The second wave of globalisation will be slowed, not stopped
NOVEMBER 9TH, 2016 — POST 304
Much has been written already about what has been best characterised as An American Tragedy and we’re surely just getting started. On January 20th, 2017 Donald Trump will be inaugurated as President of the United States. We laughed when he joined the race, chortled with schadenfreude when the Republican party allowed him to ascend to the level of their presidential nominee, and whistled naïvely on November 8th with a confidence that This Can’t Happen. It did happen, it is happening, it will yet happen. Those on the left sought to present the election as a choice not between Democrat and Republican, nor liberal and conservative, but instead between normal and abnormal. This presentation was in the interest of courting dissenting conservatives, those who surely would above all be motivated to preserve the status quo. Because to many, that was what Hillary Clinton represented — a vote for her was a duty to maintain stability. As I subjected myself to the torrential deluge of Twitter last night, glued to Tweetdeck and CNN, I witnessed our world burning. The filter bubble filtered me only mourning, only disbelief, only grief as the truth of the result resolved.
This mourning is viscerally felt by a segment of the population that has lost, that will be forced to come to terms with a breakdown along the lines of normality and abnormality. But there is the segment that won, who flooded the comments of various livestreams of Clinton’s concession speech on YouTube this morning with unicode swastikas and calls for “Hillary for Hanging”, who weren’t relishing in their abnormality. The right drew the lines differently. Alex Jones of the dystopian propaganda engine that is Infowars had led the right’s depiction of the divide as not liberal or conservative, not about parties, but about global or national. This is not a victory for abnormality, the right think behind unshakable grins that today give them away, make them visible in a manner many of us in cosmopolitan city centres wished they were earlier. This is a victory for the nation, for isolationist nationalism that we were unaware had stalked us into the third millennium when we were convinced we’d left it behind.
We were convinced in no small part because the evidence was there. The evidence that the U.S. would lead a global community is in the Coca-Cola in fridges the world over, is in the Hondas and Kawasakis pulling up to a stop light, is in the superhero movies that fill Chinese multiplexes. When nation states became impotent to challenge the sovereignty of other nations and withdrew from the colonies, corporations picked up the slack. The right adored the engine of globalisation, the worship of the profit motive. The left fell in love with globalisation’s consequences, diverse populations empowered by technology to build better lives wherever they wished. We argued about the fringe. We in the left were ever cognisant of what the global force we enjoyed did to native language and cultural practice. Those on the right saw themselves undercutting the auto industry, gutting manufacturing, pushing out low-education workers within their own nation. But for the most part, we rode the ship we had built together.
With the election, the U.S. has signaled to the world it wants to get off. And primarily, it’s because the U.S. as a sovereign state hasn’t been at the helm for some time. Globalisation’s most meaningful colonial surrogates are no longer corporations that build products to push to their colonies. The champions of the second wave are those that build products that pull their colonies closer. They’re Facebook who can keep a kid in Azerbaijan as proximal as it does your neighbour. They’re Google who built a version of YouTube for India to allow access to the world’s premiere moving image resource to many more. And they’re Snapchat who siphon the perspective of those internationally through their curated Live (not sure this is what they’re called?) features every day. The Other feels ever more pressing to a certain kind of person every day. So if they voted to conserve a nation they feared lost, they were right to be scared. Because they are outnumbered.
The billions of people that are coming online in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, will be carried on the second wave of globalisation and colonise those nations they were once colonies of. You will sign up to a video streaming service out of Sao Paolo, or a coffee delivery subscription from Lagos in the coming decades. We will lose English (and have arguably already lost it) to the mutations it will take through circuits of communication spoken and written around the world. Some will feel its imposition and recoil as was done yesterday, striving to conserve something for which value is not inherent nor arguably present. The privilege structure of the world is not sustainable when there is voice, access, and the pursuit of wealth given to everyone with the internet.
So those who today walk with high heads and broad smiles and spit venom from their fingertips into YouTube comment sections are right to be scared that they constitute a dwindling demographic. But where they’re wrong is that the encroachment of The Other means that they have to lose. You win when a CEO in Agra wants to hire you. You win when a Mongolian music producer drops a record that changes the game. Just like you’re already winning in parts of the U.S. where there’s a taco stand on every corner. Just like you won in the mid-90s when you bought your first Toyota. Just like you won in the mid-70s when guys like Scorsese and Coppola changed American cinema after seeing a bunch of French films. Even though a vote for Trump reeks of a latent admission of guilt of acts for which they see themselves owed some punishment, the breadth of human diversity is not a punishment whiteness, straightness, maleness, religiousity has to endure.
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