Will Toms
An Interview with Hari Kunzru
In the fall of last year, I registered for a course taught by author and journalist Hari Kunzru, a course described as “. . . an exploration of the weird and the eerie, the uncanny and the uncomfortable.” I was drawn to it because it described a feeling which has been, for a few years, the deepest one between myself and many of my closest friends, a persistent and bone-deep sense of alienation.
Now, after a series of cascading, generation-defining crises, it’s clear that most of the country—if not the world—is bound together, at least temporarily, in strangeness and indescribability. On April 21, Governor Andrew Cuomo described the surge-in-use and subsequent collapse of the New York State unemployment system as “unbelievable.” On May 24, the front page of The New York Times informed us that the human cost of COVID-19 was “incalculable.” On June 9, at his brother’s funeral, Rodney Floyd told The Intelligencer that he was still calling George’s phone number. The loss, he said, seemed unreal.
These might be new worlds for some of us, but they’re ones Kunzru has spent much of the last two decades writing and thinking about. Hari Kunzru’s perception is one of a world made strange, of places long hollowed-out, of mercurial borders and the passage between one reality and the next. In an hour-long discussion, we covered his years working for Wired, the early fractures in the internet free-speech movements, and his years of protest before and after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
A fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Academy in Berlin, Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men, and White Tears. He’s finishing work on a podcast called Into the Zone, which we discuss at length in this interview. His latest novel, Red Pill, will be published in September 2020.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You’ve got a lot of different projects going at once right now, but you started writing for Wired, right? Back in the late nineties?
HARI KUNZRU: It’s always been how I’ve had to do it. I mean, this teaching job is the first actual job I’ve had since I was twenty-four or twenty-five. I managed to, for quite a long time, support myself just by freelance writing, and so before I was publishing any novels, I did a lot of tech journalism because I knew about the internet early. It was a period when editors were desperate for writers who understood why you would connect a phone line to a computer.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I think a lot of people of my generation, particularly on the left, see that time as one of techno-utopianism—people believing that the internet would fundamentally change something about where power was seated. Did it feel that way then?
HARI KUNZRU: It was a really weird, double-faced thing I was doing at the time because since 1995, I’ve been in an editorial collective for a publication called Mute, which is a very strongly left-identified publication writing about culture and technology, and certainly back in the nineties we were writing a lot of critical stuff about technology. We ran a piece called “The Californian Ideology,” which was the first, I think, identification of that libertarian thing as a trend in the politics of tech.
When I got into Wired, I thought it would be much more like Mondo 2000, this amazing West Coast underground counterculture thing. I realized very quickly there was this very strongly libertarian streak at the top of the magazine. At the beginning, I was in a meeting with Louis Rossetto, who was the founder, and he was explaining to the editors what was good and what was bad and asking for ideas. I was too green to even know I shouldn’t speak in this meeting, so I spoke up and I said, “Umm, one thing that worries me about the magazine is we’re talking about these very tech-forward, wealthy people, and half the world hasn’t even made a phone call yet. Is there no way we can address the technological needs of the rest of the world?” And he turned to me and he said: “There are no have-nots. There are only have-laters.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: [Laughter]
HARI KUNZRU: And I was like, “Oh, wow, I’m not with my own team here.” That was around the time they were publishing “The Long Boom”, which, in retrospect, seems completely insane. The pitch was that previously we’ve had an economics of atoms, based on scarcity. But because digital information can be infinitely multiplied, we now have an economics that’s going to be based on infinite abundance and so, therefore, it’s all gonna be great. All the curves are going to carry on rising forever and ever. I knew that was bullshit, but I wasn’t in any position to have any input on that.
WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: What was compelling to you, if not the idea of infinite abundance?
HARI KUNZRU: I did buy into the idea that the internet was gonna dissolve senses of national boundaries. At the time, I felt that the “information wants to be free” message was something that was going to be very liberating, and in retrospect, some of those feel like very nineties positions to me. At the time, there was this catchphrase, “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog”—this idea that you could reinvent yourself, that there would be this infinite ability to change yourself up—and I thought, from the point of view of somebody who’d been very stuck in certain racial categories, that that was a potentially liberating force. And in retrospect, now a lot of the things I was advocating for—this globalized placelessness—it was very convenient to what we now call neoliberalism: the constant hammering of people who had attachments to particular places or identities they didn’t want to see dissolved into this global network.
WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: It must have been instructive to straddle those two worlds.
HARI KUNZRU: My journey through Wired in the late nineties was very instructive. At the time, I was doing this weird spy thing, feeding back the Wired version of the world to the circle of activists trying to work out how we would make a left politics out of that. These are still some of my friends, very DIY culture people, who set up community networks—people committed to open source, committed to various kinds of horizontal sharing. I feel a bit melancholy about some of it because obviously we lost the whole argument. The idea of Facebook, the very fact that so much social life is rooted toward this thing called Face-Book, is anathema to the anonymous multitude of our imagination back then.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Technology companies have this insidious ability to eat horizontalist, anarchist, or leftist projects in service of something bigger and more profitable. So when you say that maybe it was a fool’s errand to work on some of this stuff, maybe it was for you and yours, but the companies who won the argument were very intent on using it, right? We can see echoes of it in things like cryptocurrency, the basis of social media, or of social video sharing, at least on the premise that we all still create the media for free.
HARI KUNZRU: It turns out the notion of sharing is now sinister because we know we’re being mined for ourselves in some sort of basic way, but at the time, the sharing felt much more voluntary. The cyberpunk people were already well-entrenched by the time I arrived, and there was that sort of Richard Stallman “You gotta protect yourself from the interests of the government” ethos, which now I see had clearly come from this libertarian streak of American culture that was quite exotic to somebody who grew up in a British social democracy. I was more concerned about surveillance than a lot of people at Wired.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Tell me more about that relationship between Britain and surveillance.
HARI KUNZRU: There was a period in the mid-to-late nineties when the British government was subsidizing surveillance cameras. As a local municipality, you could get a grant of cameras, and I was noticing that places with virtually no crime were putting them in, and I would be asking my bosses, like, “Who’s watching these and how’s the information being used?” This is way before there was any facial recognition. It was like a dude who would have to be sitting in a control room. I ended up having a meeting with the government minister behind the surveillance program for the Conservative Party. He couldn’t believe I’d turned out. I was a very scruffy twenty-six-year-old, and I said, “Aren’t you worried that you’re putting into place an infrastructure which will reduce people’s liberty?” He said, “No because people want it.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What changes allowed surveillance to grow as a political project?
HARI KUNZRU: Obviously 9/11 is the big change, but even before that, London was the most surveilled big city in the world. 9/11 happened, and at that point, we all understood that we were in a forever war. Any optimistic nineties version of a distributed, dissolved, horizontalist multitude world was just gone, and at that point, we were gonna have to assert ourselves against state power in the name of a civil liberties agenda that was not popular at the time. There was a left group at the time called the Guantanamo Human Rights Commission. There was, then, no official confirmation that people had disappeared, but British citizens had vanished, and the suspicion was that they had gone into this gulag of black sites, but people just didn’t know. It’s very weird to imagine it now. We had none of the reporting; we really didn’t know what had happened. Bush and Cheney had just said, “The gloves are off, we’ll do anything we want to do,” and hadn’t quite said, “We’re gonna just randomly go to war with Iraq,” yet. It was this moment when you felt that there was no popular world to see what was going on with British Muslims, especially people who had quite a bit of U.S. politics, aid workers who’d been in Pakistan on behalf of Islamic charities. I ended up speaking on these platforms with one guy whose son vanished.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Where did you go from there?
HARI KUNZRU: By 2004 or 2005, I was working with PEN, the writers’ organization. That seemed like quite a good platform at that point for asserting at least some civil liberties against the state, and it was becoming clearer and clearer that the War on Terror would just be an excuse for an imperial venture in Iraq. I had some crazy meetings at the British Foreign Office. They were trying to get people back onside for the Iraq reconstruction project, showing how great it was that they were doing this-and-that for women, and they had a radio station.
I remember sitting in a conference room in the Foreign Office—it had been the India Office in the 19th century—and I’m in a room with an incredible marble frieze above the fireplace with an allegory of Asia giving her bounty to the British. So I was sitting there getting a presentation from these rather downtrodden dudes who knew what they were doing was fucked, but they had this budget to put together a media infrastructure to promote freedom of speech in Iraq.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What was your impression of them?
HARI KUNZRU: They were sort of decent, centrist liberal dudes, the British guys who felt that “We’re here, so we should do it properly.” They were just pouring their energy down the drain, but they were telling me, “We set up a radio station, and we said it would be completely secular and everyone could come and say what they wanted to say.” Of course, it got captured as a mouthpiece for one of the militia groups, so they built communications and propaganda infrastructure for some faction in Mosul or wherever.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: The situation in Iraq is a critical fissure in these movements for free speech, and I think of writers like Christopher Hitchens who, up until that point, had at least been nominally on the left but from this “enlightenment” libertarian viewpoint. You could watch those fissures widen between writers who coalesced very quickly around anti-imperialism and writers who instead adopted free speech as their rallying cry.
HARI KUNZRU: My position was as a secular leftist free-speech advocate, which made me completely astride these two groups. I never knew Christopher Hitchens, but I knew people who were his friends. Obviously now we have a rationalist movement that came out of the post-Hitchens thing that has now fully emerged as a movement of the right. Today, we have a quite a good analysis of what liberal identity politics means. People understand that there’s an idpol that is actually very unhelpful, and an assertion that these identity essences are no substitute for an intersectional materialist analysis. But for a long time, it was very easy for those Hitchens, Sam Harris-people who weren’t publicly identified as far right people to just bash all kinds of political aspirations of all kinds of especially nonwhite and gender-nonconforming left by just saying, “You’re illiberal. You’re trying to close free speech down because of offense.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What were you seeing in the United Kingdom at that time?
HARI KUNZRU: This is quite interesting for Americans because it’s not known as a story here. Tony Blair knew he’d fucked up in Iraq. And he knew he’d lost a load of his base, and he wanted to win back minorities, especially Muslims, offering them some recognition or protection. What he said was, “We’re going to enshrine and extend various hate speech laws.” Everybody writing political commentary and everybody writing satire, and all the people who had lived through the Rushdie affair in the late eighties were like, “Fuck, you’re going to give these people a legal stick?The most conservative people in every religious group are actually going to have a legal way to shut people down? Because you’re trying to buy back votes for going into Iraq?”
There was a big fight about that, and I tried to survive through this narrow gap, believing in free speech while wanting to take an anti-racist position.It was very difficult. We got them to stop it, so we got cross-party support in parliament and another weird set of panels. It would be like Libertarian Tories and other people who wanted to be able to offend Muslims, and some of us trying to say, “Yeah, we want to protect your rights, but the people who are gonna suffer most are dissidents within minority communities.” If you’re a young woman who wants to not wear a veil, or if you’re somebody to whom, for whatever reason, the old dudes who consider themselves the community leaders object. Now, the battle lines are so well drawn that a lot of people understand that the assertion of freedom of speech shades into this whole thing about “enlightenment values” as a specifically western European thing—a white thing.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: It felt like there was a real breakthrough around 2015, the Michel Houellebecq controversy, and around Charlie Hebdo. After that, it felt like there was a little bit of synthesis about the two ideas that we could obviously see violence on one side but you could also respect two hundred years, five hundred years of violence from empire.
HARI KUNZRU: The way that Charlie Hebdo played out in New York literary circles was very telling.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How so?
HARI KUNZRU: PEN decided to honor Charlie Hebdo as their honoraries for their literary gala, so there was going to be a big party, and a group of writers decided they were uncomfortable with Charlie Hebdo’s representation, especially their visual representation of African people. So they said they wouldn’t participate because they thought it was a racist publication. Then another group said, “This is disgusting, you’re equivocating, these people were killed by terrorists.” So a whole bunch of people aren’t speaking to each other because of that. The Charlie Hebdo people offered to debate the other writers and the other writers chickened out, and at that point it was all over. I mean, they were done if they weren’t prepared to debate. That was one I sat out because I could see no good was gonna come of it from any direction at all, and almost miraculously I’ve managed to stay friends with people on both sides of it.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: In your classes, you’ve got this overarching idea about how certain places feel, and you refer to it as “the Zone.” I’m wondering if you could explain this theory of the Zone. A lot of it comes out of the book Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, right?
HARI KUNZRU: In the film Stalker, which is based on the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic, there’s this guy whose job it is to go into this closed-off area where some unexplained and rather ineffable danger lies. A danger that is possibly of an alien origin. In this Zone, ordinary things may be lethal, and in the film, Tarkovsky does this famous thing where the first half an hour of the movie is in black and white, a very dour Soviet-era world, and when they travel into the Zone and they cross the border, suddenly the film is in color. It’s this amazing pastoral landscape, and there’s this very eerie quality because you’re seeing something that’s visually very beautiful and you’re being told that it’s lethal. You see the same notion in a lot of different writing, more recently in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. In our class, we read Gerald Murnane, which is a non-science fiction vision of someone going into a world where the rules feel subtly different.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: The way I take in theories like that of the Zone is to smash as many real-world experiences into it as I can and see which ones stick. So I’m wondering if I can go down a list of a few different places, imagined or real, and you tell me if they have qualities like a Zone. Alright?
HARI KUNZRU: Alright, sure.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: We’ll start with softballs because I think it’s important to get the idea solidified. In 2013, you visited Pripyat in Ukraine and wrote an essay on it for Granta, right?
HARI KUNZRU: Mmhm.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What makes that a Zone? Is it a Zone?
HARI KUNZRU: That’s a Zone, and it has many of the very same qualities that there are in Stalker. It’s actually even called “The Zone of Exclusion” around the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant, and radiation is very interesting because it’s not visible. When I went there, you could rent a little Kombi van in central Kiev and, for a little extra, a Geiger counter. So I’d be walking around with this thing, and it would feel exactly the same in one place as another, but the numbers would be shifting. Unknowableness is part of what makes it a Zone. The pandemic is the same deal. We don’t know if we’re infectious. Our own unknowableness and the unknowableness of our neighbors is half of what takes us into that.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Okay, so, Pripyat. A Zone. Disneyland during normal operation?
HARI KUNZRU: Yeah. Clearly. It’s a Zone in that the Mouse’s rules apply, and they’re very strict. There was a fascination with theme parks in the eighties and nineties through Jean Baudrillard. And I suppose the whole idea of a magic kingdom was that it was a magic kingdom—a kingdom where the normal rules were suspended.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Okay. A cathedral packed full of tourists?
HARI KUNZRU: Hmm. I would say not a zone, actually. The rules of tourism are fairly international. You’re outside the cathedral, and inside the cathedral, you’re probably functioning in the same way. The idea of a sanctum or a holy place is important. Other religious places where you might have to take off your shoes, or wash, or wear a head covering, all of those are ways of making a religious space into a Zone. That’s psychologically important for maintaining the power structure of the religion.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Two more left. A far right chat room?
HARI KUNZRU: Um. Well, you could be undercover in that. So, for you, maybe it would have that quality of a Zone, but, I mean, I imagine it would be sort of a homey and gemütlich for the far right. It would be their bros in there and would not be a Zone.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Okay. There is one more that I wanted to ask you about here. Y’know, pop-ups? Like, brand pop-ups? Shops and things like that?
HARI KUNZRU: Yeah.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Give me just a second here. If I can, I’m gonna share my screen. In Los Angeles, there is a Britney Spears themed pop-up called The Zone. Billboard went to it, and they filmed a little two minute video, and I’m wondering if we can watch that and get some impressions on whether it constitutes a Zone?
HARI KUNZRU: [Reading the ad] Taking you “In the Zone” With Britney . . . I love that. “I’m a huge fan of experiences.” That’s a controversial position. So clearly this place aspires to be a Zone. The guy pitching the Britney experience is saying, “There’ll be a border, and you’ll be different on the other side of the border.” I think what he’s created is in fact an extension of the mall. I guess maybe if you were a really big Britney fan it would be a successful Zone, but what makes it for sure is the unknowability and the idea of a personal change. In the Zone, you don’t know what the rules are anymore, and the rules have changed in a way that you don’t know anymore. You’re changed in a way you don’t know anymore, but in Britney Zone you’re still a Britney fan. You’re still a tourist. Your role is clear. You know you can’t get into that costume in the case. You know that you can walk down the fake high school corridor with the lockers because that’s what you’re supposed to do. I feel that it’s not quite a Zone. My podcast, if you want to get into the podcast —
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Yeah.
HARI KUNZRU: The podcast has ended up being called Into the Zone. In that use of the Zone, it’s got slightly different ideas about binary oppositions, and each episode of the podcast is framed around a binary opposition. What happens on the border between one term and the other, and that we often find that things aren’t as clear-cut as we think. The binary opposition frame is slightly vague. Like most podcasts, our aim is to tell stories and make documentaries. So there’s one about life and death that’s quite a clear binary opposition, and I spent time talking to a friend of mine who studies something called “cryptobiosis,” where organisms can go into a state where they appear to be dead but can revive a long time later. My friend went up to Svalbard in the Arctic Circle and talked to people who had excavated corpses who died of the 1918 flu, and they revived the flu virus. We’ve done stories like that about crossing the border between life and death.
There’s another story we did about the border between public and private. It was just really a way of telling a story about the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, and their surveillance of the punk scene. There was a tiny East German punk scene, which the Stasi were very worried about. They were worried it was a CIA plot. I went to Berlin and interviewed one of the first punks and asked him about what it was like being sixteen years old and being trailed by the Stasi. Almost every day, he would be arrested and interrogated. The Stasi inadvertently gave him a political education by asking him these questions. He didn’t know anything about anarchism, so they’d tell him this stuff and he’d find out about it so he could talk to them better when he got arrested the next time. It made him into a democracy activist when he got slightly older. So there’s eight episodes and each one’s very different.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Regardless of what’s going on with the rest of the world, we’ll at least be able to travel Into the Zone by the fall?
HARI KUNZRU: Yeah. Podcasts are one of the few growth areas of life right now. I mean, everybody needs podcast content. I’m involved in various film and TV things where people are very uncertain about what they’re going to be able to shoot and how they’re going to be able to shoot it. A friend of mine is an actor on Succession, and because it’s been very successful, they’d expanded and were going to shoot in all these amazing places. Now, they’ve rewritten the whole season to take place inside in New York. Actually, very interestingly, they’re trying to work out how you run a film set or a TV set in the age of Coronavirus, when there’s a lot of money at stake, and if an actor or actress falls sick, it’s going to destroy the whole production. They’re having to run it from rules they’ve borrowed from porn sets, where everybody has to be tested for HIV on a very regular basis. So they’re going to be filming in a situation where everyone is going to be tested for COVID every morning, and there’s a total separation between the cast and the crew. If a crew member gets sick, you can hire another person, but clearly you need Brian Cox to still be there if there’s a scene with Brian Cox in it, so they’re gonna have this physical quarantining of the talent when they’re on the set, so that’s a crazy sort of a Zone rules as well.
WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: So, the pandemic is obviously a Zone in your view?
HARI KUNZRU: The pandemic is absolutely understandable under those terms. It’s the most radical economic event of any of our lifetimes. One of the qualities of the Zone is the suspension of the ordinary set of rules, and here, we have an economic suspension, a suspension of our social life, a suspension of really fundamental rules of how we’re engaging with other people. It has an open-endedness. We’re already in the second month—for some people it may be for even longer in this new world—and it’s clear that when we go out of this, it’s not going to be the same afterwards. There’s this strange melancholy quality to it— about us being all alone, mourning for something that we’ve lost. We don’t know quite what the parameters of our loss are yet, whether that’s just like the local coffee shop which is gonna close down because they haven’t been able to make their rent, or whether that’s missing the birthday or more seriously the death of a relative. We’re experiencing a slow-motion loss. We don’t even know how to see an end to that.