chat

uneven development is some real shit in the US.

lots of civic infrastructure is funded by local property taxes, which magnifies any contrast even if the political structure isn't corrupted. which, of course, we know it is. states rarely use funds to level the playing field. they would much rather chase/induce developer interest and exacerbate internal migration, which pushes up property values in the places their political allies own property. on top of that, provisioning of services to distant places is simply less profitable than where people are already concentrated. back during the time of electrification, rural communities would have to form cooperatives to fund their own infrastructure.

to be clear, it can still be profitable, but it's not as profitable as it is to provision services for already developed communities, so it didn't happen.

i've lived and worked in two distinct federal promise zones (one in the eastern half, one in the western half). when i was younger, long before this, i had a casual understanding of the phenomenon until i took a geography class that was focused on natural resources. that gave me a context for extraction and value. when i got the opportunity to go live and work in one (do my part, i guess), i jumped at it because underdeveloped places in the US are the true edges of the map.

it's like a completely different country, hence the terms like "national sacrifice zone" or "internal colony". the language is the same (mostly), but the culture is wildly different. how people relate to institutions at each level, their political development, their contested histories, and the resilience required for day to day life is something many americans in their glittering cityscapes with functional logistical systems, communication infrastructure, and reliable energy delivery would find "extreme". i struggle to explain it to family and people i knew growing up, because they just want to shit on those places, as we are all taught to do despite limited contact.

i totally recommend Phil Neel's Hinterlands if you're down for a read about the geography of class conflict in the 21st century.

for an international comparison, i think spain is instructive in terms of internal migration. spain has some interesting analogs to the US: a once global empire, now collapsed. in its wake, a fascist project that had decades to run amok. one of the drastic geographic impacts of Franco's policies of market enabled uneven development has been the emptying of much of the countryside and its communities of their people. that article just touches on it, but neoliberal ideology is often at work in the discourse, as people pretend this is just some natural process not worth investigating or considering. which always gives me vibes of how liberals talk about accumulation through dispossession, the enclosure of the commons, etc. like people wanted to leave their homes and families to go work in a factory for a wage from the same asshole who owned the box they rented and the store they bought food from.

looking at these collapsed empires is perhaps a window into the future of the US.

Capitalism is a cancer on society.

Bugs. I used to dread the death toll on my windshield. Now it barely happens.