Hello Interactors,I’m back! After a bit of a hiatus traveling Southern Europe, where my wife had meetings in Northern Italy and I gave a talk in Lisbon. We visited a couple spots in Spain in between. Now it’s time to dive back into our exploration of economic geography. My time navigating those historic cities — while grappling with the apps on my phone — turned out to be the perfect, if slightly frustrating, introduction to the subject of the conference, Digital Geography.The presentation I prepared for the Lisbon conference, and which I hint at here, traces how the technical optimism of early desktop software evolved into the all-encompassing power of Platform Capital. We explore how digital systems like Airbnb and Google Maps have become more than just convenient tools. They are the primary architects of urban value. They don’t just reflect economic patterns. They mandate them. They reorganize rent extraction by dictating interactions with commerce and concentrating control. This is the new financialized city, and the uncomfortable question we must face is this: Are we leveraging these tools toward a new beneficial height, or are the tools exploiting us in ways that transcends oversight?CARTOGRAPHY’S COMPUTATIONAL CONVERGENCEI was sweating five minutes in when I realized we were headed to the wrong place. We picked up the pace, up steep grades, glissading down narrow sidewalks avoiding trolley cars and private cars inching pinched hairpins with seven point turns. I was looking at my phone with one eye and the cobbled streets with the other.Apple Maps had led us astray. But there we were, my wife and I, having emerged from the metro stop at Lisbon’s shoreline with a massive cruise ship looming over us like a misplaced high-rise. We needed to be somewhere up those notorious steep streets behind us in 10 minutes. So up we went, winding through narrow streets and passages. Lisbon is hilly. We past the clusters of tourists rolling luggage, around locals lugging groceries.I had come to present at the 4th Digital Geographies Conference, and the organizers had scheduled a walking tour of Lisbon. Yet here I was, performing the very platform-mediated tourism that the attendees came to interrogate. My own phone was likely using the same mapping API I used to book my AirBnB. These platforms were actively reshaping the Lisbon around us. The irony wasn’t lost on me. We had gathered to critically examine digital geography while simultaneously embodying its contradictions.That became even more apparent as we gathered for our walking tour. We met in a square these platform algorithms don’t push. It’s not “liked”, “starred”, nor “Instagrammed.” But it was populated nonetheless…with locals not tourists. Mostly immigrants. The virtual was met with reality.What exactly were we examining as we stood there, phones in hand, embodying the very contradictions we’d gathered to critique?Three decades ago, as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, I would have understood this moment differently. The UCSB geography department was riding the crest of the GIS revolution then. Apple and Google Maps didn’t exist, and we spent our days digitizing boundaries from paper maps, overlaying data layers, building spatial databases that would make geographic information searchable, analyzable, computable. We were told we were democratizing cartography, making it a technical craft anyone could master with the right tools.But the questions that haunt me now — who decides what gets mapped? whose reality does the map represent? what work does the map do in the world? — remained largely unasked in those heady days of digital optimism.Digital geography, or ‘computer cartography’ as we understood it then, was about bringing computational precision to spatial problems. We were building tools that would move maps from the drafting tables of trained cartographers to the screens of any researcher with data to visualize. Marveling at what technology might do for us has a way of stunting the urge to question what it might be doing to us.The field of digital geography has since undergone a transformation. It’s one that mirrors my own trajectory from building tools and platforms at Microsoft to interrogating their societal effects. Today’s digital geography emerges from the collision of two geography traditions: the quantitative, GIS-focused approach I learned at UCSB, and critical human geography’s interrogation of power, representation, and spatial justice. This convergence became necessary as digital technologies escaped the desktop and embedded themselves in everyday urban life. We no longer simply make digital maps of cities and countrysides. Digital platforms are actively remaking cities themselves…and those who live in them.Contemporary digital geography, as examined at this conference, looks at how computational systems reorganize spatial relations, urban governance, and the production of place itself. When Airbnb’s algorithm determines neighborhood property values, when Google Maps’ routing creates and destroys retail corridors, when Uber’s surge pricing redraws the geography of urban mobility — these platforms don’t describe cities so much as actively reconstruct them. The representation has become more influential or ‘real’ than the reality itself. This is much like the hyperreality famously described by the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard — a condition where the simulation or sign (like app interfaces) replaces and precedes reality. In this way, the digital map (visually and virtually) has overtaken the actual territory in importance and impact, actively shaping how we perceive and interact with the real world.As digital platforms become embedded in everyday life, we are increasingly living in a simulation. The more digital services infiltrate and reconstitute urban systems the more they evade traditional governance. Algorithmic mediation through code written to influence the rhythm of daily life and human behavior increasingly determines who we interact with and which spaces we see, access, and value. Some describe this as a form of data colonialism — extending the logic of resource extraction into everyday movements and behaviors. This turns citizens into data subjects. Our patterns feed predictive models that further shape people, place…and profits. These aren’t simple pipes piped in, or one-way street lights, but dynamic architectures that reorganize society’s rights.LISBON LURED, LOST, AND LIVEDThe scholars gathered in Lisbon trace precisely how digital platforms restructure housing markets, remake retail ecologies, and reformulate the rights of humans and non-humans. Their work, from analyzing platform control over cattle herds in Brazil to tracking urban displacement, exemplifies the conference’s focus: making visible the often-obscured mechanisms through which platforms reshape space.Two attendees I met included Jelke Bosma (University of Amsterdam), who researches Airbnb’s transformation of housing into asset classes, and Pedro Guimarães (University of Lisbon), who documents how platform-mediated tourism hollows out local retail. At the end of the tour, when a group of us were looking to chat over drinks, Pedro remarked, “If you want a recommendation for an authentic Lisbon bar experience, it no longer exists!”Yet, even as I navigated Lisbon using the very interfaces these scholars’ critique, I was reminded of this central truth: we study these systems from within them. There is no outside position from which to observe platform urbanism. We are all, to varying degrees, complicit subjects. This reflection has become central to digital geography’s method. It’s impossible to claim critical distance from systems that mediate our own spatial practices. So, instead, a kind of intrinsic critique is developed by understanding platform effects through our own entanglements.Lisbon has become an inadvertent laboratory for this critique. Jelke Bosma’s analysis of AirBnB reveals how the platform has facilitated a shift from informal “home sharing” to professionalized asset management, where multi-property hosts control an increasing share of urban housing stock. His research shows “professionally managed apartments do not only generate the largest individual revenues, they also account for a disproportionate segment of the total revenues accumulated on the platform”. This professionalization is driven by AirBnB’s business model and its investment in platform supporting “asset-based professionalization,” which primarily benefits multi-listing commercial hosts. He further explains that AirBnB’s algorithm “rewards properties with high availability rates,” creating what he calls “evolutionary pressures” on hosts to maximize their listings’ availability. This incentivizes them to become full-time tourist accommodations, reducing the competitiveness of long-term residential renting.The complexity of this ecosystem was also apparent during our Barcelona stop. What I booked as an “Airbnb” was a Sweett property — a competitor platform that operates through AirBnb’s APIs. This apartment featured Bluetooth-enabled locks and smart home controls inserted into an 1800s building. Sweett’s model demonstrates how platform infrastructure not only becomes an industry standard but is leveraged and replicated by competitors in a kind of coopetition based on the pricing algorithms AirBnB normalized.In Lisbon, my rental sat in a building where every door was marked with AL (Alojamento Local), the legal framework for short-term rentals. No permanent residents remained; the architecture itself had been reshaped to platform specifications: fire escape signage next to framed photos, fire extinguishers mounted to the wall, and minimized common spaces upon entry. It’s more like a hotel disaggregated into independent units.Pedro Guimarães’s work provides the commercial counterpart to Jelke’s residential analysis, focusing on how platforms reshape urban consumption. His longi
Hello Interactors,Fall is in full swing here in the northern hemisphere, which means it’s time to turn our attention to economics and economic geography. Triggered by a recent podcast on the origins of capitalism, I thought I’d kick off by exploring this from a geography perspective.I trace how violence, dispossession, and racial hierarchy aren’t simple externalities or accidents. They emerge out of a system that organized itself and then spread. Capitalism grew out of dispossession of land and human autonomy and became a dominant social and economic structure. It’s rooted in violence that became virtuous and centuries later is locked-in. Or is it?EMERGING ENGLISH ENCLOSURESThe dominant and particular brand of capitalism in force today originates in England. Before English landlords and the state violently seized common lands back in the 1300s, economic life was embedded in what historian E.P. Thompson called “moral economies”.(1) These were systems of survival where collective responsibility was managed through custom, obligation, and shared access to resources. Similar systems existed elsewhere. Long before Europeans arrived at the shores of what is now called North America, Haudenosaunee longhouse economies were sophisticatedly organized around economies of reciprocity. Further south, Andean ayllu communities negotiated labor obligations and access to land was shared. West African systems featured land that belonged to communities and ancestors, not individuals.Back in medieval English villages, commons weren’t charity, they were infrastructure. Anyone could graze animals or gather firewood. When harvests failed, there were fallbacks like hunting and gathering rights, seasonal labor sharing, and kin networks. As anthropologist Stephen Gudeman shows, these practices reflected cultures of mutual insurance aimed at collective resilience, not individual accumulation.(2)Then landlords, backed by state violence, destroyed this system to enrich themselves.From 1348-1349, the bubonic plague killed perhaps half of England’s population. This created a labor shortage that gave surviving so-called peasants leverage. For the first time they could demand higher wages, refuse exploitative landlords, or move to find better conditions.The elite mobilized state violence to reverse this. In 1351 the state passed The Statute of Labourers — an attempt to freeze wages and restrict worker movement. This serves as an early signal that reverberates today. When property and people come in conflict, the state sides with property. Over the next two centuries, landlords steadily enclosed common lands, claiming shared space as private property. Peasants who resisted were evicted, sometimes killed.Initial conditions mattered enormously. England had a relatively weak monarchy that couldn’t check landlord aggression like stronger European states did. It also had growing urban markets creating demand for food and wool and post-plague labor dynamics that made controlling land more profitable than extracting rents from secure peasants.As historian J.M. Neeson details, enclosure — fencing in private land — destroyed social infrastructure.(3) When access to common resources disappeared, so did the safety nets that enabled survival outside of market and labor competition. People simply lost the ability to graze a cow, gather fuel, glean grain, or even rely on neighbors’ obligation to help.This created a feedback loop:Each turn made the pattern stronger. Understanding how this happens requires grasping how these complex systems shaped the very people who reproduced them.The landlords driving enclosure weren’t simply greedy villains. Their sense of self, their understanding of what was right and proper, was constituted through relationships to other people like them, to their own opportunities, and to authorities who validated their actions. A landlord enclosing commons likely experienced this as “improvement”. They believed they were making the land productive while exercising newly issued property rights. Other landlords were doing it, parliament legalized it, and the economics of the time justified it. The very capacity to see alternatives was constrained by relational personal and social positions within an emerging capitalistic society.This doesn’t excuse the violence or diminish responsibility. But it does reveal how systems reproduce themselves. This happens not primarily through individual evil but through relationships and feedback loops that constitute people’s identities and sense of what’s possible. The moral judgment remains stark. These were choices that enriched someone by destroying someone else’s means of survival. But the choices were made by people whose very selfhood was being constructed by the system they were creating.Similarly, displaced peasants resisted in ways their social positions made possible. They rioted, appealed to historical customary rights, attempted to maintain the commons they relied on for centuries. Each turn of the spiral didn’t just move resources, it remade people. Peasants’ children, born into a world without commons, developed identities shaped by market dependence — renting their labor in exchange for money. What had been theft became, over generations, simply “how things are.”By the mid-16th century, England had something new. They’d created a system where most people owned no land, had no customary rights to subsistence, and had to compete in labor markets to survive. This was the essence of capitalism’s emergence. It wasn’t born out of markets (they existed everywhere for millennia) but as market dependence enforced through dispossession. Out of this emerged accumulated actions of actors whose awareness and available alternatives were themselves being shaped by the very system they were simultaneously shaping and sustaining.REPLICATING PATTERNS OF PLANTATIONSOnce capitalism emerged in England through violent enclosure, its spread wasn’t automatic. Understanding how it became global requires distinguishing between wealth extraction (which existed under many systems) and capitalist social relations (which require specific conditions).Spain conquered vast American territories, devastating indigenous populations through disease, warfare, and forced labor. Spanish extraction from mines in the 16th century — like Potosí in today’s Bolivia — were worked by enslaved indigenous and African peoples under conditions that killed them in staggering numbers. Meanwhile, Portugal developed Atlantic island sugar plantations using enslaved African labor. This expansion of Portuguese agriculture on Atlantic islands like Madeira and São Tomé became a blueprint for plantation economies in the Americas, particularly Brazil. The brutally efficient system perfected there for sugar production — relying on the forced labor of enslaved Africans — was directly transplanted across the ocean, leading to a massive increase in the scale and violence of the transatlantic slave trade.Both empires generated massive wealth from these practices. If colonial plunder caused capitalism, Spain and Portugal should have industrialized first. Instead, they stagnated. The wealth flowed to feudal monarchies who spent it on palaces, armies, and wars, not productive reinvestment. Both societies remained fundamentally feudal.England, with virtually no empire during its initial capitalist transformation, developed differently because it had undergone a different structural violence — enclosure of common land that created landless workers, wage dependence, and market competition spiraling into self-reinforcing patterns.But once those capitalist social relations existed, they became patterns that spread through violent imposition. These patterns destroyed existing economic systems and murdered millions.English expansion first began close to home. Ireland and Scotland experienced forced enclosures as English landlords exported the template — seize land, displace people, create private regimes, and force the suffering to work for you. This internal colonialism served as testing ground for techniques later deployed around the world.When English capitalism encountered the Caribbean — lands where indigenous peoples had developed complex agricultural systems and trade networks — the Spanish conquest had already devastated these populations. English merchants and settlers completed the destruction, seizing lands indigenous peoples had managed for millennia while expanding the brutal, enslaved-based labor models pioneered by the Spanish and Portuguese for mining and sugar production.The plantations English capitalists built operated differently than earlier Portuguese and Spanish systems. English plantation owners were capitalists, not feudal lords. But this was also not simply individual choice or moral character. They were operating within and being shaped by an emerging system of capitalist social relations. Here too they faced competitive pressures to increase output, reduce costs, and compete with other plantation owners. The system’s logic — accumulate to accumulate more — emerged from relational dynamics between competing capitalists. The individual identities as successful plantation owners was constituted through their position within the competitive networks in which they coexisted.New location, same story. Even here this systemic shaping doesn’t absolve individual responsibility for the horrors they perpetrated. Enslaved people were still kidnapped, brutalized, and worked to death. Indigenous peoples were still murdered and their lands still stolen. But understanding how the system shaped what seemed necessary or moral to those positioned to benefit helps explain how such horror could be so widespread and normalized.This normalization created new spirals:This pattern then replicated across even more geographies — Jamaica, Barbados, eventually the American South — each iteration destroying existing ways of life. As anthropologist Sidney Mintz sho
Hello Interactors,My wife and I recently started watching the mini-series 100 Foot Wave, which follows extreme surfer Garrett McNamara’s quest to ride the mythical 100-foot breaker. The show has put Nazaré, Portugal on the map — not just as a place, but as a symbol of human daring against forces far larger than ourselves.At the same time, I’ve been listening to physicist-philosopher Sean Carroll’s recent “solo” podcast on the emergence of complexity, tracing how the universe began in simplicity and blossomed into stars, life, and consciousness. These two threads — towering waves and cosmic arcs — collided in my mind, stirring something that has been swelling in me for years: how to reconcile wonder at life’s improbable flourishing with despair at its accelerated unraveling on Earth.Should despair be the only response? Or is it possible, like the surfers at Nazaré, to recognize the peril without surrendering to it — to ride, however briefly, the wave that could also destroy us?THE COSMIC WAVEBeneath the lighthouse bluff at Nazaré, Portugal opens a canyon 140 miles long and three miles deep — three times deeper than the Grand Canyon. Born of tectonic fractures and sculpted over millions of years, it is less a static feature than a force in its own right: a conduit that gathers the ocean’s momentum and hurls it shoreward. Swells that elsewhere would pass unnoticed are here magnified into walls of water, indifferent to whether they become playground or grave. Geography conspires — wind, current, and rock — but the canyon itself is an accomplice, a reminder that Earth is never merely stage but actor. For today’s surfers, this is possibility. For centuries of fishermen, it was peril. The waves have not changed, but the stance we take toward them has — and that, too, becomes part of the story the canyon tells.So it is with complexity. Every wave begins simple, a long low swell born of distant winds, that crescendos into chaos at the shoreline. It swirls and curls into turbulent foam piqued in curious but dangerous beauty, only to dissolve back into undertow, bubbles, and silence. Our own cosmos follows the same rhythm, driven by the logic of entropy — the tendency of energy to spread, of order to give way to disorder. In the beginning, we know the universe was astonishingly simple and ordered: a hot, uniform plasma, almost featureless in its smoothness.Imagine the origin of life sitting at origin of a graph. It exists orderly in low entropy and low complexity. But entropy is restless. As it advanced diagonally up and to the right disorder increases in a straight line. This opens space for complexity to emerge. Early on in the cosmos tiny quantum fluctuations stretched into patterns, atoms gathered into stars, stars fused new elements as galaxies spun, coalesced, and collided. Imagine this as the complexity line on our graph. It also grows with time but takes the shape of a parabolic wave climbing upward to a smooth crest as it increases in complexity. Meanwhile, entropy ticks steadily up and to the right as a straight arrow of time forever growing in disorder as our universe continues to increase in complexity.We are now somewhere on this complexity curve. And this is the paradox of our middle epoch. Entropy never reverses course — disorder always increases — yet along that trajectory the complexity within we live crests, like a wave gathering its final height. For a sliver of cosmic time, the universe has been rich, complex, and with structure. On at least one world in the cosmos, life emerges and even creates complex organisms like us. But if entropy pushes inexorably forward, complexity will not hold indefinitely. Stars will exhaust their fuel, galaxies will drift into darkness, and matter itself may decay. This diagram reminds us that complexity rises only to fall again, tracing an arc back toward simplicity even as entropy continues its steady climb.In this framing, the universe is not a march from order to chaos but a cycle of simple-to-complex-to-simple played out against entropy’s one-way slope. We live in a fleeting middle where complexity momentarily flourishes. Like the wave at Nazaré, born as a long low swell, steepening into a towering wall of water, then dissolving again into foam, undertow, and silence, our cosmos crests only once. The question is not whether entropy wins — it does — but how we dwell, and what we make of meaning, within the brief surge of complexity it permits.It took a lot to get us to this point. This complex space that entropy has carved within cosmic time leaves room for novelty. Complexity flourishes locally even as disorder deepens globally. Out of this novel initial imbalance, life emerged — fragile metabolisms harvesting energy from their surroundings, weaving temporary order against the grain of entropy. From single-celled organisms to multicellular bodies, from photosynthesis to predation, biology layered new strategies of survival atop older ones. Evolution diversified life into forests and reefs, wings and fins, neural nets and circulatory systems. These proliferations multiplied niches where order could briefly hold, even as the larger cosmos drifted toward disorder.Only much later did consciousness arise, one of evolution’s rarest experiments: a capacity not merely to metabolize energy but to reflect upon the arc of complexity itself. With awareness came memory, imagination, culture — tools for navigating the turbulence of entropy’s middle chapter. Entropy still holds the reins: the universe will drift back toward simplicity, whether into a thin uniform haze or some other quiet ending. Yet here, in the middle, entropy’s detour has produced extravagant complexity — including beings capable of gazing back at the wave that carries them and wondering what it means.THE INDIFFERENT EARTHThis same gaze can also induce speculation. Like speculative realism. Emerging in the early 2000s as a reaction against a tendency to keep reality tethered to human thought and language, its central claim is stark: the world is indifferent to us. Planets orbit, tectonic plates shift, and waves break whether or not anyone is there to see them. From this view, complexity arises from imbalances in matter and energy, from unfinished processes that unfold far beyond human agency. The wave doesn’t care whether it is surfed or feared; it builds from wind, water, and terrain, cresting and dissolving with no meaning to maintain.Animated globe of tectonic plates shifting across hundreds of millions of years, reminding us that Earth’s movements unfold indifferent to human presence or perception. Source: Reddit. And below is where we go from here:This speculation hits another conscious reality — optimism. Human optimism is as hard to contain as its constant refrain. Born of the Enlightenment but rebirthed amid the industrial expansion, world wars, and scientific breakthroughs of the early 1900s, modernist optimism leaned confidently on reason and science — a conviction that human ingenuity could transcend natural limits and bend uncertainty toward progress. Time and again, human ingenuity has found ways to stretch the boundaries of what seemed natural limits. Agricultural revolutions multiplied food production beyond what Malthus thought possible. Industrialization transformed energy regimes, substituting fossil carbon for dwindling forests. Urban innovations — from sanitation to electrification — allowed cities to grow far past the thresholds that once doomed them to collapse. Each leap suggested that collapse was not destiny but averted through cleverness.This pattern sustains modernist faith: that humans can intervene wisely in the unfolding of complexity. Where speculative realism emphasizes the indifference of natural forces — entropy driving stars and systems toward disorder regardless of our designs — modernist thought wagers otherwise. It insists that ingenuity allows us not merely to endure the swell but to ride it, to carve temporary stability out of turbulence. In this view, the challenge of complexity is not simply to recognize its inevitabilities but to cultivate the foresight, restraint, and imagination that let human life persist in its fragile middle.That is if humans “don’t do dumb things.” In other words, humans can and should preserve the conditions that let life and intelligence persist locally, even as the universal drift of entropy continues.Armed with the mathematical models that fuel both scientific confidence and human hubris, the world can appear elegant — even in its ugliness. Amidst entropy following a relentless trajectory we see scaling laws enfold organisms, cities, and civilizations alike. The planet itself is rendered as a singular complex system drifting through cosmic time. The physicist’s gaze simplifies this by design — reducing frictions, stripping away differences, until only lawlike arcs remain. As the polymath Heinz von Foerster once put it, “Hard sciences are successful because they deal with the soft problems; soft sciences are struggling because they deal with the hard problems.”Geography, by contrast, cannot ignore what falls through those cracks. The sweep of cosmology may remind us that complexity is not uniquely human — stars ignite, galaxies cluster, black holes churn — but such vistas stretch horizons so far that human lifetimes blur into insignificance. Civilizations, like waves, crest and crash in an instant against the span of cosmic time.To move closer in, at a planetary scale, complexity narrows to the thin envelope where oceans, land, and atmosphere intertwine. It is within this fragile band that agriculture took root, cities rose, and civilizations flourished. Yet scientists, equipped with hard science, warn that this Holocene balance has already been breached. The “safe operating space” is no longer secure; the planetary is already in transition.But even “the planetary” is too smooth a category. These upheavals are not shared evenly across the globe
Hello Interactors,It’s been awhile as I’ve been enjoying summer — including getting in my kayak to paddle over to a park to water plants. Time on the water also gets me thinking. Lately, it’s been about what belongs here, what doesn’t, and who decides? This week’s essay follows my trail of thought from ivy-covered fences to international borders. I trace how science, politics, and even physics shape our ideas of what’s “native” and what’s “invasive.”INVASION, IVY, AND ICEAs I was contemplating this essay in my car at a stop light, a fireweed seedling floated through the sunroof. Fireweed is considered “native” by the U.S. Government, but when researching this opportunistic plant — which thrives in disturbed areas (hence it’s name) — I learned it can be found across the entire Northern Hemisphere. It’s “native” to Japan, China, Korea, Siberia, Mongolia, Russia, and all of Northern Europe. Because its primary dispersal is through the wind, it’s impossible to know where exactly it originated and when. And unlike humans, it doesn’t have to worry about borders.So long as a species arrives on its own accord through wind, wings, currents, or chance — without a human hand guiding it — it’s often granted the status of “native.” Never mind whether the journey took decades or millennia, or if the ecosystem has since changed. What matters is that it got there on its own, as if nature somehow stamped its passport.As long time Interactors may recall, I spend the summer helping water “native” baby plants into maturity in a local public green space. A bordering homeowner had planted an “invasive species”, English Ivy, years ago and it climbed the fence engulfing the Sword Ferns, Vine Maples, and towering Douglas Fir trees common in Pacific Northwest woodlands. A nearby concerned environmentalist volunteered to remove the “alien” ivy and plant “native” species through a city program called Green Kirkland. Some of the first Firs he planted are now taller than he is! Meanwhile, on the ground you see remnants of English Ivy still trying to muster a comeback. The stuff is tenacious.This is also the time of year in the Seattle area when Himalayan Black Berries are ripening. These sprawls of arching spikey vines are as pernicious as they are delicious. Nativist defenders try squelching these invaders too. But unlike English Ivy, these “aliens” come with a sugary prize. You’ll see people walking along the side of roads with buckets and step stools trying their darnedest to pluck a plump prize — taking care not to get poked or pierced by their prickly spurs.This framing of “invasive” versus “native” has given me pause like never before, especially as I witness armed, masked raids on homes and businesses carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. These government officials, who are also concerned and deeply committed citizens, see themselves as removing what they label “invasive aliens” — individuals they fear might overwhelm the so-called “native” population. As part of the Department of Homeland Security, they work to secure the “Homeland” from what is perceived as an invasion by unwanted human movement. In reflecting on this, I ask myself: how different am I from an ICE agent when I labor to eradicate plants I have been taught to call “invasive” while nurturing so-called “native” species back to health? Both of us are acting within a worldview that categorizes beings as either threats or treasures. At what cost, and with what consequences?According to a couple other U.S. agencies (like the National Park Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture) species are considered native if they were present before European colonization (i.e., pre-1492). The idea that a species is “native” if it was present before 1492 obviously reflects less a scientific ecological reality than a political opinion of convenience. Framing nativity through the lens of settler history rather than ecological process ignores not only millennia of Indigenous land stewardship, but prehistoric human introductions and natural migrations shaped by climate and geology. Trying pin down what is “native” is like picking up a squirming earthworm.These little critters, which have profoundly altered soil ecosystems in postglacial North America, are often labeled “naturalized” rather than “native” because their arrival followed European colonization. Yet this classification ignores the fact that northern North America had no earthworms at all for thousands of years after the glaciers retreated. There were scraped away with the topsoil. What native species may exist in North America are confined to the unglaciated South.What’s disturbing isn’t just the worms’ historical presence but the simplistic persistent narrative that ecosystems were somehow stable until 1492. How is it possible that so many people still insist it was colonial contact that supposedly flipped some ecological switch? In truth, landscapes have always been in motion. They’ve been shaped and reshaped by earth’s systems — especially human systems — long before borders were drawn. Defining nativity by a colonial decree doesn’t just flatten ecological complexity, it overwrites a deep history of entangled alteration.MIGRATION, MOVEMENT, AND MEANINGIf a monarch butterfly flutters across the U.S. border from Mexico, no one demands its papers. There are no butterfly checkpoints in Laredo or Yuma. It rides the wind northward, tracing ancient pathways across Texas, the Midwest, all the way to southern Canada. The return trip happens generations later — back to the oyamel forests in the state of Michoacán. This movement is a marvel. It’s so essential we feel compelled to watch it, map it, and even plant milkweed to help it along. But when human beings try to make a similar journey on the ground — fleeing drought, violence, or economic collapse — we call it a crisis, build walls, and question their right to belong.This double standard starts to unravel when you look closely at the natural world. Species are constantly on the move. Some of the most astonishing feats of endurance on Earth are migratory: the Arctic tern flies from pole to pole each year; caribou migrate thousands of miles across melting tundra and newly paved roads. GPS data compiled in Where the Animals Go shows lions slipping through suburban gardens and wolves threading through farmland, using hedgerows and railways like interstates. Animal movement isn’t the exception; it’s the ecological norm.And it’s not just animals. Plants, too, are masters of mobility. A single seed can cross oceans, whether on the back of a bird, in a gust of wind, or tucked into a canoe by a human hand. In one famous case, researchers once proposed that a tree found on a remote Pacific Island must have arrived via floating debris. But later genetic and archaeological evidence suggested a different story: it may have arrived with early Polynesian voyagers — people whose seafaring knowledge shaped entire ecosystems across the Pacific.DNA evidence and phylogeographic studies (how historical processes shape the geographic distribution of genetic lineages within species) now support the idea that Polynesians carried plants such as paper mulberry, sweet potato, taro, and even some trees across vast ocean distances well before the Europeans showed up. What was once considered improbable — human-mediated dispersal to incredibly beautiful and remote islands — is now understood as a core part of Pacific ecological and cultural history.Either way, that plant didn’t ask to be there. It simply was. And with no obvious harm done, it was allowed to stay. We humans can also often conflate our inability to perceive harm with the idea that a species “belongs.” We tend to assume that if we can’t see, measure, or immediately notice any negative impact a species is having, then it must not be causing harm — and therefore it “belongs” in the ecosystem. But belonging is contextual. It can be slow to reveal and is rarely absolute. British ecologist and writer Ken Thompson has spent much of his career challenging our tidy categories of “native” and “invasive.” In his book Where Do Camels Belong?, he reminds us that the “belonging” question is less about biology than bureaucracy. Camels originated in North America and left via the Bering land bridge around 3–5 million years ago. They eventually domesticated in the Middle East about ~3,000–4,000 years ago to be used for transportation, milk, and meat. Then, in the 19th century, British colonists brought camels to Australia to help explore and settle the arid interior. Australia is now home to the largest population of feral camels in the world. So where, exactly, do they “belong”? Our ecological borders, like our political ones, often make more sense on a map than they do in the field.Even the language we use is steeped in militaristic and xenophobic overtones. Scottish geographer Charles Warren has written extensively on how conservation debates are shaped by the words we choose. In a 2007 paper, he argues that terms like invasive, alien, and non-native don’t just describe, but pass judgment. They carrying moral and political weight into what should be an ecological conversation. They conjure feelings of threat, disorder, and contamination. When applied to plants, they frame restoration as a battle. With people, they prepare the ground for exclusion.Which is why I now hesitate when I yank ivy or judge a blackberry bramble. I still do it because I believe in fostering ecological resilience and am sensitive to slowing or stopping overly aggressive and harmful plants (and animals). But now I do it more humbly, more questioningly. What makes something a threat, and who gets to decide? What if the real harm lies not in movement of species, but in the stories we tell about it?MIGRATION, MYTHS, AND MATTERThe impulse to define who belongs and who doesn’t isn't limited to the forest floor. It echoes in immigration policy, in the archi
Hello Interactors,It’s hard to ignore the situation in Texas, especially as I turn my attention to physical geography. 'Flash Flood Alley', as it’s called by hydrologists, had already been pounded by days of relentless rain, soaking the soil and swelling the rivers. It left the region teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Then came the deluge. A torrent so sudden and intense it dumped a month’s worth of rain in under an hour. Roads turned to rivers. Homes were lost. Lives were too. As the floodwaters recede, what remains isn’t just devastation — it’s a lesson. One about a changing water cycle, a shifting climate, and a stubborn way of thinking that still dominates how we plan for both.DROUGHT AND DELUGEIs Texas drowning due to climate change? Just three years ago, we were told it’s drying up. That’s when a record drought emptied reservoirs and threw aquifers into steep decline. From 2011 to 2015, 90% of the state was in extreme drought. This seesaw between soaked and scorched is the kind of muddled messaging that lets climate deniers laugh all the way to the comment section.The truth is Texas is drying up AND drowning. This paradox isn’t just Texas-sized — it’s systemic. Our habit of translating global climate shifts into local weather soundbites is failing us.According to hydrologist Benjamin Zaitchik and colleagues, writing in Nature Water in 2023, two dominant narratives frame how these events are explained. Public and policy reporting on patterns like those in Texas usually falls into two camps:* The "Wet-Get-Wetter, Dry-Get-Drier" (WWDD) hypothesis — climate change intensifies existing hydrological patterns, bringing more rain to wet regions and more drought to dry ones.* The "Global Aridification" (GA) hypothesis — warming increases the atmosphere's "thirst," drying out land even where rainfall remains steady.Both frameworks can explain real conditions, but the recent Texas floods expose their limits. If a region long seen as drying can also produce one of the most intense floods in U.S. history, are these ideas flawed — or just too rigidly applied?WWDD and GA aren’t competing truths. They’re partial heuristics for a nonlinear, complex water system. Yet our brains favor recent events, confirm existing beliefs, and crave simple answers. So we latch onto one model or the other. But these simplified labels often ignore scale, context, and the right metrics. Is a region drying or wetting based on annual rainfall? Soil moisture? Streamflow? Urbanization? Atmospheric demand?Texas — with its sprawling cities, irrigated farms, and dramatic east–west gradient in rainfall and vegetation — resists binary climate narratives. One year it exemplifies GA, with depleted aquifers and parched soil. The next, like now, it fits WWDD, as Tropical Storm Barry — arriving after days of relentless rainfall — stalled over saturated land, unleashing a torrent so fierce it overwhelmed the landscape.Zaitchik and his team call for a clarification approach. Instead of umbrella labels, we should specify which variables and timeframes are shifting. A place can be parched, pummeled, and primed to flood — sometimes all in the same season. And those shifting moods in the water set the stage for something deeper — a mathematical reckoning.MATH MEETS MAYHEMThis debate boils down to three basic equations — one for the land, one for the sky, and one for how the system changes over time. But that means prying open the black box of math symbols still treated like sacred script by academics and STEM pros.Let’s be clear, these equations aren’t spells. They’re just shorthand — like a recipe or a flowchart. The symbols may look like hieroglyphs, but they describe familiar things. Precipitation falls (P). Water evaporates or gets sucked up by plants — evapotranspiration (E). Some runs off (R). Some sinks in (S). Time (t) tells us when it’s happening. The 'd' in dS and dt just means "change in" — how much storage (S) increases or decreases over time (t). The Greek letters — ∇ (nabla) and δ (delta) — simply mean change, across space and time. If you can track a bank account, you can follow these equations. And if you’ve ever watched a lawn flood after a storm, you’ve seen them in action.You don’t need a PhD to understand water, just a willingness to see through the symbols.* LAND: The Water Balance EquationP − E = R + dS/dtPrecipitation (P) minus evapotranspiration (E) equals runoff (R) plus the change in stored water (dS/dt).* SKY: The Vapor Flux EquationP − E = ∇ ∙ QThis links land and atmosphere. ∇ (nabla) tracks change across space, and Q is vapor flux — the amount of moisture moving through the atmosphere from one place to another, carried by winds and shaped by pressure systems. The dot product (∙) measures how much of that vapor is moving into or out of an area. So ∇ ∙ Q shows whether moist air is converging (piling up to cause rain) or diverging (pulling apart and drying).* SYSTEM: The Change Equationδ(∇ ∙ Q) = δ(P − E) = δ(R + dS/dt)This shows how if vapor movement in the sky changes (δ(∇ ∙ Q)), it leads to changes in net water input at the surface (δ(P − E)), which in turn changes the balance of runoff and stored water on land (δ(R + dS/dt)). It’s a cascading chain where shifts in the atmosphere ripple through the landscape and alter the system itself.In a stable climate, these variables stay in sync. But warming disrupts that balance. More heat means more atmospheric moisture (E), and altered winds move vapor differently (∇ ∙ Q). The math still balances — but now yields volatility: floods, droughts, and depleted storage despite “normal” rainfall. The equations haven’t changed. The system has.Texas fits this emerging pattern:* Rainfall extremes are up: NOAA shows 1-in-100-year storms are now more frequent, especially in Central and East Texas.* Soil and streamflow are less reliable: NASA and USGS report more zero-flow days, earlier spring peaks, and deeper summer dry-outs.* Urban growth worsens impacts: Impervious surfaces around Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas accelerate runoff and flash floods.These shifts show how climate and land use intersect. It’s not just wetter or drier — it’s both, and more volatile overall.In 2008, hydrologist Peter Milly and colleagues declared: “Stationarity is dead.”For decades, water planning assumed the future would mirror the statistically stationary and predictable past. But flood maps, dam designs, and drought plans built on that idea no longer hold.We laid out land with rulers and grids, assuming water would follow. But floods don’t care about straight lines, and drought ignores boundaries. Modern hydrology rested on Cartesian geometry — flat, fixed, and predictable. But the ground is moving, and the sky is changing. The first two equations describe water in place. The third captures it in motion. This is a geometry of change, where terrain bends, vapor thickens, and assumptions buckle. To keep up, we need models shaped like rivers, not spreadsheets. The future doesn’t follow a line. It meanders.And yet, we keep describing — and planning and engineering — for a world that no longer exists.Somehow, we also need journalists — and readers — to get more comfortable with post-Cartesian complexity. Soundbites won’t cut it. If we keep flattening nuance for clarity, we’ll miss the deeper forces fueling the next flood.VAPOR AND VELOCITYIf Texas is drying and flooding at once, it’s not a local contradiction but a symptom of a larger system. Making sense of that means thinking across scales — not just in miles or months, but how change moves through nested systems.Cartesian thinking fails again here. It craves fixed frames and tidy domains. But climate operates differently — it scales across time and space, feeds back into itself, and depends on how systems connect. It’s scalar (different behaviors emerge at different sizes), recursive (what happens in one part can echo and evolve through others), and relational (everything depends on what it touches and when). What looks like local chaos may trace back to a tropical pulse, a meandering jet stream, or a burst of vapor from halfway across the world.Zaitchik’s team shows that local water crises are often global in origin. Warming intensifies storms — but more crucially, it shifts where vapor moves, when it falls, and how it clusters[1]. The water cycle isn’t just speeding up. It’s reorganizing.Thanks to the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship — a principle from thermodynamics that describes how warmer air effects vapor — each 1°C of warming allows the atmosphere to hold about 7% more moisture. That supercharges storms. Even if rain events stay constant, their intensity rises. The sky becomes a loaded sponge — and when it squeezes, it dumps.But it’s not just about capacity. It’s about flow. Moisture is moving differently, pooling unpredictably, and dumping in bursts. That’s why Texas sees both longer dry spells and shorter, more intense storms. Systems stall. Jet streams wander. Tropical remnants surge inland. These aren’t bugs. They’re features.The July 2025 Texas flood may have begun with Gulf moisture: its roots trace to warming oceans, trade wind shifts, and a migrating Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) — the low-latitude belt where trade winds converge and drive global precipitation patterns. As these systems reorganize, mid-latitude regions like Texas face more extreme rains punctuated by longer droughts[1]. More extremes. Fewer in-betweens.So Texas’s water future isn’t just about reservoirs and runoff. It’s about vapor, velocity, and vertical motion and the hidden machinery of a water cycle behaving in unfamiliar ways.This NOAA satellite (GOES-19 captures imagery every 5-10 minutes) loop captures the moisture swirling through the mid-atmosphere (Band 9 is ~20,000 feet) as the Storm pushed inland from July 3rd to the 6th. The darker blues show vapor pooling and stalling over Central and East Texas. This loaded sky, unable to drain, setting the stage for t
Hello Interactors,Happy Fourth of July and welcome to a brand new season of Interplace! We’re kicking things off with a video of my cross-country rail trip that took about four days to ride…and nearly twice as long to edit and produce. This first ever Interplace video launches our summer focus on physical geography and the environment. I hope you enjoy a slow journey through space, place, and the unexpected beauty between the coasts. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io
Hello Interactors,My daughter in Manhattan’s East Village sent me an article about the curated lives of the “West Village girls.” A few days later, I came across a provocative student op-ed from the University of Washington: "Why the hell do we still go to Starbucks?" The parallels stood out.In Manhattan’s West Village, a spring weekend unfolds with young women jogging past a pastry shop in matching leggings, iced matcha lattes in hand. Some film it just long enough for TikTok. Across the country, students cycle through Starbucks in Seattle’s U-District like clockwork. The drinks are overpriced and underwhelming, but that’s not the point. It’s familiar. It's part of a habitual loop.Different cities, similar rhythms. One loop is visual, the other habitual. But both show how space and emotion sync. Like an ambient synth track, they layer, drift, and return. If you live in or near a city, you exist in your own looping layers of emotional geography.FLASH FEEDSMy daughter has been deep into modular synthesis lately — both making and listening. It’s not just the music that intrigues her, but the way it builds: loops that don’t simply repeat, but evolve, bend, and respond. She’ll spend hours patching sounds together, adjusting timing and tone until something new emerges. She likens it to painting with sound. Watching her work, it struck me how much her synth music mirrors city life — not in harmony, but in layers. She’s helped me hear urban rhythms differently.Like a pop synth hook, the Flash loop is built for attention. It's bright, polished, and impossible to ignore. Synth pop thrives on these quick pulses — hooks that grab you within seconds, loops that deliver dopamine with precision. Urban spaces under this loop do the same. They set a beat others fall in line with, often flattening nuance in exchange for momentum.This isn’t just about moving to a beat. It’s about becoming part of the beat. When these fast loops dominate, people start adapting to the spaces that reflect them. And those spaces, in turn, evolve based on those very behaviors. It’s a feedback loop: movement shaping meaning, and meaning shaping movement. The people become both the input and the output.In this context, the West Village girl isn’t just a person — she’s a spatial feedback loop. A mashup of Carrie Bradshaw nostalgia, Instagram polish, and soft-lit storefronts optimized for selfies. But she didn’t arrive from nowhere. She emerged through a kind of spatial modeling: small choices, like where to brunch, where to pose, where to post are repeated so often they remade a neighborhood.Social psychologist Erving Goffman, writing in the 1950s, called this kind of self-presentation "impression management." He argued that much of everyday life is performance. Not in the theatrical sense, but in how we act in response to what we expect others see. Urban spaces, especially commercial ones, are often the stage. But today, that performance isn’t just for others in the room. It’s for followers, algorithms, and endless feeds. The “audience” is ambient, but its expectations are precise.As places like the West Village get filtered through lifestyle accounts and recommendation algorithms, their role changes. They no longer just host people, but mirror back a version of identity their occupants expect to see. Sidewalks become catwalks. Coffee shops become backdrops. Apartment windows become curated messes of string lights and tasteful clutter. And increasingly, the distinction between what’s lived and what’s posted collapses.This fast loop — what we might call spatial virality — doesn’t just show us how to act in a place. It scripts the place itself. Stores open where the foot traffic is photogenic. Benches are placed for backdrops, not rest. Even the offerings shift: Aperol spritzes, charm bars, negroni specials sold not for taste but for tagability.These are the high-tempo loops. They grab attention and crowd the mix. But every modular synth set, like a painting, needs contrast.So some people opt out, or imagine doing so. Not necessarily with loud protest, but quiet rejection. They look for something slower. Something that isn’t already trending...unless the trend of routine sucks you in.PULSING PATTERNSIf Flash is the pop hook, Pulse is the counter-melody. It could be a bassline or harmony that brings emotional weight and keeps things grounded. In music, you may not always notice it, but you'd miss it if it were gone. In cities, this loop shows up in slow friendships, mutual aid, and cafés that begin to feel like second homes. These are places where regulars greet one another by name. Where where hours melt through conversations. It satisfies a need to be seen, but without needing to perform. It’s what holds meaning when spectacle fades.If the fast loop turns space into spectacle, the counter loop tries to slow it down. It lures the space to feel lived in, not just liked. It’s not always radical. Sometimes it’s just choosing a different coffee shop.Back in Seattle’s University District, students do have options. Bulldog News. Café Allegro. George Coffee. These places don’t serve drinks meant to be posted. They serve drinks meant to be tasted. They’re not aesthetic first. They’re relational. These are small gestures that build culture.Social psychologists Susan Andersen and Serena Chen describe this through what they call relational self theory. We don’t become ourselves in isolation. We become ourselves with and through others — especially those we repeatedly encounter. Think about the difference between ordering coffee from a stranger versus someone who knows you like sparkling water with your Cortado. It’s a different kind of transaction. It eases things. It reinforces your own loop.So why do people routinely return to Starbucks? It isn’t just about caffeine addiction. It’s about being part of a socially reinforced rhythm — anchored in convenience, recognition, and the illusion of choice.Stores like Starbucks are often strategically located for maximum accessibility and convenience. They're nestled near transit hubs, along commuter corridors, or within high-traffic pedestrian zones. These placements aren’t arbitrary. They’re optimized to integrate into daily routines. It's less like a countermelody and more like a harmonic parallel melody. As a result, practical considerations like proximity, availability, and reliability often override ideological concerns.People return not because the product is exceptional, but because the store is exactly where and when they need it. The Starbucks habit isn’t only about routine, but rhythmic predictability that appears personal. In this sense, it functions as a highly accessible pulse: a loop that’s easy to join and hard to break. It's made of proximity, subtle trust, and convenience, but is dressed as choice.My daughter's chosen counter loop lives in the East Village — not far, geographically, from the Instagram inspired brunch queues of Bleecker Street. Her loops are different. She carries conversations across record stores, basement venues, bookstores with hand-scrawled signs, and a few stubborn restaurants.These are Places where the playlists aren't streaming through Spotify. Her city isn’t organized around visibility. It’s organized around presence. Around being seen to be honored and remembered. Like the bookstore dude who knows the lore on everyone, or the cashier who waves her through without paying, or her Brooklyn bandmate friends who fold her in like family.Sure, this scene intersects with the popular loops — modular synths are having a moment — but it sidesteps the sameness. It stays unpredictable, grounded in curiosity and care rather than clicks. The gear is still patched by hand. The performances are messy and often temporary. And yet, the loops — literal and figurative — keep returning. Not because they’re engineered for attention, but because they allow people to build something slowly...together...from the inside. Especially when done in partnership with another synthesist.You might see this in your own city. The quiet transformation of spaces: a café hosting a poetry night; a yoga studio turned warming shelter during the storm; a laundromat that leaves a stack of free books near the dryers. These are not accidents. They are interventions. Sometimes small, sometimes subtle...but always deliberate.They stand in contrast to the churn of the viral. They also offer an alternative to despair. Because the counter loop isn’t just critique. It’s care enacted. And care takes time.Still, even pulsing care needs structure. It needs floor drains, power outlets, and open hours. It needs a stable substructure.UNDERCURRENT UNDERTONESUndertone is the foundational structure on which other elements are built. It's the core of modular synth music. This isn’t just rhythm. It’s the subtle, slow, and reactive scaffolding. These core loops evolve and shift setting the timing and emotional tonality for everything else.They don’t dominate, but they shape the flow. They respond to what surrounds them to ground the composition. Cities, too, have these base layers. Often imperceptible, they are visceral, ambient, and persistent. They come into focus with the smell of rain on warm pavement. The clink of a key in a front door. These are not songs you hum, they’re the ones your heart and lungs make.Long before the influencer run clubs, celebrity shoe stores, and curated stoops, there was the mundane sidewalk. Not the kind tagged on a friend’s story or filtered through the latest app. Just concrete. Scuffed by strollers, scooter wheels, boots, and time. The sidewalk doesn’t follow trends, but it does remember them.Cities are built on these undertones: habitual routes, early deliveries, overheard exchanges, open signs flipped at the same hour each morning. They aren’t glamorous. They don’t go viral. But they are what hold everything together.Urban scholar Ash Amin calls this the “infrastructure of belonging.” In his work on ordina
Hello Interactors, This week, four strange bird encounters landed in my lap — three in real life, one on my screen. First, a crow tore through the bushes in our yard chasing a frantic nuthatch. Moments later, I spotted two more crows feasting on roadkill just outside our house. Then, while walking with my wife, we watched four ducks in hot pursuit of another, flapping furiously down the street — some kind of aerial turf war. And finally, scrolling through my feed, I stumbled on a paper describing a Cooper’s Hawk hacking the city’s traffic system to hunt smarter. After all that, I tried seeing cities as a bird might. So I wrote as one.HISS, HUM, HUNTI first sense the city as vibration. Before sun rays even breech the branches, a hiss of car tires emerge; street lamps click off; somewhere a garage door rumbles open. Each resonance strikes the hollow chambers of my bones like sonar. It’s a sketch of distance, density, and direction. This all makes perfect sense to me even though I am just a kid. A juvenile Cooper’s Hawk — Accipiter cooperii — yet the human-made maze below me is as legible to me as the nest I left barely two winters ago. What follows, in human words, is a recount of one day’s hunt. I hope to demonstrate what humans regard as intelligence, innovation, and enterprise exists in a single act of predation.DANCING WITH DATA AT DAWNPerched on a gray mast of the Main and Prospect traffic light, I begin to render the scene. My basemap is no pixel grid glowing on some screen across town; it is a topological organ in my scull. Topology matters when a lamppost sits one maneuver away from the porch roof, which is one glide away from the dumpster rim. My so-called ‘bird brain’ calculates dynamic flows of probability. One flip of a traffic light, a garbage truck rolls by, and that gust of wind changes direction. My internal map pulses between “larger” when prey likelihood rises and “smaller” when likelihood falls.As I gaze out above the east-west avenue, a slipstream peels off the 7AM wave of commuters. I spot a sparrow in a vortex that spirals from the garbage truck’s wake at 07∶13. That acoustic shadow beneath that florist’s van is one place I could pass unseen. But is a sparrow worth it?What I am doing — unknown even to myself — is what spatial scientists call real‑time kernel‑density estimation. At any point on a simple 2D path I can plop a small mathematical bump — a kernel. I can then reason about the density mapped below me by stacking up every bump’s contribution at a particular spot. That once scatter of points on a map morphs into a smooth curve that shows where meaningful observations truly cluster. I continuously weight a landscape of pigeons, cyclists, and idling SUVs by situational context rather than simple Euclidean distance.Complexity geographer David O’Sullivan calls this kind of adaptive map a narrative model — a story the system tells itself so it can keep acting. My mental basemap obeys what is adjacent to what on this map. After all, a three‑meter hedge is more impenetrable than thirty meters of empty air; therefore straight‑line distances can lie and deceive. When humans try to simplify distances by saying, ‘as the crow flies’, they have no idea what they’re leaving out.BRAKES BUILD BARRICADESAt 07∶26 a stainless‑steel button is pressed; I hear the relay’s metallic click 3.2 seconds before the little white pedestrian blinks alive. I am perched here because I anticipated this poke by pedestrians on their morning commute. Vehicles will now queue as these bi-peds spill into the cross walk. The stacked metal boxes of steel, rubber, and plastic will form a barricade forty meters long…potentially.Brake‑lights align into a pulsing crimson corridor whose half‑life I have calculated and averaged across nineteen previous dawns. Humans call the coming congestion a nuisance, but I call it camouflage. For twenty‑two seconds the asphalt canyon’s turbulence drops below an acceptable range. I can now hover as if among cedars.A scientist has been watching from the opposite curb. They will soon begin recording this trick in their field book as so: a hawk anticipates the signal pattern and times its dives to the red‑phase distribution of brake lights.Because most queues are short, but occasionally very long, I have to be careful to time this properly. If I dive for prey based on the overall mean of the lineup, I will arrive while half the cars were still rolling to a stop — dangerous. So instead, I consider just the top-10% longest lines. Scientists marvel that I learned this algorithm in a single winter. I marvel that they need calculators to compute it.ZEBRA STRIPE SLALOM STRIKEI drop. The scent of hot rubber folds swirls with the cedar‑resin on my breast feathers as the warm air fills my plumage. The slowing bumper of a school bus becomes a landing spot — a moving parapet. Fresh into the dive, the thermoplastic zebra stripes flash white‑white‑white like a stroboscopic speedometer. None of this was made for me, yet every dimension matters for my survival. The curb‑to‑planter setback of 0.9 meters sets my glide angle; the bollard spacing — installed last year to calm e‑scooters — creates a slalom that funnels starlings toward an ornamental plum in a front lawn.Urban design handbooks invoke words like livability and placemaking, as if these geometries were some kind of neutral toolkit. But for me, in the instant before impact, this curb‑to‑planter setback, this bollard slalom, adjudicates more than legal fiction — it means life and death.Urban forms may look passive, yet every angle, radius, and dwell time means someone has won and someone has lost — wide curb radii speed cars through a right-turn but lengthen the crossing exposure for a toddler. Urban geometry is power cast in concrete; it never clocks off, and is both political and ecological: a three‑second refuge for a starling is a three‑second targeting solution for me.FORCE AND FEATHERS FACES FEEDBACKImpact. Feathers erupt like dark gray confetti. The starling crumbles under thirty‑four newtons of closing force — about the weight of a brick slammed into its ribcage. While I mantle the prize, a more philosophical bird might wonder: Who authored this death? Was it my neuromuscular burst alone? Or the person whose fingertip initiated a forty‑second cascade of stopped traffic? Or the traffic engineer who — chasing level‑of‑service targets — extended the red phase by six seconds last fiscal year?Philosophy of science warns against naïve linear causation; urban events rarely run in neat A → B lines. Herbert Simon, writing on complex systems, described cities and organisms as “nearly decomposable hierarchies,” where slow, macro‑scale layers — like signal‑cycle regulations, curb geometries, and commuter habits — set the boundary conditions within which rapid micro‑events unfold. My talon snap and a starling’s dodge happen inside those higher‑order constraints, even as countless such micro‑acts, in aggregate, keep the larger structure of life humming along.My strike, therefore, is a city‑scale phenomenon folded into tendon and keratin — street grids, signal cycles, and global supply chains compressed into one ballistic gesture. In the metallic tang of blood this mystery unfolds. I taste data: adipose fat tissue infused with fryer grease, feather sheaths dusted in brake dust, hormone ratios ticking through molt stage like seasonal code. Each swallow becomes a lab assessment — an unwitting biopsy of the urban food web — revealing how corn subsidies, restaurant waste, and airborne microplastics percolate up the trophic ladder. To devour a single starling is to audit the metabolic ledger of the Anthropocene, one protein strand at a time.All of which reminds me that agency, mine, yours, the starling, is relational: the prey’s demise is over‑determined by a network whose nodes include asphalt viscosity — how a petrochemical blend modulates surface friction, drainage, and midday heat plumes — and municipal bond ratings that decide whether this intersection receives fresh pavement or another crosswalk. Chemistry, finance, and instinct co‑author every kill I make, and every step you take.FIBERS, FOSSILS, AND FIRMWARE REFRESHDusk now drapes the mast in violet. Streetlamps flicker on; LED headlight arrays begin tinting the roadway cyan. Beneath the darkening asphalt, copper once meant for a clicking telegraphs now pipes broadband; beneath that, bricks baked when canals were high‑tech cradle those cables like red‑clay fossils. Media archaeologist Shannon Mattern argues that cities have always computed — tallying grain on cuneiform tablets, ringing bell‑tower hours to synchronize labor, routing mail through pneumatic tubes — only the substrates keep shifting, from clay and bronze to fiber optics and silicon. And trust me, nature was doing math long before humans claimed to invent it.From my perch, epochs overlay transparently: timber palisades, horse drawn carriage tracks, fiber conduits. My hunting tactic is merely firmware patch v.2025 in a 5,000‑year old operating system. Your protocol tomorrow may be Li‑Fi pulses from a smart pole — a future where streetlamps won’t just illuminate, they’ll whisper streams of data in rapid-fire flashes — or the hiss of an autonomous shuttle that brakes at frequencies human reflexes never reach.And you’ll be impressed with yourself. Meanwhile, I listen, map, and adjust — in my world here, survival goes to whoever learns faster, not whoever hits harder. Every fresh tactic buys a heartbeat of advantage, yet it also tightens the ratchet: the prey adapts, signals change, habits shift. Humans follow the same spiral — each smarter signal controller, each app‑driven reroute, plugs one gap while opening two more, slipping us all a step deeper into the city’s endless, restless loop.OF DASHBOARDS AND DAGGER-WINGSHumans may obsess over their dashboards and digital twins, yet a hawk that weighs less than a laptop already runs a live cognitive twin
Hello Interactors,I was in Santa Barbara recently having dinner on a friend’s deck when a rocket’s contrail streaked the sky. “Another one from Vandenberg,” he said. “Wait a couple minutes — you’ll hear it.” And we did. “They’ve gotten really annoying,” he added. He’s not wrong. In early 2024, SpaceX launched seven times more tonnage into space than the rest of the world combined, much of it from Vandenberg Space Force Base (renamed from Air Force Base in 2021). They’ve already been approved to fly 12,000 Starlink satellites, with filings for 30,000 more.This isn’t just future space junk — it’s infrastructure. And it’s not just in orbit. What Musk is doing in the sky is tied to what he’s building on the ground. Not in Vandenberg, where regulation still exists, but in Starbase, Texas, where the law doesn’t resist — it assists. There, Musk is testing how much sovereignty one man can claim under the banner of “innovation” — and how little we’ll do to stop him.TOWNS TO THRUST AND THRONEMusk isn’t just defying gravity — he’s defying law. In South Texas, a place called Starbase has taken shape along the Gulf Coast, hugging the edge of SpaceX’s rocket launch site. What looks like a town is really something else: a launchpad not just for spacecraft, but for a new form of privatized sovereignty.VIDEO: Time compresses at the edge of Starbase: a slow-built frontier where launch infrastructure rises faster than oversight. Source: Google EarthThis isn’t unprecedented. The United States has a long lineage of company towns — places where corporations controlled land, housing, labor, and local government. Pullman, Illinois is the most famous. But while labor historians and economic geographers have documented their economic and social impact, few have examined them as legal structures of power.That’s the gap legal scholar Brian Highsmith identifies in Governing the Company Town. That omission matters — because these places aren’t just undemocratic. They often function as quasi-sovereign legal shells, designed to serve capital, not people.Incorporation is the trick. In Texas, any area with at least 201 residents can petition to become a general-law municipality. That’s exactly what Musk has done. In a recent vote (212 to 6) residents approved the creation of an official town — Starbase. Most of those residents are SpaceX employees living on company-owned land…with a Tesla in the driveway. The result is a legally recognized town, politically constructed. SpaceX controls the housing, the workforce, and now, the electorate. Even the mayor is a SpaceX affiliate. With zoning powers and taxing authority, Musk now holds tools usually reserved for public governments — and he’s using them to build for rockets, not residents…unless they’re employees.VIDEO: Starbase expands frame by frame, not just as a company town, but as a legal experiment — where land, labor, and law are reassembled to serve orbit over ordinance. Source: Google EarthQuinn Slobodian, a historian of neoliberalism and global capitalism, shows how powerful companies and individuals increasingly use legal tools to redesign borders and jurisdictions to their advantage. In his book, Cracked Up Capitalism, he shows how jurisdiction becomes the secret weapon of the capitalist state around the world. I wrote about a techno-optimist fantasy state on the island of Roatán, part of the Bay Islands in Honduras a couple years ago. It isn’t new. Disney used the same playbook in 1967 with Florida’s Reedy Creek District — deeding slivers of land to employees to meet incorporation rules, then governing without real opposition. Highsmith draws a straight line to Musk: both use municipal law not to serve the public, but to avoid it. In Texas, beach access is often blocked near Starbase — even when rockets aren’t launching. A proposed bill would make ignoring an evacuation order a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by jail.Even if Starbase never fully resembles a traditional town, that’s beside the point. What Musk is really revealing isn’t some urban design oasis but how municipal frameworks can still be weaponized for private control. Through zoning laws, incorporation statutes, and infrastructure deals, corporations can shape legal entities that resemble cities but function more like logistical regimes.And yet, this tactic draws little sustained scrutiny. As Highsmith reminds us, legal scholarship has largely ignored how municipal tools are deployed to consolidate corporate power. That silence matters — because what looks like a sleepy launch site in Texas may be something much larger: a new form of rule disguised as infrastructure.ABOVE THE LAW, BELOW THE LANDElon Musk isn’t just shaping towns — he’s engineering systems. His tunnels, satellites, and rockets stretch across and beyond traditional borders. These aren’t just feats of engineering. They’re tools of control designed to bypass civic oversight and relocate governance into private hands. He doesn’t need to overthrow the state to escape regulation. He simply builds around it…and in the case of Texas, with it.Architect and theorist Keller Easterling, whose work examines how infrastructure quietly shapes political life, argues that these systems are not just supports for power — they are power. Infrastructure itself is a kind of operating system for shaping the city, states, countries…and now space.Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite constellation, provides internet access to users around the world. In Ukraine, it became a vital communications network after Russian attacks on local infrastructure. Musk enabled access — then later restricted it. He made decisions with real geopolitical consequences. No president. No Congress. Just a private executive shaping war from orbit.And it’s not just Ukraine. Starlink is now active in dozens of countries, often without formal agreements from national regulators. It bypasses local telecom laws, surveillance rules, and data protections. For authoritarian regimes, that makes it dangerous. But for democracies, it raises a deeper question: who governs the sky?Right now, the answer is: no one. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 assumes that nation-states, not corporations, are the primary actors in orbit. But Starlink functions in a legal grey zone, using low Earth orbit as a loophole in international law…aided and abetted by the U.S. defense department.VIDEO: Thousands of Starlink satellites, visualized in low Earth orbit, encircle the planet like a privatized exosphere—reshaping global communication while raising questions of governance, visibility, and control. Source: StarlinkThe result is a telecom empire without borders. Musk commands a growing share of orbital infrastructure but answers to no global regulator. The International Telecommunication Union can coordinate satellite spectrum, but it can’t enforce ethical or geopolitical standards. Musk alone decides whether Starlink aids governments, rebels, or armies. As Quinn Slobodian might put it, this is exception-making on a planetary scale.Now let’s go underground. The Boring Company digs high-speed tunnels beneath cities like Las Vegas, sidestepping standard planning processes. These projects often exclude transit agencies and ignore public engagement. They’re built for select users, not the public at large. Local governments, eager for tech-driven investment, offer permits and partnerships — even if it means circumventing democratic procedures.Taken together — Starlink above, Boring Company below, Tesla charging networks on the ground — Musk’s empire moves through multiple layers of infrastructure, each reshaping civic life without formal accountability. His systems carry people, data, and energy — but not through the public channels meant to regulate them. They’re not overseen by voters. They’re not authorized by democratic mandate. Yet they profoundly shape how people move, communicate, and live.Geographer Deborah Cowen, whose research focuses on the global logistics industry, argues that infrastructure like ports, fiber-optic cables, and pipelines have become tools of geopolitical strategy. Logistics as a form of war by other means. Brian Highsmith argues this is a form of “functional fragmentation” — breaking governance into layers and loopholes that allow corporations to sidestep collective control. These aren’t mere workarounds. They signal a deeper shift in how power is organized — not just across space, but through it.This kind of sovereignty is easy to miss because it doesn’t always resemble government. But when a private actor controls transit systems, communication networks, and even military connectivity — across borders, beneath cities, and in orbit — we’re not just dealing with infrastructure. We’re dealing with rule.And, just like with company towns, the legal scholarship is struggling to catch up. These layered, mobile, and non-territorial regimes challenge our categories of law and space alike. What these fantastical projects inspire is often awe. But what they should require is law.AMNESIA AIDS THE AMBITIOUSElon Musk may dazzle with dreams full-blown, but the roots of his power are not his own. The United States has a long tradition of private actors ruling like governments — with public blessing. These aren’t outliers. They’re part of a national pattern, deeply embedded in our legal geography: public authority outsourced to private ambition.The details vary, but the logic repeats. Whether it’s early colonial charters, speculative land empires, company towns, or special districts carved for tech campuses, American history is full of projects where law becomes a scaffold for private sovereignty. Rather than recount every episode, let’s just say from John Winthrop to George Washington to Walt Disney to Elon Musk, America has always made room for men who rule through charters, not elections.Yet despite the frequency of these arrangements, the scholarship has been oddly selective.According to Highsmith, legal academia has largely ignored
Hello Interactors,This week, I’ve been reflecting on the themes of my last few essays — along with a pile of research that’s been oddly in sync. Transit planning. Neuroscience. Happiness studies. Complexity theory. Strange mix, but it keeps pointing to the same thing: cities aren’t just struggling with transportation or housing. They’re struggling with connection. With meaning. With the simple question: what kind of happiness should a city make possible? And why don’t we ask that more often?STRANGERS SHUNNED, SYSTEMS SIMULATEDThe urban century was supposed to bring us together. Denser cities, faster mobility, more connected lives — these were the promises of global urbanization. Yet in the shadow of those promises, a different kind of city has emerged in America with growing undertones elsewhere: one that increasingly seeks to eliminate the stranger, bypass friction, and privatize interaction.Whether through algorithmically optimized ride-sharing, private tunnels built to evade street life, or digital maps simulating place without presence for autonomous vehicles, a growing set of design logics work to render other people — especially unknown others — invisible, irrelevant, or avoidable.I admit, I too can get seduced by this comfort, technology, and efficiency. But cities aren’t just systems of movement — they’re systems of meaning. Space is never neutral; it’s shaped by power and shapes behavior in return. This isn’t new. Ancient cities like Teotihuacan (tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN) in central Mexico, once one of the largest cities in the world, aligned their streets and pyramids with the stars. Chang’an (chahng-AHN), the capital of Tang Dynasty China, used strict cardinal grids and walled compounds to reflect Confucian ideals of order and hierarchy. And Uruk (OO-rook), in ancient Mesopotamia, organized civic life around temple complexes that stood at the spiritual and administrative heart of the city.These weren’t just settlements — they were spatial arguments about how people should live together, and who should lead. Even Middle Eastern souks and hammams were more than markets or baths; they were civic infrastructure. Whether through temples or bus stops, the question is the same: What kind of social behavior is this space asking of us?Neuroscience points to answers. As Shane O’Mara argues, walking is not just transport — it’s neurocognitive infrastructure. The hippocampus, which governs memory, orientation, and mood, activates when we move through physical space. Walking among others, perceiving spontaneous interactions, and attending to environmental cues strengthens our cognitive maps and emotional regulation.This makes city oriented around ‘stranger danger’ not just unjust — but indeed dangerous. Because to eliminate friction is to undermine emergence — not only in the social sense, but in the economic and cultural ones too. Cities thrive on weak ties, on happenstance, on proximity without intention. Mark Granovetter’s landmark paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, showed that it's those looser, peripheral relationships — not our inner circles — that drive opportunity, creativity, and mobility. Karl Polanyi called it embeddedness: the idea that markets don’t float in space, they’re grounded in the social fabric around them.You see it too in scale theory — in the work of Geoffrey West and Luís Bettencourt — where the productive and innovative energy of cities scales with density, interaction, and diversity. When you flatten all that into private tunnels and algorithmic efficiency, you don’t just lose the texture — you lose the conditions for invention.As David Roberts, a climate and policy journalist known for his systems thinking and sharp urban critiques, puts it: this is “the anti-social dream of elite urbanism” — a vision where you never have to share space with anyone not like you. In conversation with him, Jarrett Walker, a transit planner and theorist who’s spent decades helping cities design equitable bus networks, also pushes back against this logic. He warns that when cities build transit around avoidance — individualized rides, privatized tunnels, algorithmic sorting — they aren’t just solving inefficiencies. They’re hollowing out the very thing that makes transit (and cities) valuable and also public: the shared experience of strangers moving together.The question isn’t just whether cities are efficient — but what kind of social beings they help us become. If we build cities to avoid each other, we shouldn’t be surprised when they crumble as we all forget how to live together.COVERAGE, CARE, AND CIVIC CALMIf you follow urban and transit planning debates long enough, you’ll hear the same argument come up again and again: Should we focus on ridership or coverage? High-frequency routes where lots of people travel, or wide access for people who live farther out — even if fewer use the service? For transit nerds, it’s a policy question. For everyone else, it’s about dignity.As Walker puts it, coverage isn’t about efficiency — it’s about “a sense of fairness.” It’s about living in a place where your city hasn’t written you off because you’re not profitable to serve. Walker’s point is that coverage isn’t charity. It’s a public good, one that tells people: You belong here.That same logic shows up in more surprising places — like the World Happiness Report. Year after year, Finland lands at the top. But as writer Molly Young found during her visit to Helsinki, Finnish “happiness” isn’t about joy or euphoria. It’s about something steadier: trust, safety, and institutional calm. What the report measures is evaluative happiness — how satisfied people are with their lives over time — not affective happiness, which is more about momentary joy or emotional highs.There’s a Finnish word that captures this. It the feeling you get after a sauna: saunanjälkeinen raukeus (SOW-nahn-yell-kay-nen ROW-keh-oos) — the softened, slowed state of the body and mind. That’s what cities like Helsinki seem to deliver: not bliss, but a stable, low-friction kind of contentment. And while that may lack sparkle, it makes people feel held.And infrastructure plays a big role. In Helsinki, the signs in the library don’t say “Be Quiet.” They say, “Please let others work in peace.” It’s a small thing, but it speaks volumes — less about control, more about shared responsibility. There are saunas in government buildings. Parents leave their babies sleeping in strollers outside cafés. Transit is clean, quiet, and frequent. As Young puts it, these aren’t luxuries — they’re part of a “bone-deep sense of trust” the city builds and reinforces. Not enforced from above, but sustained by expectation, habit, and care.My family once joined an organized walking tour of Copenhagen. The guide, who was from Spain, pointed to a clock in a town square and said, almost in passing, “The government has always made sure this clock runs on time — even during war.” It wasn’t just about punctuality. It was about trust. About the quiet promise that the public realm would still hold, even when everything else felt uncertain. This, our guide noted from his Spanish perspective, is what what make Scandinavians so-called ‘happy’. They feel held.Studies show that most of what boosts long-term happiness isn’t about dopamine hits — it’s about relational trust. Feeling safe. Feeling seen. Knowing you won’t be stranded if you don’t have a car or a credit card. Knowing the city works, even if you don’t make it work for you.In this way, transit frequency and subtle signs in Helsinki are doing the same thing. They’re shaping behavior and reinforcing social norms. They’re saying: we share space here. Don’t be loud. Don’t cut in line. Don’t treat public space like it’s only for you.That kind of city can’t be built on metrics alone. It needs moral imagination — the kind that sees coverage, access, and slowness as features, not bugs. That’s not some socialist’s idea of utopia. It’s just thoughtful. Built into the culture, yes, but also the design.But sometimes we’re just stuck with whatever design is already in place. Even if it’s not so thoughtful. Economists and social theorists have long used the concept of path dependence to explain why some systems — cities, institutions, even technologies — get stuck. The idea dates back to work in economics and political science in the 1980s, where it was used to show how early decisions, even small ones, can lock in patterns that are hard to reverse.Once you’ve laid train tracks, built freeways, zoned for single-family homes — you’ve shaped what comes next. Changing course isn’t impossible, but it’s costly, slow, and politically messy. The QWERTY keyboard is a textbook example: not the most efficient layout, but one that stuck because switching systems later would be harder than just adapting to what we’ve got.Urban scholars Michael Storper and Allen Scott brought this thinking into city studies. They’ve shown how economic geography and institutional inertia shape urban outcomes — how past planning decisions, labor markets, and infrastructure investments limit the options cities have today. If your city bet on car-centric growth decades ago, you’re probably still paying for that decision, even if pivoting is palatable to the public.CONNECTIONS, COMPLEXITY, CITIES THAT CAREThere’s a quote often attributed to Stephen Hawking that’s made the rounds in complexity science circles: “The 21st century will be the century of complexity.” No one’s entirely sure where he said it — it shows up in systems theory blogs, talks, and books — but it sticks. Probably because it feels true.If the last century was about physics — closed systems, force, motion, precision — then this one is about what happens when the pieces won’t stay still. When the rules change mid-game. When causes ripple back as consequences. In other words: cities.Planners have tried to tame that complexity in all kinds of ways. Grids. Zoning codes. Dashboards. There’s long been a kind of “physi
Hello Interactors,This week, the European Space Agency launched a satellite to "weigh" Earth's 1.5 trillion trees. It will give scientists deeper insight into forests and their role in the climate — far beyond surface readings. Pretty cool. And it's coming from Europe.Meanwhile, I learned that the U.S. Secretary of Defense — under Trump — had a makeup room installed in the Pentagon to look better on TV. Also pretty cool, I guess. And very American.The contrast was hard to miss. Even with better data, the U.S. shows little appetite for using geographic insight to actually address climate change. Information is growing. Willpower, not so much.So it was oddly clarifying to read a passage Christopher Hobson posted on Imperfect Notes from a book titled America by a French author — a travelogue of softs. Last week I offered new lenses through which to see the world, I figured I’d try this French pair on — to see America, and the world it effects, as he did.PAPER, POWER, AND PROJECTIONI still have a folded paper map of Seattle in the door of my car. It’s a remnant of a time when physical maps reflected the reality before us. You unfolded a map and it innocently offered the physical world on a page. The rest was left to you — including knowing how to fold it up again.But even then, not all maps were neutral or necessarily innocent. Sure, they crowned capitals and trimmed borders, but they could also leave things out or would make certain claims. From empire to colony, from mission to market, maps often arrived not to reflect place, but to declare control of it. Still, we trusted it…even if was an illusion.I learned how to interrogate maps in my undergraduate history of cartography class — taught by the legendary cartographer Waldo Tobler. But even with that knowledge, when I was then taught how to make maps, that interrogation was more absent. I confidently believed I was mediating truth. The lines and symbols I used pointed to substance; they signaled a thing. I traced rivers from existing base maps with a pen on vellum and trusted they existed in the world as sure as the ink on the page. I cut out shading for a choropleth map and believed it told a stable story about population, vegetation, or economics. That trust was embodied in representation — the idea that a sign meant something enduring. That we could believe what maps told us.This is the world of semiotics — the study of how signs create meaning. American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce offered a sturdy model: a sign (like a map line) refers to an object (the river), and its meaning emerges in interpretation. Meaning, in this view, is relational — but grounded. A stop sign, a national anthem, a border — they meant something because they pointed beyond themselves, to a world we shared.But there are cracks in this seemingly sturdy model.These cracks pose this question: why do we trust signs in the first place? That trust — in maps, in categories, in data — didn’t emerge from neutrality. It was built atop agendas.Take the first U.S. census in 1790. It didn’t just count — it defined. Categories like “free white persons,” “all other free persons,” and “slaves” weren’t neutral. They were political tools, shaping who mattered and by how much. People became variables. Representation became abstraction.Or Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century Swedish botanist who built the taxonomies we still use: genus, species, kingdom. His system claimed objectivity but was shaped by distance and empire. Linnaeus never left Sweden. He named what he hadn’t seen, classified people he’d never met — sorting humans into racial types based on colonial stereotypes. These weren’t observations. They were projections based on stereotypes gathered from travelers, missionaries, and imperial officials.Naming replaced knowing. Life was turned into labels. Biology became filing. And once abstracted, it all became governable, measurable, comparable, and, ultimately, manageable.Maps followed suit.What once lived as a symbolic invitation — a drawing of place — became a system of location. I was studying geography at a time (and place) when Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and GIScience was transforming cartography. Maps weren’t just about visual representations; they were spatial databases. Rows, columns, attributes, and calculations took the place of lines and shapes on map. Drawing what we saw turned to abstracting what could then be computed so that it could then be visualized, yes, but also managed.Chris Perkins, writing on the philosophy of mapping, argued that digital cartographies didn’t just depict the world — they constituted it. The map was no longer a surface to interpret, but a script to execute. As critical geographers Sam Hind and Alex Gekker argue, the modern “mapping impulse” isn’t about understanding space — it’s about optimizing behavior through it; in a world of GPS and vehicle automation, the map no longer describes the territory, it becomes it. Laura Roberts, writing on film and geography, showed how maps had fused with cinematic logic — where places aren’t shown, but performed. Place and navigation became narrative. New York in cinema isn’t a place — it’s a performance of ambition, alienation, or energy. Geography as mise-en-scène.In other words, the map’s loss of innocence wasn’t just technical. It was ontological — a shift in the very nature of what maps are and what kind of reality they claim to represent. Geography itself had entered the domain of simulation — not representing space but staging it. You can simulate traveling anywhere in the world, all staged on Google maps. Last summer my son stepped off the train in Edinburgh, Scotland for the first time in his life but knew exactly where he was. He’d learned it driving on simulated streets in a simulated car on XBox. He walked us straight to our lodging.These shifts in reality over centuries weren’t necessarily mistakes. They unfolded, emerged, or evolved through the rational tools of modernity — and for a time, they worked. For many, anyway. Especially for those in power, seeking power, or benefitting from it. They enabled trade, governance, development, and especially warfare. But with every shift came this question: at what cost?FROM SIGNS TO SPECTACLEAs early as the early 1900s, Max Weber warned of a world disenchanted by bureaucracy — a society where rationalization would trap the human spirit in what he called an iron cage. By mid-century, thinkers pushed this further.Michel Foucault revealed how systems of knowledge — from medicine to criminal justice — were entangled with systems of power. To classify was to control. To represent was to discipline. Roland Barthes dissected the semiotics of everyday life — showing how ads, recipes, clothing, even professional wrestling were soaked in signs pretending to be natural.Guy Debord, in the 1967 The Society of the Spectacle, argued that late capitalism had fully replaced lived experience with imagery. “The spectacle,” he wrote, “is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”Then came Jean Baudrillard — a French sociologist, media theorist, and provocateur — who pushed the critique of representation to its limit. In the 1980s, where others saw distortion, he saw substitution: signs that no longer referred to anything real. Most vividly, in his surreal, gleaming 1986 travelogue America, he described the U.S. not as a place, but as a performance — a projection without depth, still somehow running.Where Foucault showed that knowledge was power, and Debord showed that images replaced life, Baudrillard argued that signs had broken free altogether. A map might once distort or simplify — but it still referred to something real. By the late 20th century, he argued, signs no longer pointed to anything. They pointed only to each other.You didn’t just visit Disneyland. You visited the idea of America — manufactured, rehearsed, rendered. You didn’t just use money. You used confidence by handing over a credit card — a symbol of wealth that is lighter and moves faster than any gold.In some ways, he was updating a much older insight by another Frenchman. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he wasn’t just studying law or government — he was studying performance. He saw how Americans staged democracy, how rituals of voting and speech created the image of a free society even as inequality and exclusion thrived beneath it. Tocqueville wasn’t cynical. He simply understood that America believed in its own image — and that belief gave it a kind of sovereign feedback loop.Baudrillard called this condition simulation — when representation becomes self-contained. When the distinction between real and fake no longer matters because everything is performance. Not deception — orchestration.He mapped four stages of this logic:* Faithful representation – A sign reflects a basic reality. A map mirrors the terrain.* Perversion of reality – The sign begins to distort. Think colonial maps as logos or exclusionary zoning.* Pretending to represent – The sign no longer refers to anything but performs as if it does. Disneyland isn’t America — it’s the fantasy of America. (ironically, a car-free America)* Pure simulation – The sign has no origin or anchor. It floats. Zillow heatmaps, Uber surge zones — maps that don’t reflect the world, but determine how you move through it.We don’t follow maps as they were once known anymore. We follow interfaces.And not just in apps. Cities themselves are in various stages of simulation. New York still sells itself as a global center. But in a distributed globalized and digitized economy, there is no center — only the perversion of an old reality. Paris subsidizes quaint storefronts not to nourish citizens, but to preserve the perceived image of Paris. Paris pretending to be Paris. Every city has its own marketing campaign. They don’t manage infrastructure — they manage perception. The skyline is a product shot. T
Hello Interactors,Every week it seems to get harder to ignore the feeling that we're living through some major turning point — politically, economically, environmentally, and even in how our cities are taking shape around us. Has society seen this movie before? Spoiler: we have, and it has many sequels. History doesn't repeat exactly, but it sure rhymes, especially when competition for power increases, climates collapse, and the urban fabric unravels and rewinds. Today, we'll sift through history’s clues, peek through some fresh conceptual lenses, and consider why the way we frame these shifts matters — maybe more now than ever.PRESSURE POINTS AT URBAN JOINTSLet’s ground where we all might be historically speaking. Clues from long-term historical patterns suggests social systems go through periodic cycles of integration, expansion, and crisis. Historical quantitative data reveals recurring waves of structural-demographic pressure — moments when inequality, elite overproduction, and resource strain converge to produce instability.By quantitative historian Peter Turchin’s account, we are currently drifting through some kind of inflection point. His 2010 essay in Nature anticipated the early 2020s as a period of peak instability that started around 1970. That’s when people earning advanced degrees, entering law, finance, media, and politics skyrocketed from the 1970s onward. Meanwhile, the number of elite positions (like Senate seats, Supreme Court clerkships, high level corporate positions) remained fixed or even shrank. This created decades of increased income inequality, elite competition, and declining public trust that created conditions for events like the rise of Trump, polarization, and institutional gridlock.The symptoms are familiar to us now, and they are markers that echo previous systemic ruptures in U.S. history.In the 1770s, colonial grievances and elite competition led to a historic revolutionary realignment. It also coincided with poor harvests and food insecurity that amplified unrest. The 1860s brought civil war driven by slavery and sectional conflict. It too occurred during a period of climate volatility and crop failures. The early 20th century saw the Gilded Age unravel into labor unrest and the Great Depression, following years of drought and economic collapse in the Dust Bowl. The 1960s through 1980s unleashed social protest, stagflation, and the shift toward neoliberal governance amid fears of resource scarcity and rising pollution. In each case, ecological shocks layered onto political and economic pressures — making transformation not only likely, but necessary.Spatial patterns shifted alongside these political ruptures — from rail hubs and company towns to low flung suburban rings and high-rise financialized skylines. Cities can be both staging grounds creating these shifts and mirrors reflecting them. As material and symbolic anchors of society, they reflect where systems are strained — and where new forms may soon take root.Urban transformation today is neither orderly nor speculative — it is reactive. These socio-political, economic, and ecological shifts have fragmented not just the city, but the very frameworks we use to understand it. And with urban scale theory as a measure, change is accelerating exponentially. This means our conceptual tools to understand these shifts best respond just as quickly.Let’s dip into the academic world of contemporary urban studies to gauge how scholars are considering these shifts. Here are three lenses that seem well-suited to consider our current landscape…or perhaps those my own biases are attracted to.Urban Political Ecology. This sees the city as a socio-natural process — shaped by uneven flows of energy, capital, and extraction. This approach, developed by critical geographers like Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika, highlights how environmental degradation is often tied to social inequality and political neglect. Matthew Gandy, an urban geographer who blends political theory and environmental history, adds to this view. He shows how infrastructure — from water systems to waste networks — shapes urban nature and power.The Jackson, Mississippi water crisis, for example, revealed how ecological stress and decades of disinvestment resulted in a disheartening breakdown. In 2022, flooding overwhelmed Jackson's aging water system, leaving tens of thousands without safe drinking water — but the failure had been decades in the making. Years of underfunding, political neglect, and systemic racism had hollowed out the city’s infrastructure.Or take Musk's AI data center called Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee. It’s adjacent to historically Black neighborhoods and uses 35 methane gas-powered turbines that emit harmful nitrogen oxides (NOx) and other pollutants. It’s reported to be operating without proper permits and contributes to air quality issues these communities already have long experienced. These crises are vivid cases of what urban political ecologists warn about: how marginalization and disinvestment manifest physically in infrastructure failure, disproportionately affecting already vulnerable populations.Platform Urbanism. This explains much of the growing visible and invisible restructuring of urban space. From delivery networks to sidewalk surveillance, digital platforms now shape land use and behavioral patterns. Urban theorists like Sarah Barns and geographer Agnieszka Leszczynski describe these systems as shadow planners — zoning isn’t just on paper anymore; it’s encoded in app interfaces and service contracts. Shoshana Zuboff, a social psychologist and scholar of the digital economy, pushes this further. She argues that platforms are not just intermediaries but extractive infrastructures. They’re designed to shape behavior and monetize it at scale. As platforms replace institutions, their spatial footprint expands. For example, Amazon has redefined regional land use by building vast fulfillment centers and reshaping delivery logistics across suburbs and exurbs. Or look at Uber and Lyft. They’ve altered curbside usage and traffic patterns in major cities without ever appearing on official planning documents. These changes demonstrate how digital infrastructure now directs physical development — often faster than public institutions can respond.Neoliberal Urbanism. Though widely critiqued, this remains the dominant lens. Despite growing backlash, deregulated markets, privatized services, and financialized real estate continue to shape planning logic and policy defaults. Urban theorists like Neil Brenner and economic geographer Jamie Peck describe this as a shift from managerial to entrepreneurial cities — where the suburbs sprawl, the towers rise, and exclusion is reproduced not by public design input, but by tax codes, ownership models, and legacy zoning. Like many governing systems, the default is to preserve the status quo. Institutions, once entrenched, tend to perpetuate existing frameworks — even in the face of mounting social or ecological stress.For example, in many U.S. cities, exclusionary zoning laws have long restricted the construction of multi-family housing in favor of single-family homes — limiting supply, reinforcing segregation, and driving up housing costs. Even modest attempts at reform often meet local resistance, revealing how deeply these rules are woven into planning culture.These lenses aren’t just theoretical — they are descriptively powerful. They reflect what is, not what could be. But describing the present is only the first step.NEW NOTIONS OF URBAN MOTIONSIt’s worth considering alternative conceptual lenses rising in relevance. These are not yet changing the shape of cites at scale, but they are shaping how we think about our urban futures. Historically, new conceptual lenses have often emerged in the wake of the kind of major social and spatial disruptions already covered.For example, the upheavals of the 19th century. This rapid industrialization, urban crowding, and public health crises gave rise to modern, industrial-era city planning. The mid-20th century crises helped institutionalize zoning and modernist design, while the neoliberal turn of the late 20th century elevated market-driven planning models.Emerging conceptual lenses of the 21st century are grounded in complexity, care, informality, and computation. These are responses to the fragmented plurality of our planetary plight — characteristic of the current calamity of our many crises, or polycrisis. Frameworks for thinking and imagining cities gain traction in architecture and planning studios, classrooms, online and physical activist spaces, and experimental design projects. They’re not yet dominant, but they are gaining ground. Here are a few I believe to be particularly relevant today.Assemblage Urbanism. This lens views cities not as coherent wholes, but as contingent networks that are always in the making. The term "assemblage" comes from philosophy and anthropology. It refers to how diverse elements — people, materials, policies, and technologies — come together in temporary, evolving configurations. This lens resists top-down models of urban design and instead sees cities as patchworks of relationships and improvisations.Introduced by scholars like Ignacio Farias, an urban anthropologist focused on technological and infrastructural urban change, and AbdouMaliq Simone, a sociologist known for his work on African cities and informality, this approach offers a vocabulary for complexity and contradiction. It examines cities made of sensors and encampments, logistics hubs and wetlands. Colin McFarlane, a geographer who studies how cities function and evolve — especially in places often overlooked in mainstream planning — shows how urban learning spreads through these networks that cross places and scales. As the built environment becomes more fragmented and multi-scalar, this lens offers a way to map the friction and fluidity of emergent urban life
Hello Interactors,Cities are layered by past priorities. I was just in Overland Park, Kansas, where over the last 25 years I’ve seen malls rise, fall, and shift outward as stores leave older spaces behind.When urban systems shift — due to climate, capital, codes, or crisis — cities drift. These changes ripple across scales and resemble fractal patterns, repeating yet evolving uniquely.This essay traces these patterns: past regimes, present signals, and competing questions over what's next.URBAN SCRIPTS AND SHIFTING SCALESAs cities grow, they remember.Look at a city’s form — the way its streets stretch, how its blocks bend, where its walls break. These are not neutral choices. They are residues of regimes. Spatial decisions shaped by power, fear, belief, or capital.In ancient Rome, cities were laid out in strict grids. Streets ran along two axes: the cardo and decumanus. It made the city legible to the empire — easy to control, supply, and expand. Urban form followed the logic of conquest.As cartography historian, O. A. W. Dilke writes,“One of the main advantages of a detailed map of Rome was to improve the efficiency of the city's administration. Augustus had divided Rome into fourteen districts, each subdivided into vici. These districts were administered by annually elected magistrates, with officials and public slaves under them.”In medieval Europe, cities got messy. Sovereignty was fragmented. Trade replaced tribute. Guilds ran markets as streets tangled around church and square. The result was organic — but not random. It reflected a new mode of life: small-scale, interdependent, locally governed.In 19th-century Paris, the streets changed again. Narrow alleys became wide boulevards. Not just for beauty — for visibility and force. Haussmann’s renovations made room for troops, light, and clean air. It was urban form as counter-revolution.Then came modernism. Superblocks, towers, highways. A form that made sense for mass production, cheap land, and the car. Planning became machine logic — form as efficiency.Each of these shifts marked the arrival of a new spatial calculus — ways of organizing the built environment in response to systemic pressures. Over time, these approaches came to be described by urbanists as morphological regimes: durable patterns of urban form shaped not just by architecture, but by ideology, infrastructure, and power. The term “morphology” itself was borrowed from biology, where it described the structure of organisms. In urban studies, it originally referred to the physical anatomy of the city — blocks, plots, grids, and streets. But today the field has broadened. It’s evolved into more of a conceptual lens: not just a way of classifying form, but of understanding how ideas sediment into space. Today, morphology tracks how cities are shaped — not only physically, but discursively and increasingly so, computationally. Urban planning scholar Geoff Boeing calls urban form a “spatial script.” It encodes decisions made long ago — about who belongs where, what gets prioritized, and what can be seen or accessed. Other scholars treated cities like palimpsests — a term borrowed from manuscript studies, where old texts were scraped away and overwritten, yet traces remained. In urban form, each layer carries the imprint of a former spatial logic, never fully erased. Michael Robert Günter (M. R. G.) Conzen, a British geographer, pioneered the idea of town plan analysis in the 1960s. He examined how street patterns, plot divisions, and building forms reveal historical shifts. Urban geographer and architect, Anne Vernez Moudon brought these methods into contemporary urbanism. She argued that morphological analysis could serve as a bridge between disciplines, from planning to architecture to geography. Archaeologist Michael E. Smith goes further. Specializing in ancient cities, Smith argues that urban form doesn’t just reflect culture — it produces it. In early settlements, the spatial organization of plazas, roads, and monuments actively shaped how people understood power, social hierarchy, and civic identity. Ritual plazas weren’t just for ceremony — they structured the cognitive and social experience of space. Urban form, in this sense, is conceptual. It’s how a society makes its world visible. And when that society changes — politically, economically, technologically — so does its form. Not immediately. Not neatly. But eventually. Almost always in response to pressure from the outside.INTERVAL AND INFLECTIONUrban morphology used to evolve slowly. But today, it changes faster — and with increasing volatility. Physicist Geoffrey West, and other urban scientists, describes how complex systems like cities exhibit superlinear scaling: as they grow, they generate more innovation, infrastructure, and socio-economic activity at an accelerating pace. But this growth comes with a catch: the system becomes dependent on continuous bursts of innovation to avoid collapse. West compares it to jumping from one treadmill to another — each one running faster than the last. What once took centuries, like the rise of industrial manufacturing, is now compressed into decades or less. The intervals between revolutions — from steam power to electricity to the internet — keep shrinking, and cities must adapt at an ever-faster clip just to maintain stability. But this also breeds instability as the intervals between systemic transformations shrink. Cities that once evolved over centuries can now shift in decades.Consider Rome. Roman grid structure held for centuries. Medieval forms persisted well into the Renaissance. Even Haussmann’s Paris boulevards endured through war and modernization. But in the 20th century, urban morphology entered a period of rapid churn. Western urban regions shifted from dense industrial cores to sprawling postwar suburbs to globalized financial districts in under a century — each a distinct regime, unfolding at unprecedented speed.Meanwhile, rural and exurban zones transformed too. Suburbs stretched outward. Logistics corridors carved through farmland. Industrial agriculture consolidated land and labor. The whole urban-rural spectrum was redrawn — not evenly, but thoroughly — over a few decades.Why the speed?It’s not just technology. It’s the stacking of exogenous shocks. Public health crises. Wars. Economic crashes. Climate shifts. New empires. New markets. New media. These don’t just hit policy — they hit form.Despite urbanities adaptability, it resists change. But when enough pressure builds, it breaks and fragments — or bends fast.Quantitative historians like Peter Turchin describe these moments as episodes of structural-demographic pressure. His theory suggests that as societies grow, they cycle through phases of expansion and instability. When rising inequality, elite overproduction, and resource strain coincide, the system enters a period of fragility. The ruling class becomes bloated and competitive, public trust erodes, and the state’s ability to mediate conflict weakens. At some point, the social contract fractures — not necessarily through revolution, but through cumulative dysfunction that demands structural transformation.Cities reflect that process spatially. The street doesn’t revolt. But it reroutes. The built environment shows where power has snapped or shifted. Consider Industrial Modernity. Assuming we start in 1850, it took roughly 100 years before the next regime took shape — the Fordist-Suburban Expansion starting in roughly 1945. It took around 30-40 years for deregulation to hit in the 80s. By 1995 information, communication, and technology accelerated globalization, financialization, and the urban regime we’re currently in — Neoliberal Polycentrism.Neoliberal Polycentricism may sound like a wonky and abstract term, but it reflects a familiar reality: a pattern of decentralized, uneven urban growth shaped by market-driven logics. While some scholars debate the continued utility of the overused term 'neoliberalism' itself, its effects on the built environment remain visible. Market priorities continue to dominate and reshape spatial development and planning norms. It is not a wholly new spatial condition. It's the latest articulation of a longer American tradition of decentralizing people and capital beyond the urban core. In the 19th century, this dynamic took shape through the rise of satellite towns, railroad suburbs, and peripheral manufacturing hubs. These developments were often driven by speculative land ventures, private infrastructure investments, and the desire to escape the regulatory and political constraints of city centers. The result was a form of urban dispersal that created new nodes of growth, frequently insulated from municipal oversight and rooted in socio-economic and racial segregation. This early polycentricism, like fireworks spawning in all directions from the first blast, set the stage for later waves of privatized suburbanization and regional fragmentation. Neoliberalism would come to accelerate and codify this expansion.It came in the form of edge cities, exurbs, and special economic zones that proliferated in the 80s and 90s. They grew not as organic responses to demographic needs, but as spatial products of deregulated markets and speculative capital. Governance fragmented. Infrastructure was often privatized or outsourced. As Joel Garreau’s 1991 book Edge City demonstrates, a place like Tysons Corner, Virginia — a highway-bound, developer-led edge city — embodied this shift: planned by commerce, not civic vision. A decade later, planners tried to retrofit that vision — adding transit, density, and walkability — but progress has been uneven, with car infrastructure still shaping much of daily life.This regime aligned with the rise of financial abstraction and logistical optimization. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman argue in Underground Empire, digital finance extended global capitalism’s reach by creating a networked infrastructure that
Hello Interactors,Spring at Interplace brings a shift to mapping, GIS, and urban design. While talk of industrial revival stirs nostalgia — steel mills, union jobs, bustling Main Streets — the reality on the ground is different: warehouses, data centers, vertical suburbs, and last-mile depots. Less Rosy the Riveter, more Ada Lovelace. Our cities are being shaped accordingly — optimized not for community, but for logistics.FROM STOREFRONTS TO STEEL DOORSLet’s start with these two charts recently shared by the historian of global finance and power Adam Tooze at Chartbook. One shows Amazon passing Walmart in quarterly sales for the first time. The other shows a steadily declining drop in plans for small business capital expenditure. Confidence shot up upon the election of Trump, but dropped suddenly when tariff talks trumped tax tempering. Together, these charts paint a picture: control over how people buy, build, and shape space is shifting — fast. It all starts quietly. A parking lot gets fenced off. Trucks show up. Maybe the old strip mall disappears overnight. A few months later, there’s a low, gray building with no windows. No grand opening. Just a stream of delivery vans pulling in and out.This isn’t just a new kind of facility — it’s a new kind of urban and suburban logic.Platform logistics has rewritten the rules of space. Where cities were once shaped by factories and storefronts, now they’re shaped by fulfillment timelines, routing algorithms, and the need to move goods faster than planning commissions can meet.In the past, small businesses were physical anchors. They invested in place. They influenced how neighborhoods looked, felt, and functioned. But when capital expenditures from local firms drop — as that second chart shows — their power to shape the block goes with it.What fills the vacuum is logistics. And it doesn’t negotiate like the actors it replaces.This isn’t just a retail story. It’s a story about agency — who gets to decide what a place is for. When small businesses cut back on investment, it’s not just the storefront that disappears. So does the capacity to influence a block, a street, a community. Local business owners don’t just sell goods — they co-create neighborhoods. They choose where to open, how to hire, how to design, and what kind of social space their business offers. All of that is a form of micro-planning — planning from below. France, as one example, subsidizes these co-created neighborhoods in Paris to insure they uphold the romantic image of a Parisian boulevard.But without subsidies, these actors are disappearing. And in the vacuum, big brands and logistics move in. Not softly, either. Amazon alone added hundreds of logistics facilities to U.S. land in the past five years. Data centers compete for this land. Meta recently announced a four million square foot facility in Richland Parish, Louisiana. It will be their largest data center in the world.These buildings are a new kind of mall. They’re massive, quiet, windowless buildings that optimize for speed, not presence. This is what researchers call logistics urbanization — a land use logic where space is valued not for what people can do in it, but for how efficiently packages and data can pass through it.The shift is structural. It remakes how land is zoned, how roads are used, and how people move — and it does so at a scale that outpaces most municipal planning timelines. That’s not just a market change. It’s a change in governance. Because planners? Mayors? Even state reps? They're not steering anymore. They're reacting.City managers once had tools to shape growth — zoning, permitting, community input. But logistics and tech giants don’t negotiate like developers. They come with pre-designed footprints and expectations. If a city doesn’t offer fast approval, industrial zoning, and tax breaks, they’ll skip to the next one. And often, they won’t even say why. Economists studying these state and local business tax incentives say these serve as the “primary place-based policy in the United States.”It forces a kind of economic speed dating. I see it in my own area as local governments vie for the attention (and revenue) of would-be high-tech suitors. But it can be quiet, as one report suggests: “This first stage of logistical urbanization goes largely unnoticed insofar as the construction of a warehouse in an existing industrial zone rarely raises significant political issues.”(2)This isn’t just in major cities. Across the U.S., cities are bending their long-term plans to chase short-term fulfillment deals. Even rural local governments routinely waive design standards and sidestep public input to accommodate warehouse and tech siting — because saying no can feel like missing out on tax revenue, jobs, or political wins.(2)What was once a dynamic choreography of land use and local voices becomes something flatter: a data pipeline.It isn’t all bad. Fulfillment hubs closer to homes mean fewer trucks, shorter trips, and lower emissions. Data centers crunching billions of bits is better than a PC whirring under the desk of every home. There is a scale and sustainability case to be made.But logistic liquidity doesn’t equal optimistic livability. It doesn’t account for what’s lost when civic agency fades, or when a city works better for packages than for people. You can optimize flow — and still degrade life.That’s what those two charts at the beginning really show. Not just an economic shift, but a spatial one. From many small decisions to a few massive ones. From storefronts and civic input to corporate site selection and zoning flips. From a lived city to a delivered one.Which brings us to the next shape in this story — not the warehouse, but the mid-rise. Not the loading dock, but the key-fob lobby. Different function. Same logic.HIGH-RISE, LOW TOUCHYou’ve seen them. The sleek new apartment buildings with names like The Foundry or Parc25. A yoga room, a roof deck, and an app for letting in your dog walker. “Mixed-use,” they say — but it’s mostly private use stacked vertically.It’s much needed housing, for sure. But these aren't neighborhoods. They're private bunkers with balconies.Yes, they’re more dense than suburban cul-de-sacs. Yes, they’re more energy-efficient than sprawl. But for all their square footage and amenity spaces, they often feel more like vertical suburbs — inward-facing, highly managed, and oddly disconnected from the street.The ground floors are usually glazed over with placeholder retail: maybe a Starbucks, a Subway, or nothing at all…often vacant with only For Lease signs. Residents rarely linger. Packages arrive faster than neighbors can introduce themselves. There’s a gym to bench press, but no public bench or egress. You’re close to hundreds of people — and yet rarely bump into anyone you didn’t schedule.That’s not a design flaw. That’s the point.These buildings are part of a new typology — one that synchronizes perfectly with a platform lifestyle. Residents work remote. Order in. Socialize through screens. The architecture doesn’t foster interaction because interaction isn’t the product. Efficiency is.Call it fulfillment housing — apartments designed to plug into an economy that favors logistics and metrics, not civic social fabrics. They’re located near tech centers, distribution hubs, and delivery corridors, and sometimes libraries or parks outdoors. What matters is access to bandwidth and smooth entry for Amazon and Door Dash.And it’s not just what you see on the block. Behind the scenes, cities are quietly reengineering themselves to connect these structures to the digital twins — warehouses and data centers. Tucked into nearby low-tax exurbs or industrial zones, together they help reshape land use, strain energy grids, and anchor the platform economy.They’re infrastructure for a new kind of urban life — one where presence is optional and connection to the cloud is more important than to the crowd.Even the public spaces inside these buildings — co-working lounges, shared kitchens, “community rooms” — are behind fobs, passwords, and management policies. Sociologists have called this the anticommons: everything looks shared, but very little actually is. It's curated collectivity, not true community.And it's not just isolation — it’s predictability. These developments are built to minimize risk, noise, conflict, friction. Which is also to say: they’re built to minimize surprise. The kind of surprise that once made cities exciting. The kind that made them social.Some urban scholars describe these spaces as part of a broader “ghost urbanism” — a city where density exists without depth. Where interaction is optional. Where proximity is engineered, but intimacy is not. You can be surrounded by life and still feel like you're buffering.The irony is these buildings often check every sustainability box. They’re LEED-certified. Near transit. Built up, not out. From a local emissions standpoint, they beat the ‘burbs’. But their occupant’s consumption, waste, and travel habits can create more pollution than homebody suburbanites. And from a civic standpoint — the standpoint of belonging, encounter, spontaneity — they’re often just as empty.And so we arrive at a strange truth: a city can be efficient, dense, even walkable — and still feel ghosted. Because what we’ve optimized for isn’t connection. It’s delivery — to screens and doorsteps. What gets delivered to fulfillment housing may be frictionless, but it’s rarely fulfilling.DRONES, DOMICILES, AND DISCONNECTIONI admit there’s a nostalgia for old-world neighborhoods as strong as nostalgia for industrial cities of the past. Neighborhoods where you may run into people at the mailbox. Asking someone in the post office line where they got their haircut. Sitting on the porch, just waitin’ on a friend. We used to talk about killing time, now we have apps to optimize it.It’s not just because of screens. It’s also about what kinds of space we’ve built — and what kind
Hello Interactors,It’s March Madness time in the states — baskets and brackets. I admit I'd grown a bit skeptical of how basketball evolved since my playing days. As it happens, I played against Caitlin Clark’s dad, from nearby Indianola, Iowa! Unlike the more dynamic Brent Clark, I was a small-town six-foot center, taught never to face the basket and dribble. After all, it was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s era of back-to-the-hoop skyhooks. By college, however, I was playing pickup games in California, expected to handle the ball, shoot, dish, or drive. Just like Caitlin! The players around me were from East LA, not Indianola. Jordan was king, and basketball wasn't just evolving — it was about to explode. It’s geographic expansion and spatial dynamism has influenced how the game is played and I now know why I can’t get enough of it.BOARDS, BOUNDARIES, AND BREAKING FREEThere was one gym in my hometown, Norwalk, Iowa, where I could dunk a basketball. The court was so cramped, there was a wall right behind the backboard. It was padded to ease post layup collisions! But when I timed it right, I could run and jump off the wall launching myself into the air and just high enough to dunk. This old gym, a WPA project, was built in 1936 and was considered large at the time relative to population. It felt tiny by the time I played there during PE as a kid and on weekend pickup games as a teen — though it was still bigger than anything my parents experienced in rural Southern Iowa.Basketball began as a sport of spatial limitation. James Naismith invented the game in 1891 — 45 years prior to my dunk gym’s grand opening. The game was invented to be played in a YMCA gym in Springfield, Massachusetts. This building dictated the court's dimensions, movement, and strategy. Naismith’s original 13 rules emphasized order—no dribbling or running, only passing to move the ball. Early basketball wasn’t about individual drives but about constant movement within a network of passing lanes, with players anticipating and reacting in real time.The original peach baskets were hung ten feet high on a balcony railing, with no backboards to guide shots. Misses bounced unpredictably, adding a vertical challenge and forcing players to think strategically about rebounding. Since the baskets had bottoms, play stopped after every score, giving teams time to reset and rethink.Soon the bottom of the basket was removed, and a backboard was introduced — originally intended to prevent interference from spectators batting opponents shots from the balcony. The backboard fundamentally altered the physics of play. Now a player could more predictably bank shots of the backboard and invent new rebounding strategies.When running while dribbling was introduced in the late 1890s, basketball’s rigid spatial structure loosened. No longer confined to static passing formations, the game became a fluid system of movement. These innovations transformed the court into an interactive spatial environment, where angles, trajectories, and rebounds became key tactical elements. According to one theory of spatial reformulation through human behavior, structured spaces like basketball courts evolved not solely through top-down design, but through emergent patterns of use, where movement, interaction, and adaptation shape the space over time.By the 1920s, the court itself expanded—not so much in physical size but in meaning. The game had spread beyond enclosed gymnasiums to urban playgrounds, colleges, and professional teams. Each expansion further evolved basketball’s spatial logic. Courts in New York’s streetball culture fostered a tight and improvisational style. Players developed elite dribbling skills and isolation plays to navigate crowded urban courts. Meanwhile, Midwestern colleges, like Kansas where Naismith later coached, prioritized structured passing and zone defenses, reflecting the systemic, collective ethos of the game’s inventor. This period reflects microcosms of larger social and spatial behaviors. Basketball, shaped by its environment and the players who occupied it, mirrored the broader urbanization process. This set the stage for basketball’s transformation and expansion from national leagues to a truly global game.The evolution of basketball, like the natural, constructed, and cultural landscapes surrounding it, was not static. Basketball was manifested through and embedded in cultural geography, where places evolve over time, accumulating layers of meaning and adaptation. The basketball court was no exception. The game burst forth, breaking boundaries. It branched into local leagues, between bustling cities, across regions, and globetrotted around the world.TACTICS, TALENT, AND TRANSNATIONAL TIESThe year my ego-dunk gym was built, basketball debuted in the 1936 Olympics. That introduced the sport to the world. International play revealed contrasting styles, but it wasn’t until the 1990s and 2000s that basketball became a truly global game — shaped as much by European and African players as by American traditions.Europe’s game focused on tactical structures and spatial awareness. In the U.S., basketball was built within a high school and college system, but European basketball mimicked their club-based soccer academy model. It still does. In countries like Serbia, Spain, and Lithuania, players are taught the game from a tactical perspective first — learning how to read defenses, move without the ball, and make the extra pass. European training emphasizes court vision, spacing, and passing precision, fostering playmakers wise to the spatial dynamics of the game. Geography also plays a role in the development of European basketball. Countries like Serbia and Lithuania, which have a strong history of basketball but relatively smaller populations, could not rely on the sheer athletic depth of players like the U.S. Instead, they had to refine skill-based, systematic approaches to the game. This helped to ensure every player developed what is commonly called a “high basketball IQ”. They also exhibit a high level of adaptability to team-oriented strategies. European basketball exemplifies this, blending the legacy of former socialist sports systems — which prioritized collective success — with contemporary, globalized styles. This structured process explains why European players like Nikola Jokić, Luka Dončić, and Giannis Antetokounmpo often arrive in the NBA with an advanced understanding of spacing, passing, and team concepts. Jokić’s story is particularly revealing. Growing up in Serbia, he didn’t just play basketball — he played water polo, a sport that demands high-level spatial awareness and precision passing. In water polo, players must make quick decisions without being able to plant their feet or rely on sheer speed. Although, at seven feet tall, Jokić could probably sometimes touch the bottom of the pool! These skills translated perfectly to his basketball game, where his passing ability, patience, and ability to manipulate defenders make him one of the most unique playmakers in NBA history. Unlike the American model, where taller players are often pushed into narrowly defined roles as rebounders and rim protectors (like I was), European training systems emphasize all-around skill development regardless of height.This is why European big men like Jokić, Gasol, and Nowitzki excel both in the post and on the perimeter. Europe's emphasis on technical education and tactical intelligence fosters versatile skill sets before specialization. This adaptability has made fluid, multi-positional play the norm, prioritizing efficiency and team success over individual spectacle.If European basketball emphasizes structure, the African basketball pipeline fosters adaptability and resilience — not as inherent traits, but as responses to developmental conditions. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu popularized this as habitus, where individuals unconsciously shape their skills based on their social and material environments. With limited formal infrastructure, many African players learn in fluid, improvised settings, refining their game through necessity rather than structured coaching.Unlike U.S. and European players, who train in specialized systems from an early age, African players often develop versatile, positionless skill sets. Their careers frequently involve migrating through different leagues and coaching styles. A great example is Joel Embiid. He didn’t start playing basketball until he was 15. Growing up in Cameroon, he initially played soccer and volleyball. These sports both contributed to his basketball development in unexpected ways. Soccer helped him refine elite footwork, now a required trait of the post game, while volleyball sharpened his timing and hand-eye coordination — hence his dominance as a shot-blocker and rebounder. This multi-sport background is common among African players. Many grow up playing soccer first, which explains why so many African-born big men in the NBA — Hakeem Olajuwon, Serge Ibaka, and Pascal Siakam — have exceptional footwork and agility.Like Jokić’s water polo background shaped his passing, soccer’s fluidity influences how many African players move on the court. Beyond skills, migration plays a key role, as many leave home as teens to develop in European leagues or U.S. schools. Constant adaptation to new environments builds mental resilience, essential for professional sports. (just ask Luka Dončić after suddenly being traded to the Lakers!) Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai describes this as evolving ethnoscapes and how globalization drives global cultural flows. Practices, traditions, and ideas reshape both new destinations and home cultures as identities become blended across cultures and borders. African players embody this, adapting their games across multiple basketball traditions.Look at Embiid moving from Cameroon to the U.S., adapting to American basketball while retaining his cross-sport instincts. Or Giannis Antetokounmpo, he
Hello Interactors,From election lies to climate denial, misinformation isn’t just about deception — it’s about making truth feel unknowable. Fact-checking can’t keep up, and trust in institutions is fading. If reality is up for debate, where does that leave us?I wanted to explore this idea of “post-truth” and ways to move beyond it — not by enforcing truth from the top down, but by engaging in inquiry and open dialogue. I examine how truth doesn’t have to be imposed but continually rediscovered — shaped through questioning, testing, and refining what we know. If nothing feels certain, how do we rebuild trust in the process of knowing something is true?THE SLOW SLIDE OF FACTUAL FOUNDATIONSThe term "post-truth" was first popularized in the 1990s but took off in 2016. That’s when Oxford Dictionaries named it their Word of the Year. Defined as “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, the term reflects a shift in how truth functions in public discourse.Though the concept of truth manipulation is not new, post-truth represents a systemic weakening of shared standards for knowledge-making. Sadly, truth in the eyes of most of the public is no longer determined by factual verification but by ideological alignment and emotional resonance.The erosion of truth infrastructure — once upheld by journalism, education, and government — has destabilized knowledge credibility. Mid-20th-century institutions like The New York Times and the National Science Foundation ensured rigorous verification. But with rising political polarization, digital misinformation, and distrust in authority, these institutions have lost their stabilizing role, leaving truth increasingly contested rather than collectively affirmed.The mid-20th century exposed truth’s fragility as propaganda reshaped public perception. Nazi ideology co-opted esoteric myths like the Vril Society, a fictitious occult group inspired by the 1871 novel The Coming Race, which depicted a subterranean master race wielding a powerful life force called "Vril." This myth fed into Nazi racial ideology and SS occult research, prioritizing myth over fact. Later, as German aviation advanced, the Vril myth evolved into UFO conspiracies, claiming secret Nazi technologies stemmed from extraterrestrial contact and Vril energy, fueling rumors of hidden Antarctic bases and breakaway civilizations.Distorted truths have long justified extreme political action, demonstrating how knowledge control sustains authoritarianism. Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, Jewish-German intellectuals who fled the Nazis, later warned that even democracies are vulnerable to propaganda. Adorno (1951) analyzed how mass media manufactures consent, while Arendt (1972) showed how totalitarian regimes rewrite reality to maintain control.Postwar skepticism, civil rights movements, and decolonization fueled academic critiques of traditional, biased historical narratives. By the late 20th century, universities embraced theories questioning the stability of truth, labeled postmodernist, critical, and constructivist.Once considered a pillar of civilization, truth was reframed by French postmodernist philosophers Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard as a construct of power. Foucault argued institutions define truth to reinforce authority, while Baudrillard claimed modern society had replaced reality with media-driven illusions. While these ideas exposed existing power dynamics in academic institutions, they also fueled skepticism about objective truth — paving the way for today’s post-truth crisis. Australian philosophy professor, Catherine (Cathy) Legg highlights how intellectual and cultural shifts led universities to question their neutrality, reinforcing postmodern critiques that foreground subjectivity, discourse, and power in shaping truth. Over time, this skepticism extended beyond academia, challenging whether any authority could claim objectivity without reinforcing existing power structures.These efforts to deconstruct dominant narratives unintentionally legitimized radical relativism — the idea that all truths hold equal weight, regardless of evidence or logic. This opened the door for "alternative facts", now weaponized by propaganda. What began as a challenge to authoritarian knowledge structures within academia escaped its origins, eroding shared standards of truth. In the post-truth era, misinformation, ideological mythmaking, and conspiracy theories thrive by rejecting objective verification altogether.Historian Naomi Oreskes describes "merchants of doubt" as corporate and political actors who manufacture uncertainty to obstruct policy and sustain truth relativism. By falsely equating expertise with opinion, they create the illusion of debate, delaying action on climate change, public health, and social inequities while eroding trust in science. In this landscape, any opinion can masquerade as fact, undermining those who dedicate their lives to truth-seeking.PIXELS AND MYTHOLOGY SHAPE THE GEOGRAPHYThe erosion of truth infrastructures has accelerated with digital media, which both globalizes misinformation and reinforces localized silos of belief. This was evident during COVID-19, where false claims — such as vaccine microchips — spread widely but took deeper root in communities with preexisting distrust in institutions. While research confirms that misinformation spreads faster than facts, it’s still unclear if algorithmic amplification or deeper socio-political distrust are root causes.This ideological shift is strongest in Eastern Europe and parts of the U.S., where institutional distrust and digital subcultures fuel esoteric nationalism. Post-Soviet propaganda, economic instability, and geopolitical tensions have revived alternative knowledge systems in Russia, Poland, and the Balkans, from Slavic paganism to the return of the Vril myth, now fused with the Save Europe movement — a digital blend of racial mysticism, ethnic nostalgia, and reactionary politics.Above ☝️is a compilation of TikTok videos currently being pushed to my 21 year old son. They fuse ordinary, common, and recognizable pop culture imagery with Vril imagery (like UFO’s and stealth bombers) and esoteric racist nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and hyper-masculine mythologies. A similar trend appears in post-industrial and rural America, where economic decline, government distrust, and cultural divides sustain conspiratorial thinking, religious fundamentalism, and hyper-masculine mythologies. The alt-right manosphere mirrors Eastern Europe’s Vril revival, with figures like Zyzz and Bronze Age Pervert offering visions of lost strength. Both Vril and Save Europe frame empowerment as a return to ethnic or esoteric power (Vril) or militant resistance to diversity (Save Europe), turning myth into a tool of political radicalization.Climate change denial follows these localized patterns, where scientific consensus clashes with economic and cultural narratives. While misinformation spreads globally, belief adoption varies, shaped by economic hardship, institutional trust, and political identity.In coal regions like Appalachia and Poland, skepticism stems from economic survival, with climate policies seen as elitist attacks on jobs. In rural Australia, extreme weather fuels conspiracies about government overreach rather than shifting attitudes toward climate action. Meanwhile, in coastal Louisiana and the Netherlands, where climate impacts are immediate and undeniable, denial is rarer, though myths persist, often deflecting blame from human causes.Just as Vril revivalism, Save Europe, and the MAGA manosphere thrive on post-industrial uncertainty, climate misinformation can also flourish in economically vulnerable regions. Digital platforms fuel a worldview skewed, where scrolling myths and beliefs are spatially glued — a twisted take on 'think globally, act locally,' where fantasy folklore becomes fervent ideology.FINDING TRUTH WITH FRACTURED FACTS…AND FRIENDSThe post-truth era has reshaped how we think about knowledge. The challenge isn’t just misinformation but growing distrust in expertise, institutions, and shared reality. In classrooms and research, traditional ways of proving truth often fail when personal belief outweighs evidence. Scholars and educators now seek new ways to communicate knowledge, moving beyond rigid certainty or radical relativism.Professor Legg has turned to the work of 19th-century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, whose ideas about truth feel surprisingly relevant today. Peirce didn’t see truth as something fixed or final but as a process — something we work toward through questioning, testing, and refining our understanding over time.His approach, known as pragmatism, emphasizes collaborative inquiry, self-correction, and fallibilism — the idea that no belief is ever beyond revision. In a time when facts are constantly challenged, Peirce’s philosophy offers not just a theory of truth, but a process for rebuilding trust in knowledge itself.For those unfamiliar with Peirce and American pragmatism, a process that requires collaborating with truth deniers may seem not only unfun, but counterproductive. But research on deradicalization strategies suggests that confrontational debunking (a failed strategy Democrats continue to adhere to) often backfires. Lecturing skeptics only reinforces belief entrenchment.In the early 1700’s Britain was embroiled in the War of Spanish Succession. Political factions spread blatant falsehoods through partisan newspapers. It prompted Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, to observe in The Art of Political Lying (1710) that"Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired."This is likely where we get the more familiar saying: you can't argue someone out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into. Swift’s critique of propaganda a
Hello Interactors,Since his return to office, Trump hasn’t just taken power — he’s trying to reshape the landscape. From border crackdowns and sick real estate fantasies to federal purges by strongman stooges, his policies don’t just enforce control — they seek to redraw the lines of democracy itself.Strongmen don’t wait for crises — they create them. They attempt to manipulate institutions, geographies, and public trust until there’s so much confusion it makes anything they do to ease it acceptable. I dug into how authoritarianism thrives on instability and contemplate some ways to alter it.DEMAND DOMINATION THROUGH DOUBT AND DISORDER I was once a strongman, or at least I could summon one when needed. I could override the part of my brain that protects me from injury and tap into something primal — something that made me feel invincible. A surge of adrenaline convinced my brain I could not only hurl myself into another person but through them, painlessly.I played rugby. What I experienced is known as Berserker State, or berserkergang—a shift in brain activity and hormone surges that cause extreme arousal and altered perception. Rugby is a sport where people spend over an hour pretending they’re not hurt. That’s in contrast to soccer, where people spend over an hour pretending they are. 😬 But while rugby is violent, it’s not played with violent intent. Players may be tough, but they don’t seek to hurt each other — at least, not permanently.That’s in stark contrast to figures like Trump or the new FBI deputy director, Dan Bongino — men who cultivate a different kind of "strongman" identity. They like to wield aggression not as a tool for sport, but as a weapon against others. Bongino is a tough guy on steroids — literally, or at least he acts like it. His wide-eyed rage on his online show suggests a performance of strength, a constant need to assert dominance. But people like Trump and Bongino weren’t born this way; they were molded by insecurity, myths, and a long history of toxic masculinity.Psychologist Brian Lowery challenges the idea that identity is something stable and fixed. Instead, in his 2023 book, Selfless, he argues that identity is socially constructed—shaped by interactions, cultural narratives, and institutions. In times of stability, people feel secure in who they are. But when faced with economic instability, cultural shifts, or political crises, identity becomes fragile and unstable. Some people lash out. Some, like myself on the rugby field, may go berserk. Others — like Trump and Bongino — build their entire personas around control. In the end, it’s just bluster, bravado, because they behave like a jerk.Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman takes this argument further, showing how growing inequality and precarity drive people toward authoritarianism and fundamentalism. When the world feels chaotic, strongman leaders and rigid ideologies provide the comforting illusion of order and control — even if they fail to address the root problems. Bauman warns that these leaders scapegoat the vulnerable, suppress truth, and mystify the real causes of inequality — all while presenting themselves as the only force capable of restoring stability.But authoritarianism isn’t just about psychology — it’s also shaped by real-world conditions. Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues that authoritarian rule isn’t just about individual strongmen — it’s embedded in systems that use violence and spatial control to uphold racial and class hierarchies. Identity insecurity isn’t just a feeling; it’s a reaction to real structural forces like economic displacement, aggressive policing, and militarized borders. Strongman leaders don’t just exploit insecurity — they thrive where instability is built into everyday life.In 2020 Journalist Shane Burley examined how white nationalist groups tap into these anxieties, embedding themselves in mainstream politics by offering disaffected individuals a sense of belonging through authoritarian ideologies. The Alt-Right doesn’t just recruit based on political beliefs — it recruits based on a fear of displacement and loss. Authoritarianism isn’t just ideological; it emerges from instability, reinforced by systems of control like aggressive policing and restrictive immigration policies.Strongmen don’t just seize on fear — they stoke, sculpt, and steer it, spinning crises into control. Through media manipulation and crisis narratives, they mold public perception and then mandate obedience.SPINNING STRIFE INTO SUPREMACYOnce fear is felt — it can be harnessed. Political elites capitalize on uncertainty, framing crises in ways that make authoritarian measures seem necessary. Feldman & Stenner, political psychologists specializing in the study of authoritarianism and ideological behavior, argue that authoritarian attitudes intensify when people perceive instability, whether real or exaggerated. Their research highlights how threat perception — not just personal ideology — activates authoritarian tendencies, leading individuals to prioritize conformity, obedience, and strong leadership in times of social or political uncertainty. By defining threats and controlling the narrative, leaders turn uncertainty into urgency, making repression feel not only justified but necessary.Crisis narratives work because they reshape reality. Right-wing populists blame immigrants, global elites, and cultural change, painting national identity as under siege. Meanwhile, progressive authoritarian movements often frame reactionary forces, corporate elites, and slow-moving institutions as existential threats, demanding immediate, drastic action. Mikhail Bakunin, a 19th-century anarchist and revolutionary who was both a friend and fierce critic of Karl Marx, warned that revolutionary leaders who claim to act in the people’s name often end up seeking power for themselves. He accused Marx and Engels of designing a system where they, not the workers, would ultimately rule. In 1873 he wrote, “The Marxists maintain that only a dictatorship—their dictatorship, of course—can create the will of the people, while our answer to them is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but to perpetuate itself.” Both right and left-wing authoritarianism use fear to rally supporters, silence opposition, and create a sense of emergency where only their leadership can restore order.Media control plays a key role in reinforcing these crisis narratives. In 2019, it was exposed how Trump advisor Stephen Miller deliberately inserted white nationalist rhetoric into U.S. policy. He used far-right media to amplify unverified crime statistics and frame immigration as a civilizational threat. This wasn’t just ideological posturing — it was a calculated effort to embed fear into governance, making xenophobia a political weapon.But crisis narratives don’t just shape perception; they translate into policy. ICE raids and the Muslim ban turned entire communities into symbols of danger, reinforcing the idea that certain groups are inherent threats. Militarized borders, aggressive policing, and detention centers didn’t just enforce laws — they reinforced the notion that outsiders must be feared. The state stands as fear’s fierce enforcer, embedding oppression in order and power in place.This dual strategy — controlling the narrative and enforcing it through space — creates a self-reinforcing cycle. When people see more policing in "dangerous" areas, they assume the danger was real all along. When borders become militarized, they don’t just frame outsiders as threats — they enforce state power over Indigenous lands. The U.S. foundation stands on the reservation system, the suppression of the American Indian Movement, and the crackdown on Standing Rock from 1890 to 2016. This is how authoritarianism isn’t just imposed — it’s sustained. Fear becomes a governing principle, and governance becomes a system of control. Crises are never solved — only maligned, magnified, or momentarily managed.BREAKING THE CYCLE OF CRISIS AND CONTROLAuthoritarianism feeds on instability. It thrives in moments of crisis, when people feel insecure about their place in society, fearful of rapid change, and unsure of who to trust. As historian Alexandra Minna Stern shows in Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate, far-right groups have mainstreamed authoritarian rhetoric, repackaging extremism as populist conservatism and framing strongman rule as the only defense against societal collapse. But authoritarianism is not confined to one ideology. Different movements, across the political spectrum, use crisis narratives to justify coercion.Some frame threats as coming from the outside, while others see danger emerging from within. But the burden of these crisis narratives is not evenly distributed — the historically marginalized powerless pay the price when panic fuels policy.* Nationalist movements depict outsiders — immigrants, racial minorities, queer communities, and religious groups — as existential threats. Border militarization, mass surveillance, and authoritarian crackdowns are justified as necessary to preserve “national security” and maintain cultural homogeneity. These policies disproportionately harm those already marginalized. They deepen structural inequalities through exclusion, criminalization, and violence.* Radical movements on the left often focus on reactionary forces — corporations, conservative institutions, or privileged elites — as dangers to progress. While calls for justice are vital, ideological purity tests and coercion can sometimes alienate marginalized activists. People of color, queer individuals, and various other members the poor working class are forced to navigate rigid expectations. They’re not always accepted or embraced for their own lived experience and material struggles.While both reactionary nationalism and ideological rigidity can rely on crisis-driven politics to justify control, the scale, methods, and impact differ. Authoritarianism, in any form, thri
Hello Interactors,The land on which we stand can demand where we politically stand. But what happens when that land shifts, shakes, burns or blows away? Recent Southern U.S. floods displaced thousands. Disasters don’t just destroy — they can redraw political lines. With second round of Trumpster fires deepening divides, geography and ideology matter more than ever. As climate crises, economic upheaval, and political struggles intensify, the question isn’t just where people live — but what they’ll fight for. History shows that when the ground shifts, so does power.SHIFTING LANDS AND LOYALTIESFrom fertile fields to frenzied financial hubs, geography molds the mindset of the masses. Where people live shapes what they fear, fight for, and find familiar. Farmers in the Great Plains worry about wheat yields and water rights, while coastal city dwellers debate rent control and rising tides.But political geography isn’t just about climate and crops — it’s about power, privilege, and the collective making of place. No space is neutral; as evidenced by the abrupt renaming of an entire gulf. History and the present are filled with examples of territories being carved and controlled, gerrymandered, and gentrified.The recent floods in the South serve as a stark reminder of how geography has historically upended political identity. Especially during Black History Month. The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was a devastating deluge that displaced thousands of Black sharecroppers, washing away not only homes but also old political loyalties. The Republican-controlled federal government, led by President Calvin Coolidge, took a hands-off approach, refusing to allocate federal aid and instead relying on Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to coordinate relief efforts through the Red Cross.However, aid distribution was dominated by white Southern landowners, who withheld resources from Black communities. They forced many into quasi-forced labor camps under the guise of relief. Hoover, later touting his role in disaster response to win the 1928 presidency, was ultimately seen by many Black voters as complicit in their mistreatment. This failure accelerated Black voters’ gradual shift away from the Republican Party, a realignment that would deepen under FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s. The flood was not just a natural disaster — it was a political reckoning. Who received help and who was abandoned shaped party loyalties for generations to come.Yet, history proves that political realignments are rarely one-sided or uniform. While Black voters were shifting toward the Democratic Party, another Southern political identity crisis was brewing. Southern white conservatives — longtime Democrats due to the party’s historical ties to segregation — began their own political migration in the mid-to-late 20th century.The Civil Rights Movement and desegregation led many white Southerners to feel alienated from the Democratic Party, pushing them toward what was once unthinkable — the Republican Party. This shift cemented a racialized realignment, with Black voters backing Democrats and Southern white conservatives reshaping the GOP into today’s right-wing stronghold.Both political shifts were responses to crisis — one to environmental disaster and racial exclusion, the other to social change and perceived status loss. The fact that geography remained constant but political identities flipped highlights a crucial truth: where people live matters, but how they respond to change depends on identity, history, and power.The political path of any place isn’t just shaped by its space — it’s who claims the land, who crafts the law, and who casts a crisis as chaos or cause.SORTED, SEPARATED, AND STUCKGeography shapes political identity but doesn’t dictate it. Human agency, economics, and psychology influence where people live and how they vote. Over time, self-sorting creates ideological enclaves, deepening polarization instead of fostering realignment.Psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner’s Social Identity Theory explains why people align with in-groups and see out-groups as threats, as identity shapes self-esteem and belonging. This leads to in-group favoritism, out-group bias, and polarization, especially when power or resources feel like a zero-sum game.But Optimal Distinctiveness Theory (ODT) adds another layer to this understanding. Developed by Marilynn Brewer, building on Social Identity Theory, ODT proposes that people need to feel a sense of belonging to a group while also maintaining individuality within it. This balancing act between assimilation and uniqueness explains why political identities are not just about partisanship — they encompass culture, lifestyle, and even geography. Individuals self-sort both by community and distinction within their chosen political and social environments.Modern political sorting has made partisanship an all-encompassing identity. It aligns with race, religion, and even consumer habits. This process has been amplified by geography, as people increasingly move to communities where they feel they “fit in” while also distinguishing themselves within their political faction. ODT helps explain why urban progressives might distinguish themselves through niche ideological positions (e.g., Socialists in Brooklyn vs. Tech libertarians in San Francisco), while rural conservatives in swing states may lean into Christian nationalism or libertarianism (e.g. Christian nationalists in rural Pennsylvania vs. Tea Party libertarians in rural Wisconsin).American political power is unevenly distributed. The Senate majority can be won with just 17% of the population, and the Electoral College inflates rural influence. The 10 smallest states hold 3% of the population but 20% of Senate seats and 6% of electoral votes. This imbalance amplifies rural conservative power, giving certain regions outsized political sway.ODT also helps explain why political polarization has deepened over time rather than softened with economic shifts. Historically, political realignments occurred when crisis moments forced cross-cutting alliances — like when poor white and Black farmers joined forces during the Populist Movement of the 1890s to challenge banking and railroad monopolies.However, these coalitions often fell apart due to racial and regional pressures. The Populist Party was ultimately absorbed into the Democratic Party’s white Southern wing, leaving Black farmers politically stranded. They still are. Around 1890 Black farmers made up an estimated 14% of farmers in America, now it’s fewer than 2% due to racist lending practices, discriminatory federal policies, land dispossession, and systemic barriers to credit and resources.Today, realignments are rare because identity-based partisanship satisfies both belonging and distinctiveness (ODT). Rural conservatives see themselves not just as Republicans but as defenders of a distinct way of life, reinforcing identity through regional pride, gun rights, and religion. Urban liberals, meanwhile, develop sub-identities — progressives, moderates, democratic socialists — within the broader Democratic Party. This illusion of uniformity masks deep internal ideological divides.This sorting shapes where people live, what they watch, and which policies they support. The false consensus effect deepens political silos, as rural conservatives and urban progressives assume their views are widely shared. When elections defy expectations, the result is shock, anger, and further retreat into ideological camps.This explains why U.S. political alignments resist economic and geographic shifts that once drove realignments. Where hardship once built coalitions, modern partisanship acts as a psychological refuge. The question is whether climate change, automation, or mass migration will disrupt these patterns — or cement them. Will today’s anxieties redraw party lines, or will political sorting persist, turning geography into a fortress for the familiar, deepening division and partisan pride?FROM REALITY TV TO ALTERNATE REALITYIf geography and identity sketch borders of polarization, then media is the Sharpie darkening the divide. The digital age hardens these political divides, where confirmation bias runs rampant and algorithms push people to one side of the ideological line or the other.In a recent interview, political psychologist and polarization expert Liliana Hall Mason, known for her research on identity-based partisanship and rising affective polarization, recalled a 2012 TiVO study that analyzed TV viewing habits of Democrats and Republicans. The study found that among the top 10 most-watched TV shows for each party, there was zero overlap — Democrats and Republicans were consuming completely separate entertainment. Cultural, and presumably geographical, divergence was already well underway in the 2010s.Republicans favored shows like Duck Dynasty while Democrats gravitated toward satirical cartoons like Family Guy. While it predates TiVO, I was more of a King of Hill fan, myself. I thought Hank Hill humanized conservative rural life without glorifying extremism while critiquing aspects of modernity without being elitist. Hulu has announced its return sometime this year. But Republicans and Democrats today don’t even consume the same reality — they don’t watch the same news, follow the same influencers, trust the same institutions, or even shop at the same grocery stores. Will both tune into watch Hank Hill walk the tight rope of a pluralistic suburban American existence?This media-driven fragmentation fuels geographic sorting, as political preferences influence where people choose to live. A person might leave a liberal city for a conservative suburb, or vice versa, based on what media tells them about their “kind of people.” Over time, partisan enclaves harden, reducing exposure to opposing viewpoints and making political shifts less likely.When political identities are so deeply entrenched that losing an
Hello Interactors,In 2002, when I was at Microsoft, Bill Gates launched an initiative called Trustworthy Computing (TwC). The internet was fresh, ripe for malicious attacks, and Microsoft was a big target. Memos were issued, posters were printed, teams were formed, and code was fortified. And in the case of hidden Easter Eggs in Windows and Office — removed. Internal hacks weren’t a good look.Trust is everywhere these days — politicians vow to restore it, social scientists try to measure it, and brands continue to demand it. U.S. money says to trust God, and it seems we’re now asked to trust Musk. Clearly trust isn't universal; it's shaped by our views of and interactions with power, place, and institutions.Lately, trust feels harder to hold onto. It's not just social media, politics, or government failures — the spaces where trust once thrived are disappearing. Town squares, shops, and local newspapers are vanishing, replaced by fragmented digital alternatives. Trust may be declining; but it's mostly shifting, and not always for the better.Trust won't simply "return" with a memo from Bill. Nor from Trump, Zuck, Musk, or Jeff. Even if they did, they’d likely soon be tossed in the Trumpster Fire. These figures make us question who is gaining trust, who is losing it, and what these new patterns mean for democracy and social cohesion?SELF-TRUST LOST TO CIVIC COSTTrust begins with confidence in what we know and perceive. We rely on self-trust to navigate the world — to make decisions, assess risks, and interpret so-called reality. Self-trust relies on the brain’s ability to process uncertainty and predict outcomes. The prefrontal cortex (the brain’s decision-making hub) assesses risks based on past experiences, while the anterior cingulate cortex (a small but crucial center between hemispheres) detects conflicting information, signaling when to doubt or adjust beliefs. When these systems function well, self-trust remains stable. But in an era of conflicting information, the brain is flooded with competing signals, making it harder to form confident judgments. Chronic exposure to uncertainty and misinformation can overstimulate these networks, leading to decision paralysis or over-reliance on external authorities.Yet self-trust isn’t just a cognitive process — it is also shaped by social and epistemic (knowledge-related) factors. Prominent NYU philosopher Miranda Fricker, known for her work on epistemic injustice, argues that trust in one’s own knowledge isn’t formed in isolation but depends on social reinforcement and being recognized by others as a credible source of knowledge. When individuals experience repeated epistemic injustice — being dismissed, ignored, or denied access to authoritative knowledge — they internalize doubt, weakening their own cognitive autonomy. Without reliable social validation or consistent feedback from their surroundings, self-trust erodes. This is not just a psychological state, but a consequence of power structures that shape who gets to "trust" their own judgment and whose knowledge is devalued.In the past, people validated their understanding through direct experience and social reinforcement. I remember watching TV anchor Walter Cronkite as a kid with my family in Iowa. He was the source of authoritative knowledge for us all. We also learned from trusted local voices and community newspapers. The Des Moines Register was won of the most influential and trusted regional papers in the country. It won 16 Pulitzer Prices from 1924 to 2010 — the first being for the work of syndicated editorial cartoonist “Ding” Darling. Now, those anchors have weakened. These knowledge sources have been replaced by curated digital landscapes, where information is sorted not by credibility, but by engagement metrics and algorithmic amplification. One case study shows that this shift can lead to a growing public reliance on self-reinforcing information bubbles, where trust in knowledge is shaped more by network effects than by institutional credibility. This creates a paradox: people have more access to knowledge than ever before yet feel less certain in what they know and trust.This crisis of self-trust extends beyond information. It is not just about struggling to determine what is true, but also about uncertainty over how to act in response to a changing political and social landscape. Despite declining trust in political leaders, there is evidence public support for democracy remains strong. We may doubt the players, and even the game, but our faith in democracy mostly stays the same.This gap — between distrust in leadership and belief in the system — creates the sense of civic uncertainty we all feel. It’s not hard to find those who once trusted their ability to participate meaningfully in democracy but now feel disengaged, disoriented, or discombobulated. They’re unsure whether their actions can have any real impact. Voting, town halls, and community groups used to feel like meaningful ways to engage, but when institutions seem distant or unresponsive, they lose their impact. At the same time, digital activism and decentralized movements offer new ways to get involved, but they often lack clear legitimacy, accountability, or real influence on policy.Rising polarization, disinformation, and the decline of local journalism have made it harder for people to trust democratic institutions. Many still believe in democracy but doubt whether their actions make a difference. This uncertainty fuels disengagement, creating a cycle where institutions fail to respond, deepening distrust. The real crisis isn’t about rejecting democracy — it’s about struggling to find meaningful ways to participate in a system that feels increasingly unresponsive.STRANGERS ONLINE, NEIGHBORS OFFLINEIf trust in ourselves grounds what we know, trust in others helps it grow. We nurture it through everyday interactions — recognizing familiar faces, exchanging small favors, and feeling a shared connection to the places we live. But as communities change and people become more disconnected, those trust-building moments start to wither.Many neighborhoods once relied on deep social networks woven through personal relationships — longstanding ties between neighbors, trust built through shared spaces, and informal support systems that provided stability. Small businesses, community centers, and local institutions weren’t just places of commerce or service; they were gathering spots where people formed relationships, exchanged information, and reinforced a sense of belonging. But economic restructuring, gentrification, and urban development have disrupted these networks, dismantling the infrastructure that once sustained social trust.As housing costs rise, longtime residents are pushed out, taking with them the relationships and shared history that held communities together. Gentrification swaps deep local ties for a more transient crowd, while big corporations replace small businesses that once fostered real connections. Where shop owners knew customers by name, now it’s all about quick transactions, leaving fewer chances for meaningful interaction.Adding to this shift, the rise of online shopping and door-to-door delivery has further reduced the need for everyday in-person interactions. Where people once ran into neighbors at the local grocery store or chatted with shop owners, now packages arrive with a quick doorstep drop-off, and errands are handled with a few clicks. This convenience comes at a cost, replacing casual, trust-building encounters with isolated transactions, further weakening the social fabric of neighborhoods.Car dependency doesn’t help. Car dependence doesn’t just reduce social interactions — it reshapes them. As urban sprawl spreads people further apart, longer commutes and car-centric infrastructure leave less time for community engagement, weakening neighborhood ties. Public transit, one of the few remaining shared civic spaces where people of different backgrounds interact, has been deprioritized, reinforcing isolation.Yet, denser urban living isn’t necessarily the fix. While some advocate for more compact, walkable communities to counteract social fragmentation, there is research that shows density alone doesn’t guarantee stronger social bonds. High-rise developments and mixed-use neighborhoods may put people physically closer together, but without intentional social infrastructure — such as well-designed public spaces, accessible community hubs, and policies that foster local engagement — denser environments can be just as isolating as car-dependent sprawl.At the same time, digital life has transformed how we interact. Social media and online communities have expanded the scope of connection, but often at the cost of place-based relationships. Online, people tend to engage with those who already share their views, reinforcing ideological silos rather than broadening social trust. Meanwhile, interactions with strangers — once the foundation of civic life — become more fraught, as society sorts itself into parallel realities with fewer common reference points.Yet social trust is not entirely collapsing. While some forms of trust — particularly trust in strangers and diverse social networks — are declining, alternative forms of community trust are emerging. Digital spaces, local activism, and mutual aid networks offer new avenues for rebuilding trust, even as traditional community bonds weaken. The question is not whether trust exists, but what kinds of trust are flourishing, and at what cost?CONNECTED OR CONNEDAt the broadest scale, institutional trust is what binds societies together — it’s the belief that governments, media, and public institutions operate with some level of fairness, competence, and accountability. But in many places, that trust has been unraveling for decades.This isn’t just about political polarization or disinformation. Much of the erosion of trust in institutions comes from lived experience.
Hello Interactors,Artificial intelligence divides us. To some, it’s a miracle waiting to solve humanity’s greatest problems. To others, it’s a creeping force, stealing our skills, jobs, and even autonomy. The truth, as always, is more complicated.From sharpened sticks to smartphones, humans have always loved their tools — but at what cost? Plato feared writing would weaken memory; now we worry GPS dulls our sense of direction, calculators erode our math skills, and AI chips away at our ability to think creatively and critically. Are we creating marvels that strengthen us, or are we outsourcing so much that we’re making ourselves vulnerable?What if the answer isn’t rejection or blind adoption, but finding a smarter balance? Let’s dive into what we gain, what we lose, and how interdependence with technology might just be our greatest strength.DEPENDENCY WEAKENS COGNITIVE AGENCYLet’s start with Plato. He famously criticized writing for weakening human memory. His complaint, though seemingly dramatic today, nonetheless echoes across centuries. Modern tools like calculators, spellcheckers, and GPS extend our cognitive reach — a concept known as extended cognition, where tools function as external parts of our thought processes.These tools are marvels of convenience, but they come at a cost. As geographer Paul Torrens highlights in his work on behavioral geography, tools like GPS don’t just help us — they sideline us. By reducing direct interaction with our environment, they bypass processes like navigating landmarks or forming mental maps. Over time, the skills we’ve refined for millennia quietly wither under the glow of our devices.But there’s more to the story than atrophy. Torrens points out another subtle trap: the loss of what “small geographies” offer when we overly rely on tools like GPS and vehicles, both forms of extended cognition. “Small geographies” — our immediate, lived, day-to-day interactions with space — are rich in sensory details that inform navigation and spatial awareness. Walking through a neighborhood engages embodied perception, helping us notice landmarks, smells, textures, and even microclimates that shape our understanding of place.Yet, when we succumb to technologies that abstract these experiences into rationalized systems of larger geographies — like cities planned for efficiency rather than experience — we sacrifice this richness. GPS reduces navigation to turn-by-turn instructions, while vehicles reduce us to a brain in a box shielded from tactile, sensory feedback. This abstraction reshapes not only how we move through space but also how we sense and value it, distorting our relationship with our surroundings.History has plenty of warnings about over-reliance on rigid, top-down systems. During the Little Ice Age (c. 1300–1850), societies that had shifted to monoculture farming or depended on specific trade routes faced catastrophe when the weather turned erratic. Crops failed, rivers froze, and with them, the mills that powered daily life ground to a halt. Communities that had abandoned adaptive skills like crop diversification or local food storage found themselves particularly vulnerable, left scrambling to cope with nature’s prolonged unpredictability.Catastrophes are brutal. Especially when our capacities are brittle. It’s the same trap we risk falling into today, as natural disasters increase in intensity and sometimes duration. We are more dependent than ever on our systems, certainly more than the Little Ice Age. We depend on power, electrodes, and grids of digital nodes embedded in a global network of interdependent modes.Unlike in the 19th century, most of us don’t have a clue about growing food, let alone storing it. We’ve increasingly prioritized the efficiencies and abstractions of our institutionally driven lives over a more fundamental biological existence. Are we at risk of losing the cognitive and sensory richness that smaller, localized environments, or “small geographies”, uniquely offer? Would we survive an arid hell scape or another ice age?STRENGTH IN INTERDEPENDENCEDependency is not a weakness — it’s indistinguishable from life. Humans exist because we rely on mutually dependent organisms — our gut microbes help us digest food and produce vital nutrients, our skin microbiome protects us from harmful pathogens, and even the mitochondria powering our cells were once independent organisms that became integral to our survival. Together, these partnerships form the foundation of our health and life itself. Our very bodies are home to incredible systems that operate as internal biological technologies, silently and effortlessly aiding our survival and navigation.Take grid cells in the brain, for example. These specialized neurons, part of the brain’s spatial navigation system, act like an internal GPS. Grid cells encode distances and directions, enabling us to navigate our environment and construct mental maps of space without conscious effort.Recent studies demonstrate how these grid cells work together in a way that forms a torus-like (donut) structure. The patterns of cognitive activity match up with the animal's movements as its position in the environment gets mapped onto a toroidal shape. Imagine a rat navigating a flat surface. As it moves, this research show its 2D planar coordinates are being translated to and from a 3D toroidal surface mapped on the inside of a gridded donut in its mind. Our neurons interact with sensory inputs, seamlessly guiding us through environments through 3D biolelectric GPS wetware. Sensory modalities like kinesthetic and vestibular senses integrate with our neural systems to inform our perception of space and movement. In essence, our biological organs and limbs come equipped with intricate systems of extended cognition, working in coordinated harmony with the world around us. Just as our plastic and silicon devices extended our biological cognition, our cognition — our bioelectric calculators and wetware GPS — are extended forms of our environment.The study of bioelectromagnetics spans biophysics, cellular biology, neuroscience, and regenerative medicine. It explores how electrical signals within and between cells govern critical processes like neural communication, cell behavior, and tissue regeneration. Biophysics examines the principles of ion flow and membrane potentials, while cellular biology investigates how bioelectric signals guide growth and differentiation. Emerging areas like systems and synthetic biology expand its applications and bioelectricity is key to understanding and engineering life’s electrical foundations.These decentralized processes mirror key features of intelligence: sensing, processing information, and acting in a goal-directed manner. From resolving cellular disputes to coordinating regeneration, these bioelectric communication systems demonstrate how interdependence fosters adaptability.Research already shows how synthetic technology can mirror these biological processes. Software acts as an extension of human adaptability rather than an artificial facsimile. Can we depend on this tech to instruct, not corrupt, the systems that make us up?TOWARD ETHICAL TECHNICAL INTEGRATIONElectrobiology and the synthetic merging of technology with biology may seem futuristic, but it’s here. Moreover, we humans have a long tradition of infusing technology into the biological systems to sustain life. From vaccines to pacemakers, humanity has a history of cautiously adopting innovations that enhance our biology. While these technologies have saved countless lives, their integration hasn’t come without apprehension.Take vaccines, for instance. While vaccines are now widely regarded as one of the greatest public health achievements in history, there have always been skeptics. Even now, after COVID-19 vaccines demonstrated the speed and efficacy of mRNA technology, new waves of fear and misinformation have followed.These concerns echo a broader unease about technological advancements, seen not only with vaccines but also with the rise of AI. Obviously, a system that mimics human cognition raises questions about control, autonomy, and unintended consequences. Especially as it becomes infused with our biology.But this dynamic mirrors the communication and deliberation found at the cellular level. Just as cells exchange bioelectric signals to coordinate action and solve problems, society deliberates at a larger scale, navigating conflicting viewpoints to determine whether and how to adopt new technologies.Scale Theory offers a lens by looking at how systems and processes shift when moving between different scales, from the cellular to the societal. At one scale, bioelectricity reveals cells working collaboratively to heal wounds or regenerate tissue, a process both decentralized and adaptive. At a larger scale, society’s responses to new technologies — vaccines, AI, or bioelectric tools — follow a similar pattern of negotiation, fear, and eventual coordination.The Eames Power of Ten explores how perspective shifts across scales—from the subatomic to the cosmic—reveal interconnected systems. Similarly, Scale Theory highlights how changes in scale reshape our understanding, ethics, and interactions, emphasizing the need to navigate complexity at every level. Together, they underscore the web of relationships that define our world.While the scale differs, the core idea remains: complex systems deliberate and act in ways that ripple across their networks, whether they’re composed of cells or people. How much of this is metaphorical versus empirical is the work of complexity science.I recently heard this sobering example of a synthetic creation rippling to cells: dating apps. These services use pair matching algorithms, made by an arbitrary human and influenced by networks of arbitrary people, actively manipulate our gene pool when certain biological pairings result in newborns. The same rippling occurs with zoning laws and the