Part VI - Ex/tension

Summary

Come to the final physical pages of this volume, we take up the end of the world as a particular physical geography. As much as the millennial is accomplished through time, it has as well its favorite places, which are at once ex/tensions and projections. Ex/tensions: land's ends that nearly everywhere are extended offshore by legends of sunken cities or ghostly remnants of perfected civilizations audible or visible at certain sweeps of tide; pyramids and space needles that intimate at destinies miles higher or galaxies away. Projections: of cultural space, unbidden or latent energies. Here in Part VI, Michelle Dent tackles Seattle's ageing Space Needle, built for the Century 21 World's Fair in 1962 and desperately in need of another world of tomorrow once the twenty-first century had dawned despite Y2K the Computer Fix and Election 2000 the Rigged Victory. Dent investigates a scheme to move the Space Needle, which she understands as an apocalyptic scheme, for like other more explosive apocalypses it would have obliterated a landmark, excised a memory site, eliminated a locality of hopefulness in the name of statewide rejuvenation. How strikingly similar this apocalypse to that feared in the 1999 Battle in Seattle against the globalizing practices of the World Trade Organization, whose policies (said thousands of protesters who came to Seattle from around the world) were displacing or distancing people from their sacred places and destroying homelands or homeland security in the name of global capitalism…and how very complementary to the hegemony of Microsoft in Redmond just outside Seattle, whose digital billionaires ex/(press)alt the no-place of a monopolized virtuality.