Shared public spaces and facilities have traditionally served, in equal measure, as symbolic equalisers and facilitators of social interactions (Getty Images)
When the internet displaces the town square
At the intersection of urbanisation, technology and culture, a major geopolitical transformation is taking place.
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For more than a century since its publication in 1922, TS Eliot’s The Waste Land has inspired. The poem’s (and poet’s) fans are legion and varied. They include those from 1930s China who saw the work as a meditation on a crisis-ridden West. Following the Hiroshima bombing, some in Japan equated modern civilisation with Eliot’s spiritually desolate, confusing and grim landscape. Long before he became one of the most notorious and fascinating characters in CIA history, James Angletoncorresponded with Eliot. And it is largely through Angleton that Eliot’s poem Gerontion – as bleak as The Waste Land and also published in the aftermath of the First World War – became a pop culture trope.
Waste Land
With his book Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, the journalist and scholar Robert Kaplan joins a long list of thinkers who have turned to Eliot for metaphors and maps. Kaplan describes Eliot’s magnum opus as “an immense panorama of futility and anarchy”. Twenty-five years into the new millennium, Kaplan finds the contemporary world to be quite similar. But it would be a mistake to think of Kaplan’s latest as yet another litany of all that ails the world. Contemporary concerns such as Ukraine and Gaza do frame Kaplan’s “infernal vision”, as the great literary critic Northrop Frye once described Eliot’s The Waste Land. However, it is his accent on the intersections of urbanisation, technology and culture as major drivers of geopolitical transformation that renders edifying value.
For Kaplan, urbanisation is a principal agent of political and therefore geopolitical change. This is a claim that is, at once, unexceptionable and striking. After all, it is hard to imagine the American Revolution without Boston and Philadelphia. Or the Arab Spring without Cairo. Or Bangladesh's student-led revolution last year without Dhaka. Detailed empirical analysis supports such straightforward observations.
However, urban growth is increasingly unequal. For example, since the mid-20th century big and dense American cities have acted as “divisive forces”, reducing opportunities for economic mobility. A concomitant phenomena is segregation and stratification within cities, often functionally enforced by physical layouts and enclavisation. And as always, we have social media technologies to thank when it comes to accentuating divisions, urban or otherwise.
Shared public spaces and facilities have traditionally served, in equal measure, as symbolic equalisers and facilitators of social interactions. They are increasingly being displaced by internet platforms carrying the promise of “transcending locality” (to use a chapter title from a 1997 proto-tech-bro manifesto of sorts). Meanwhile, consumer internet tech is creating a permanent underclass of delivery agents and warehouse workers, often living in the physical and social fringes of cities. There are very few reasons to be optimistic about the fate of the new urban precariat.
As technologies cohere to become the defining driver of the 21st century, cities are fragmenting. And from this fragmentation flows social atomisation, which technology claims to ameliorate through digital ersatz.
For all its woes, the Weimar Republic did not have to contend with social media algorithms (even though it did have fake news challenges of varying gravity of its own).
Through messaging apps and social media, it is easier for low-income Latino Trump supporters in Queens to connect with West Virginians than fellow New Yorkers in Manhattan. It is easier for Muslim immigrants in London’s Tower Hamlets – where high finance coexists with crushing poverty – to identify with friends and family in Dhaka than with those in now-gentrified Notting Hill. It is easier for entrepreneurs in South Mumbai to make common cause with Manhattanites than with residents of Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums just twenty-odd kilometres away.
To be sure, cities have never been paragons of equality. Anybody who has ever read Charles Dickens knows that. We also have the pioneering work of economics Nobelist Thomas Schelling, which shows how segregation is, often, unintentional. But what is a new phenomenon is the extent to which cities have become divided, even as they chalk up significant successes. As Kaplan puts it, cities around the world increasingly resemble Weimar Berlin, where high culture flourished amid squalor, crime, and political crisis.
That said, for all its woes the Weimar Republic did not have to contend with social media algorithms (even though it did have fake news challenges of varyinggravity of its own). Not only do they create echo chambers – “wilderness of mirrors”, to use a phrase from Gerontion so favoured by a young Angleton – but they also fan a very basic human urge to imitate, the cult of influencers and “virality” being cases in point.
Computational modellers have shown how imitative behaviour can dramatically change the behaviour of economic and social systems, in a manner that resembles earthquakes. Interpolating from that line of thought, it is fair to conjecture that at least some of the political upheaval we are witnessing right now is a result of cascading imitation facilitated by tech. But some anthropologists argue that imitative behaviour is a cornerstone of culture. So, it may just be that technology is simply warp-speeding behaviour hardwired by evolution.
This places us – as it is sure to land Kaplan, with his conservative’s focus on culture as a primary determinant of societal success – in controversial territory. And that may be the most enduring contribution of his new book.
As long as domestic politics in major powers more or less proceeded along expected lines, a certain foreign-policy consensus across party lines – especially when it came to foundations – was assured. Consequently, it was fine to treat international politics as a game of billiards, where what happened inside countries mattered much less than how they interacted with each other according to immutable laws of power. But in moments of revolution, the billiard ball picture falls short. And suddenly, we are forced to look anew and take culture and values and various gradients within nations into account.
Inspired by Eliot, Kaplan tells us where to start.
