Episode 4: Joshua Ellis - American Nightmares
Drought, homelessness, collapse, and township tech: Las Vegas journalist and futurist Joshua Ellis on his predictions for a very American apocalypse, and what comes next...
Episode 4 was a conversation with writer and futurist Joshua Ellis about American collapse, and our Mad Max future.
When I decided to start a podcast, Josh was near the top of the list of guests I hoped to speak with. I’ve followed his writing since around 2007, after I first encountered him through an online comics forum.
I’ve lost count of the number of acid-tongued, often bleak, always devastatingly on-point predictions he’s made on his various (and frequently banned) social media accounts, but one thing is certain. Time and time again, Josh has proved himself to be something of a Cassandra figure.
I began to read more of his writing, starting with his excellent collection of essays and fiction, Everyone I Know is Brokenhearted. Not only is Josh an old-school reporter with a depth of knowledge about American history and politics that dwarfs that of most of his contemporaries, his writing never gives up hope in the face of our lost and broken futures.
Josh’s work blurs the boundaries between reporting and activism. His writing has a social conscience, whether he is simply humanising and revealing the stories of the forgotten and overlooked, or actively campaigning to crowdsource supplies for them, as he did for the Las Vegas homeless population.
His politics have always fascinated me - a mix of democratic socialism, antifascist and anti-capitalist militancy, and libertarian self-reliance. In direction if not in scope, his opinions on various issues often mirrored my own.
Having recently undergone life-changing surgery, and now engaged to a British national, Josh was staying near London when we spoke on the eve of the 2020 US elections. This was a few months before the electrifying violence of the January 6 riots at the Capitol. Later on in our conversation, I asked him to make some predictions about the election. His take on what was about to unfold proved to be scarily accurate.
What this says about his other predictions - from the almost inevitable deepening of global social and economic crises of various kinds, to the slow leaching of the water table in the US, to the wider climate crisis, and the rise of the hard right - is perhaps frightening to consider.
Josh is never a pessimist. He never lets go of hope. Whether among the homeless population living in the storm drains of Las Vegas, or exploring the ragtag community already living our dystopian near-future in California’s Slab City, Josh takes inspiration from the innovation and tenacity of the dispossessed and the exiled. He offers a glimmer of light and possibility from within the dark heart of the American nightmare, inspired by the transformative potential not of a broken centrist politics, but by the people it rejects and excludes.
From the early American pioneers who charted the course of America’s great lakes and rivers right up to the desolate, Martian cultural barrens of Las Vegas, this month’s episode was a wild ride through the shadows of US history, and into its uncertain future.
What will Josh Ellis be right about next? As a devoted follower of his writing, I honestly dread to think.
Our Mad Max future: Reading recommendations from Joshua Ellis
Early on in our chat, Josh recommends the (not particularly critically adored!) 2011 version of Fright Night as a metaphor for living in Las Vegas. I’m going to revisit it, if only for the ridiculous spectacle of David Tennant as a louche, leather-clad rock star ‘vampire expert’.
He also mentions Frank Herbert’s science fiction masterpiece Dune as a perfect metaphor for the dry, unforgiving environs of the Nevada desert, alongside the desolate, alien landscape of the Philip K. Dick classic Martian Time Slip.
Each year, climate activists publicise Earth Overshoot Day - the day on which we have consumed the equivalent of all the world’s resources that it is possible to produce in a year. This day has been arriving sooner and sooner, year on year, since the project started.
A 2009 report suggested that “humanity would need five Earths to produce the resources needed if everyone lived as profligately as Americans.” The Footprint Network estimates that at current global rates of consumption, we use the resources of 1.6 Earths annually. Josh and I discuss this early on in the podcast, and how this relates to the controversial topic of population pressure and climate-change driven migration.
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond is the book Josh recommends as one of the key texts that helped him understand the history of America, and its roots in European imperialism. He also recommends Diamond’s Collapse, about the crumbling infrastructure and economics of Western democracies, and how this signals the decline of the US empire and its eventual demise. He cites Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man as an example of the kind of free market neoliberalism that got us into this mess.
Another book Josh mentions is Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner, the account of the rivalry between the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the competition to transform the West.
Reisner’s book was where Josh learned about explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell, who advocated in the late 1800s for drawing state lines in parallel with the great American lakes and rivers. This was a significant historical turning point, with poor planning and political chicanery leading to water shortages, wildfires, and fast-approaching resource crises in hydroelectric power, farming, and the sustainability of cities like Las Vegas in the present century.
This led to Josh telling me about The Salton Sea in California, a vast, dying freshwater lake. As the lake dried, it became toxic. Small communities nearby like Bombay Beach, previously built as tourist towns, faced devastation.
Near to the Salton Sea is the exile community of Slab City. This Slab City documentary offers an hour inside the desert shanty town, and another by VICE offers a brief overview. A ragtag society of outsiders, outlaws and renegades, the squatter community evolved from a small number of veterans who took possession of an abandoned army base in the 1950s, making a home in the inhospitable desert in trailers and makeshift shacks.
Outside the bounds of conventional law and morality, Slab City offers hope for Josh, with what he calls an ‘afropunk’ or ‘township tech’ approach to both society and technology. In many ways, Josh sees this community as better prepared for a possible collapse of society than most of us, echoing some of the features of Bartertown from 1985’s Mad Max 2.
For an example of township tech, he mentions the story of Malian inventor William Kamkwamba, the subject of the Netflix movie The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Both of Kamkwamba’s excellent TED talks are well worth a watch.
For more on Josh’s views and activism on homelessness, start with his 2019 talk for the Las Vegas Sunday Assembly. Matthew O’Brien, Josh’s writing partner on the original Las Vegas City Life investigation into the homeless population living in the city’s storm drains, later expanded the story into the book Beneath the Neon. Unfortunately, City Life itself is now offline, so I can’t link to the original piece.
The William Gibson quote that Josh paraphrases is from his early cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, the first of the ‘Sprawl’ novels:
“Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.”
Later, Josh also mentions Gibson’s more recent (and connected) novels The Peripheral and Agency as a prescient stories about social decline and approaching collapse in America, in particular what Gibson calls “the jackpot” - a black swan event that wipes out a huge slice of the world’s population.
Josh is a truly independent writer and journalist, one of a rare and disappearing species of political, ethical and moral crusaders in print and online. His polemics and predictions are always worth listening to, and his contribution to the discourse is worth supporting. If you can, back Josh on Patreon.
You can read a few of Josh’s essays for free over on Medium, and at NSFWCorp. His own website Zenarchery collects a lot of his writing, and has a shop where you can buy a copy of Everyone I Know is Brokenhearted. When they eventually let him back on, you can also find Josh on Twitter.
Coming up on Episode 5: Marianela D’Aprile
Next month’s guest is Chicago journalist Marianela D’Aprile. A writer on architecture, culture and politics, she has contributed to sites including Jacobin, The Nation, and Surface Magazine.
I first encountered Marianela’s work in her brilliant review of Lauren Oyler’s novel Fake Accounts, in which she articulates some incisive thoughts about the performative nature of online identities.
Marianela has been a member of the National Political Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America since 2018. Involved with and invested in the work of political candidates like Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, her explainer piece, What you need to know about democratic socialism, is a clear and convincing summary of her political outlook.
This conversation was a great follow-up to the radicalism of the positions taken by both Josh Ellis and David Lee Morgan in previous episodes. We explored this more conventional side of left-wing politics, and Marianela challenged a lot of my preconceptions about the aims and approaches of traditional party-political activism. Her thoughts on the politics of architecture and public space were absolutely fascinating too.
Look out for Episode 5 later this month.
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Take care of each other.
Bram E Gieben, Glasgow, April 2021