The Demographic Drag-and-Drop

And the Video Game Logic of Those in Power

By guest author Sam Lively.

They say we’re living in a simulation, and recent events have convinced me that it must be a variation of Sid Meier’s Civilization. If we zoom in to the ground level and play it on pleb mode, an area like Springfield, Ohio, is a homeland: its buildings and landscapes reservoirs of cultural and ancestral memories stretching back centuries; its inhabitants the custodians and cultivators of that inheritance. But if we zoom out to the player view, these quaint notions disappear, and we see a grid map exposing Springfield as a generic hexagon in a vast imperial matrix. Toggle on the statistical overlay, and we see further that it’s a badly underperforming zone, dwindling in population, absorbing a bunch of imperial funds, and generating little in the way of money, production, culture, or political power for the Player. Meanwhile, only a few hexes away on the grid map, the collapsing city-state of Haiti pumps out surpluses of cheap labor just waiting for someone to claim them.

From this perspective, it makes all the sense in the game for the Player to drag and drop the Haitian surplus right into the Springfield problem zone. Should the Player then zoom back in to pleb mode, he might find scenes of Old Testament mayhem: fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, rivers and seas boiling, 40 years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats cooking together, mass hysteria. But the economic advisor pops up to assure him that such disturbing visuals are ephemeral; economic growth is forever. And so what if the old cultural landscape is transformed underfoot? Is anyone crying for the Indian villages and buffalo herds and prairie grasses that were steamrolled to make way for modern Springfield? Our forebears annihilated pre-Columbian civilizations along with time and space; it’s only natural for us to obliterate our own culture if it stands in the way of progress.

The lunacy of this video game logic is obvious, but it’s important to recognize that our elites, in embracing it, are demonstrating a vim and vigor reminiscent of our founding stock. This is not the decadence and managed decline we see in so many places — it’s more like a demonic reimagination of Manifest Destiny, with much of the boldness and ingenuity that animated the original. You have to admire the magicianship required to abracadabra 20,000 Haitians into the middle of the heartland on the eve of a presidential election/culture war. How about the logistical skill required to coordinate the innumerable federal agencies, airlines, local businesses, and NGOs involved in getting all these people transported, housed, employed, and hooked into our byzantine social services network virtually instantaneously? It looks more like the work of the people who lifted Chicago out of the swamp two centuries ago than the malicious incompetents in charge of getting us out of Afghanistan or keeping Trump out of harm’s way.

To switch briefly back into the game metaphor, what we’re witnessing is a Player deploying a revolutionary technology/social policy to give himself a boost. For historical analogues, there are lots of tempting parallels, from the H-bomb to the Ulsterization of Northern Ireland, but I prefer a subtler tech from the history of the heartland itself: the steam-powered grain elevator. This unassuming machine deserves credit for unleashing the full modern economic potential of our favorite staple crop.

In our age of crunchy homesteaders and food justice nerds and gluten-freaks, it’s become fashionable to plumb the mysterious origins of the generic and essentially invisible wheat that shows up in almost all of our food. But prior to the advent of the grain elevator, there was no mystery involved. As William Cronon details in Nature’s Metropolis, a fascinating environmental history of Chicago and the heartland, every grain of wheat grown for the market traveled alongside its closest neighbors in a sack bearing the label of the farm that grew them. It would remain in that sack for the entirety of its torturous route across the global network of carts, boats, and rail, until it reached its consumer.

Sacks were discrete, non-fungible units — the grains inside could not be blended with others. As Cronon puts it, “nothing adulterated the characteristic weight, bulk, cleanliness, purity, and flavor that marked it as the product of a particular land and particular farmer’s labor.” While this setup sounds ideal to the modern “locally sourced, cruelty-free, fair trade, non-GMO” consumer, it was the black-and-white part of the infomercial for Chicago traders. Sacks on the back of human stevedores were an offensively antiquated technology retarding the otherwise efficient operation of the market, a sandbag set up against the advancing tide of modernity, a provincial husk to be shucked at the first opportunity.

Enter the grain elevator, a device for moving grain to and from boats and railcars without the need for human hands. More consequential than the reduction of human labor was the removal of the sack. Stripping the sack meant ridding the grain of any identity or label other than what the market wished to affix to it. Farmer John’s 1845 wheat harvest, grown and bagged from the cutest little farm in Madison, Wisconsin, was suddenly and violently ripped from its burlap womb and sucked into the oblivion of a vast silo by a Chicago grain elevator, only to be reborn alongside tons of other anonymous grains and rechristened by a grain inspector as “white winter #2.” The transformation didn’t stop there — it was only a short hop from shedding the wheat sack to doing away with its physical presence altogether. Chicago quickly moved from selling wheat to selling the promise of wheat in their Board of Trade’s emerging futures market (currently the largest in the world, according to Wikipedia). A plant atomized down to the idea of its seed became the plinth for skyscrapers.

What the elevator did for grain, the demographic drag-and-drop aims to do for Man — transform an unwieldy product of nature into a fungible, mark-to-market commodity. In place of the Chicago Board of Trade, we have a vast, nameless complex of politicians, government agencies, nonprofits, and chambers of commerce that closely resembles the Company from the Alien franchise. For the Company, Man’s provincial origins and ties are an encumbrance to attaining his ideal form as Homo economicus. A man’s identity and his community — his family, faith, culture, language, ethnicity, race, etc. — function as the coarse burlap sack that prevents him from passing smoothly and quietly through the channels of the global economy.

It’s not that the Company doesn’t like labels; it just wants to make its own, and a predetermined community denies it that power. Thus, the concept of a town as a pre-sealed, intact package is offensive to the Company. While the Springfield package means “home” to a native, to the Company the packaging hides a grab bag of questionable economic and political value. Some, they assume, are good workers, but there are all the entitled hangers-on, loafers, and addicts mixed in. Plus, there’s the risk that the obnoxious blight of MAGA populism, with its trade wars and border walls, has spoiled the whole batch.

The demographic drag-and-drop offers the Company instant relief from this aggravation. Why should the Company have to deal with underperforming Springfield as an intact, self-contained community when the social tech exists to open it up and transform its contents? Just unzip the Springfield folder, right-click on the Haitian bargain bin, select as many huddled masses as you need, and then drop them right into their new home. A few flicks of the wrist, and the backward burgh becomes a Company boomtown.

There’s no need to stop at Springfield and Haiti — the potential applications are endless! The whole map is a Company catalog. Colorado getting a little stagnant? There’s a fire sale on Venezuelans. No one to keep the seedy motel chains going? I hear India’s got a great Groupon for Patels. And there are always the giveaway programs from foreign prisons and asylums — the quality is highly variable, but might as well bring them in in hopes of landing an Aladdin-style diamond in the rough.

If the first-order benefits of all that cheap product flowing weren’t attractive enough, there are always the second-order effects on the domestic population. The old identities with all their hang-ups dissolve under the friction generated from so much human weight. Protest votes disappear under the flood. The old farm sacks give way to the capacious Company silos. Progress marches on. Luddites take the L.

For Company Men like Matt Yglesias, the demographic drag-and-drop brings the glittering prospect of One Billion Americans (“Americans” being the brand identity encompassing a billion fungible labor units) as close as Chicago’s coming out party at the 1893 World’s Fair was to that city’s mid-century boosters. They dismiss any of the chaos on the ground as growing pains, footnotes on the path to this Manifest Destiny. But for the current 333 million Americans, the dissolution of their past to make room for an anonymous future alongside 666 million strangers is an existential threat.

This is not news to anyone who has been online for the last 20 years, where there has been no shortage of right-wing rogues taking on the mantle of third-act Charlton Heston and sounding the alarms. But the unhindered march of the Company towards its objectives has shown us that shouting out Soylent Green’s secret ingredient and damning the maniacs that blew it up isn’t enough. You can’t staff a resistance with prophets and martyrs. If we want to take on the Company, we should look to those who have perfected the arts of obstinance and obstruction in the face of relentless progress.

Hard to find a more formidable practitioner of these dark arts than the longshoremen’s union that grabbed hold of the last news cycle. Their president, an old man wearing a gold chain and shirt emblazoned with “A Force to Be Reckoned With,” went viral for boasting that they could cripple the economy if the union demands for a big raise weren’t met. He immediately drew fire from virtually all corners for his greed and tone-deafness, including many voices on the Right. While I understand why most don’t like it — the guy comes straight out of Central Casting for corrupt union boss villainy — there’s a good argument that this is what peak performance looks like.

Consider the more respectable bastions of trad values and aesthetics and their track records. All those wholesome mom-and-pop shops and main-street mainstays we romanticize? They got absolutely stomped by the likes of Wal-Mart and Amazon, and now vape shops and tattoo parlors wear their storefronts like skinsuits. All those National Review Poindexters standing athwart history yelling “stop”? They’re now breathlessly giving history affirmative consent. But the bums from On the Waterfront are still out there, still delivering sweet chin music to the Company. If we’re stuck in Civilization, they’re the crusty club-wielding barbarians somehow dealing damage to the Information Age missile cruisers, still collecting Danegeld in the Year of Our Lord 2024.

Instead of reflexively siding with the faceless conglomerates trying to ship us more beads and firewater, we should learn a lesson from the braves still taking scalps. We have to be impervious to the bad-faith appeals to morality and restraint coming from the Company zealously working to replace us with strangers and robots. We have to be willing to shut down progress and economic growth to secure our own interests. And whenever the Company tries to pull off a demographic drag-and-drop, we’ve got to be willing to drag-and-dropkick them back to the Stone Age.