It was right out of The Founder’s Paradox, this whole idea. I thought again of the world-building strategy board game, down in that dungeon-like basement of the gallery in Auckland, depicting successive levels of escape from a dying planet, with its democratic nation-states, until the player finally reached the anarcho-capitalist utopia of Mars. In his catalog essay for the show, Anthony had quoted an article by Thiel in which he’d said that, when it came to the matter of escape, the important question was one “of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country.” The undiscovered country was the Internet, yes, but it was also New Zealand, and it was also space itself.
I remembered Anthony, driving our rental car toward Thiel’s estate on Lake Wanaka, talking about how he didn’t want his son to grow up in the future people like Thiel and Musk were working to construct.
No truly free places left in our world. The kind of freedom that was being invoked here was the freedom from government, which meant freedom from taxation and regulation, which in turn meant the freedom to act purely in one’s own interest, without having to consider the interests of others—which seemed to me the most bloodless and decrepit conception of freedom imaginable. (It was surely no coincidence, I thought, that little was ever said about building “communities” on Mars: the concept of community involved thinking of other people as more than burdens, or resources to be exploited, or rational actors with whom you could trade.) The notion of escaping “beyond politics” was, in other words, itself inescapably political. It was a dream of dissolving all entanglements with, and obligations toward, other people. This amounted to nothing less, in my view, than the dissolving of life itself.
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At the time of the convention, notwithstanding the occasional plane coming in low toward LAX, Mars was the brightest thing in the night sky above the city. Mars, the planet closest to our own, is no particular distance away. Because the two planets are elliptically orbiting the sun at different rates, the distance varies from 33.9 million miles at its shortest to 250 million miles at its longest. In the late summer of 2018, toward the end of that long and devastating fire season, Mars was closer to Earth—or, and this was somehow more unsettling to consider, Earth closer to it—than at any point in the previous fifteen years. If you were going to set out for Mars, or return from there to Earth, now would be the time.
“To be living here, and not in what we mostly believe is the insupportable there, elsewhere, is to be assimilated into a powerful abstraction, the abstraction of never-ending possibility,” wrote Elizabeth Hardwick. “The American situation is not so much to overthrow the past as to overthrow the future before it arrives as a stasis.”
The chaos and upheaval and entropy of our time, its roiling surface of radical change: Are these not in fact hysterical symptoms of a deep and lethal stasis? Everything is falling apart, coming to an end, precisely because we are unable to believe in the possibility of change. And what is true of the West in general is, as always, spectacularly, gruesomely true of America in particular. At the risk of stating the obvious: nobody is going to make America great again. Nobody even seriously imagines it to be a possibility. America might, it is true, eventually stop outsourcing its manufacturing to China, but if those jobs are ever brought back home, they will return in the form of automated labor. Robots and algorithms will not make America great again—unless by “America” you mean billionaires, and by “great” you mean even richer. Its middle class has been gutted, sold off for scrap. Trump is only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country’s blood—a rapidly metastasizing tumor of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and fear that we might as well go ahead and diagnose as terminal-stage capitalism.
What Hardwick calls the abstraction of never-ending possibility has its historical precedent in the frontier. Among the many other things it is animated by, abstract and concrete, America is animated by a foundational imperative of expansion. And this much it has in common with another of its great animating forces, capitalism, which exists and thrives through expansion of its own frontiers, through a relentless force of deterritorialization. And it is running out of frontiers; running out of boundaries to obliterate, nature to exploit. The legacy of its monomaniacal pursuit of cheap resources is a devastated planet that may soon be unlivable for vast numbers of its inhabitants.
“Human beings can’t go west anymore,” write Charles Wohlforth and Amanda R. Hendrix in their book Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets. “Our planet is full. Our personality as a species suggests some of us won’t put up with that situation indefinitely.”
The fantasy of colonizing Mars is, to employ Hardwick’s terms, a means of overthrowing the future before it arrives as stasis. In calling it a fantasy, my intention is not to dismiss the idea as a mere delusion. The world, after all, is built on mythology. The foundations of our flimsy reality rest in the bedrock of fiction.
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Once you start using the apocalypse as a way of encountering the present, an anxious response to uncertainty and change, it presents itself everywhere in the form of cryptic signals, deep emanations. On the final afternoon of the convention, I took an Uber back to the city from Pasadena. I got talking to the driver, a man of about fifty whose name was Alexander, and he told me about his childhood in the Philippines. His parents had both died when he was very young, he said, and he’d been taken in by an older brother, who himself had many children and little time or inclination to look after him. And so he’d grown up on the streets of Manila. Somewhere along the way, he’d picked up a pretty serious gambling addiction, which had only worsened when he moved to California in his twenties. But all that had changed now, he said. He hadn’t held a deck of cards in years, felt the rattle of dice in his closed fist. Something in his manner, a kind of entrepreneurial approach to the retailing of his own story, told me I was talking to a born-again Christian, and indeed we had only just hit the freeway by the time he turned his attention toward his personal relationship with the Redeemer.
Between one thing and another, he got to talking about the end of the world, a subject that was drawn to me as much as I was drawn to it. The catastrophes that were happening now, he said, were so much worse than they ever had been before, and were happening so much faster. The world had gotten so bad. God had told us to love one another, and we were doing so much greed. God had said I gave you all enough to eat, enough to live good lives, but still there was so much suffering in the world. So many people doing greed, he said: everywhere greed. He was in no doubt, he told me, that he and I both would live to see the end. Noah’s flood would come again in our time. Though not myself a Christian, or really much of anything at all, I was helpless to resist the lure of this talk, this language of floods and redemption, a personal God driven by love and vengeance. I didn’t get the feeling he was trying to convert me, for what it was worth. My sense of it was we were just two guys talking.