1 The Super-Hyped, Ultra-Rich Technopolis of Despair Security just told me No photos of the sleek Apple campus in Austin, Texas. No images of the pristine white hallways. No images of the sterile landscaping between the glass and concrete buildings. No images of the brightly lit cafeteria where I?m waiting for my wife to return from the medical facility for Apple employees. Although she only works part-time in the Apple store in the mall, she gets better benefits than what I receive as a tenured professor?but I?m not bitter. By the inedible standards of campus dining, I?m in a Michelin-starred restaurant, and they have fancy everything, even gelato, at subsidized prices for lucky Apple insiders. There is only one exception to their prohibition against image making: we are permitted to take selfies. Which seems weird but fitting.

The corporation that has made untold and allegedly untaxed billions from the selfie craze that has turned a nation of supposedly rugged individualists into a bunch of filler-injecting, self-promoting narcissists is making sure I don?t point my iPhone at its makers and marketers. I?m not even sure how they noticed me taking a quick pic, but I apologize to the guard who gives me the ?no second chances? look and disappears into some hidden door like Houdini. Wearing a difficult-to-get visitors badge, I?m not eager to get booted out because this might be my only chance to see inside the kingdom that Mac made. It?s fascinating here, even if it makes me feel a little bit like a medieval heretic, dirty and bearded, who has snuck over the walls of Vatican City to gawk at the papal riches and priestly rituals. And make no mistake about it: Apple is the Catholic Church of the new millennium?infinitely rich, aesthetically seductive, insidiously influential, and absolutely sacred to the culture it both serves and devours. Other aspects of the North Austin campus, one of only two in the United States, feel more like the sci-fi version of the twenty-third century. Surfaces are as white and perfect as a new set of dentures, and everything feels precisely engineered in a way that is overpowering (it?s beautiful but intimidating). When I was there just before the pandemic, it was already a million square feet of real estate, but a billion-dollar expansion of the Austin campus was soon in the works.

Even for a big corporation, a billion dollars might seem like a vast sum, but in June 2020, in the midst of the global pandemic, Apple became the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, with a market cap approaching two trillion dollars. It?s very hard to imagine the enormity of a billion, let alone a trillion, dollars, so I won?t even try to provide an analogy of its almighty Mother of God bigness. On second thought, I?ll give it a shot. To a company that is worth as much as the entire gdp of Russia, that has kept an astonishing two hundred billion dollars in cash on hand for several years running, a billion dollars is like a hundred dollars to a middle-class person: you will miss it but not that much. But down the road is something else, a place where a missing one hundred dollars would be devastating, a place that wouldn?t even exist if someone dropped a spare billion on it: it?s the other side of our modern pseudo-abundance. I?m talking about the explosion of little tent cities for Austin?s homeless?some just a few scattered urban campsites, others with dozens or more?that have sprung up along the major roads in one of the most prosperous and fastest-growing cities in the United States. Inside the tents are the forgotten casualties of neoliberalism, the winner-take-all ideology that exalts the individual at the expense of any kind of social accountability or state intervention. Neoliberalism is like a rich man who tells his poor cousins to work harder and stop bellyaching.

Writ large, it is a mindset of profound political cynicism in which social safety nets are sliced into disrepair and then mocked for their own deficiency: I told you government pro- grams don?t work! If that sounds familiar, it?s because it?s deep in the withered heart and soul of modern Republicanism. The whole thing works beautifully for the few and terribly for the many, but nowadays radical disparity is accepted as the cost of doing business even in cities with progressive reputations. Income inequality, already severe in a nation inclined to worship wealth while ignoring poverty, became even worse during the pandemic, resulting in a covid recession that struck with disproportionate fury at the least among us. Much of that suffering landed on people of color, which is not surprising given that 37 percent of Black families have zero or negative wealth, meaning that bankruptcy or homelessness are never too far away. Living like this is bad for everyone, not just for the poor: social psychologists have shown that inequality elevates fear and anxiety among the rich and poor alike, although for different reasons. The poor sense they are falling further behind in unequal societies, while the rich see how far they might fall into precarity if their wealth were threatened. But Americans have always been people of paradox: we are a nation that celebrates individualism and bootstrapping but practices conformism and nepotism, that enshrines the separation of church and state but allows the U.S.

Senate to hire an official chaplain (all Christians so far!), that maintains ?Anyone can grow up to be president? even though the presidential portraits almost all bear a striking resemblance to one another in terms of race, gender, and religious background. Which is to say, I?m not naive about our capacity for self-delusion, and I am aware that cultural contradiction is as American as wearing a greasy mullet to the state fair for some deep-fried butter sticks. But when the gap between ideology and reality reaches a level that sends the contradiction Geiger counter into click spasms, I wonder if we are gearing up for the revolutions that we saw in 1917 or if we are just becoming permanently stratified like Brazil or Russia. Several thousand homeless people live on the humid streets of Austin, which has long had a not-so-great reputation for its unhoused population (one reliable estimate claims forty-five hundred, though the city likes to say around twenty-five hundred). I?ve heard stories that smaller cities in Texas cynically hand out bus tickets to Austin, almost as punishment for its liberal reputation: Let the bleeding heart liberals take care of this. Except we don?t, not really, and homelessness in Austin remains unsolved, half-addressed, and controversial. When I arrived, in 1985, the unenlightened discourse was about ?drag worms? bumming spare change and hassling people on the street around the ut campus. Runaways hung out on sidewalks next to people who had been pushed out of mental institutions in the Reagan years.

Today our vocabulary has improved but not the conditions on the pavement, even though every new mayor claims that it?s near the top of their agenda. For a couple of years, at the start of the 2020s, the unhoused in Austin had a kind of hypervisibility, with colorful tents filling the flat space underneath freeway ramps and overpasses, creating temporary neighborhoods of the dispossessed within a rapidly gentrifying city. Because Austin relaxed its ban on public camping in 2019, people stopped hiding from police citations in the dark alleys and built somewhat safer and certainly more stable communities in plain sight alongside the access roads of major freeways. For a few years we could see what was hidden before: hunger, thirst, trauma, grief, pain, loneliness, mental illness, addiction. These makeshift settlements of large nylon tents, surrounded by broken bikes, trash bags, and plastic coolers, were the floating campground of neoliberal shame. What does it mean? It?s not that complicated really. Such profound disparity of experience, from the glorious summit of techno-capitalist opulence to the dirty off-ramps (literally) of despair and precarity, all within a small radius, even on the same exact road, is a sign of barbarism plain and simple. But how can that happen in the allegedly progressive mecca of Austin? After all, the city has been mocked as ?the People?s Republic of Austin? since the 1970s, when it was an overgrown college town that the rest of the state loved to hate for its serape-wearing guitarists and angry feminists (or was it angry guitarists and serape-wearing feminists?).

Back then it was an escape hatch for 80 percent of the free spirits south of the Red River, a chill place where you could hide out, feel safe, and build a good life when small-town Texas was too constrained (although the you in that sentence never applied to people of color as much as white Austin progressives assumed). Before the great overbuild of the twenty-first century, when Austin got as steroidally ?swoll? as Lance Armstrong?s thighs, it was a pleasant city with affordable tree-lined neighbor.