Parts 6 & 7: Disposable Neighborhoods and the Loss of Place
This is the thrilling conclusion of a 7-part series about how so much of this country has come to look and feel identical, and what that standardization means to our communities, our well-being, and our ability to generate a dynamic, living culture.
If you missed any of the other pieces, or want to read them all in chronological order (including the one below), I’ve now collected them all in one post, which I’ve linked below.
Read parts 1-7 here, or just read on if you’re already up to speed.
6. Liberty from all Masters
The forcible displacement of independents by corporate titans has been an ongoing tragedy in this country since the 1970’s, when both Republican and Democratic administrations stopped using anti-monopoly laws to enforce economic and political equality. The resulting explosion of mergers and chain store expansions has resulted in intense market concentration, with ramifications that go far beyond the simple replacement of one interchangeable business with another.
As independent businesses are typically run by individuals who live in the communities they serve, they prove far more responsive and accountable to those communities’ needs. In addition to providing more economic benefit to the community compared to chains, they also pay higher wages and provide more benefits to their workers. (For a jaw-dropping, data-driven breakdown of this issue, please read Big Box Swindle, by Stacy Mitchell.)
But the benefits go far beyond just economic gains, touching on everything from our ability to lead an independent, self-directed life, to the very health of our democracy. For an example of this, we need only look at how the enforcement of fair trade legislation in the 1960’s allowed minority-owned businesses to flourish, which in turn allowed these business owners to take an active role in the civil rights movement. On account of their financial independence, they had no fear of retaliation from a white employer, and were able to fund activists and provide storefronts for use in organizing. In fact, civil rights leaders of that era—including Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, and Thurgood Marshall—explicitly made a direct connection between antitrust laws and civil rights.
To put it simply, starting a small business was once a way to be uniquely beneficial to one’s neighborhood and local economic ecosystem, while also providing a reliable middle-class income and autonomy. The current predatory business environment, structured into existence by federal law and trade policy, has ended that. It has also destroyed the indefinable but essential role the individuals behind these local businesses once held as anchors in their neighborhoods and cities.
Today, any still-surviving local grocery stores and retailers, once key to market access for local farmers and other makers, must now compete with the unrestrained expansion of deep-pocketed corporations like Walmart, Target, Albertsons, and Dollar General. Our local bookstores, if they made it through the war of attrition with the bookstore chains, must now contend with immense pressure from the Prime juggernaut. Our medicines, our clothing, our electronics, nearly all of it now shipped in from overseas, drop into our hands from impersonal delivery staff or undermanned chain stores. Even our radio DJs, once key culture-builders in cities around the country, no longer get to choose which songs they broadcast over publicly owned airwaves. Instead, we’re left with whatever’s handed down from a shockingly small number of corporate offices.
This top-down standardization on such a huge scale represents the loss of local control, and with it the loss of local opportunities, the loss of complexity and nuance, and the loss of sensitivity to subtle but critical signals buried in the noise—all abilities that keep a lively culture active and growing, able to respond with rapid correction to negative feedback, thereby preventing stagnation, internal rot, and wholesale collapse.
Ultimately, what this standardization points to is the end of our autonomy as we know it—meaning the end of our ability to determine the direction of our communities, our culture, and even our lives. This, more than anything, is the capstone of forty years of ‘consumer-first’ law and an obsessive focus on efficiency above all else.
7. Meet me at the corner of Arby’s and Chipotle
“Standardization is the parent of stagnation.” - Jane Jacobs, from Dark Age Ahead
What pride or sense of ownership can one really feel, honestly, for the cinderblock buildings and nauseating parking lots that house the nation’s fast food restaurants, big box retailers, and gas stations, and which now blight every road in this country? And how can we feel any distinction between the templated tract homes or sprawling apartment complexes dropped in a monolithic mass from spreadsheet to field by corporate developers?
How can we feel attached to a place when everywhere we go looks and feels basically the same?
According to the researchers behind a study mapping the proliferation of chain stores, “theories of place attachment assert that we form special memories and self-actualize more in places with a unique identity, and that the opposite concept of ‘placelessness’ can be linked to feelings of dullness, loss and sadness.”
The implications of this are both profound and predictable. Not only have we lost the small business owners who used to anchor our neighborhood pharmacies, grocery stores, pizza places, bowling alleys, theaters, radio stations, and restaurants, but we’ve lost ourselves as well—because the unfortunate flip side to standardized homes, stores, and products is, of course, standardized people.
Perhaps this is the reason why we now latch onto identity with such stubborn, tribalistic firmness. Because what’s left and who would we be without our fine-grained political affiliations, our maddeningly specific dietary preferences, our social media churn that provides a daily bouquet of outrage by folding every bit of news and content into a singular, exhausting narrative?
Whether we’re stuck at a desk, or behind the counter, or on a jobsite, we can always turn to our phone—both the source and outlet for our now-cosmic levels of dyspepsia, and which provides an effective hologram of personal significance within an online clique that reinforces our better than belief systems.
Like it or not, we now depend on this exact mechanism to generate meaning and purpose for our days, not because it’s up to that task, but because we have little else to go on.
Our frantic need to identify as—or more importantly identify against—has us trapped in a fortress mentality, a fundamentally conservative “with-us-or-against-us” framework that now engulfs all sides, with each camp believing their views are unquestionably the correct ones, and that they, therefore, have a mandate to impose those beliefs on others.
Cooperation, constructive dialogue, common purpose, and the ability to learn from, or even identify, mistakes—all gone, or nearly so. Independent thinkers and even sympathetic dissenters are expelled from the tribe rather than engaged, thus pushing the tribes ever further from reality.
Because the more we point to the ‘other’ as the cause of our problems, the more isolated we become, the angrier and more rage-filled, the less we’re able to look inward and question our own beliefs or see anything or anyone with an open, curious mind. Instead, whatever and whomever gets marked as bad becomes merely an object without value, something irredeemable, fit only for destruction and scorn.
This is the end of our vibrant, progressive, and innovative culture, displaced as it has been by a deteriorating, increasingly desperate anti-culture marked by myopia, hysteria, and hate. For shame. As a people, we once resisted standardization, uniformity, censorship, and top-down control—now what?