Fighting for the Future, page 17
The audience said nothing, nodding politely with the requisite smile on their faces.
Finally fed up, Sami latched onto the podium.
“You know, I do have something to say, actually, and it’s something you should all hear. Everyone thinks this place is so fucking perfect, and you know what, maybe it is! But you know what’s not perfect? You people! I mean, how do you live with yourselves! Day in and day out, you waste your lives patting yourselves on the back for the silliest shit, pushing back, or outright ignoring anything that you think will change things. Leading a perfect life doesn’t mean that you’re leading a good life, and we’ve all just given up on trying to be happy because we’ve gotten too comfortable and too scared. Back in the city, life may not have been all that it could be, but that was the last time I remember being happy because that was the last time I lived my life. If there’s one thing I want you to take from all this is that it doesn’t have to be this way, and I wish you could all just see that!” Sami turned to storm off stage before remembering what she originally planned to say. “And by the way, you all smell bad. Those essential oils don’t work as well as you think you do.”
Finally satisfied that she’d said her piece in a way that definitely counted as rebellion, Sami walked back to her friends with the long, confident strides of a revolutionary. The Community Organizer’s expression of utter shock was utterly satisfying, but it was her attempts to sniff her underarms as inconspicuously as she could that made all this trouble worth it.
“Uhm…” Ros smacked her lips. “Sami…”
“Yes,” Sami beamed with a self-satisfied smile “And you’re more than welcome,” she felt the need to add.
Amara huffed and crossed her arms in frustration. “Your mic was off, Sami,” she said, gritting her teeth.
“Oh…” was all Sami could say.
“Yeah…” Ros smacked her lips again. “Yeaaaaah…”
Flushed with embarrassment, Sami sank her face into her palms and groaned loudly—only to be drowned out by the unbridled adulation of her friends, family, and peers, who were still excited, because they hadn’t heard a single word she said. The Community Organizer played along, of course, tugging at her collar with an awkward smile, now trying to sniff her blouse.
And so the trio stood there with shame, taking it all in.
“Why does this always happen?” Sami felt the need to say, breaking the silence. “Every time we try to revolt, they just…”
Ros and Amara glanced at her, then turned back to the cheering throng, putting on their bravest, most stoic expressions.
“I saw it coming,” Ros replied with an air of polite condescension.
“Don’t worry,” Amara suggested, trying, as always, to be helpful. “We’ll tarnish this community someday.”
Materiality
Cory Doctorow
It was supposed to be a special graduation treat: for their last two weeks of middle school, Artemio's class would be the model classroom for the Huerta's Twenty-First Town, part of the show for all the other kids whose teachers were no more excited about being in school in the final weeks of May than their students were.
Artemio's parents thought it was going to be great. His dad had loved the Huerta when he was a kid, and his mom, who had grown up in Oregon, had been charmed by the Huerta when she moved to LA for grad school. There hadn't been a Twenty-First Town back then, only the Tongva village, the Mission, the pioneer town, the Gold Rush town, the FEMA camp. It was still enough for the Huerta to claim to be "the world's largest open-air museum," though much of its land was raw San Fernando Valley grit and scrub, with each little village connected to the other by a fleet of lovingly maintained antique vehicles from every era of California history: Redcar trams, omnibuses, horse-drawn carriages, Model Ts, a pod of hand-rubbed convertibles and muscle-cars that still ran on gasoline.
Artemio didn't think it was going to be great. His grandparents had told him enough stories of their childhoods to convince him that Old Timey People were fucking idiots (Artemio's parents said he could swear, so long as he did it well). It wasn't just the stupidity of sending tons of CO2 into the atmosphere: it was the reason for all that CO2, which was the production, distribution and elimination of some really terrible stuff.
Artemio's dad had had a favorite tee, with the Superman S on it and a satin cape. Artemio knew about that shirt because he'd seen plenty of pictures of his dad wearing it, mostly while jumping off of things while his parents tried to stop him from breaking his neck. But Artemio had never see the Superman S shirt, because his father wore it until it disintegrated.
But a bunch of Artemio's dad's shirts had survived, because he didn't like them enough to wear them out. Some of those were cut up for Grandpa's shop-rag bag, and some of them were in boxes in Grandma and Grandpa's attic, which Artemio had spent long hours exploring while his parents and uncles and aunts were being boring in the dining room between the end of dinner and the start of dessert.
(The plastic wrapper that the Superman S shirt had almost certainly survived, and was doubtless in mint condition in some deep landfill, unless it had been incinerated and turned into more greenhouse gases and carcinogenic smoke)
Artemio had a favorite shirt, too: it was a full-print dye-sub of Skullky, with his horns stretching down the arms and his flaming eyes right in the middle of Artemio's chest. It started off as just a quick print, picked during the morning hustle to get out the door for school, with Artemio anxiously checking the door and the app as he ran around packing his lunch and getting his other school stuff together, until finally the house chimed and there was the printer at the door, and he touched in and it sighed open and there was the shirt, and it was way cooler than it had looked in the preview and he tugged it on and it fit perfectly, of course.
So many people liked the shirt that day! Complements started two blocks from school and didn't stop until he'd turned the corner for his street on the way home. When he stripped the shirt off at bedtime and carried it down to the kitchen to put in the compost bucket with a sprinkle of tailored bacteria to get to work on its long starches, he stopped at the foot of the stairs: "Daaad!"
"What?"
"OK to order that shirt from today in permanent?"
"What?" Dad was doing his league night and was hard to get an interrupt in.
"The shirt! The one from today. Can I order another one? Permanent?"
"What? Oh, sure!"
So he did. It arrived the next morning, waiting on the doorstep when he got up, and it felt great and fit exactly like the one from the day before, but it was long wearing and would require some machine work to get it back into the material stream, but that's because it was ripstop and double-stitched, dirt-shedding and doped with silver ions so it wouldn't stink even if he didn't wash it after every wearing.
He had a growth spurt later that year, as it turned out, and the shirt stopped fitting, and he got another one, but then a month later he got bored of it and sent it to decomposed in the city vats, and switched to wearing these amazing hoodies that did this crazy thing like they were breathing, billowing in and out as they channeled air over him by means of these super-precise convection gills, and so the Skullky shirt got decomposed, too, though he kept it bookmarked at his mother's insistence, "in case one day you have a kid who wants to wear it."
Mom had weird ideas about stuff.
Ms Mirzoyan spent the week before the Huerta trip taking them through the different ways of thinking about the different eras represented by the model villages.
"Who can tell me about embodied labor?" she bueller-buellered, hoping to get some rise out of a graduating class with less than two weeks to go before the end of the school year. "Anyone?"
Ousa took pity on him. "Embodied labor is the amount of human work that goes into an object."
"Very good!" Mirzoyan pushed her luck. "What else is embodied in an object?"
"Ummm," Ousa said. "Materials and..." She looked around. Mirzoyan pointed at the light fixtures, made a hopeful face. "Energy!"
"Correct!" Mirzoyan made the wall rearrange its charts. "Let's just think about buildings for a sec. We know that they had a lot more enclosed space per person back in the Twenty First Town days, but that's not the whole picture. Look at this now, who can explain it?"
Ousa was apparently done for the day and the words hung in the class like a fart. Artemio sighed. "They used a lot more materials and energy per, uh, cubic meter back then?"
"Thank you, Artemio, yes. Now, who's going to put it all together for me?"
The class looked at the time display in the corner of the wall and steadfastly refused to meet Mirzoyan's eye. She shook her head.
"Remember yesterday's group discussion? Anyone?" She checked the time, realized she had to wrap things up. "For a long time, we were limited by labor, how much human work there was available to make things. Then we started to figure out how to trade energy for labor, animals, water, the sun, and then fossil fuels, to augment human work. Then we started to run out of materials, and we started to substitute energy for materials, too, as well as labor, working harder to get materials from remote places and process them.
"As we started to run out of better ways to extract energy, and better ways to trade energy for materials, we turned to using materials better, learning how to use less to make more, and then, how to reclaim the materials we'd used to make new things.
"But it was uneven, remember, and so in the Twenty First Town times, we were making things faster than we could unmake them, and a lot of them were badly made and hard to make into new things, and a lot of things we only needed for a short time were made from materials that lasted a long time. Things started to pile up.
"But that changed. Can anyone tell me how? Come on, people, you know this. No one leaves until I get an answer!" She smiled to let them know that she was kidding, but not entirely.
Artemio raised his hand: "Networks?"
"Networks! Thank you, Artemio!" The wall chimed. Class was over. The students tensed as a body in their seats, ready to leap for the door. Ms Mirzoyan saw her moment slipping. "OK, networks. Your homework: explain one way that networks have changed our relationship to stuff. Audio, video, text, anything goes. Tomorrow, people!"
And with that, they were off, charging out of the class, out of the school, and into the hot Burbank afternoon.
Dad was super-excited about Twenty-First Century town. Like, weird-excited.
"Arty, before you disappear into your room, let's talk about clothes, OK?"
Artemio stopped on the stairs, half a quesadilla in his mouth. "Dad!"
"Come on, kiddo. This stuff's going to take a while to fab up, you don't want to leave it to the last minute."
He chewed and swallowed. "I'll just get quickies made up every day."
"Don't half-ass this, son. You're going to be part of the museum! Other kids who come to it are going to be looking to you to find out what life was like then! I've pulled up a ton of reference for us, come on to the living room, we'll sort it out."
True to his word, he'd dialed up the living room, putting away his office and the dining room and converting the space to sofas and blank walls, and now they were crawling with reference photos and specsheets for Twenty First Town clothes, and Artemio could see that he was right—every piece had estimated delivery dates of like, three or four days away. It was crazy, like he was ordering up a building or something.
But when the clothes arrived, it made sense. They had a weird solidity—Dad used "materiality" which was also the word that Ms Mirzoyan used. Artemio couldn't figure out what it was, not at first. They weren't stiff or heavy, but they still felt durable, and then Artemio realized what it was: the stitching, the materials, the whole construction was something you only got on heavy work clothes, like the overalls Mom wore when she was in the shop, working on big iron. These t-shirts, jeans and sweaters—even the underwear and socks!—were made to last for years, even decades, long after he'd outgrown them. It was like making single-use chopsticks out of stone or plastic or something. Who did that?
Monday at the school was a mob-scene waiting for the bus, 55 kids in weird, old-timey, stiff and durable clothes, carrying backpacks whose stitching and rivets were designed to last for decades longer than the backpacks themselves. No one was actually wearing anything made from hydrocarbons, of course, but the corn plastics doped with carbon nanotubes did a good approximation.
One kid—Mike McKinley, who was either really stupid or hilariously funny and no one was ever sure which—showed up dressed like a newsie from the 19th century with a flat cap and big knickerbockers. They'd had a Buster Keaton LARP the year before so everyone got the reference but no one laughed. Ms Mirzoyan made him change, despite his insistence that Twenty First Town was "an age of atemporality" and they all groaned because everyone hated that chapter in the sociology textbook.
The ride out to Van Nuys was short, even though there were two times they got routed onto surface streets as part of the cadence and pacing system and of course Mirzoyan used it as a "teachable moment" to learn about flow in complex systems. But apart from those times, it was one of those awesome, sociable times when the whole eighth grade thrummed with anticipation of who they were about to become—just a week until graduation, then a whole summer of bumming around and getting into trouble, and then high school, baby. Most of them would go to Burroughs High, and some to Burbank, and a few weirdos with weird parents would be pulled out and homeschooled to keep them from having to get their vaccination boosters or learn about evolution. Those kids were planning to party the hardest.
They started seeing signs for the Huerta, and bits of the old fencing from when it had been Van Nuys airport, and then they were at the turnoff. Incredibly, it was still before 8AM, and when they got off the air had a chill and their breath fogged, the last of the LA June Gloom, which had been migrating steadily to May or even April over their lifetimes. They were met by a museum official who recited parts of the orientation—which they'd already watched in class the week before—and then went among them and shook their hands and complimented them on their outfits and smiled in a dazzling, wrinkly way with crinkled eyes and it hit Artemio that this grownup really cared about this place and it really mattered to them that Artemio and his classmates would be good Twenty First Town living museum exhibits.
Suddenly, he felt a different kind of excitement, maybe the same thing that had made his dad so weirdly into his wardrobe choices.
They had to walk from the parking lot to the Twenty First Town line; none of the vehicles were running yet. They marched past other school groups heading for the other parts of the Huerta, drawn from all over LA county, wearing outlandish matching cosplay for their respective historic areas. Seeing that made Artemio mostly glad about his assignment, he couldn't imagine dressing for the Mission Town, for example—though the gold rush outfits were actually pretty cool; he whispered himself a reminder to try out some of the outfits that summer, maybe for parties.
The Twenty First Town schoolhouse was aggressively air-conditioned and surveilled, with metal-detectors and bulletproof shelters in each classroom, and they were impressively solid and heavy enough that Artemio was willing to bet that they'd stop a bullet. They took historical accuracy seriously at the Huerta.
As he settled into his desk with his Chromebook and dutifully performed the lesson they were doing, using the clunky, historical interfaces. When the first school-group came through the room he got really distracted and self-conscious, but by the time the third group came around, he was actually really into it, like it was a drama class exercise: ignore the outsiders, don't break character. When the lunch-bell rang, the school played the sound of the hallway rush, simulating a thousand kids all mobbing the hallways, and it was so convincing that he steeled himself for the crush before stepping out.
The Huerta provided lunch—it would have been crazy to expect all the kids to get historically accurate food from home. The cafeteria was staffed by a couple of retired old ladies who were really into it, playing up a whole performance about the meat being from animals, which some of the kids got into to, making gagging noises and so on though of course it all came from culture, because of course it did.
By the third day, something flipped. Artemio got out of bed and accidentally shoved it halfway across the room, pushing off from it to stand up, forgetting how light it was and how easily it moved, the better to fold it down and flip it up flush with the wall when he needed the space for his desk and other furniture.
It wasn't just the bed: as he helped his dad flip down the kitchen table from the wall and get out the cutlery and such, he found himself overhandling everything, ready for it to weigh more, to be more rigid and creakier. He dropped a glass and though he caught it on the third bounce, he still had to buzz for the wetvac and let it in the door and then mom nearly tripped over it as it was cleaning the milk off the floor. Dad tried to make a joke about not crying over tripping over a robot that was dealing with spilled milk but it fell flat even by the standards of dad jokes.
He took a quickie shower and let his pyjamas run down the drain and then somehow he was late so he found a bike and pedaled hard for school, his heavy Twenty First Town clothes trapping the sweat and chafing, and the bike, too, was weird and flimsy-feeling, not like the racers they rode around on in Twenty First, with their solid carbon-fiber frames and thick, rugged rubber tires. The ride to the Huerta—almost all on surface streets that day, avoiding some unseen mess on the freeway—took them past low-density/low-rise housing from an earlier age, the last remnants of the small towns and suburbs outside of LA whose residents hadn't migrated to the dense, luxurious new builds that had already been old builds when his parents were kids.
"The age of atemporailiy," that groaner of a phrase, rattled around in his head, as did, "The future composts the past," which was the name of an independent study unit they'd been assigned over Christmas break, to find the mute, ancient remnants of the old world in their new world, sending him down to the storm drains beneath Burbank with a Burbank Water and Power crew that was inspecting the old cement and firing sensors into it with a big, noisy staplegun. It had been unsettling, seeing that much stuff that wasn't self-aware and also wasn't part of the natural world, as electronically silent as a hike in Angeles State Forest but in a place that was tame and orderly and human.
