Letters / On “Florida Is Everywhere”

As I read Arielle Angel’s letter from the editor in Jewish Currents’s Florida issue, I thought about how Florida may be best understood simply as one of the northernmost parts of the Global South. Situating the state in this context, we can see it for what it is: a space that has all the trappings of modernity—gleaming skyscrapers, sprawling suburbs, and high-tech industries—but lacks the necessary political and social structures to meaningfully sustain them. This tension highlights the shaky foundations of modernity itself, which are most evident in the Global South. This is because the region’s integration into capitalism—after the peak of industrial modernity—entrenched dependency and uneven development, producing a bifurcated space where rapid growth co-exists with systemic inequality.

We are now seeing this untenable arrangement’s rapid undoing, in phenomena like the unchecked expansion of precarious housing developments, rising sea levels threatening essential infrastructure, and deepening inequality under climate pressures. While industrial modernity in the West was once stabilized by robust institutions, these are now eroding under the pressures of neoliberalism, austerity, and political fragmentation. (As J.G. Ballard supposedly once remarked, “The periphery is where the future reveals itself.”) Others have called this global pattern of collapse Brazilianization or South Africanization. But we may just as easily call it Floridification.