ARTICLE TITLE 1 GEOGRAPHICAL ZONE DARK MATTERS 4 MIGRANT X CONTRIBUTER NAME A CROSSING INTO CEUTA P 8 Ch arlotte Malterre-Barthes & A. George Bajalia B H UNDI & HAWALA P 2 4 Parsa Sanjana Sajid C T IL GRAVITATION IS THE CAUSE OF MIGRATION P 3 0 Michaela Büsse D E SSENCE DU BÉNIN P 4 0 Javier Corso E A BYSSAL THEORY P 60 C. S. Hu F T HEY FUCK IT UP P 7 2 Max Opray G VOX EX ORIENTIS P. 82 Giorgos Kassiteridis H E XIT STRATEGIES P 92 Alice Bucknell I MY LAND P 105 M auro Tosarelli J BEYOND ELYSIUM P 1 22 Benjamin H. Bratton K N OT OUR RYTHM SECTION P 1 30 Yeb Wiersma & Ishion Hutchinson EDITORS ’ LETTER P 2 THE CONTRIBUTORS P 149 COLOPHON P 152 TABLE OF CONTENTS 93 EXIT STRATEGIES H EXIT STRATEGIES ALICE BUCKNELL Dawn breaks over the Mojave Desert in Southern California, reflecting off the white-domed structure of the Integratron in a blinding light. Inside its warm wooden cu - pola, a group of lifestyle bloggers from Los Angeles recline on woven blankets import - ed from Mexico, preparing for a restorative sound bath experience. Meanwhile, a thou - sand kilometres east, the winter sun beats down on Spaceport America, its glassy husk blending into the New Mexican land - scape through an outer layer of painted rub - ber sheeting. Rows of barbed wire fencing grips its $ 2 09 million facilities in a choke - hold. ¹ S ecurity cameras glitter like gem - stones across the 73,000,000 m ² expanse; a yawning guard reaches the end of his night shift and scans the horizon one last time for the intruder who never arrives. New-age health nuts and space-hungry tech billionaires: what causes these worlds’ collision—and collusion—within the south - west American desert, and why now? Orig - inally settled some ten thousand years ago and written off later in the 15 t h cen - tury by European colonists as inhospitable wasteland, modern attempts at settling the desert—such as the urban lab of Arcosanti ² —were ridiculed as the fanta - sies of heat-stricken madmen. Now, this s prawling landscape and its alluring narra - tive of un-mined potential has become the perfect backdrop for late capitalist survival strategies. Fifty years on, amid rising tem - p eratures, sinking cities, and the imminent exhaustion of natural resources, the dark - ness of the desert has kicked up a dust c loud of speculative capital, becoming a petri dish and spiritual mega-mall of space tourism and metaphysical encounters. Though it permeates pop culture in the form of scraggly tumbleweed, snuff-chew - ing cowboys, fiery rock formations, and prehistoric-sized cacti, the American South - west has no consolidated location: a resist - ance to the real that doubtlessly adds to its mythic allure and springboards its con - temporary profitability. Some sources de - marcate the southwest region of the United States from Los Angeles to El Paso, while the US Census Bureau demarcates Texas and Oklahoma as part of the South, ³ a nd National Geographic excludes California entirely. ⁴ Generally, the common ground is the heartland of New Mexico and Arizona, through which the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts unwind. Yet with the introduction of annual desert music festivals such as Burning Man in 1986 and Coachella in 1 999, the Mojave Desert across South - ern California and Nevada has in c reas i ng - ly become a part of the Southwest in pop cultural discussion. Ditching state lines and regional distinc - tions for common geography, it becomes easier to understand the Southwest instead as a cluster of deserts whose precise sur - face areas have morphed across millennia, w ith the acceleration of these changes in recent years largely attributed to human ac - tivity. This effect comes in the form of both localised action, e.g. nuclear tests conduct - ed by the US government during the 1950s; and global circulation, e.g. the centuries-old shale oil extraction from the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico. ⁵ S till, the murky history of the Southwest and its entangled geopolitical present is perhaps best told through its long term residential flora. Stretching across Mexico and the United States, the 8,000-year-old landscape of the Chihuahuan Desert has survived livestock overgrazing, agriculture, oil and gas drilling to remain one of the most diverse ecoregions in North America. Home to over 3,000 spe - cies of plants and over a third of the world’s known cacti, its most significant prickly lodg - er may well be the psychoactive species NORTHERN AMERICA In this comprehensive and vivid essay Alice Bucknell brings together three rather untypical mi- gration stories originating in the South - ern Cal i f or n ia desert. Using drug trade, space travel and spiritual trans- f ormation treatments as case studies, Bucknell outlines the entangled re l a - tion s hip between the flow of resources, big dreams and (dark) economies. LOCATION United States LANGUAGE English CURRENCY US Dollar (USD) TIME ZONE CT (UTC–5), MST (UTC–6), PT (UTC–8) AREA 9 833 520 km ² POPULATION 325 719 178 1 The Integratron is a 11.5 m tall structure designed by ufologist and alien contactee George Van Tassel. Once claiming to be capable of rejuve - nation, anti-gravity and time travel, the Integratron now offers sound baths, consciousness building workshops and other new age health services. NORTHERN AMERICA 95 H Lophophora williamsii (Peyote). Traditional - ly used by the Navajo, Huichol, and other indigenous tribes in shamanistic practices, this hardy root cactus now circulates in the underground drug trade due to its easy ex - traction and powerful psychic properties. Ingesting a small handful of its buttons, or spores, results in a trip lasting around twelve to eighteen hours. Furthermore, while Peyote traditionally grows along the Texas-Mexico border, climate change and the Chihuahuan’s increasing aridification has caused the cactus to migrate further southwest into Mexico in recent years. While growing, selling, or consuming Peyote has been strictly outlawed in the US since 1970 (except for the Native American Church, which is exempt from this ban) and recreational cactus eaters face up to fifteen years of prison, Peyote’s (il)legal status remains largely unenforced in Mexico. The bypass made possible by the species’ territorial shift across borders has single- handedly revitalised the abandoned min - ing town of Real de Catorce, whose pop - ulation dropped from 40,000 residents to less than a thousand after the silver crash in the late 19 t h century. ⁶ Now, this remote pueb l o in the mountains sustains a healthy commercial base of cafés, bars, motels, and shuttles out to the desert year-round. There, curious tourists can pick their own peyote as souvenirs and tripping psychonauts can find their spiritual essence out in the infinite, star-studded wilderness of the desert. Just as migrant psychedelic cacti and the recreational drug trade trailing behind it have revitalised an old mining town in the Chihuahuan Desert, Spaceport America pitched itself as an antidote to the sluggish tourist economy of Truth or Consequences. Sensing a southwestern gap in the space tourism market, with the other ten licensed spaceports around the country flocking to Texas and Florida, mega mogul Richard Branson descended upon the unassuming community of six thousand residents in 2005. His first step in selling the Space- port America fantasy—just one of his 400 en t er p rises—was to conjure a two- way desert mirage that could be sold to overseas venture capitalists as well as local residents and politicians alike. Enter “starchitect” Norman Foster. Smitten with the idea of space tourism since his visit in 1990 to Russia’s cosmonaut boot camp, Star City, ⁷ F oster churned out a typ i - cally glassy and high-tech design for the enterprise. The Spaceport’s shell-like body appears to rise out of the desert, its top covered in non-descript rubber sheet - ing and military-grade camouflage paint. Piles of dirt swoop up to meet the wings of the building on either side, concealing its glossy underbelly with a desert cape. From the ground, Spaceport is all metal and glass, the organic form dissolving under a blind - ing display of skylights and floor-to-ceiling glass that reflects the desert sun with an ominous Cheshire Cat-like grin. The design intends to spellbind jet-lagged venture capitalists and feels all kinds of other - w orldly; simultaneously futuristic and pre - historic, the building harbours the same mystical aura of living fossils that patrol the dark depths of the ocean. Truth or Consequences ate it up, and how would they not? Settled in 1876 as Hot Springs, Truth or Consequences (known simply as T or C to locals) has always had a thing for the spectacular. In 1950, its 6,000- some residents voted to rename the town as part of a larger publicity stunt by the popular radio quiz show of the same name (its host, Ralph Edwards, announced he w ould air the programme’s 10 t h anniver - sary from the first town to change its name after the show). The name change was par - tially T or C’s own PR stunt, and partially because the small town “didn’t have much else to stand for,” according to the owner of a Seventh Day Adventist thrift shop on the high street—and only main street—of this 30 km ² town. But T or C’s rustic eccentricity cuts deep - er, with more than a third of its residents making less than $ 1 5,000 per year, and forty-six per cent of children living beneath the US poverty line. ⁸ F or Branson—whose individual net worth tops $ 5 b illion—bleed - ing this impoverished town further to fund his space dreams was a no-brainer. To get the town on board, Branson conjured a vi - sion of future riches lying in wait for T or C following Spaceport’s construction and promised the town’s economic rebirth in the form of luxury tourism. T or C would re- ceive its own airport for the international 1 % t o come stay in its spa resorts; when T or Cers got tired of their newfound mate - rial wealth, they could tour Spaceport’s fa - cilities for free or maybe join in on a steeply discounted sub-orbital flight. Sierra County approved the Spaceport tax hike in 2008, and construction of the $ 2 09 million facilities officially began. Branson’s promises had an optimistic start with a bump in employment in 2008 that was primarily due to growth in trade, trans - portation of materials, and increasing utili - ties, both in the private sector and in federal government employment—nearly all ex - plained by Spaceport’s construction. But when the buzz cooled and construction was complete, yet New Mexico’s desert skies remained conspicuously empty, things started to go awry. Completed in 2011 and with no set date for its first commercial launch, Spaceport almost immediately switched gears into distracting self-promotion, co-opting T or C’s town hall and transforming it into the offi - cial Spaceport Welcome Centre. Branson tapped the same company behind Disney - land to create a similar environment of sus - pended reality and patronising spectacle, complete with interactive exhibits and pro - motional videos. The Disneyfied entrance has been closed for weeks but LaRena Miller, the Executive Director of the larger Geronimo Trail Sce n ic Byway Visitor Centre housing Space p ort’s Welcome Centre, senses my curiosity and lets me in. She flips the switch and suddenly a cacophony of Branson voices erupt from the video screens, while the interactive exhibits light u p and whirr in fairground-like fashion. Following the death of a Virgin Galactic pilot during a botched rocket launch in October 2014, the Welcome Centre—like the rest of the Spaceport enterprise—has “operated in a paranoid, erratic fashion, 2 Arcosanti is a desert community built in the 1970s by archi - tect-theorist Paolo Soleri. It intended to be an experimental testing ground for a new form of ur ban - ism based on Soleri’s understanding of “arcology”, or the harmonious merging of architecture and ecology. 3 See the Census Regions and Divisions of the United States [census.gov/geo/ pdfs/maps-data/ maps/reference/us_ regdiv.pdf] 4 Miller, M. and Lehman, D. (2002) National Geographic's driving guides to America; Southwest. 5 In its nearly hundred years of production, the Permian Basin has never produced more oil than it produces today, according to a report published in Forbes Magazine on 18 January 2018. At the time of writing, ExxonMobile has announced plans to increase its extraction from the area fivefold by 2025: a rate of 500,000 barrels a day. 6 Hutchinson, B . (1974, 24 July) “Mountain top ghost town will be - come tourist center” Hutchinson News, p. 5. 1 1 The Peyote cactus is a small, spineless cactus with psychoactive properties when ingested. It is used worldwide, having a long history of ritualistic and medicinal use by indigenous North Americans. Peyote contains the hallucinogen mescaline. EXIT STRATEGIES NORTHERN AMERICA 97 H Aerial view of the Gateway to Space facing west at Spaceport America. The site opened in October 2011 and is built to accommodate both vertical and horizontal launch aero - space vehicles, as well as an array of non-aerospace events and commercial activities. EXIT STRATEGIES NORTHERN AMERICA 99 H restricting access to its facilities and re - maining closed most days,” explains Miller, while wiping some dust from the airport style check in counter. She gestures toward some framed photographs of the facilities nestled in an alcove like family portraits. One of the glossier images is of a luxury British sports car, the $ 3 .5 million Aston Martin One-77, parked on Spaceport’s 3 .65 k m runway. Aston Martin is one of many companies taking advantage of the facility for car and motorcycle advertise - ments, leasing Spaceport’s mythic aura for their own luxury escapism. Yet the economy of secrecy that binds Spaceport America with its rival spaceports as part of this second age of space travel casts a darker shadow on Branson’s failure to launch. The billionaire space race, other - wise known as Space Race 2.0, kicked off when NASA retired its space shuttle fleet in 2012 to focus on travel to Mars, and ap - pealed for private companies to step in. ⁹ Alongside the government, NASA has given large subsidies to private companies like SpaceX, Up Aerospace, EXOS Aerospace, and EnergeticX to perform a space shuttle service that sends astronauts up to the In - ternational Space Station, a task NASA currently outsources to Russia. ¹ ⁰ Unlike the interstellar fantasies of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos, Spaceport es - capism was always supposed to be tem - porary. Its suborbital flights would hardly graze the entry point of outer space; a short 2.5 h t rip would culminate with a brief moment of noiseless suspension some 100 k m up, where passengers would “ex - perience weightlessness and views of our b eautiful planet that will change your per - ception of life,” Branson coos in a pro m o - t ional film. ¹ ¹ Surrounded by the infinite darkness of the universe, space tourists m ight achieve a higher form of spirituality, a deeper connection with the planet they would soon return to again. With so much money flowing in from investment capital alongside NASA and government funding, t here’s no hurry for Spaceport to initiate its commercial offerings (the tax hike ap - proved by Sierra County in 2008 to sub - sidise its construction has no official expi - ration date). On the fringe of Joshua Tree in Landers, California, sits the collective fantasy of “ufologists”, lifestyle journalists, and Sound - cloud musicians. Built in 1953 by ex-aviator George Van Tassel, who claimed to have received its blueprints from aliens, the Inte - gratron is a 11.5 m ta ll cupola made entirely out of wood. Today, it is run by three sisters with no relation to Tassel who died in 1978 after twenty years of toiling away at the sixteen-sided, metal-free building. It now of - fers a transformative spiritual journey in the form of an hour-long, acoustically-perfect sound bath. These sonic healing sessions—priced between $ 3 0 – $ 9 0, depending on who’s rubbing your quartz crystal singing bowls, and how many others are joining in—don’t quite reach Tassel’s original vision of time travel and infinite life. The Integratron is a sort of sacred vessel in its own right. It brings a steady flow of tourists, including rock stars (such as the Smashing Pumpkins, the Arctic Monkeys, and Arcade Fire on a post-Coachella cleanse) into the otherwise isolated desert town of 3,900 inhabitants. It also attracts a large crowd of admiring architects who flock to the outskirts of J oshua Tree to get a look at this perfectly preserved sample of mid-century modern - ist design. Finally, the Integratron serves as a living fossil of Cold War-era UFO culture and cult spirituality. Today’s visitors are not the only recipients of the Integratron’s life-changing powers. When Joanne, Nancy, and Patty Karl pur - chased the Integratron in 2000 after two d ecades of disuse, they decided to trade in their former lives as medical researchers and marketing managers. Joanne and Nancy even moved out to the desert to learn the craft of performing sound baths. Yet the owners—or “stewards”, as they prefer to be called—tend to take an ambivalent ap - proach to this spirituality, their business intuition emerging in collaborations with o ther businesses to provide private resto - ration retreats at the Integratron. Clients range from local metaphysical and wellness centres to package-deal visits organised by Urban Outfitters. The sisters’ ambiguous stance is an appropriate metaphor for the booming business, which is booked out for months at a time by a steady stream of re - turning clients and curious tourists. Each drawn into the desert by escape fantasies conjured in the fatigue of late capi - talism, cactus-hunting psychonauts, space tourists, and metaphysical spiritualists converge in the crosshairs of a hidden com - mercial flow. This ever-accelerating circu - lation of goods, bodies, and capital moves across borders and species, giving birth to unique ecologies that emerge silently from the desert sand. It also persists in shadowy and speculative ways: through the delayed promises and unexpected arrivals of tourist economies that breathe new life into dried up ghost towns or hover on the horizon, for - ever just out of reach. Desert escapism has become the lucid exit strategy from our overcrowded and undermined world. For the 1 % , this salvation manifests through a life-changing orbit around the Earth, face-to-face with the dark abyss of outer space. Others find it through the euphoric prick of a new vein of oil, its sputtering black discharge as deep as any cosmos. Still others find it in the unfamil - iar faces of curious tourists who have trav - elled many miles to land on their doorstep. Regardless of its physical form, desert es - capism is sustained only by the continued extraction of non-renewable resources from the Earth. The fuel of this fantasy is finite, but the darkness of the desert incubates this ec - static fantasy of limitless potential. It lets us keep the blinds closed a little longer, concealing the messy gravitas of the pres - ent with its lucid daydreams of rejuvena - tion and invisibility. While delusion as a resource has the longest half-life, the de - sert’s physical expanse is quicker to reflect these pressure points. When the hallucino - genic high wears off and the pseudo-spiri - tualism comes crashing down like one of Virgin Galactic’s rockets, these illusions of a desert salvation will dissolve into the arid landscape like a cruel mirage. • 7 About an hour’s drive northeast of Moscow, Star City (Zvyozdny Gorodok) was an ultra-secret Air Force facility transformed into a cosmonaut training centre in the heyday of the Soviet space programme in the early 1960s. Unveiled to the public in the 90s following the dissolution of the USSR, today Star City behaves like a sort of self-sustained intergalactic Vegas: curious tourists can test out the gear, floatation tanks, and other facilities that originally primed soon- to-be-spacemen. 8 Joyce, G . and Mitchell, J. (2015) “Truth or Con se quences Main- street: Commu ni ty Ec o nomic Assess - ment” [bber.unm.edu/ media/files/Truth %20or%20 Consequences%20 Economic%20 Assessment.pdf] 9 Charlton, A . (2017) “Space Race 2.0: How SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and more will take us to the stars” Inter - national Business Times [ibtimes.co.uk/ space-race-2-0- how-spacex-virgin- galactic-blue-origin- more-will-take- us-stars-1627455] 10 Messier, D. (2 015) “No End in Sight for Spaceport America Tax” Parabolic Arc. [parabolicarc.com/ 2017/09/05/ sight-spaceport- america-tax/] 11 T urner, C. (2012) “Foster + Partners' Spaceport America” Icon [iconeye.com/ architecture/ features/item/9838] 1, 2 Inside the spaceport . Spaceport America has experienced problems in development of their programmes and technologies, resulting in revenues far below projections. 1 ↓ 2 EXIT STRATEGIES NORTHERN AMERICA 101 H The creator of Integratron, George Van Tassel (1910 –1 978), claimed that the structure of the 55-foot diametre, all wood dome is based on the design of Moses’ Tabernacle, the writings of Nikola Tesla and telepathic directions from extraterrestrials. EXIT STRATEGIES NORTHERN AMERICA X CONTRIBUTER NAME ARTICLE TITLE 103 GEOGRAPHICAL ZONE U S A Spaceport America Kodiak Launch Complex White Sands Missile Range Cape Canaveral 111 m 95 m 70 m 60 m 30 m launch from Cape Canaveral 1 2 3 4 boostback burn adjusts vehicle and deceleration fins slow it single engine landing burn UN-anchored drone platform (92 x 52 m) vehicle separates second stage ignites to boost payload into orbit A T L A N T I C O C E A N 20 50 30 40 10 0 60 70 20 08 20 18 20 13 20 23 20 27 FEDERAL VS. COMMERCIAL US SPACEPORTS Spaceports are sites for launching spacecrafts into the orbit of Earth or on interplanetary trajectories. They can be rented by companies that want to–for example–send satellites or tourists into space. While the first spaceports after World War II were owned by the Federal Aviation Administration, more and more privately owned spaceports pop up today, fulfilling the rising demand for low costs and launches on time. A simple satellite launch can cost upwards of $ 60 million. US COMMERCIAL ORBITAL LAUNCHES The space launch services business began in the early decades of the Space Age in the 1950s with state-owned programmes. Only when commercial satellites became a major tool of communication and transport later in the 20 th century, the mar - ket became privatised. In 2017, the United States, Russia, Europe, China, Japan, India, and New Zealand conducted a total of 90 orbital launches, 33 of which were commercial. Most of these 33 launches were conducted by private companies. NUMBER OF COMMERCIAL LAUNCHES IN 2017 21 USA 8 Europe 3 Russia 1 New Zealand MOST LAUNCHES >7.000 White Sands 151 Cape Canaveral 14 Kodiak Launch C. 8 Spaceport America US ROCKET LAUNCH VEHICLES The US government prefered contractor for launching rockets was United Launch Alliance (a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin). But due to high cost structures new options for obtaining spaceflight services emerged since 2010. For example, SpaceX–owned by Paypal-co-founder Elon Musk. Through the use of new technologies the company has de - creased the costs of access to orbit by 10 – 20 %, starting at around $ 57 million for a Falcon launch. REUSABLE ROCKET LAUNCH SYSTEM The use of innovative technologies has reduced the costs of entering the orbit drastically. For example, SpaceX has de - veloped a reusable launch system for NASA to service the International Space Station (ISS). Thereby the Falcon 9 booster rocket used to launch the payload flies back and lands safely on an offshore floating patform on Earth. The manoeuvre was performed successfully for the first time in 2015 and raised SpaceX’s global commercial market share up to 62 % by 20 17. FALCON 9 PARTS 1 First Stage 2 Interstage 3 Second Stage 4 Dragon Cargo Capsule PAYLOADS OF ROCKETS [1] 60,000 kg [2] 45,000 kg [3] 26,700 kg [4] 8,900 kg [5] 1,350 kg US ST ATE WITH SPACEPORT 1–SATURN V (APOLLO MOON MISSIONS) 2–NEW GLENN (BLUE ORIGIN) 3–FALCON HEAVY (SPACEX) 4–ATLAS V (UNITED LAUNCH ALLIANCE) 5–MINOTAUR C (ORBITAL ATK) US FEDERAL SPACEPORT HISTORICAL AND PROJECTED COMMERCIAL US ORBITAL LAUNCHES COMMERCIAL SPACEPORT COMMERCIAL ORBITAL LAUNCHES FOR THE TELECOMMUNICATION INDUSTRY PROPOSED COMMERCIAL SPACEPORT