The day we understand the bizarre idea of being a tourist in our own land is the day we may start to…

The day we understand the bizarre idea of being a tourist in our own land is the day we may start to understand how little we’ve changed, culturally, since the days of Empire. Why this matters for climate and Covid, and everything else. /1 https://t.co/gEvsJzKK0x

A constant theme of mine is the difference between space, and place. Space is map-world, the lands of the world divided up into spatial territories by lines on a map. That’s also travel and tourism culture, the lands of the world parcelled up into ‘sights’ to be seen. /2

All travel is social. We’re not travelling through the world, we’re travelling through our own social relationships. A sight to be seen is one generated by the social activity of others going to see it, and feeding back what they find. Others then go on the same journey. /3

Which is really just a journey through a map, but even more participation in a social activity, with the locations there only as infrastructure for that social activity. It becomes imitative rivalry, to be seen in prominent places, and even better to find new places. /4

So that you become the influencer who generates new waves of ‘travel’, to new locations, really just building a new social network focused more on you. I encourage people to think about space entirely differently, in the same way they think about human relationships. /5

The locations of the world aren’t spaces. They’re PLACES. They’re a *relationship* between a diverse range of humans and non-humans, giving a place a unique and ongoing dynamic character. The most fundamental level of place-making is your own home. The concept of home. /6

The places we travel to aren’t sights. They’re homes. Homes for people, animals, plants, rivers, geologies etc. Places that are made and constantly remade. In relationship terms, a tourist is like a speed-dater, looking for a quick fling with the places they touch down in. /7

Justifying it by saying they’re getting ‘experiences’. Everything is an experience, you don’t need to leave your backyard to have an experience. You don’t fuck everything that moves at home to have the ‘experience’ of all of those people (though maybe some do). /8

But this is what travel does to locations. It doesn’t matter how many Ptolemaic acrobatic epicyclic methods you come up with to be a more ‘authentic’ tourist, you’re still just having casual sex with all of these places. With peoples’ homes. /9

This all fundamentally matters for the two biggest issues of right now, Covid and climate. Both driven by this same stripping away of place, and replacement by space. Mass, spreading infection is a violation of the sovereignty of place. Driving infection into peoples’ homes. /10

Climate change is 250+ years of refusing to respect any sort of sensible use of energy, to drive mass mobilisation of everything. People and resources. To destroy place and turn it into nothing more than a resource. This is what empires have always done. Destroyed place. /11

Replacing it with smooth roads and waterways and flight routes, to bring the spoils of conquest back to the massive centres of accumulation at the centres of the empires. Slaves, sugar, spices, minerals, this process hasn’t ever really ended. Slavery became ‘labour hire’. /12

Extractive cultures, decoupled from connection to place. Except their own places, which they protect violently, but even within those nations those not at the top of social hierarchies can expect to be sleeping rough if you allow the process to continue. To have no place. /13

Mass Covid infection is a violation of my place, and everybody else’s. To have infection deliberately driven into my home, by the refusal to do anything to stop the circulation outside it. That restricted the great mobilisation culture, and that’s not allowed. /14

It’s not ‘capitalism’, an empty word. It’s a social and cultural refusal to come to terms with place and what it means. To be grounded. To have to make and maintain a relationship with the land you live in. Rather than it just be a theme park to tow your caravan through. /end