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Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe
I’m going to do my best not to make this essay into joining a major social media frenzy just to fire off one more zinger aimed at the main character.
The main character in this case is Michelle Tandler, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who asked on Twitter whether public hangings might serve as a deterrent against drug dealing in San Francisco and thus solve the city’s current problem.
This predictably led to a long running battle on Twitter that went on for a few days. (Maybe that’s still going on? I don’t keep up with Twitter much at this point.) Tandler didn’t give up, characterizing her various critics as a “hard left”, as cowards, and much more besides, while also trying to reframe her initial interventions as thought experiments, as ideas that she herself didn’t support, as perhaps not as fully informed as she could be about the history she was invoking, and so on.
This is one of many moments where it’s fair to say that both the culture and the design of major commercial social media platforms has badly degraded our ability to have public conversations about major problems we’re facing. Or perhaps it is more that those conversations could happen in ways they’ve never happened and those platforms are preventing it, because I’m not sure that the pre-Internet public culture was especially good at putting everything on the table that needed to be.
What’s on the table in this case in part is necessarily partly about the contending sociologies that are trying to speak about crime in a city like San Francisco, and which of them are not paying a necessary ante for the conversation to unfold usefully. I think it’s fair to say that Tandler is one of those trying to avoid paying up, like many of the entrepreneurs who have made their way to San Francisco. The city’s problems today are partly a product of what they did to the city’s economy and society. Moving fast and breaking things, well, that unsurprisingly leaves wreckage in its wake. If you stop moving fast—or you find yourself eating the dust of those moving faster than you—you suddenly find yourself in the ruins that the racers created.
Tandler invokes Singapore at one point in the Twitter thread, noting the proposition that hanging a few dealers every year seems to keep the dealers away from Singapore. Maybe investing in infrastructure for all, supporting a good healthcare system open to all, and building a massive affordable housing initiative might have something to do with that as well. Invoking Singapore as proof that harsh criminal punishments are a deterrent without understanding that Singapore checks runaway economic inequality and re-invests in middle-class society in a thorough and systematic way is the kind of thing that an Ivy League grad with a degree in intellectual history should know better than to do. It is the kind of thing you do when you post angry, frustrated attention-bait and then double-down from that point onward.
I am sure that San Francisco is scary right now for a lot of people trying to live and work in a calm and secure way in one of the most beautiful cities in North America. There are other areas of American cities going through the same thing at the moment. I’m glad I don’t live in Kensington, Fishtown, Northern Liberties in Philadelphia at the moment, for example. The problem is real and just calling for treatment or safe conditions for addicts alone is as unresponsive and dubious as calling for public hangings.
But if you want to think into a solution space—and buy yourself credibility with readers, if you want to create a conversation that works towards possible answers, you not only have to own your share of the causes of the problem, you have to explore the reality with humility. Singapore is one data point—and Tandler dramatically underexamines it by just saying “but hangings!”—but the Philippines are another, where vigilantes and executions under Duterte abound with seemingly little to no effect on drug dealing and drug addiction.
Think about the big canvas of American society and policy at the moment. Are we a society that is too slow to incarcerate people for crimes, including drug-related ones? No, we have the highest percentage of our own population behind bars on the entire planet. Are drug-related crimes a significant part of that incarceration? Yes, yes they are. Do we lack a death penalty? Nope, we have one, and some states use it fairly heavily. Do the states which use it heavily have fewer problems with addiction or drug trafficking? No. So from the start, it cannot be that putting even more people in prison or executing even more people in a more spectacularized way is the answer to the problem that is troubling Tandler. When you are already doing something more than any other society on the planet and it’s not solving your problem, doing more still fits the classic definition of insanity: expecting a change from just doing the same thing over and over again.
At the same time, what’s happening to American life expectancy? It’s diving at a time when every other rich country is seeing post-pandemic improvement. It was diving already before the pandemic. Addiction is part of that story, but only a symptom. Some of the experts who’ve analyzed the change have referred to “deaths of despair”; others have pointed out that what’s going on is white Americans are catching up to Americans of other racial groups in terms of suffering the effects of structural exclusion from economic possibility.
It may be that this is what Tandler thinks is “hard left” as an understanding of addiction, and that she is looking at hangings and vigilantism because they seem simple and don’t require a much broader kind of social transformation, a reordering of the American political economy and a rebuilding of the institutions supporting the American middle class. That’s particularly counter to the shared ideology of many of the entrepreneurs who’ve flocked to San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
There are places in the world where small numbers of relatively wealthy people who are succeeding in a closed, confined, restrictive formal economy decide not to build out into and raise up the wider society beyond but to hold on to most of their wealth—or where the state is a hopelessly compromised and incompetent partner in any such enterprise—and yet have (sort of) solved the problem of security that Tandler has identified. It’s not by hangings and imprisonment, at least not primarily. It’s by building higher walls topped by razor wire, by hiring private security forces to clear undesirables and criminals who get too close to the enclaves of professionals, managers and business owners, by gating off the desirable parts of the world and letting the rest of it burn. I make it sound here like there’s people in the world who have preferred it that way, but I don’t think that’s true. No one in those places likes that solution. No one likes the fear, the constriction of movement, the escalation of security forces to match the desperation of the people outside the walls. But they’ve settled into it because anything else didn’t seem possible—or seemed to require them to give up too much.
So what do we do? I don’t think it’s enough to call for targeted treatment of addicts, for safe injection sites, for bundling treatment and short-term housing. I don’t think you can bypass criminalization of dealing altogether—but getting at the higher levels of criminal trafficking isn’t just a matter of being tougher or meting out harsher public punishment. I think involuntary confinement of addicts is only going to work in a society with better institutional approaches to treatment and its aftermath than the United States. I think that the real solutions—build a better social democracy with more equitable institutions and an economy that works for everyone rather than just hedge-fund managers and high-flying entrepreneurs—are the only real way to achieve a city, a state, a country where someone like Tandler can take her dog out to go to the bathroom at 12:30 am and not be afraid of someone in the shadows. TED Talk solutions—the one easy thing! whether it’s hanging or safe injection sites—won’t cut it.
But I’m also sure that we can’t talk or think or organize our way towards creative and fully-imagined solutions collectively without a better public sphere and a more fulsomely democratic temperament than what any social media platform—including this one—is either capable of or willing to provide. In the absence of that, someone who jumps onto one of those platforms and flings the shit that their interfaces and structure readily provide should not be surprised when it comes back at them in the same spirit. Nor should they be surprised when that leaves everyone exactly where they were before, with no solutions. Well, perhaps one thing changes: everybody hates each other just a little bit more.
Image credit: "Treatment, Not Evictions rally" by joepiette2 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.