Monday, September 2, 2019

What recent event gets replayed in Kisangani 2150 to a different effect?

“We Are the World”, the 1985 charity song/event orchestrated by (well-off) pop musicians to benefit African famine relief.

Before going any further, however, let’s back up. The idea of Kisangani 2150 is to take the world Kim Stanley Robinson created in New York 2140, run it forward 10 years, and re-center it somewhere else, like Kisangani (in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). KSR wrote NY2140 as a replay of the financial collapse of 2008, but to a different effect. The banks were nationalized and new taxes allowed a fundamental shift if the goals of the federal government. But the book ended there, without providing any sense of how that worked out. OK.

So, I want to replay “We Are the World”. The song itself will be different, and it will be organized out of Kisangani. But why? Who’s to benefit? Good questions. In due course.

I note first of all that this connects organically to NY2140, which ended with our crew dancing to West African pop in a club deep beneath Manhattan. Final words in the novel (613):
“Could you believe that guy on the whatever?”
“I know. Fucking amazing. Best music I ever heard.”
“And now, look at this, here we are right on top of the place, and it’s like they’re not even there!”
“It’s true. And there was hardly anyone there anyway. I never even caught the band’s name.”
“They might not even have a name.”
“Heck, there’s probably fifty bands like them playing tonight in this city. Dances like that going on right now, all over town.”
“It’s true. Fucking New York.”
And that’s it, that’s all. That’s the story I want to tell, about not only those 50 bands, but the million bands all over the world. Without them the story that Robinson told would not have happened. Now that it has happened, now there’s a chance for a real revolution.

And then there’s this, from Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over, which is his guesstimate of our near term future (229):
We will move from a society based on the pretense that everyone is given an okay standard of living to a society in which people are expected to fend for themselves much more than they do now. I imagine a world where, say, 10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives, the equivalent of current-day millionaires, albeit with much better health care.

Much of the rest of the country will have stagnant or maybe even falling wages in dollar terms, but a lot more opportunities for cheap fun and also cheap education. Many of these people will live quite well, and those will be the people who have the discipline to benefit from all the free or near-free services modern technology has made available. Others will fall by the wayside.
Let’s just take that as a reasonable assessment of the near term future. What bothers me is this phrase, “cheap fun and also cheap education.” Why not “inexpensive fun and also affordable education”? Why the use of “cheap” and why the doubling? For that matter, why “fun”, for I doubt that Cowen meant it with the foundational valence it has in the title of Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. I sense a value judgment lurking in Cowen’s wording. Kisangani 2150 will be working against that value judgment.

Just how to do that, that’s another matter. Just for fun, for example, I imagined exploiting the fact that airships (lighter than air aircraft) are a major form of transportation in NY2140. Not only that, but some people lived in villages in the sky. Why not have a string of airships encircling the globe, nose to tail, with people dancing on them. So I did a quick calculation: assume our airships are 100 yards long (I suppose I should have done this in meters, no?), with a hundred dancers/singers per airship. That’s 440,000,000 dancing at once. Seems like a rather large number. Let’s space the airships out so we only need a tenth as many; that gives us 44,000,000 people. That’s a more manageable number.

Now maybe I don’t want to do that. It’s just an idea. Something to play with.

Why Kisangani? I note that the Congo basin is mineral-rich and some of those deposits are southeast of Kisangani, not nearby, but, when they’re transported may of them would be transported through Kisangani. Maybe Kisangani becomes a center of airship manufacture and maintenance. Who knows?



Coming back to the present, YouTube has a number of collective musical projects. One type involved a song that is sung by performers all over the globe. They recordings are made whenever and however and then edited together into a single clip where we hear one continuous performance and see it handed off from one set of performers to another. That’s the kind of thing that could build to whatever is going to be orchestrated out of Kisangani in 2150 or not too long after.

It’s an idea, a goal, and material to work with.

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