Like a lot of you, I’ve spent the last few weeks watching The Last of Us, and, yes, it’s pretty good, and, let’s be honest, there’s also not much on TV to compare it to. In the same way the world wide web, that endless, multitudinous expanse I remember from the early 2000s days of Homestar Runner and YTMND, has been reduced to a handful of hypervisible social media sites, TV has been distilled into a handful of streaming services marketed at, well, everybody. “There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking,” Sarah Schulman is saying inside my head, “…aesthetics blindly selected from the pre-sorted offerings of marketing and without information and awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility…” Even HBO isn’t safe from the dumbing-down; in April of last year, WarnerMedia, which owns HBO Max, merged with Discovery, putting all those decades of scripted shows in the hands of David Zaslav, a man firmly enthralled to reality TV. Read ‘em and weep.
One of the reasons The Last of Us is compelling to me is because the story–written by Neil Druckmann and first told, for those of you who might not know, vis a vis a 2013 video game from Naughty Dog–is unique, even though it treads in territory (apocalypse, zombies) that pop culture has tread before. The story is original, the characters are original, the way the world is shown falling apart after Outbreak Day is original, while also deeply, familiarly scary: militarized quarantine zones in major cities, chaos elsewhere; pop-up markets to exchange ration cards for cigarettes; remote areas where there’s no fear of getting bitten, but certainly of being raided or raped; millions of people dead or infected and thousands more living, not exactly thriving, but adapting; lush forests inside of abandoned buildings. The Last of Us imagines a future, a terrifying and bleak one, but a future nonetheless, one that both looks and doesn’t look like the present we live in now, and one which only barely includes us.
This originality is a relief because this is an era of redos (even our subject matter was a video game first.) Just now I googled “movie theater near me” and randomly picked the closest Regal or AMC—a Regal in Battery Park City—the offerings? Of the twelve movies showing today, four are remakes or sequels, three are based on novels, two are movies that literally already existed (Despicable Me, 2010, and a rerelease of Titanic, 1997), and a whopping two, according to Wikipedia, are entirely original: M3gan and 80 for Brady, a movie about four lifelong friends traveling to see their idol, Tom Brady, play football. The twelfth film, Missing, is what is called a “screenlife thriller,” a genre of visual storytelling where all the events are shown on the screen of a smartphone, tablet, or computer. An original method of filmmaking, for sure, but as a practice, not one relying much on original materials or resources. Also, a film that takes place on a screen? I don’t know where to place it. (Schulman: “...a weird passivity that accompanies gentrification…”)
If Regal Battery Park can be taken as a microcosm of American culture, what I’m seeing–in addition to a liberal blah-ness neutralizing the potential for groundbreaking new art–is a lot of hesitance to make new things up. To me, that makes sense, considering *gestures at world* all of this. It’s not just the fact of climate change upending our understanding of what’s to come; it’s the fact of climate change upending our understanding of what’s already happened. So, we go back—back to history, back to familiar stories, back to what we used to know, or thought we knew, about our past, present, and future.
Growing up a white, upper middle-class 90s baby, I understood my future to be an extension of my present–that I would continue the slow, upward climb my parents inherited from their parents and passed on to me. That there would be a 401(k), home ownership, kids. That there would be a world I could extrapolate myself into without reorienting too much. That the creek I grew up playing in would not flood; that the houses that dotted the intracoastal waterway would not blow away. That the pelicans would still line the docks. But this here and now is not the here and now I envisioned back then–having, as I did, the ability to envision at all because of whiteness, generational wealth, the impact of slavery, property cost and value math, affordable housing, so on. As a kid, I just thought that was how things were; knowing better has meant going back and re-understanding huge swaths of my past as something different.
Similarly, a lot of us have been wondering when, if at all, it’s going to snow. Not if you’re here from Florida or if you’re reading from Vermont or out west, but those of us in the coastal Northeastern cities are breaking records. As I write this, it’s 64 degrees in New York City; there’s a pair of cardinals chirping in the bare trees outside my window, perched on branches that haven’t seen “measurable snow” since March of last year. It’s been like this all winter—with two notable exceptions of below freezing temperatures, our “feels like” has been drifting mostly between 45 and 55 since December, and even though cities really, really close to us have gotten occasionally walloped, we’ve been trapped in a perpetual, lukewarm, vacuous gray. Some of my neighbors are happy about it; plenty of New Yorkers, after all, aren’t fans of winter. Most of us, though, it seems, feel uneasy.
As a Floridian who moved to the Northeast, snow was part of my mental construction of New York City, a pre-formed assembly that also included pay phones, the metallic tear of the subway, dark bars, brownstones, the anxiety and thrill of touch, and every kind of person that exists. The winter after my high school sweetheart moved to the city for college, he sent me a video of himself in Prospect Park after a storm: one gloved hand with fingers spread wide, depressing itself into two feet of snow. It was part of my expectation of New York City; it was part of my understanding of my own future–an extension of the present, that video, the way the trees looked in the background, laced with white.
But the future of New York City looks increasingly like current-day Arkansas or Washington, D.C.: “humid subtropical,” a climate zone that in 2020 officially enveloped New York City, settling in from here all the way down to Florida, where it gives way to pure, unfiltered tropics. (I remember winters as a kid; our lows were only in the 40s, but at least we had them, and we wore coats sometimes; the average low in January this year in Sarasota, Florida was 60 degrees.) Before 2020, New York City was designated as humid continental, a label still accorded to our friends upstate. Being the next Arkansas or Washington D.C. doesn’t mean no snow ever again, but it does mean longer, hotter, more humid summers; more rain; and higher average daily temperatures. That’s the prediction, anyway, and so far–although this is where our lived, experiential data ends–the winter of 2022-2023 has been far more aligned to prediction than expectation.
Escaping Florida meant escaping a perpetual summer that, as a child, then teenager, then young adult living there, started to blur my experience of how time, and therefore life, was passing. Winter is a crucial quadrant of my understanding of that process–hibernate, grow, thrive, then hibernate again. Without snowfall or even freezing temperatures punctuating the passage from December to January to February, it almost feels like winter isn’t happening at all. And that is fucking with me. It’s forcing me not only to reevaluate my understanding of my future but to rework my understanding of the past, too, of the vision I had back then that took, in its creation, elements of a world that no longer exists.
So, I’m watching The Last of Us, and what’s standing out to me most in the future Druckmann invented is all the green–the thick, abundant blanket of trees, ferns, leaves, vines, bushes, roots, flowers, and grass that, twenty years after the end of the world, has taken over most of what’s left of human civilization. An overgrown post-apocalyptic landscape is nothing new to the genre, but the way that nature is rendered in the game and the show is thoughtful and specific: moss growing over a carpeted dressing room, birds nesting in toppled skyscrapers, the infected themselves linked by a network of fungal spread that can sense when one or another of itself is in danger. (One question for Druckmann: where are all the mammals?) Regardless of the plot, the natural world of the game and the show is a beautiful one, and in both it typically heralds a moment for breath, for pause, for momentary peace or conversation, as you move with the characters through their world. The horror, in other words, is entirely in the human experience.
A few years ago, I wandered into the lobby of the Central Library in Brooklyn, where an exhibit had been installed—a biodome, erected right in the middle of the floor. I walked into the structure and found myself surrounded by a variety of species of plants that, according to the plaque, were likely to be found growing in New York City by the middle of this century. It was warm, wet; there were automatic sprinklers installed to keep the plants adequately watered. Standing there inside, cut off from the low buzz of library patrons by cubic glass panels, encircled by lush greenery, I felt a strange, sad feeling of relief. The feeling was that there was a future–something that contained multitudes, whether or not those multitudes contained us. In a flash, I saw New York City the way Druckmann might render it, and in that flash, it was very much alive.
Inherent in the invention of futures is the risk that you make a mistake–underestimate the toll, overestimate capacity, look foolish or hysterical or overly pessimistic, alienate your friends, get cast out of the market, be shadowbanned on the web. The alternative is to continue eating up the nostalgia. Climate change grief is real; I look at maps of the disappearing coastline of Senegal and immediately feel that hungry ocean on the steps of my first home and my current one. Climate change grief is also a consumer index. In a world this unpredictable, our fear, our need for stability, is exploitable, and it is being exploited–by oil companies paying for public relations campaigns meant to assuage a justifiably distrustful public, by centrist Democrats quashing dissent from the left by provoking the beast on the right, by a media culture that turns personal narratives into sellable content, and by an economy that turns humans and nature into labor and resources so it can pour back into itself what it takes, living off of our therefore perpetually unfulfilled lives like a parasite.
As environmental writer George Monbiot says, “We will prevent the pandemics of the future only when we value life ahead of money.” Here, he’s responding specifically to the recent, seemingly unstoppable outbreak of avian influenza as it relates to animal farming, but I’ve had the phrase running through my head in just about every context: on the train, at the doctor’s office, while paying bills. Valuing life ahead of money is also how we’re going to survive climate change, if we’re going to survive it in a meaningful way, because doing so would put us back into alignment with nature, which has no use for money at all and, in fact, thrives in the absence of the systems which center it. And in this era, which may or may not be late capitalism, imagining a future where we value life ahead of money is, by necessity, an invention. It means pulling “the violence” that “has been largely pushed out of sight,” as David Graeber puts it, back into the center of our understanding of what’s bad and what is changeable about this world.
It’s part of New York City lore that there’s always the potential for a March snowstorm–that late, heavy, devastating return of winter that kills magnolias and cherry blossoms and throws a lot of people into a brief depression. A lot of us are waiting to see if it’s that, or a standard snowy last week of February, or nothing at all. Regardless, for many of us, the past—that part of the timeline we were in when we formed the basis for what we understood our future, our now, to be—is dead. It doesn’t matter if the next few winters are a return to normal; the season won’t again be something that always functioned “naturally.” What was infallible is now not that.
What I wonder–or what I hope–is if this might be part of what has to happen for a collective (re)invention of futures. This has been going around social media a lot lately, and it’s true that the vast majority of people on earth at the turn of the 20th century were living under the divine right of kings—kind of impossible to imagine now, and in that fact, something to hold onto. That things change. That things change constantly, slowly and rapidly, whether or not we want them to and, often, because of us, whether or not we want them to. What we’re definitively not is a static species, living in a unchanging environment, despite what the movies want us to believe. There has been and will be collapse.
And because there has been and will be collapse, we have to make at least one the collapse of the social construct that is capital. Anything that has been invented by human beings, and which confers economic value and financial benefit to its owners simply by being owned—buildings, financial assets, others’ labor—perpetuates the notion, based on not one single natural law, that anything can be owned. That nature, or wildlife, or human beings, can be owned. Graeber again: “We are talking of ‘rights held,’ as English law puts it, ‘against the world’—that is, understandings between ourselves and everyone else on the planet that they will all refrain from interfering with our possessions, and therefore allow us to treat them more or less any way we like.” Consider the reality that we can legally, lawfully, under capitalism, apply these principles to natural ecosystems that we ourselves live within and depend on. To me, a smart kid who nevertheless got a C in Econ, it makes no sense. It seems evidently destructive, yet it’s what we’re dealing with.
So, it is imperative to invent something else. As always, I see this capacity in my friends—people who share meals with each other, grow tomatoes and give them to neighbors, travel to the border to assist asylum seekers, create skill-share groups, donate to GoFundMes, disrupt gender norms, read each other’s poems or whole entire manuscripts, exchange clothes, start free stuff groups online, install community fridges, pass the joint, try desperately to better understand what “the economy” actually is, share abortion information, create families, march in the streets. As always, it’s us, and we’re already doing it on a small scale every day. Acknowledging that, seeing that in our natural constitutions, is vital to the process of getting rid of the rest of it, which is vital to inventing a new relationship with this, our one place in the universe, which is vital to saving it.
The future I want to invent preserves migratory pathways and undisturbed spaces for wild animals, invests in public transportation and rewilds parking lots, builds affordable urban housing infrastructure and gets rid of suburban sprawl, kills the corporation-as-person, holds the CEOs of our worst polluters legally and financially accountable, and—easy!—rewires our entire culture away from profit as a practice. On a personal level, getting to a place where any of that seems possible has involved a wholesale re-remembering that debt, money, laws, governments, and the economy are all social constructs: we invented them. We made it all up. And we can do it again.
Until next time.