Pro: Nakagin Capsule Tower

In the early 1970s, a Japanese architect named Kisho Kurokawa had an idea for a better way to construct an apartment tower, made manifest in his Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo. More an act of architectural idealism than sociological Utopianism, it consisted (yeah, past tense) of 140 individual but identical, fully outfitted “capsules,” each one sort of like a shipping container (so popular in residential architecture these days) with a large porthole window on one end, all of them attached around a pair of concrete piers. A member of the nature-inspired Metabolism movement, he envisioned it as a building that was renewable — new pods being swapped out for old ones as needed — and could thus last for centuries. It was modular, recyclable and, he thought, sustainable.

It still looks futuristic even today, or did until it was dismantled in 2022, in need of too much repair to be sustained after all. The good news is that 23 of the pods have been salvaged, restored, and are now being repurposed in various ways and places.*

Con: California Forever

In the 2020s, we have billionaire tech bros (and wannabes) who feel they should both live forever and secede from society rather than improve it.

Last summer there was this weird story in The New York Times* about there finally being an answer to the mystery of who, for the previous few years, had been secretively yet determinedly buying up most of the farmland in Solano County, northeast of San Francisco. (My former stomping grounds.) After several years of these mysterious purchases, the buyer had revealed itself as The Flannery Group – a consortium of tech billionaires — and their motive as being the creation of a new super-city. At the time, it was hard to imagine how their plan could possibly go well, much less why they would be investing in it. In keeping with their immortality complex, they call it California Forever. (#🙄)

But there are more layers to this onion.

In an ongoing development that could not sound more like Fyre Festival if it tried, there’s a 20-something dude of no particular credentials named Dryden Brown raising money from billionaires to build an Ayn Randian, government-free, Mediterranean “cryptostate” called Praxis, and while that may end the same as Fyre (if anything ever comes of it at all), he’s far from alone. There’s a whole movement (complete with a conference) around so-called ‘Network States,’ and a recent book on the subject called Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy by Quinn Slobodian. The book, the movement, and the question of whether or not California Forever is a stealth Network State (the backers claim it’s not), is well-covered in this New Republic piece: The People of Solano County Versus the Next Tech-Billionaire Dystopia (+ Apple News link) —

‘ Despite Silicon Valley’s talk of techno-optimism and abundance, many tech plutocrats are plagued by a “creeping sense of paranoia” about the future, said Slobodian in an interview. Fearing the possibility of civilizational collapse—or driven by “greed, megalomania and the desire to have a zero percent tax rate”—some tech elites seek a retreat into bespoke fortress societies. … It’s a dystopian vision in which existing countries and governments, hollowed out by capital flight and declining tax revenues, will theoretically be left to collapse outside their highly fortified walls. ’

Have I even mentioned the “Western beauty ideals” revered by the Praxis crowd? It’s a disturbing story from top to bottom, and I imagine we’ve only just scratched the surface.

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*New York Times Gift Links

[ IMAGE: Nakagin Capsule Tower by Jordy Meow (Creative Commons license), cropped ]