SOHRAB AHMARI: Do Androids Dream of Terrible Streets?

“Techno-capitalism and urban dilapidation … seemed to go hand-in-hand.”

As the Marxist geographer Mike Davis, who died last year at age 76, noted, Starr’s offhand remark attested to Blade Runner’s enduring status as the “star of sci-fi dystopias.” The film has become a sort of visual shorthand for a set of persistent American anxieties about biotechnology, corporate misrule, and multiculturalism, projected from the California dream factory onto the rest of the country (and the world). For Davis, it was significant that the dream factory, Hollywood, was located nearby other key Golden State industries, not least computing and biotech, whose business was to slingshot our species into Dickian dystopia.

Yet Davis wasn’t very impressed by Blade Runner as a piece of urban futurism. While boasting whiz-bang effects (by ’80s standards), the movie presented a retread of a much older old, and racially tinged, picture of the future as Manhattan-style “giganticism”: teeming masses of culturally mixed and confused human drones huddling under massive pyramids of steel and glass.

That picture no doubt appealed to the likes of Starr as they sought to place the sole blame for the political-economic dislocations and contradictions of California at the feet of “multiculturalism.” Lamenting the loss of WASP primacy was a lot easier than facing up to the de-industrialization and middle-class destruction wrought by the neoliberal revolution launched by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

For Davis, the Kevin Starr/Blade Runner vision of Los Angeles (as yellow-peril giganticism) missed something still more crucial: the fact that the advances in technology hatched in California sat next to a “great unbroken chain of aging bungalows, stucco apartments, and ranch style homes”—all decaying as the city entered the third millennium. Techno-capitalism and urban dilapidation, sentient machines and lousy bus lines, seemed to go hand-in-hand.

I don’t think Reagan and Thatcher had much to do with the poor state of Silicon Valley’s infrastructure, where 21st century technology is being birthed alongside an ill-maintained power grid, telephone lines, and roads seemingly little changed since the late 1940s through the mid-1960s.