NIMBYism's Slow Cancellation of the Future

In the opening chapter of his book Ghosts of My Life , the Marxist theorist Mark Fisher argues that capitalism has destroyed creativity. That art—and he's talking mostly about music in the book—has stagnated, that it's no longer dynamic, but is instead endlessly remixing the past.

I've always found this passage fascinating, because he's very much onto something, even if not to quite the degree he imagines, but then he pins the blame in the wrong place. To the extent that we've lost the creative spark, in the way Fisher presents it, the culprit really isn't capitalism. Or neoliberalism. It's instead, to a rather blameworthy degree, NIMBYism.

Here's the core of his argument:

Despite all its rhetoric of novelty and innovation, neoliberal capitalism has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new. In the UK, the postwar welfare state and higher education maintenance grants constituted an indirect source of funding for most of the experiments in popular culture between the 1960s and the 80s. The subsequent ideological and practical attack on public services meant that one of the spaces where artists could be sheltered from the pressure to produce something that was immediately successful was severely circumscribed. As public service broadcasting became ‘marketised’ , there was an increased tendency to turn out cultural productions that resembled what was already successful. The result of all of this is that the social time available for withdrawing from work and immersing oneself in cultural production drastically declined. If there’s one factor above all else which contributes to cultural conservatism, it is the vast inflation in the cost of rent and mortgages.

To do the kind of deep creative work, the kind of weird deep creative work, that drives artistic innovation, you need time. You need to experiment and play and do it around other deeply creative and weird people experimenting and playing. That time doesn't typically pay much, unless you luck into convincing rich people and foundations in the art scene into believing you're a genius, and so you need to live cheaply enough that you can afford to live while having that (from the typical employer's perspective) unproductive time.

He calls this "the slow cancellation of the future."

It’s no accident that the efflorescence of cultural invention in London and New York in the late 1970s and early 80s (in the punk and postpunk scenes) coincided with the availability of squatted and cheap property in those cities. Since then, the decline of social housing, the attacks on squatting, and the delirious rise in property prices have meant that the amount of time and energy available for cultural production has massively diminished.

For all this, Fisher blames Margaret Thatcher. Or, at least, the neoliberal policies of Thatcher and the free-marketers of her generation and subsequent. You used to be able to make do on the minimal earnings from part time work or odd jobs while living in dense artist communities in vibrant cities, where you all forged genuinely new and world shaking artistic movements together.

And I get it. He right that a lot of those neighborhoods have gentrified, the squats and punk houses replaced with million dollar homes or townhomes or condos populated by owners or renters with high powered jobs that decidedly aren't about forging new and world shaking artistic movements. It does, he's right, feel like something important has been lost.

But pinning the blame on capitalism or neoliberalism or the free market lets the real culprits off the hook. It's looking too far from home for who to blame. The real villains are, of course, the NIMBYs. The reason housing is so expensive—and Fisher is right that it's expensive and getting worse—is that plenty of people in the cities plenty more people want to live in, or in the neighborhoods plenty more people want to live in, have decided they don't want more neighbors, and have pooled their political power to convince their city governments to put a stop to the only way to make housing cheaper again: Building more of it.

NIMBYs aren't the corporate CEOs or the neoliberal politicians, at least not all of the time. In fact, they're often pretty progressive folks who nonetheless think it's the role of government to stop people poor than them, of a different social class than them, from having places to live in their neighborhoods and so moving in an "changing the character."

Fisher laments a decline in artistic dynamism. NIMBYs fight tooth and nail to fight dynamism whenever it might change anything about their lived environment. They think the world owes them stasis, no matter how much that stasis hurts others, denies them their own bliss, or prevents the kinds of neighborhoods and lifestyles Fisher is nostalgic for.

Fortunately, breaking the power of the NIMBYs, while challenging, is a whole lot less challenging, and a whole lot more likely to work and a whole lot less likely to impoverish, than forging the kind of post-capitalist world Fisher longed for. We're already seeing progress, and we can see a lot more. YIMBYism is one of the most powerful ways we've got to uncancel the future.