The shame Aucklanders have about their city is entrenched, but no less laughable for being so entrenched. I can’t help but see a unique confrontation here in the Auckland identity between the national character of humility (feeding into the proverbial tall-poppy antics we all know and love) and more cosmopolitan aspirations which, for whatever reason, we will not allow ourselves the courtesy of seeing as anything more than aspirations; fucking pipe-dreaming even. As if to say the urban infrastructure and trafficking of wealth happening before our eyes weren’t ‘real’ like it is overseas, but some sort of collective hallucination.
An antipodean mirage.
It’s not humble, or cute.
In fact, this insistence on ‘humility’ expressing itself at best as a realistic approach to the ambient bombast of neoliberal society, and at worst as a totalising resentment of peers and contemporaries (who dare to discern their own talents and act accordingly), blocks any sort of criticality we might otherwise have about our placement in a larger global society. Anyone who thinks New Zealand is cleaved enough (socially, culturally, economically etc) from the rest of the planet to be outside hegemony has miserably failed to grasp the moment, and it is a moment of infinitely networked being and event, a moment of chaos-theorem made mundane by the micro-tethering of big-data and a sort of rapt mutual surveillance.
There is no vacuum for New Zealand to inhabit anymore. The draconian omniscience of tethered media is exactly that; omniscient. As well as omnipotent.
I would hope anyone with any kind of social media account knows that with the digital medium, cutting through the affective noise of virtue-signalling and righteous infographics and thirst-posting, there is the real-time collection of usable information vectors which are immediately purposed to filter user-worlds through diminishing lenses of consumption and opinion (opinion as consumption). Yeah, this is stale news (and anyone who needs me to explain the consummate effects of media saturation, you’re probably not even reading this because you’re too busy turning ground for next season’s kumara harvest at the commune). But what’s fresh is this nagging feeling I have that the Auckland character needs to play catch-up and relinquish this self-imposed apathy which says we bow to parochial conceptions of a) urban planning and b) our lives in that plan.
Most of the habitual Auckland profile stems from a non-synchronous time in which our movements weren’t immediately universalised as data, and they subsequently have no validity any more. Like, bending ourselves to a national character that insists on property ownership as the marker of mature/stable adulthood du jour.
What fucking nonsense.
If we insisted on an overhaul of renting rights and made renting an experience which could enclose the same types of imagined security people claim resides in a mortgage (lol) then we could conceivably ease the current market back from it’s frankly insane extrapolations. I know one of Auckland’s routine conversation topics no matter where you are (bar, restaurant, sex-party in Point Chev) is property, and I hate playing to type, but seriously; bolstering renting as an equally glamorous or viable (or whatever) option could displace the annoying centrality of housing in the Aucklander’s spiritual makeup. Just make it accessible and suddenly housing is a non issue! Imagine all that mental and emotional space which would get freed up if we could go somewhere and talk about something else, something besides the mythic tensions between landlords and renters, something more constructive than the coded class-violence which these conversations are so often guises for; something closer to lived experience, something we could actually share on an interpersonal level (I prefer my dinner parties to be transformative, actually).
Because talking about housing is so supernaturally boring that I want to kill myself by the appetisers (and if it happens to me again this coming summer, I’m putting cyanide in the punch).
