they were kind of forced to build on marginal, greenfield lands and then have to defend their position there. I think what we are doing is different. We don’t see this as anarchy. That sounds a bit too crazy, really. No, what we are doing is a kind of recalibration of existing buildings to fit our own desire.”
Ivan, 56, metal detector. Loves coins. Hates currency. Dreams of moving to Ephesus.
London URE
Flow of Capital Bonds
Ultimate physical expression Skyscraper Party
In its infancy the URE does not have the tools to build big – and would it desire to? We saw no evidence of any new projects of significant scale. It is our belief that Absorbism is a socio-economic system – an economic system that functions through deliberate social exchange: bond making. Therefore, the significant change in the Absorbist world is not in technology per se but in the humans’ and humanity’s self-awareness, as opposed to unconscious individual experience.
The Party is the Absorbists’ glass tower, in that it is the ultimate display of human exchange. The Party exists momentarily and remains as a kind of memory, documented for posterity, of course, but only really livable as a present.
Economic Science Fictions Page 17