Yet the perceived suspension of quarantine — like the horror vacui of the sea or the terra nullius of the wilderness — tends to obfuscate all the vectors converging at our homes and in our neighborhoods

nothingness is a matter of aesthetics; it’s the appearance of asceticism, the stylized performance of retreat — Kinfolking, urban-lumberjacking, “upstating.”

I am also thinking of the work of feminist geographers, who have learned how to trace informal networks of exchange and care, how to consider embodied and emotional aspects of urban experience, how to attend to social differences and intersectional identities, and how to recognize the limitations of GIS-based cartography.

We have plenty of maps and data visualizations that trace the macro-scale public health and political-economic forces that precipitated the “Great Pause”; but we have relatively few that show all those under-appreciated agents that are making it possible — all the something anchoring and abetting that nothing, all the pulsing activity powering the... See more

The pursuit of spiritual retreat and technological disconnection has, of course, a long history in various religious traditions and cultural movements: the Zen Buddhists, the Luddites, the Transcendentalists, the Amish, the countercultural communes of the 1960s, the digital detoxers of today.

Such contemplative practice has undoubtedly been therapeutic, even psychologically essential, for many of us as we’ve grappled with tumult and trauma: nothing as escape from the too-muchness of it all.

maps can serve as “tools for social transformation”; that they can “produce worlds instead of simply reflecting them.”

Yet as in the archives, “new evidentiary technologies” and techniques — including remote sensing and forensic fossil seed analysis — are revealing the forest’s topographically hidden, and politically erased, scripts and structures; they’re demonstrating how, in the words of ecologist William Balée, the forest constitutes a “vast archaeological... See more

Undergirding the geographies of suspension were networks in furious motion, continual overstimulation, and exhaustive exertion.