Month: December 2023

The Dimensions of a Cave – Greg Jackson

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Propaganda, mass surveillance, algorithmic metadata analysis, torture and interrogation: these are responses to a world in which violence is a property of information, understood in information’s terms. The deaths occasioned by terrorism are a mere byproduct of its goal, which is informational violence. It means to attack the minds of those who survive, not the bodies of those who perish. Its aim is to insinuate a feeling in our private lives. Our psyches. And torture means to draw reluctant privacy into the light. Metadata intends to reconstruct an inner truth through the superficial palpation of its outer form. And what of that private place, the last fastness of inviolate humanity? One day it will collapse. Give up the ghost and fall inward. But first it will die by a thousand incursions, as the probes get deeper, smarter, as we learn—like brutalized interrogees—what the algorithms want, reward, and select for, and as our desire to rebel against this becomes yet another way to manipulate us, one more tactic to exploit while the policing function moves inward and installs itself, like the most potent software, in the alloy of our brains.

This is an insane book. To review it properly might require the powers of one of the contemporary lit heavies blurbed on the back; dedicated weeks of thinking, writing, and revising; and/or probably a second read altogether. At 476 pages thick with lengthy meditations on technology, power, consciousness, violence, and the nature of reality, that would be a tall order. The novel hasn’t been out two months yet, so that might be why no really serious appraisals have been published: the mention in The New Yorker‘s ‘Briefly Noted‘ kind of reads like they didn’t finish (or much attempt) it, and The Spectator‘s is better but seems choked by a 500 word count limit. The Scotsman‘s literary editor ‘fear[s] this may be a somewhat niche novel,’ but offers a thoughtful précis and some measure of praise: ‘a fascinating set of speculations, even if overlong and overwrought.’

The book is neither, if you’re bought in and along for the ride, or already a fan of Jackson’s distinctive, impossibly sophisticated prose. The metaphysical density and verbal acrobatics are leavened by crisp, bantery dialogue, and a Hollywood-ready plot keeps it all moving along, flexing a range of genre elements: D.C. political thriller, journalism noir, gritty War on Terror exposé, cyber-sci-fi conjecture. The obvious cinematic reference points are The Matrix, The Truman Show, a bit of Inception, but there are enough shades of the The Cell to wonder if Jackson ever saw that unsung Y2K-era relic, in which Jennifer Lopez enters the mind of a serial killer using experimental virtual reality technology.

It is a demanding text, though, and if it’s interesting to think about what might’ve been if Jackson hadn’t ‘cut an entire book out of it,’ ‘over 50,000 words,’ as he says on the Our Struggle podcast, most readers who reach the end will probably appreciate that he did. Sentence by sentence, it has to be some of the most ambitious and balls-out writing put out by a big corporate publisher in recent years, refreshingly unafraid to show off its erudition and command of language. The ‘virtuoso’ tag is apt. Many no doubt will find it over the top—take the opening paragraph:

The island clung to the mainland by a spit of sandbar as low and shingled as a manicured walk and could not therefore be properly called an island. Still we called it that, ‘the island,’ and at times, when the ocean cycles and planets aligned, the perigean king tide with its liquid cargo brought the water up over the lip of that persistent littoral, briefly severing all tie to the shore and bringing the fact of the land into sympathy with its name.

‘Perigean,’ ‘liquid cargo,’ ‘persistent littoral’: Jackson is a master at crafting vivid imagery and supple prosody with the aid of recherché vocabulary, and if it can at times ring as overwrought, it’s mostly just impressive. I’ve never read a novel that required as much reaching for the digital dictionary, and started keeping a list of all the words looked up throughout:

escarpments, cyanotic, pavor nocturnus, susurration, garniture, porphyry, cicatrice, pullulating, agate, donnée, raddled, sempiternal, monitory, lemniscate, ormolu, blancmange (those two used in the same sentence), nitid, collimated, gnarr, cupreous, thewy, pegamoid, benthic, nuncupative, solatium, bruiting, gelid, involute, leporello, fankle, faience, penetralium, scrims, flocculating, pentimenti, falcate, écorché, antres, caporal, hallux, jaillissant, formulary, fulgurant, rufous, embowering profluence (two-for-one), fibril, horrent, crewel, preterition, parterre, ha-ha, barmecidal, moulage, flèchelike, purdah, corolla, sillage, friable, phatic, parti pris, brume, hyaloid, gracile, gentian, bajada, lisle, crypsis, lethean, metic, Lar Familiaris, nescient, tetter, stridulating, voile, apoptosis

Like the plot, the syntax is intricate and nested, the clauses so often winding and refracting that, combined with the expansive lexicon, many sentences have to be read at least twice to grasp their meaning:

In this fading breath of dream I felt the coincident sense-form of so many departures—unrecoverable moments, lost people, the caustic of life’s first bitter lessons—and I understood in the dim way we understand such things that all our experiences, our entire lives, rhyme on the tonality of these emotions, this iterative formulary, at once dull in its repetition and nuanced, layered even, in all the pleated crosscurrents of its ambivalence.

Is it all a bit much? Not really, because Jackson manages to put the writing in service of both a page-turner story and a wide-ranging disquisition on topics timely and timeless: artificial intelligence, surveillance, imperial power, corporate power, the delusions of the self, the futility of fact, the inevitability of atrocity. The last gives the book its major set-piece show of bravado, a 30-page tour of episodes of mass slaughter, enslavement, rape, and mutilation throughout history, structurally and thematically reminiscent of the several-page sentence describing the Theresienstadt ghetto in Sebald’s Austerlitz. The novel is another ‘modern day retelling of Heart of Darkness,’ and this monologue of ‘horrors’ is delivered by its Kurtz stand-in Bruce, who nods to the source material with a sketch of the Congo Free State’s depravity and his later insistence that he’s ‘not some madman gone native.’ 

The ‘modern day’ twist is twofold: the idealistic newspaper journalist Bruce leaves D.C.to cover the war in Afghanistan, disappears, and resurfaces, in a sense, in an experimental metaverse developed by a defense contractor as a successor to the failed intelligence program SIMITAR—’soft interrogation managed in totally artificial reality.’ He then refuses to ‘leave,’ and his mentor Quentin, whose story on SIMITAR is killed by his editors at the behest of the White House, is tasked with getting him out, or so it seems. Fairly high-concept stuff, and a major changeup from Jackson’s 2016 short story collection Prodigals, such that on the same podcast episode he confesses to a ‘fear that anybody who liked Prodigals is just going to be so kind of disappointed’ by the novel. But that was the vision, to go big and to get away from the more familiar, domestic, sex and drugs and ennui stuff that got tagged as arch ‘satire of the elite’ in reviews:

There’s a little, tiny soupçon… of autofiction in Prodigals, and I got so nauseously sick of autofiction and so angry at autofiction that I decided in my latest book to do the exact opposite, and not put any of my life into it, not put any characters into it who were versions or shadows of myself, and also to try and create a purely imaginative world.

In this he succeeded. The depictions of journalistic tradecraft and the national security apparatus in particular are so convincing that it’s hard to fathom how they could emerge from imagination and research alone, and to some extent it seems they didn’t. Jackson worked for renowned investigative journalist Ron Suskind during the late, fervid Bush years, and had his own brush with the kind of bureaucratic menace and pervasive surveillance that The Dimensions of a Cave probes:

I sent Greg up to New York to do some sort of color reporting about demonstrations and security precautions, because Bush and Ahmadinejad that day were both speaking at the UN at the same time. Greg went up there and was just doing what a reporter does, sort of taking notes, looking around, and he is detained by officials up there, including a State Department intelligence official, various folks in law enforcement, taken aside and essentially grilled for an hour and a half.

They end up taking his notes and also, in a way, kind of threatening him, saying, “Look, we know who you are.” They run his name through every computer in the planet, his mother, other people he knows, certainly me, as well. And at the end of the day, they said, “If anything happens up here in the next week, we know where to find you.”

Similarly, the novel’s layered storylines turn out to be the reverberations of elaborate ploys to control the flow of information, to occlude and to muddle—heads up, plot details follow—as Bruce is goaded into committing an extrajudicial killing of a powerful warlord, partly to neutralize his investigation into shadowy networks of state-sponsored corruption and plunder, and Quentin’s VR odyssey is apparently all a feint to trick him into revealing the identity of his insider source from the original SIMITAR story. So it all gets rather slippery:

It was following this train of thought that Quentin became fixated on the question of Bruce’s reality. Was it possible to know whether his friend had been a fellow dreamer within that liminal sphere or merely a fantasy and projection of Quentin’s own dreaming? It was the difference between an experience of another person and an experience of oneself. It crossed Quentin’s mind that Bruce may have been deluded, baited, as he had been himself, into performing a role in a larger plot, by being made to believe his own contrived fantasy, one in which he was the crusading hero and scourge of the powerful. 

It’s a clever way to wrap, skirting and subverting the ‘it was all a dream’ cliche, and if you’re not really reading for the story so much as the sumptuous texture of its telling, it’s still something of a relief to see the ending stuck. As the Greek chorus of Quentin’s fellow journalist friends, for whom he has spun the otherworldly yarn over five long days, warily concludes: ‘We’d been affected by what we heard, and in some way changed. Could we simply retreat back down the bolt-holes of routine to the close, dark corridors that hedged our days?’ Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about—or if only if it were that easy. 

We’re drawing closer to the surface. To the fantasy. For now we content ourselves with the image growing larger and clearer. But at some point our longing to penetrate the image will overwhelm us. We won’t abide separateness. We’ll pass into it—through the glass. Don’t ask me how. Maybe we’ll enter it so slowly it takes generations, and we won’t know we’re inside until it’s too late. Too late! I say it like it’s a bad thing, but won’t it be marvelous? Won’t our dreams come true? Our memories return? Our fantasies take place? Then the limits of our life—the inadequacy of moments, our insignificance—will be no more.

The Dimensions of a Cave – Greg Jackson

The Boom, the Channel, and the New Human

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In January 2020, then Director of the Boston Planning & Development Agency Brian Golden was busy overseeing a ‘building boom’ so historic one had to cast all the way back to the days of John Winthrop for a precedent: ‘There hasn’t been this much built in a six-year sequence,’ he told Boston.com, ‘since the founding of the city in 1630.’ A heady claim for a city famously enlarged vastly beyond the 1.2 square miles of the original Shawmut Peninsula, but by the measure of ‘tens of millions of square footage in permitted development,’ probably true enough.

The ‘biggest building boom in the history of the city’ became something like Golden’s signature line: he was seeding the narrative to WBUR as early as 2015, again in a 2017 Wall Street Journal piece, in a joint Globe op-ed with Mayor Marty Walsh in 2019, and the BPDA dropped it in the second sentence of the press release announcing his resignation in 2022. Whether well-meaning boosterism, anxious overcompensation, or canny PR bluster to keep the deals flowing and the ground breaking, the breathless insistence on the bigness of the ‘boom’ seemed to gloss over something fundamental: building what, exactly?

Over a decade into the post-recession development mania, Boston has become known as much for its wildly expensive housing as its universities, sports, or tourist charms, and the ‘affordability crisis shows no sign of abating,’ per the Boston Foundation’s 2023 Greater Boston Housing Report Card. In 2022 Boston edged out San Francisco as the second costliest city for renters in the country (technically third if you count Jersey City separately from New York), and the median single-family home price in the metro area hit a record high of $910,000 this past July.

So what were the builders building? One answer is ‘luxury’ condos and apartments, an angle covered at length by the Globe Spotlight Team in ‘Reckoning with Boston’s towers of wealth,’ the third installment of its big new report on the housing crisis:

Since 2000, more than 50 sizable developments featuring multimillion-dollar condos — both new construction and renovations — have opened in Boston, according to a Globe analysis of city and state records. In a flurry of activity in the seven years from 2015 to 2021 alone, that included more than 1,000 new condos now worth $2 million and up.

Who can afford such pricey real estate? Less than 2 percent of the Boston population. Yet in the seven-year span, luxury developers built about one condo worth $2 million or more for every four such super-rich households.

Compare that to affordable housing: In the same timeframe, developers created just one affordable unit through various city programs for every 21 middle- or low-income households.

As ever, Downtown and the Back Bay claimed the most dramatic, skyline-padding projects—the Millennium Tower, One Dalton, Winthrop Center—but nowhere in the city is as closely associated with the 2010s boom era as the Seaport District. Created virtually ex nihilo beginning in the 1990s, on as blank a slate in as prime a location as there could be, the Seaport now glistens with blocks of glassy new construction often criticized as generic, confected, and placeless. (A 2019 Globe Magazine listicle slotted the ‘soulless’ neighborhood in the ‘Loathe’ column, as ‘a bland cityscape, a tract of straight lines, hard surfaces, and glass boxes,’ where ‘much of the time, you’d never even know you were near the sea.’) And with still more blocks to fill, cranes will loom for yet a while longer. In one particularly jarring case, the site of the perennially packed ‘Snowport’ Holiday Market, hosted on one of a couple open plots left in the neighborhood’s center, has for several years been approved for an 18-floor tower consisting mostly of office space.

On the cusp of the boom: the Seaport’s sea of parking lots, pictured in 2006. (Boston.com: Seaport District through the years)

Notably visible in aerial shots of the old, wasteland-era Seaport is the cluster of buildings on the area’s upper edge, along the Fort Point Channel. Designated the city’s ninth protected historic district in 2009, the Fort Point neighborhood had stood for well over a century, originally developed by the Boston Wharf Company from an even blanker slate than the new Seaport: the ground itself didn’t exist yet. As the Landmarks Commission Study Report explains, the company not only made the land by filling in muddy tidal flats, in a drawn-out process lasting nearly a half-century, but also designed and built the streets and eventually the industrial buildings that still stand today.

From marshy beginnings, Fort Point boomed. Summer Street became the center of the country’s wool trade, and the curved New England Confectionery Company (Necco) complex along Melcher Street ‘was the largest establishment devoted exclusively to the production of confectionery in the United States.’ The story following the Depression and WWII is a familiar one: manufacturing decline, mounting vacancy, and decades of decay until groups of artists began working and living, not strictly legally, in the high-ceilinged brick-and-beam lofts, which would gradually become again attractive to investors as the broader vision for the waterfront materialized.

Today, with the core Seaport area built up and accounted for, the largely fallow strip of land fronting the Fort Point Channel is up next. First to rise, at 15 Necco Street, is Eli Lilly’s $700 million Genetic Medicine Institute, which points to the other great gold rush of the development boom era: lab space. As Bloomberg reported in March 2022, Boston had ‘more lab space under construction than anywhere else in the U.S.,’ and was ‘poised to surpass the San Francisco Bay Area as the country’s biggest hub for life sciences.’ While the rush has since slowed, the biotech industry has already made a distinct imprint on the greater Seaport, beginning in 2011 when Vertex Pharmaceuticals announced a game-changing move from its Cambridge headquarters with a $1 billion lease of two new Fan Pier buildings. (And has kept it coming: upon completion of a new lab and office complex in 2025, ‘Vertex will occupy 1.9 million square feet of real estate in the Seaport across five sites, making it the largest biotech in Boston in terms of square footage.’)

The new Eli Lilly building, with its recently installed signage.

The case of Eli Lilly in particular is rich with detail illustrating this evolution of a new economy, and perhaps even a new human. Its 15 Necco site was originally slated to be the world headquarters of General Electric, the centerpiece of a much-hyped relocation to Boston that involved a tag-team wooing effort by Mayor Walsh and Governor Charlie Baker to the tune of $145 million in tax breaks and government incentives. At the time seen as a historic coup, the deal unraveled spectacularly as the ailing industrial dinosaur imploded, shedding upwards of $200 billion in market cap over two years and eventually being removed from the Dow Jones after 111 consecutive years in the index. In 2023 the company unceremoniously packed up and left Fort Point altogether for a single floor in a tower across the channel.

Over the same period, Eli Lilly’s stock went vertical: now the most valuable drug company in the world, the WSJ reports, ‘it became the first big pharmaceutical to surpass a market capitalization of $500 billion thanks to the popularity of its obesity and diabetes medications.’ Named for a world-leading candy factory that once churned out sugar wafers and Sweethearts by the ton, Necco Street will soon host a company projected to make as much as $50 billion annually from the blockbuster drug Mounjaro (now approved to be sold as Zepbound for weight loss), a ‘GLP-1 agonist’ like its more famous cousin Ozempic. Beyond obesity and diabetes, studies are showing the potential for GLP-1s to treat heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and even substance abuse:

‘This opens up really some dramatic new opportunities in terms of control of the satiety region of the brain, but also other regions where addiction might be controlled,’ said Lawrence Tabak, principal deputy director at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). ‘I think these drugs are going to change the way people experience healthcare… If you are able to get a better control of obesity in this country, the savings on the back end due to reductions in cardiovascular disease, and then, you know, related conditions will be quite vast.’

And those are just the ‘traditional’ drugs. Lilly’s new Genetic Medicine Institute will significantly expand the company’s research into futuristic ‘RNA and DNA-based technologies’ that hold the potential to treat and even cure the rarest and most intractable diseases; as the company puts it, ‘The possibilities to come from genetic medicine are potentially limitless.’ In that field it’ll have some catching up to do with its Seaport neighbors. CRISPR Therapeutics opened its R&D headquarters in late 2022 in a new building a half mile away down A Street, and last week the FDA approved its sickle cell treatment developed in partnership with Vertex, the first such approval for a medicine using the groundbreaking CRISPR gene editing technique. From wool and candy to technology that promises to transform our bodies at the most elemental level—Fort Point is set for a powerful second act.

As the Lilly building approaches completion, the race to fill the adjacent land is accelerating. Next door, construction on Related Beal’s massive $1.2 billion, mixed-use Channelside project will begin soon, targeted for completion in 2026. Further down, in August the Globe reported on plans by the developer of the CRISPR headquarters to build on parking lots once used for the Gillette razor factory, and in October Proctor & Gamble announced they would fully move Gillette manufacturing operations out of the century-old site overlooking the channel. Across the water, maybe the most momentous deal of all is taking shape, as the United States Postal Service might soon enter negotiations to sell off its sprawling sorting facility property, enabling the expansion of South Station and air rights development to complement the 51-story tower currently rising above the tracks.

Altogether, if all goes to plan, the area surrounding the Fort Point Channel will be soon be unrecognizable, a transformation to rival the Wharf Company’s original conjuring act from the tidal flats a century and a half ago. There will be world-changing laboratories, high-powered Class A office space, and multimillion dollar residences—plus concessions for affordable housing units and ‘civic spaces’ mandated by law or leveraged via the development process—but will the result be a ‘real’ neighborhood? Not long ago, two banners hung from the 249 A Street Artists Cooperative building proclaiming, ‘WE ARE FORT POINT’ and ‘NOT ANOTHER SEAPORT’. Let us hope.

The Boom, the Channel, and the New Human