The New York cooperative building was facing a city ordered renovation that would cost each shareholder an additional $5000 this year, in excess of their 6% maintenance increase. It was a heavy burden; but there was nothing else for the board of directors to do, except to approve it. The work was ordered. There was a cost.

For the elderly and underemployed in the building, it was another confrontation with the nonhuman environment. Not the financial markets this time, but the rational decision of their duly elected fiduciary agents. The decision meant personal hurt without personal redress. The board passed on the city’s mandate; and while its officers were jointly and individually responsible, there was nothing to be done. It was the human rubber-stamping of a nonhuman decision. One board member, realizing that he would be unable to pay the extra charge and might be required, in time, to sell his holding in the building, refused to vote. He was too busy managing his panic.

When he leaves, he will fall off the map. Another will take his place, more capable of paying the necessary surcharges. But the fact of his falling, along with many others, highlights the increasing prevalence for each of us of managing the conduct of our lives not through interpersonal concert with others, in the face-to-face engagements of daily life, but facelessly, anonymously, in response to our hitherto unrecognized environmental relations to the nonhuman.

Operationally, nothing has changed. Where once, the board was able to float a loan to sustain such work, both cumulative debt and the city’s relentless generation of new ordinances, make such action impossible. Where once, denial of the nonhuman environment was possible for the building’s residents, denial itself has become impossible. Where shall they go? Because the human map extends only to their decision to stay or go, it doesn’t matter to the building or its governance team.

But of course, it does. Maps, in this case, are a fiction. As  are our conventions of socio-economic class and standards of living. Someplace cheaper, we are told. That is where they shall go. Wherever that might be—- until it is our turn (when it really matters).

And then, bowing to the contingencies of the nonhuman environment, there will, again, be no one to address. The fiduciary responsibilities of the decision makers will be true and sure. Yet , again, unresponsive to the human need, they will be made in congruence with submission to the dominance of the nonhuman environment.

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