naomi klein
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010What haunts me is not exactly the absence of literal space of much as a deep craving for metaphorical space: release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom.
All my parents wanted was the open road and a VW camper. That was enough escape for them. The ocean, the night sky, some acoustic guitar…what more could you ask? Well, actually, you could ask to go soaring off the side of a mountain on a snowboard, feeling as if, for one moment, you are riding the clouds instead of the snow. You could scour Southeast Asia, like the world-wearing twenty-somethings in Alex Garland’s The Beach, looking for the one corner of the globe uncharted by the Lonely Planet to start your own private utopia. You could, for that matter, join a New Age cult and dream of alien abduction, from the occult to raves to riots to extreme sports, it seems that the eternal urge for escape has never enjoyed such niche marketing.
In the absence of space travel and confined by the laws of gravity, however, most of us take our open space where we can get it, sneaking it like cigarettes, outside hulking enclosures. The streets may be lined with billboards and franchise signs, but kids still make do, throwing up a couple of nets and passing the puck or soccer ball between the cars. There is release, too, at England’s free music festivals, and in conversations of untended private property into collective space: abandoned factories turned into squats by street kids or ramped entrances to office towers transformed into skateboarding courses on Sunday afternoons.
But as privatization slithers into every crevice of public life, even these intervals of freedom and back alleys of unsponsored space are slipping away…How does it feel to have your culture “sold out” now, as you are living it?
Thoughts?
(No Logo, p. 64)
