Horror Film Imagery
Yang adopts the familiar imagery of horror films to convey the meaning of a condition terms “negative infrastructure.” This is a reference to the collapse and decay of infrastructural elements related to the economic collapse of a location:
“If you’ve ever been to a dead or dying mall, you know that it’s both depressing and eerie…Ghost malls are an example… Unused infrastructure decays quickly and gives an environment a bleak, dystopian atmosphere, like a zombie movie set.”
White Supremacy
Yang provides one of the cleanest, clearest and most succinct analyses yet for the intensification of extreme acts of violent by lone white males in America and he does it not through statistics or sociological complexity, but simply getting to the heart of the matter with imagery. The imagery is pervasively related to the conception of white supremacy not its most negative sense, but as a historical fact of life:
“It’s difficult to go from feeling like the pillar of one’s society to feeling like an afterthought or failure. There is a strong heritage of military service in many white communities that will be subverted into antigovernment militias, white nationalist gangs, and bunkers in the woods. There will be more random mass shootings in the months ahead as middle-aged white men self-destruct and feel that life has no meaning. As the mindset of scarcity spreads and deepens, people’s executive functioning will erode."
Dentophobics Beware
Word of warning: if you suffer from an intense fear of visiting the dentist, do not read the rest of this section. And when you get to the part in the book from which it is excerpted, just quickly turn the page. Yang swears the following imagery is a true, an actual anecdote from his youth. It sounds unlikely, but that’s what the man insists:
“I remember going to the dentist and wondering what kind of magic he would employ to pull the teeth. Not much—Dr. Goodman just put some pliers on the first tooth and yanked and jerked until it came out. The second one was stubborn and he had to shift positions a few times—I remember him putting his foot on my chest and yanking away.”
Yang Predicts the Future
At one point, Yang creates an imaginary standoff over the rights of workers in the face of the rise of the robots which he concludes by recognizing that “Maybe the scenario I sketched above seems unlikely.” Well, maybe not so much. In this “unlikely” scenario, the following imagery occurs: protests take place in cities across American involving tens of thousands, the National Guard is activated and the President calls for a "return to order", looting occurs as police are preoccupied elsewhere, riots rage in some cities for weeks without end, billions of dollars’ worth of property is destroyed amid widespread economic harm, millions around the world watch violence taking place in real time.
