Avoiding plurality produces social monoculture that destroys existing dynamism

Evidence

To live without encountering plurality, both within oneself and without, brings about a phenomenon that Sarah Schulman describes in her book The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Schulman gives a firsthand account of what happened in 1980s New York, when the children of suburban families who had been part of post–World War II white flight filled the vacancies left by the dying, AIDS-affected queer community in places like the Lower East Side. Both in urban and psychological space, Schulman witnessed “the replacement of complex realities with simplistic ones,” a process leading to a kind of social monoculture. Afraid of anyone who differed from the suburban archetype, the newcomers to Schulman’s neighborhood were not only uninterested in learning anything about the incredibly dynamic place they had moved to, but ignorant of their role in destroying that dynamism. They, too, had gone somewhere without going anywhere. Schulman compares the first gentrifying businesses in her neighborhood—beacons that signaled to newcomers using aesthetics and price—as isolated outposts, like “the hard currency kiosks in the Soviet Union that sold Marlboros to apparatchiks and tourists.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 476

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s critique lens: Schulman’s gentrification account is the concrete historical case grounding Odell’s attention argument, and the Soviet-kiosk analogy pairs with ‘Grafting & Growth’ naming of infrastructure as worldmaking. — connects to: Industrial society reduces individuals to interchangeable species beings through conformist working conditions; The Green Revolution’s yield gains depend on monocultures that destroy local farming knowledge. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1422