Axelrod’s model has been improved and added upon like a flotilla of ships lashed to one another with their bows all plowing determinedly forward into the becalmed seas of predictive entropy. The future is only one where rulers can guarantee their bets when acting against other rulers while technocrats run the numbers and set the odds on the inevitably boring tempests of technologized globalization. This flotilla is a theoretical space amassed for power and the “drift” from within is already pulling it apart. What might’ve been a heterotopia launched outwards in a thousand cavorting courses is instead an island of coffin ships. They wallow with dead culture in their holds, overinsured with the promise of a future under control and with a cargo so flayed and eviscerated, they are ultimately worth more sunk into the numeric depths than afloat as living, disorderly objects. The spatialized dream-strata conjured on these ships are incredible and narcotic.

Before their scheming engineers sink these coffin ships as the artificial landmass for a new panoptic continent with a single myopic eyeball screwing itself ever tighter into the filmy corpuscle of the Future, we have to become pirates. Seizing “drift” from the very strain of inertia these vessel-models exert is no easy task. If cultural drift is understood among these captains and pilots and techno-alchemists as interruption, breakdown, failure—as drag and compulsion towards a hegemonic equilibrium, then I’m certain there’s something here we can use.

Drift as action may give us back some of the chaos amid the currents of habitus. Drift as a form of encounter may be where the anticipated is not actively sought. The improvised act made in the space of drift extends and propels drift in unexpected directions. It crosses borders aimlessly and misdirects energy where no one was paying attention. It presupposes a loss but often results only in unintentional arrivals or prolonged circulations, making contact on the peripheries where it was drawn by the effect of prime forces elsewhere but never still, never plotted. We might even think of drift as becoming those prime forces at times when Axelrod’s computational, rationalized flotilla has run aground and the machines have become fouled on their own teleological lines. The concept of drift is the slippage in controlled velocity, of sliding sideways, of shedding a few degrees of accuracy, of forfeiture of binary, of jettisoning algorithmic models. To be adrift is to be “at sea,” unable to harness the forces of current and wind moving on their own private errands but to still be part of these forces and included in their power. This drift is the loss of projected futures and aligned points of contact or, in other words, the heterogeneous bumping of cultural forms, jostling one another when the tight ships of scripts get leaky.

I imagine drift as mechanism of becoming. It is the irregularity and imprecision O’Connor finds off-putting in Appadurai’s “flows.” Given the economic unevenness and cultural disequilibrium in the context of Mexico City punks, “flows,” I suspect, is unsatisfactory in the way it deracinates a critical politics. The attention to powerful nodes and centers of meaning is crucial and this is why O’Connor’s use of habitus is a necessary corrective to the postmodern adventures of scholarship, cruising culture. Drift is not aimless, it manifests forces of propulsion and testifies to the wakes and riptides and stormy centers of convergence happening across the space of globalized cultural practices. It partakes in a process of change, exchange, and reformulation, “becoming bound up in some other production…a component in a series of flows and breaks, of varying speeds and intensities” (Grosz 1995, 184). The action of drift brings cultural practice and subjectivities into endless contacts where nothing is still and nothing is a given while “always concrete and specific, becoming-something, something momentary, provisional, something inherently unstable and changing” (Ibid.). In living with and studying young people already contending with the strong currents of social identity, familial belonging, laboring self, and intimate embodiments, the “global” can often feel like an exterior and extraneous immaterial force, one forfeited to the math-capture traps of model-makers like Axelrod.

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