Once someone reads Nature’s Metropolis they can’t help but see the world in terms of abstractions in motion. Moving into the information age, labor-time has become more easily and more commonly abstracted, sometimes with troubling results. According to the study referenced below, time clock algorithms are abstracting labor at an astounding rate and volume. The authors estimate that some $15 billion have been stolen from workers through keystrokes and computer errors. Labor is treated so callously because modern economic relations demand that abstractions move nearly instantaneously.
Nature’s Metropolis reveals present problems with media of abstraction and provides foresight into future problems. The idea of “income share agreements” for college students, originally proposed by Milton Friedman in 1955, has gained popularity in the last five years. Under this proposed system, students could avoid college debt by engaging in agreements with investors who would fund their education in exchange for a share of future income. Given the level of student debt in the U.S. this is not on its face reprehensible. The reader of Nature’s Metropolis, however, would be quick to wonder what might happen when student-investments are transformed from curious undergraduates into abstractions that can be traded on four-year future markets, or even bundled into investment vehicles. It is no exaggeration to say that Nature’s Metropolis changed the way that I comprehend the world, revealing the layers of fictions that sit on top of, and shape, labor, nature, and economic relationships in the past, in the present, and in possible futures.
Jason L. Newton
Further Reading
Anna-Lisa Cox, The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018).
St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1945).
Jo Guldi, “What Is the Spatial Turn?,” Spatial Humanities, Scholar’s Lab, University of Virginia, 2011, http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/.
Newspaper Account of a Meeting between Black Religious Leaders and Union Military Authorities, in New-York Daily Tribune, February 13, 1865, Freedmen and Southern Society Project, http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/savmtg.htm.
Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, Creating Abundance Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Broadway Books, 2016).
Gabriel N. Rosenberg, “No Scrubs: Livestock Breeding, Eugenics, and State Power in the United States, 1919- 1933,” Journal of American History 107, no. 2 (September 2020): 362-87.
Gabriel N. Rosenberg, “A Race Suicide Among the Hogs: The Biopolitics of Pork in the United States, 1865-1930,” American Quarterly 68, no. 1 (March 2016): 49-73.
Joshua Specht, Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-To-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
Elizabeth Tippett, Charlotte S. Alexander, and Zev J. Eigen. “When Timekeeping Software Undermines Compliance,” Yale J.L. & Tech 19, issue 1 (2018).
Richard White, “What Is Spatial History?,” The Spatial History Project, 2010, http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29.
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010).
Rebecca Woods, The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
This article originally appeared in December 2021.
Contributors:
Francesca Gamber is a member of the editorial board of Commonplace. She is the Principal and Faculty in History at Bard High School Early College Baltimore.
Thomas Andrews studied with Bill Cronon at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teaches and writes about the social and environmental history of the U.S. West at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Cameron Blevins is Associate Professor, Clinical Teaching Track at the University of Colorado Denver. A leader in the field of digital history, he is the author of Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West (2021).
Gabriel N. Rosenberg is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and History at Duke University. He is currently writing a history of livestock breeding and its relationship to human race science, tentatively titled, Purebred: Making Meat and Eugenics in the Modern United States.
Jason L. Newton (https://capitalismstudies.charlotte.edu/postdoctoral-fellow) is the post-doctoral fellow in the history of capitalism and environmental sustainability at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He tweets @Jason_L_Newton and his work can be found here.