Miami

25 January 2025, from Writings

There is a peculiar super-modernity to Miami, a rabid anti-nostalgia. I detect peppery notes of post-post-modernity here, of post-internet culture, of irony so heavy it becomes serious. The city is incredibly diverse, fully differentiated, post-American. You could be anything here — anything, that is, except the past. No quaint 1990s pre-internet twee hipsterism. No pseudo-retro 80s dance nights. No long-expired musty hippie fashion. Even being in the 21st century seems declassé here.

The 1950s Miami that built itself to this urban pinnacle seems happy to sacrifice itself, to be remade — reprocessed, composted organically, if you will — into something new. And then to be processed again, and again, and again.

Miami is both simulation and authenticity. An authentic simulation? Not a simulated authenticity: an authenticity that is real, but one happy to make itself out of synthetic material. A lived-in simulacrum. It is unabashedly unsustainable, cavorting intentionally and madly in front of the oncoming headlights of our climate dystopia.

I imagine a future Miami — a not too far future! — slipping into the sea. Yet… differently. Intentionally. Authentically. As the rest of the world regrets its fixed settledness — its mistaken urge to set its footings too deep into this changing, boiling, freezing, floating world, its poor decision to base history and culture on geography — Miami instead prepares its journey to the seas. Not a journey of disaster or wreckage or capitulation, but one of exploration and perfect, fateful, stupid freedom.

The plan has been a long time coming. We’ve heard rumors for decades: architectural and structural plans to reconstruct Miami as an immense floating catamaran, its pontoons the first-floor mixed-retail floor of the post-modern downtown urban-core-living condos.

By this time, of course, the fragile Florida Peninsula holding Miami Beach and Key Biscayne, has already sunk into the ocean trenches, leaving Miami itself directly facing its seaward destiny.

One day, a vast ripping sound spreads across the city. The streets crack open to reveal mammoth cables long buried under them. Anchors aweigh! The doors of the pizza shops and bike rentals and free-weight gyms and yoga studios slam shut, airtight, ready to float. The ultralight concrete changes function, from stable mass to bouyant air. The deeply-driven pilings that secured so much seemingly fixed structure to the underlying Miami oolite snap off — as designed — and the city detaches from the Miami-Dade landmass (if you can call it that anymore) with a very loud SPLURP. And we’re off!

Miami floats east, creeping infinitely slowly but certainly, and certainly very ironically, as a modern water-city does: out over the now-sunken peninsula, rolling over the Biminis like speed bumps, and, in only a few days, passing just north of Nassau. It rotates hard right, flipping the once decidedly north/south city temporarily east/west, to nudge through the Providence Channel.

Look! Blue waters as far we can see! Cheers erupt from the highest condos, from the rooftop bars, palm fronds now lapping at seawater. WE ARE IN THE ATLANTIC. FUCK IT, WE ARE THE ATLANTIC! Dance party tonight, a million of ’em. See you, America! We’re living on the GODDAMN OCEAN!