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Hello Interactors,
Behind every map is intent. When it comes to making plans for a city, streets are more than mere passageways; they are the cartography of power, exacting politics and ideology for the unfolding of urbanity.
Paris is the blueprint of social order and control portrayed as a symbol of beauty and progress. I wanted to unravel the threads of intent, from communal aspirations to the heavy hand of authoritarianism — a kind of narrative map of a city renowned as much for its revolutions as for its romance.
Let’s go.
COMMON ROOTS, CONTRASTING COMMUNITIES
I’ll offer a word and you examine your emotional reaction to it. Communism. If you’re like me, you’ve been trained to have negative thoughts. Maybe even stop reading. Communism has been associated with authoritarian, repressive regimes that denied basic freedoms and human rights. Ask anyone who lived under these conditions and you can see why it’s been ideologically blackballed in America.
Now I’ll offer another word. Community. Ah, yes, good vibes. Who could possibly be against community? It’s strange how two words with common origins can differ so much by changing two letters.
The word Communism comes from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s Kommunismus as early as 1847 and is derived from the French word communisme which first appeared three years earlier in 1843. This word comes from the Old French word comun meaning "common, general, free, open, public."
A group of people in common, “the common people” who are not rulers of property, clergy, or monarchy, is from the 14th century French word comunité meaning "commonness, everybody" or community.
I had the experience of checking my own reaction to the word communist while reading about how communist ideals helped a politician in Paris help his community.
The French Communist senator, Ian Brossat, lead housing policy in Paris for a decade. He said his
“guiding philosophy is that those who produce the riches of the city must have the right to live in it.”
He and the local government under Mayor Hildago are doing their best to live up to this. Over the past decade, the French Communist Party has emphasized social justice and economic equality, advocating for stronger public services, wealth redistribution, and workers' rights. They've also focused on environmental sustainability, aligning with broader movements to address climate change and social disparities.
People from all over the world are drawn to Paris for its diverse array of small shops, cafes, expansive boulevards, monuments, and museums. It exudes old-world charm complete with cobblers, tailors, jewelers, and luthiers tucked in and among various neighborhoods — some more manicured than others. It’s a dappled array of diverse color and verdant softscapes that when viewed from afar offers an impression of a picture-perfect pointillist painting.
Paris exists as a seemingly organic and emergent unfolding of placemaking complete with public spaces and parks for the taking — by all walks of life. For many, it’s a composite of ideals that harken back to romantic images of a fashionable and stylistic ‘pick your favorite’ century in Europe making it a perennial favorite destination for tourists.
But surrounding the parks where healthy blossoms glow are stealthy property plots where wealthy funds grow. Amidst the green where healthy plants are planted longtime residents squirm as their neighbors are supplanted. Despite the city building or renovating “more than 82,000 apartments over the past three decades for families with children”, 2.4 million people are on the waiting list for affordable housing.(1)
This isn’t the first time economically disadvantaged people have been displaced from Paris. In 1853, one year after Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew Napoleon III declared himself emperor in a successful coup d'état, he wasted no time embarking on what many believe to be the biggest ‘urban renewal’ project in history.
It was famously led by a former prefect administrator, Georges-Eugène Haussmann. His swift and heavy hand pushed powerless Parisians to the periphery to build the Paris so many adore, only to have them return. A pattern that exists today.
Napoleon III, exiled in England, was reluctant to return to a France in decline, marred by unemployment and poverty. By 1848, a massive influx of laborers had swollen Paris's population to over a million. Despite its picturesque image today, 19th-century Paris was a labyrinth of dilapidated buildings and narrow streets, lacking modern infrastructure, and grappling with increasing crime and deadly outbreaks, including a cholera epidemic that claimed 20,000 lives in 1832.
The French author Honoré de Balzac wrote of Paris at the time,
“’Look around you’ as you ‘make your way through that huge stucco cage, that human beehive with black runnels marking its sections, and follow the ramifications of the idea which moves, stirs and ferments inside it.’”
By 1848, France was besieged by societal strife as the monarchy's resurgence fueled public outrage, contrary to the Republic's ideals of liberty. Mass protests and strikes became common, culminating in a tragic clash at the Foreign Ministry where troops fired on protestors, killing 50. The slain were symbolically paraded through Paris, highlighting the oppressive turn of events.
This ignited the Revolution of 1848; a diverse coalition, from students to disillusioned aristocrats, took to the streets, overwhelming the army and storming the King's palace. This mass uprising prompted the formation of a provisional government while monarchist officials, including Haussmann, fled the turmoil.
In the power struggles of post-revolutionary France, neither Socialists nor Republicans could stabilize the economy or improve living conditions. As a result, calls for Napoleon III's return gained traction. He pledged to serve if elected, mirroring the American democratic elections model. He won a four-year term by a wide margin, but he did not have dominant support within the Assembly.
Facing political opposition and public discontent as his term ended, Napoleon III dissolved the Assembly, fired his adversaries, and named himself emperor. A government for the people and by the people was attempted and failed. Long live the King. Authoritarianism was back to the cheers of many in the streets as Napoleon was pulled through the streets by carriage for three hours amidst roars of support.
PARIS: FROM SIEGE TO CHIC
By 1848, Parisians had erected numerous barricades, limiting Napoleon’s access through the city. Originating in 1588 as a defense against soldiers, these barricades evolved from rudimentary stone walls into complex structures capable of withstanding cannon fire, serving both practical and symbolic roles in the city’s history of civil resistance.
Amidst the dawn of the Industrial Age in 1848, Napoleon III aimed to modernize Paris, differentiating it from the neo-gothic style of London's "Albertropolis." Preferring the era's new materials like iron and glass. Dismissing the gothic aesthetics, Napoleon, with Haussmann—a disciplined administrator with similar architectural sensibilities—set out to reshape Paris into a contemporary urban jewel.
In the words of Hausmann reflecting in his memoir,
“We ripped open the belly of old Paris, the neighborhood of revolt and barricades, and cut a large opening through the most impenetrable maze of alleys, piece by piece.”
In Balzac’s 1843 book Lost Illusions he captures the contrasting existence of society revealing the class Hausmann sought to favor at the expense of the other.
The proletariat
“live in insalubrious offices, pestilential courtrooms, small chambers with barred windows, spend their day weighed down by the weight of their affairs.” While the bourgeoisie enjoy “the great, airy, gilded salons, the mansions enclosed in gardens, the world of the rich, leisured, happy, moneyed people.”(2)
Haussmann, satirically termed the "Artiste Démolisseur," enacted a policy akin to 'creative destruction' to achieve it. This is a concept Karl Marx alluded to and the Austrian Economist Joseph Schumpeter later popularized. In Marx and Friedrich Engels popular 1848 book “The Communist Manifesto” they used the term Vernichtung which describes the continuous devaluation of existing wealth to pave the way for the creation of new wealth.
During the 1830s and '40s, monumental ‘devaluations’ came at the expense of land and rivers paving the way for infrastructure like railroads and canals. Including other parts of the world. Americans, Indigenous and colonized, saw over 3000 miles of canals being dug by 1840 and 9,000 miles of railroad by 1850. We can all think of examples of ‘creative destruction’ today — be it from bombs that fall or a wrecking ball.
This 19th century period of transformation also saw France's first passenger train and the spread of a national railway network, all under Napoleon III's ambition to fortify France's economic stature. He promoted and founded new national banks to fund these transformations, fueling Marx's view that economic efficiencies could be gained through improved transportation.
The rise of capitalism and the concept of 'the world market,' as Marx termed it, pushed for more efficient movement of people and goods, a task complicated by Paris's antiquated layout. Although Napoleon and Haussmann are credited with modernizing Paris, initiatives to improve urban circulation were already underway. Prior to 1833, significant canals, roads, and railways were constructed, and post-1832 cholera outbreak, efforts were made to expand the city and reduce congestion.
Architectural and urban planning, including the design of the Place de la Concorde by Jacques Hittorff, aimed to push the city's boundaries. In 1843, Hippolyte Meynadier proposed major urban changes to improve air quality and circulation. Haussmann later embraced and amplified these existing plans with and without Napoleon's support. For example, Napoleon did not see the need to bringing running water to Paris, but Hausmann did it anyway.
Hausmann was fond of expanding. Whereas these earlier plans were certainly grander than any in Paris, or possibly the world, Hausmann multiplied dimensions. Hittorf had drawn plans for some streets be obesely wide, even by today’s standards, but Haussmann tripled the dimensions. For example, the road leading to the Arc de Triomphe, known now as the Champs-Élysées, was first drawn to be 120 feet wide. But Hausmann insisted it be 360 feet wide with an additional 40 feet of sidewalks on each side. He tripled the scale of a project that had already been tripled.
What resulted was a diagonally criss-crossing web of stick straight boulevards with massive monuments strategically placed at nodes and termini. The Arc de Triomphe from above looks like a shining star with roads and boulevards as glimmering spires. Some scholars believe Hausmann, and his coconspirators, were the first to view the city as a technical problem to be solved from the top down.
It was a civic product to be worked on with little regard for the people who were working within. This view of a city may have been influenced by the aerial photographer Nadar who from 1855 to 1858 perfected aerial photography in France. He patented the use of aerial photography for mapmaking and surveying in 1855.
A WHOPPER OF A TRANSFORMATION
Soon after Hausmann finished the complete remaking of Paris in 1870, Friederic Engels published his 1872 book The Housing Question where he explored the housing crisis facing industrial workers of the 19th century. He criticized what became known as the Hausmannization of cities, writing,
“By ‘Haussmann’ I mean the practice which has now become general of making breaches in the working class quarters of our big towns, and particularly in those which are centrally situated, quite apart from whether this is done from considerations of public health and for beautifying the town, or owing to the demand for big centrally situated business premises, or owing to traffic requirements, such as the laying down of railways, streets, etc. No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is everywhere the same: the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else and often in the immediate neighbourhood”
Groups of people struggling to live in a city, “the common people”, those who were not rulers of property, clergy, or monarchy, began organizing as a community. Property owners spared by Hausmann’s utter destruction saw their applications for building improvement permits rejected. In the years leading up to 1871, tensions were once again mounting in a city that had yet to form a municipal government.
Meanwhile the Francho-Prussian War erupted in July of 1870 as France sought to assert its dominance in Europe fearing a pending alliance between Prussia and Spain. During the war, the French National Guard defended Paris. Given their proximity to growing working-class radicalism, sentiments began to be shared among soldiers.
After a significant defeat of the French Army by the Germans, National Guard soldiers seized control of the city on March 18, killing two French army generals and refusing to accept the authority of the French national government. The community became a commune — common, general, free, open, and public.
The commune governed Paris for two months, establishing policies that tended toward a progressive, anti-religious system of their own self-styled socialism. These policies included the separation of church and state, self-policing, the remission of rent, the abolition of child labor, and the right of employees to take over an enterprise deserted by its owner.
Predictably, the Commune was ultimately suppressed by the national French Army at the end of May during "The Bloody Week” when an estimated 10-15,000 Communards were killed in battle or executed.
The Commune's policies and outcome had a significant influence on the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who described it as the first example of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Without it, it’s unlikely Ian Brossat would have a Communist party fighting for fair living conditions. A modern day nod to those Communards slaughtered in 1871.
Meanwhile, today’s City Hall also ensures the persistence of the bucolic, romantic, idealistic — and perhaps classist — proprietors who help to sustain the manicured experience Hausmann set out to achieve nearly 200 years ago. Just as the government plays a role in controlling rent so less financially privileged can live and work there, so too does the government subsidize select city shops and restaurants that attract the well heeled. But they have their limits.
The counselor in charge of managing commercial holdings said, “We don’t rent to McDonald’s, we don’t rent to Burger King and we don’t rent to Sephora.”
These stores obviously exist, so clearly landlords across the city have long sold out to ‘world market’ chains even Hausmann may frown upon. Even as the city take steps to ensure curated theme shops continue to exist. Hausmann may not have planned for this, but Paris did become a kind of a public theme park to the world.
Given the history of radicals and conservatives toiling in a tug of war for centuries over what exactly the city should be and for whom, perhaps the conservative former housing minister now commercial developer, Benoist Apparu, put it best —
“A city, if it’s only made up of poor people, is a disaster. And if it’s only made up of rich people, it’s not much better.” (1)
I, for one, was pleased to find a Burger King on the Champs-Élysées during my first trip to Paris as a teenager in 1984. After a few days of European food, I was ready for a Whopper. Of course, I was unaware of any of the socio-political or psychogeographical implications and ramifications of all this — both historically and in that moment.
I was a middle-class mini-bougie white American eating comfort food while obliviously participating in the exploitive world of ‘rich, leisured, happy, and moneyed people’ on a boulevard designed for it. But I was also in city that birthed liberty, the potential for revolutionary change, and the promise and struggle of egalitarian policies.
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Hello Interactors,
We are fully into spring and that means a shift toward cartography. I’ll be exploring how abstract symbols, lines, and colors can both represent and misrepresent people, politics, and the physical environment. Maps are tools of power and persuasion, which can shape perceptions of space and reality, influence behavior, and maintain or challenge social norms and power structures.
Today’s post bridges Winter’s focus on human behavior with the maps, plans, and politics of cities. In this case, Los Angeles and their attempts at curbing rising traffic related fatalities through safer forms of transportation infrastructure…but not without a fight from some unlikely foes.
Let’s go…
CURBSIDE CASUALTIES LEAD TO ASPHALT ACTIVISM
Angelinos recently passed a controversial measure intended to save lives. It won 63 percent in favor to 37 percent opposed. Maybe it wasn’t so controversial after all. Why should helping save children from being violently killed be controversial in the first place? And why were firefighters leading the charge to kill a measure that saves lives.
Car collisions were the leading cause of death for children in Los Angeles County in 2022. Drug overdose and homicide have been in competition with ‘motor vehicle collisions’ for the top kid-killer spot over the last few years. Drowning, another preventable killer my wife is focused on eradicating, was the number three killer in 2021.
In January, the hyperlocal newsletter Crosstown reported data from the Los Angeles Police Department that 2023 was the “deadliest year on the roads in at least a decade, with 337 fatalities.”
More than half of these were pedestrians. In 2022, 160 pedestrians died from being struck by a motor vehicle. It’s been getting worse for some time.
If you’re not already depressed, this might push you over the edge. Hit and runs are also climbing.
In October of 2022, the County of Los Angeles Public Health Department published the “Leading Causes of Death and Mortality Rates (per 100,000) by Age Group” in Los Angeles County from January to June for 2019 to 2022. During these years, of those aged 0-17, 73 have been killed by motor vehicles. In 2022, it was the number one killer.
Alarmed by the trend, former Mayor Eric Garcetti formulated a “Mobility Plan 2035” in 2015 that “incorporates ‘complete streets’ principles and lays the policy foundation for how future generations of Angelenos interact with their streets.” This follows California state’s 2008 Complete Streets Act (AB 1358), which requires local jurisdictions to
“plan for a balanced, multimodal transportation network that meets the needs of all users of streets, roads, and highways, defined to include motorists, pedestrians, bicyclists, children, persons with disabilities, seniors, movers of commercial goods, and users of public transportation, in a manner that is suitable to the rural, suburban or urban context.”
The rise in traffic deaths reveals that the aspirational goals set in various levels of government often represent legal fictions—idealized plans that simplify complex issues, but don’t always lead to action. These legal frameworks, while not intentionally misleading, can result in a disconnect between policy intentions and outcomes, promoting a status quo bias due to the complexities of change, systemic inertia, and established interests — including those of firefighters.
But a group of citizen activists organized to bring action to the fiction and gain traction amidst the friction. They drew attention to the fact that although L.A. had laid out a progressive ‘complete streets’ plan, they had only executed 5% since its inception nearly a decade ago. At that rate they calculated it would take 160 years to build a minimum network of safe streets. All the while hundreds upon thousands would die while the legal fiction would continued to paint a different picture.
So, they devised Measure HLA, the Healthy Streets L.A. initiative, inspired by other cities to bring action to ‘complete streets’ fiction. The measure states every time a street is resurfaced, any corresponding Network Mobility Plan improvements must be implemented. For example, if a street has been designated as a segment of a bike network and is due to be resurfaced, the city must install the protected bike lane (or other complete street infrastructure) needed to fulfill the city’s Mobility Plan 2050. Common sense exceptions are included to ensure public works could still fix things like potholes, utility cuts, or emergency repairs.
But installing 560 miles of pedestrian paths, 300 miles of enhanced transit lanes, 520 miles of bike lanes safe enough for an eight-year-old, 830 miles of neighborhood enhancements, and 800 miles of bike networks for all levels of cycling requires some sacrifices. Motorists will have to sacrifice space on roadways to accommodate these changes. In doing so many roads will be narrowed and speeds lowered thus sacrificing speed of vehicles.
And this is where the firefighters come in. There’s a common misperception among many firefighters and emergency responders that safe streets, that is slow streets, lead to slower response times resulting in people dying. The hundreds of people, including young people, they scrape off the pavement or extract from a car after being obliterated by a ton of metal charging at excessive speeds seem to be excluded from this calculus.
It is true there was a time when speed bumps were added to slow speeding vehicles that also slowed first responders. But civil engineers and urban planners worked through these challenges and now speed cushions can be installed that permit fire trucks (and other large vehicles) to proceed through gaps in the speed bumps. There are also ways to design safe street networks in ways that allow speeding emergency vehicles to move quickly through road networks protected from or free of pedestrians and cyclists…and clogged traffic. In many cases, it’s the same paths carved out of stalled traffic for buses.
FIRST RESPONSE AND EMERGENCY OBJECTIONS
The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) seemingly haven’t gotten the memo from the Federal Highway Administration on how to calm traffic while not reducing response times. One LAFD Captain, Frank Lima, was quoted as saying “Firefighters are opposed to Measure HLA…[because] response times from 911 resources will increase…Every second in our profession means [life or death].” But Mr. Lima then exposes what is perhaps the true source of his opposition which is not related at all to his expertise or profession but likely a personal conviction.
“It’s going to hurt small businesses and it’s going to take away parking spaces,” he said. “It’s one of those projects that sounds good on paper, but when you put it in reality, it’s going to have a negative impact.”
He is right that legal fiction does sound good on paper, and on-street parking spaces may be taken away on some streets, but if done well other cities have shown small business improves as does property value. It turns out everybody wants to live on a safe and quiet street, expect maybe this LAFD Captain.
Mr. Lima is also a member of the International Association of Firefighters and presumably the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City Local 112 (UFLAC) who claim they spent $100,000 fighting this measure. Their president, Freddy Escobar, said Measure HLA “is full of lies…all these confusing lanes, dangerous bike lanes, pedestrian medians, and all the chaos - and nobody is using 'em." If that was extreme enough in his attempt to scare voters, he added, “If we pass HLA we're going to see chaos all over the city.”
Not to be out done, the president of the California Professional Firefighters, Brian Rice, also revealed his personal convictions while presumably speaking on behalf of all California firefighters stating,
"I hate to tell you men and women, California - and Los Angeles in particular - this is a car community. You may not like it, but it is."
He then took a shot at bus drivers and riders who are stuck in traffic today but will benefit from bus priority signaling and bus only lanes as part of the complete streets plan. He asked,
"Do you really think you're going to see buses go faster than 12 miles an hour?"
And then, he fully exposed his motivations for wanting to deny Angelinos safe streets. Dog whistling conservatives across L.A., he claimed the initiative came from “a small group of elite...Democratic Socialists.”
It might seem unusual for firefighters to be so misaligned with most people they serve (the measure passed by a 2 to 1 margin) or for their personal convictions or biases to seemingly conflict with their egalitarian duty to serve all members of the community, but it’s not.
Firefighters are unique. They’re the only profession that attracts people who need to be trained NOT to immediately run into a burning building. As one fire chief said to his trainees,
“Risk a lot to save a lot. Risk a little to save a little. Risk nothing to save nothing. We’re all here to help people... but you need to have your priorities straight: life safety first, incident stabilization second, and property conservation last.”
These people must not only endure and survive extreme physical conditions, but they are also exposed to human pain and suffering, mutilations, and death. All of which require a healthy support network and relationships to maintain their mental health. This is why their training and work environment also includes indoctrination an institutional culture that instills comradeship, respect, and devotion to service — for each other and the communities they serve.
But within any group of people each individual member shows up with their own implicit or explicit biases toward minority members of any community they may serve, be it class, race, ethnicity, gender, or apparently pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, and those with opposing political views. How might these biases interfere with their duty to serve all community members?
Much of our behavior is subtly influenced by unconscious biases, deep-seated preferences we're often unaware of. These hidden biases can significantly impact daily decisions and societal dynamics, especially in critical areas like healthcare, where they contribute to disparities in patient treatment and outcomes.
Similarly, in the criminal justice system, implicit biases affect law enforcement actions, with studies indicating varying responses based on race. However, the connection between these unconscious biases and actual discriminatory behavior remains a topic of debate, with some research suggesting the link is weaker than previously thought, emphasizing the complexity of addressing such ingrained biases.
One researcher embedded himself in a fire crew in a small town in the southern United States to explore these complex behaviors. To be accepted as ‘one of the guys’ the researcher went through training and served on calls with the crew. It took weeks, but he eventually earned his insider status where he felt everyone was acting normally should he not be observing them. It wasn’t pretty.
AMIDST FLAMES OF PREJUDICE, A BROTHERHOOD IN THE BALANCE
As a member of a white crew serving a racially and ethnically diverse community, he indeed uncovered some alarming and explicit individual biases. In a banter of stories about various calls, he observed a trend in one-upmanship among story tellers. “Tall tales” is a form of bonding among groups of humans that have existed across time and culture. Each story becomes increasingly exaggerated and in the case of the culture of this group of firefighters, explicitly racist, sexist, and/or classist. One such crescendo culminated with this alarming tale (trigger warning, some nasty and disturbing language in here),
“Green Village is the worst because you’ve got all those Mexicans who don’t f*****g speak English. At least at Friendship Haven, you can say, ‘Listen, bro, I’m gonna call the f*****g cops,’ and they scurry off. [He simulates running, while holding up pants] These f*****g Mexicans don’t speak English, so they’re a pain in the ass. Those Jose Cuervos think they are doctors. There was that one call at Green Village, where there was this woman. It was toned out [dispatched] as a cardiac arrest, but we got there and the woman was having a seizure.
Anyway, it was me and Kelly and we pulled her out of the bed to this little spot on the floor between the bed and dresser and her two sons were like standing over her. One was flashing a light in her face, like a flashlight. And she was fat, obviously. And the other one was pulling her shirt down to cover up her fat, while yelling, “She dead. She dead.” The woman was fine. I walked out and called police on that f*****g Beaner. If I would have had a gun, I would have shot those two Speedy Gonzalezes.”
In another story, a Black woman in a hijab arrived at a residence where the crew was cleaning up after a call. Laughing, one of the firefighters asked his crew,
“Did you see what they were cooking? There were bones in that pot.” His colleague responded, “What was it? A cat? Rats? Hamsters?”
Amidst the laughter another story was shared.
“Remember we were at that fire last weekend, over in Africa, and that woman slapped the s**t out of that guy?” One of the Lieutenants replied how hilarious it was while stomping his foot performing a racist caricature and mimicking an African language saying “…she was yelling and really going off on him in Black.”
Upon hearing this, the researcher reported, one of the firefighters laughed so hard he lost his breath. As the laughter subsided another firefighter said of the neighborhood they were serving, “Friendship Haven can burn down and I wouldn’t give a f**k. F**k. That. Hellhole.”
It’s hard to read this and imagine why these bigoted firefighters bother even showing up to help these people. But according to the researcher, this is how a fraction of these “white, male, working-class firefighters cope with stress and forge solidarity” while most of the others passively laugh and follow along.
He claims these individual beliefs don’t interfere with their duty to serve because the one thing that would exclude a firefighter from the ‘brotherhood’ is allowing a human to suffer or die — regardless of how they may personally feel about them. He said that while this Southern white “working-class, locally raised, politically conservative peer culture dominates the social space…prejudiced beliefs take a back seat to enacting excellence on the fireground.”
He says because these extremely discriminatory words and actions are portrayed in private and only among other firefighters they entrust, and issued by those in command, there is little opportunity for disciplinary action. He also believes “it is a tall order to exorcise prejudice from individuals.” The best remedy to counter these individual beliefs, the researcher writes, is to start by “educating staff about the populations they serve and teaching nonviolent approaches to conflict resolution.” He also believes “organizational incentives that encourage grassroots competition to provide optimal service or community engagement can stymie discriminatory behavior.”
In the case of the LA firefighters, they are clearly more ethnically and racially diverse than those this researcher observed in the South, so attacks on minority races is unlikely happening in the open. And what discriminatory prejudices these L.A. firefighters do have are clearly not just private. After all, they just spent $100,000 to make them public.
Should a social psychological researcher embed themselves in any number of these L.A. squads, I’m sure they’d reveal disparaging language there too. Their quasi-militaristic allegiance to the ‘brotherhood’ is evidently forged in a shared disdain for ‘cyclists’, ‘pedestrians’, liberal ‘elite social democrats’, and/or some ‘others’ outside their tribe.
As for those firefighters who may be partial to, or members of, these ‘other’ tribes, and perhaps even chided for being one of ‘them’, the group likely accepts them because even if they’re a negatively branded a ‘liberal socialist’ they’d still risk their life to save another crew member or community member.
American firefighters are portrayed as heroes in America. Movies like Backdraft or television shows like 9-1-1 portray firefighters as tough, rugged, fearless public saviors. The heroic narrative can attract those seeking action, adventure, and camaraderie awash in a glamorous glow of danger. But perhaps society’s hero worship can also insulate those with hateful and bigoted views from public scrutiny. They will perform heroic acts to society’s benefit, but perhaps with a bit more education, less bravado, and more tolerance they could become better firefighters and heroes.
One veteran of emergency services, fire marshal, and U.S. Marine Desert Storm war veteran, Daniel Byne, made a plea in 2007 to,
“Take off the macho T-shirts. Take down the pictures and posters that paint our profession in an unrealistic light and encourage our firefighters to take unwarranted chances in the pursuit of living up to an unrealistic image.”
He is echoing criticisms from a Swedish firefighter Dr. Stefan Svensson, a PhD in fire engineering. He says in many countries the ‘heroic deeds’ many American firefighters are lauded for “would probably had led to inquiries, changes in training manuals, the dismissal of the fire fighter and probably even prosecution of the fire fighter for causing immediate danger to others.” Perhaps the bigoted attitudes may also.
Curiously, some of these other countries happen to be social democracies like Sweden. After this country of nearly 10 million people instituted similar ‘complete streets’ initiatives in 1997, their pedestrian deaths dropped from 134 in 1990 to 25 in 2020. Sweden and Norway have the smallest numbers of traffic related deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in the world, thanks to Vision Zero and ‘complete streets’ initiatives.
Sweden’s Svensson’s message for American firefighters is this:
“Bravery and heroic deeds must result from knowledge, not from illusions.”
Perhaps it’s time more firefighters get educated on the negative effects of outwardly expressing hatred toward others, trust their fellow public service colleagues like city planners and engineers, and learn to operate their equipment on streets designed for all — even if that means learning it from people they disparage as ‘social democrats.’ After all, as that fire chief in the South said, “We’re all here to help people... but you need to have your priorities straight.”
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Hello Interactors,
Continuing on the theme of the brain being embedded in the world in which ‘we’ interact, I explore how the brain is also embodied in a biological system with which ‘it’ interacts. The brain conjures this sense of itself inside this thing called ‘me’. How do these illusions come to be inside a tangible body?
Let’s find out…
Thank you for reading Interplace. This post is public so please do something for my brain… Share it’s thoughts with people you trust.
CONSTRUCTING BRAD
I read a passage in a book a few years ago that fundamentally changed how I think about myself. We were fully into the pandemic, and I had started walking…a lot. I would pick a green patch on Google Maps, put my earplugs in, launch a book, and walk to my little green polygon. Some journeys stretched to 15 miles roundtrip.
So, when I was browsing one of my favorite little independent bookstores, you can imagine my attraction to a book positioned to get my attention called, “In Praise of Walking”. It’s a book on the neuroscience behind walking by the experimental brain researcher at Trinity College, Shane O’Mara. I also recommend his Brain Pizza Substack.
Walking, for me (and him), is a treat. For anyone able to walk, it should be considered a treat.
I learn a lot by walking. But walking is no longer something I need to learn. I already learned how to walk. We are not born knowing how to walk, we must be taught. We are not born knowing much at all. That includes who we are.
I was born Brad. Had I popped out with internal plumbing, I learned I would be named Becky. Here is something else I learned: I was born with a body that had already learned how to pee. That’s what I apparently did in the face of the doctor who pulled me out of the womb.
I am half constructed out of the same DNA that built that womb. Though every cell that constructed that baby Brad are long gone. The body I have today is made of different cells — a result of continuous cell division and renewal processes. Something cells have they already learned to do.
I was born a unique self only in that those cells remembered how to recombine genetically out of DNA passed down for generations. My uniqueness over my life arises out of mutations — random events in the sequencing of my own DNA. Other outside events, like what was in my Mom and Dad’s blood stream just prior to conception, can also randomly cause one gene to turn on and another to turn off.
Those random mutations, some stemming from other random events, continued as I went from being enveloped in a warm viscous fluid shielded from light to my blinding, cold, stark reality. I was so happy or angry I peed on a human urinal. Every planned or random event that happened after that continued to shape my biological makeup — including the arranging, refining, and pruning of the 86 billion neurons in my little brain.
I can’t remember any of this. I can’t even remember learning to walk. But I apparently did. Once out of the womb, the world around us continues to shape us. Like those early moments of DNA expression, some genetic expression is baked into our physical genes. But the constructions of those genes are influenced through biochemical reactions which are influenced by our environment. This can lead cells to communicate and conspire to create unique and differentiating genetic expressions. Even genetically identical twins evolve to have differentiated biology — including physical skills, health outcomes, and the development of ‘self.’
Early brain development is a particularly sensitive period to environmental influences. The brain undergoes development, with processes that move neurons from their place of origin to their final position in the brain, guided by molecular signals. The formation of synapses between neurons allows for the transmission of electrical and chemical signals across the brain, enabling learning and memory.
Our neurons are then wrapped in long slender microscopic tubes made of a fatty substance that helps neurons communicate with other neurons, muscles, and glands. They can be an inch long or several feet with tiny junctions that branch off laying the groundwork for cognitive and socioemotional functions…and how to walk.
As we grow and engage with our environment, our brains evolve the ability to control our body's movements accurately and adaptively well into our adolescence. Learning to walk, we’re not just building muscle strength and balance, but creating and reinforcing the neural pathways that make walking a fluid, automatic process. These processes also underlie the brain's ability to adapt and learn from experience. Each successful step taken strengthens the neural pathways associated with walking.
As adults, the neural pathways we associate with walking become so well-trodden that they are almost automatic, requiring minimal conscious thought for each step we take. This allows the brain to shift its focus from the mechanics of walking to the navigation of the path ahead. What concerns us most these days isn’t the act of walking itself but where our feet are taking us.
BIOLOGICAL RUBE GOLDBERG
The brain uses sensory information—sights, sounds, and the feel of the ground beneath us—to map out our environment, guide us around obstacles, and towards our intended destination in life and in the world.
And this is where Shane O’Mara formed an image in my brain that changed how I think about my brain and myself. I, like most in the West, was raised being exposed to Christian traditions and philosophies that teach the ‘self’ is an immutable soul that is unique. Christians believe the soul is God-given, inherently present from birth or even conception and this belief guides much of our social norms and laws. Many people thus grow up believing we possess some essence that makes up our identity. Lady Gaga’s 2011 hit might sum it up best in that people tend to have an oversized belief that they were ‘Born This Way.’
Another view is that the ‘self’ is continually constructed to form an overlapping Venn diagram of many ‘selves’. For me, oneself is a son, oneself is a brother, a friend, a husband, a father, a former employee, a member of a community, a nation, a society, and any other ‘oneselves’ that any given situation demands. Together, they make ‘oneself’. These have all been developed, like my genes, through socialization, communication, and cultural and environmental context — through inter-place, if you will, the interaction of people and place.
More broadly, think of a human as a system of assembled biological parts, each with its distinct function yet systematically interdependent. We have a bony skeleton that supports and protects a complex array of organs. These organs include a powerful cardiac muscle—the heart—that pumps blood infused with oxygen and nutrients through a vast fractal-like network of vessels, reaching to the very edge of existence.
This circulatory system not only delivers life-sustaining substances but also carries away the metabolic byproducts with clever ways for them to be expelled. It’s coordinated with specialized systems for intake and digestion of nutrients, transforming food into fuel. The gastrointestinal tract is a winding pathway designed for the efficient processing of food, extracting vital nutrients, and compacting waste for disposal.
Containing all these gooey bits is a bag of skin. It’s the largest organ and much more than a bag. It is a reactive, dynamic interface that interacts with the world through touch, temperature sensation, and protection against environmental threats. It also plays a role in thermoregulation, maintaining internal climate through sweat and the subtleties of blood flow.
The muscular system is a Rube Goldberg web of fibers capable of delicate manipulation of tweezers to the powerful thrusts for jumping. It all remains suspended with tissue connecting muscles to bones and to each other enabling both movement and stability.
At the core is another set of muscles that operate the respiratory system, expanding and contracting to draw in air rich in oxygen and expel air laden with carbon dioxide. Lungs, nestled within the ribcage, serve as the sites of this gaseous exchange that literally breathe life into us.
Skin allows for the injection of sensory organs without springing a leak. Eyes capture light and render vision, ears detect vibrations and translate them into sound, and olfactory receptors decode molecular messages into scents and tastes.
The nervous system is an internal communication network, a lightning-fast array of signals that governs everything from the reflexive yank or a staggering reel to a cognitive think or emotional feel. It is the electrical wiring that animates our being, rooted in the brain, an organ of such complexity that it conjures consciousness itself.
When I look at these systems together, they make ‘me’. They sustain the biological necessities that enable what we call the human experience. I am a being of both strength and vulnerability, an assemblage of interdependent systems I call 'self'.
This image of myself came into focus with a simple passage from Shane O’Mara:
"As far as your brain is concerned, your body hangs down from your head, until it makes contact with the ground through your feet. You're not built from the soles of your feet up - it's more like your head is a 'castle in the air', with scaffolding reaching down to the ground."
I imagine my brain being the one going on a walk by coordinating with my body to make sure it survives the journey. This ‘castle in the air’ takes input from the world and prunes its own neural network. In the walk of life, the brain conjures an image and belief that ‘I’ exist by enacting and interacting in ways that serve changing social contexts unfolding in front of me. Part of this image of myself leads me to imagine I exist so the brain itself can survive.
‘I’ am more like an evolutionary experiment conjured in a brain working on behalf of, and in coordination with, a biological system within which it is embodied. And ‘I’ exist in a world in which my brain is embedded, attached to scaffolding that touches the ground on which it walks. Sometimes, in search of little green patches on a map waiting to be visited.
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Hello Interactors,
All the talk and evidence of AI, chips in the brain, and robotic overlords has created emotions ranging from hysteria to malaise to clinical depression. How much of this is caused or influenced by narratives spun by favored voices telling tall tales of proximal parables and are there other ways to think about our brain than just a processor?
Let’s find out…
THE MENTAL MYTHS OF SILICON AND SYNAPSES
Our brain is an energy intense organ. It consumes 20% of our energy but accounts for just 2% of our body weight. To manage this high demand for energy, the brain employs various strategies to simplify tasks and processes. One of those is to simplify how the world works. Like dividing it into discernable individual component parts.
In a world increasingly seduced by these crisp edges of in groups and out groups, there exists a tribe of techno-optimists, guardians of an old tale, who look to the brain as humanity's ultimate processor and a promise and desire for digital immortality. This romanticized notion of the “mind as computer” is facing competition as feats of AI reveal a seemingly superior capability to their own self-assuming super-intelligence. So, they want their outdated hardware upgraded. It's all positioned as cutting edge and futuristic but harks back to the clockwork dualistic and mechanistic universe of the Enlightenment.
We’ve been preached a digital gospel that suggests the warm wetware within our skulls operates like baked silicon chips, crunching data of daily existence with the cold precision of a CPU. Yet, simmering in the biochemistry that hosts these digital dreams are ripples of evidence captured and crunched by computers and displayed in the form of MRI’s, fMRI’s, PET scans, SPECT scans, NIRS, and MEG’s. These images lead some cognitive scientists, with the help of various forms of AI, to slowly dismantle the mechanistic metaphor of ‘the brain as CPU’, piece by intricate piece.
The metaphor of the brain functioning as a processor is as old as Alan Turing and the mid-20th century computational theories that birthed computer science. These ideas and experiments propagated as mass media proliferated and now serve as common conceptions of how the mind works. Other historical and cultural factors contribute to the persistence of this metaphor and perpetuated among teachers, scientists, and attention seeking tech moguls.
But it was centuries before, during the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, that a significant shift towards rationalist, determinist, and mechanistic views of nature were put forth by figures like René Descartes and Isaac Newton. The world and its phenomena, including human beings and human thought, began to be understood in terms of mechanical laws and principles, laying the groundwork for comparing the brain to a machine.
The advancements in machinery and technology during the Industrial Revolution further reinforced the mechanistic view of life processes, including human cognition, making it easier to draw parallels between the operations of machines and the functions of the human brain. I recently wrote about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a prime example from that period.
Fast forwarding a century later, to the 1970s, I remember watching the “Six Million Dollar Man” on TV as a kid. This show was based on a Martin Caidin novel called Cyborg depicting an astronaut who survives a plane crash and is brought to life by replacing body parts with robotics. The “Six Million Dollar Man” was soon joined by “The Bionic Woman” and episodes that featured the faces of human robots being ripped off to reveal a computer inside. Naturally, these two computer-powered bionic superpowers worked as secret agents in U.S. Office of…wait for it…“Scientific Intelligence.”
Source: YouTube
This was all occurring alongside emerging discoveries in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, further cementing the brain-CPU analogy. Like science fiction writers and directors, early AI researchers and scientists aimed to replicate human cognitive processes in computers, leading to conceptual overlaps between how brains and computers function in science and society.
The CPU metaphor provides a simplified way to understand the complex workings of the brain, making it accessible to people without specialized knowledge in neuroscience or cognitive science. This metaphor continues to be used in educational contexts to teach basic concepts about brain functions, reinforcing its prevalence.
The tendency toward reductionism — to reduce complex phenomena to their simplest components — is present in many scientific and engineering disciplines and has long contributed to the organ-as-part metaphor. Viewing the brain as akin to a computer's CPU aligns with reductionist approaches reminiscent of those early Enlightenment thinkers seeking to understand biological systems by dissecting their individual parts and drawing useful, but also isolated and simplified conclusions.
While the brain-CPU metaphor has historical roots and provides a convenient framework for understanding some aspects of cognitive function, many believe it is ultimately flawed. It can overlook the brain's integrated and dynamic nature, its entanglement within a larger biological organism, and its continuous interaction with a complex environment. These are themes under exposed and under explained in popular science, media, and most of the tech industry.
The growing recognition of these limitations, particularly within fields like 4E cognitive science (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended cognition), is leading to the development of more nuanced and holistic models of cognition that transcend simplistic mechanical analogies.
Do we have the energy to spare our brain so we may better understand it?
EMBODIED MINDS EMBEDDED, EXTENDED, AND ENACTIVE
The 4E framework in cognitive science highlights the brain's integrated and dynamic nature. Advances in neuroscience have shown that the brain is not a static organ with fixed functions but is highly malleable, capable of reorganizing itself in response to learning and experience. This plasticity allows for adaptability and resilience necessary for its survival, characteristics not accounted for in the rigid structure of a CPU.
The brain's structure is composed of complex, interconnected networks that support a wide range of functions, from basic sensory processing to higher-order cognitive tasks. These networks do not operate in isolation but are dynamically interacting and reconfiguring based on internal and external demands.
The brain's function is also modulated by a variety of neurotransmitters that influence mood, cognition, and behavior. This biochemical layer adds a level of complexity to brain function that is absent in computer CPUs today. This means the brain is intimately connected to the biology of the body, receiving continuous sensory inputs and sending commands to our organs and limbs. This sensory-motor coupling is foundational to cognition, emphasizing the role of bodily interactions with the world and how our brain processes it.
Research supports this concept. Cognition is something that is embodied in us, where cognitive processes are grounded in sensory and motor systems. For example, studies on mirror neurons suggest that understanding others' actions involves simulating these actions in our own sensory-motor systems.
For instance, when a child observes an adult using a tool, such as a hammer, the mirror neurons associated with the motion of hammering may fire in the child's brain, despite the child not physically performing the action. This neural activity can help the child understand the action and later replicate it, contributing to the learning process.
Another example is in the understanding of emotions. When we see someone smiling or frowning, our mirror neuron system may activate the same facial muscles involved in smiling or frowning, contributing to an empathetic response. This internal mimicry can help us to 'feel' what the other person is feeling and develop a better understanding of their emotional state.
The brain is in continuous interaction with the complex environment in which we exist. It is embedded in an environment that it continuously interacts with, influencing and being influenced by it. This interaction is not merely passive; the brain actively constructs perceptions and meanings based on environmental inputs.
This enactive perspective posits cognition arises through a dynamic interplay between an organism and its environment. Cognitive processes such as perception and action are therefore inseparable and co-determined. In the example of a child learning to use a hammer, they learn to grasp the handle not just by observing but through a process of trial and error. This involves actively engaging with the object and learning from the outcomes of these interactions thus enacting cognition through interactive processes.
These dynamic interactions are extended beyond the brain and body to include tools, like a hammer, but also computers, mobile phones, and automobiles. These tools become part of the mind's cognitive architecture. This perspective challenges traditional notions of cognition as being confined within the boundaries of the individual, proposing instead that objects and devices in our environment can function as extensions of our cognitive system when they are deeply integrated into our mental activities.
As the brains of neuroscientists interact with each other, their embedded and embodied brains are synthesizing an ever-evolving understanding of cognition that is more integral than dichotomous, more holistic than dualistic. Even as the brain employs cost-cutting simplification strategies, a rich emergent complexity emerges that further defines our cognitive reality.
The old metaphor of the brain as a CPU, once a middle 20th-century marvel, is gradually yielding to a perspective that sees the brain not as a solitary processor but as part of a dynamic, integrated system of organism and environment. As techno-optimists laud AI and digital immortality, praying to dualistic gods, the minds of some neuroscientists are extended by imaging tools powered by CPUs, presenting a model of cognition far from the mechanistic. Instead, they argue our brains are enmeshed in a dynamic and fluid biological existence.
It is here, in the flowing network of neurons and scientific narratives, that the future of understanding the human mind is taking shape. Even as I write this and you read it, we are moving our brain from the rigidly digital dualistic understanding to the fluidly enactive. In doing so, our brains are redefining our place within this emergent organism-environment system we call life using as little energy as necessary.
References:
Knyazev, G. G. (2023). A Paradigm Shift in Cognitive Sciences. Neuroscience and Behavioral Physiology. DOI: 10.1007/s11055-023-01483-9
Newen, A., De Bruin, L., & Gallagher, S. (Eds.). (2018). The Oxford handbook of 4E cognition. Oxford University Press.
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Enactivism. In Wikipedia. Retrieved February 2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enactivism
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Hello Interactors,
A Frankenstein announcement from Musk this week punctuated my recent fascination with the author of that popular novel, Mary Shelley. Her isolated lived experience in a time of intense technological discovery, social and geo-political unrest, AND a climate crisis rings true today more than ever.
But she also was subtlety representing a scientific movement that is largely ignored today, but just may be experiencing a bit of a resurgence in areas like biology and neuroscience.
Let’s dig in…
FRANKEN-MUSK
“It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”
Mary Shelley was intrigued, and maybe a little scared, by the idea of electrifying organs. She admits as much in her 1831 forward of her famous novel, “Frankenstein”, first published January 1, 1818. She wrote,
"Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth."
Bioelectrical experimentation had been happening for nearly 40 years by the time Shelley wrote this book. Luigi Galvani, an Italian physician, physicist, and philosopher demonstrated the existence of electricity in living tissue in the late 1780s. He called it ‘animal electricity’. Many repeated his experiments over the years and ‘galvanism’ remained hotly debated well into the 1800s.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Shelley and her “Frankenstein” lately. The hype and hysteria surrounding AI, human-like robots, and biocomputing make it easy to imagine. Just last week Elon Musk tweeted that his company, Neuralink, implanted its brain chip in a human for the first time. He wants to make ‘The Matrix’ a reality. Here we are some 200 years later, wanting to believe ‘perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.’
‘Vital warmth’ seems a borrowed phrase from another scientific movement of the time, ‘vitalism’. Vitalism is the belief that living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities, like computer chips, because they are governed by a unique, non-physical force or "vital spark" that animates life. A kind of teleology for which some contemporary biologists now have empirical evidence.
One prominent vitalist of the 18th and 19th century, the German physician, physiologist, and anthropologist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, is best known for his contributions to the study of human biology. He developed the concept of the "Bildungstrieb" or "formative drive," which he proposed as an inherent force guiding the growth and development of organisms. Contemporary science explains these processes through a combination of genetic, biochemical, and physical principles like encoded DNA, gene expression networks, and morphogenesis — the interactions between cells and their responses to various chemical and mechanical forces.
THE INDUSTRIALIST’S VITAL SPARK
‘Formative drive’ was a vitalist response to the mechanistic explanations of life that were prevalent in the Enlightenment period. The same mechanistic fervor that endues so many technologists today, like Musk, with vital warmth. Blumenbach argued that physical and chemical processes alone could not account for the organization and complexity of living beings. Instead, he suggested that some other vital force was responsible for the development and function of organic forms.
Vitalists had their skeptics. Chiefly among them was Alessandro Volta. He was critical of Galvani’s ‘vital spark’. In Galvani’s frog leg experiments, he discovered that when two different metals (e.g., copper and zinc) were connected and then touched to a frog's nerve and muscle, the muscle would contract even without any external electrical source. Galvani concluded that this was due to an electrical force inherent in the nerves of the frog, a concept that challenged the prevailing views of the time and eventually laid the groundwork for the field of electrophysiology.
Volta, however, believed the electrical effects were due to the metals used in Galvani's experiments. Volta’s work eventually led to the development of the Voltaic Pile, an early form of a battery. Hence the term ‘volt’. The Voltaic Pile enabled a more systematic and controlled study of electricity, which was a relatively little-understood phenomenon at the time. It provided scientists and inventors with a consistent and reliable source of electrical energy for experiments, leading to a deeper understanding of electrical principles and the discovery of new technologies.
One such technology was the invention of the telegraph in the 1830s. The availability of electric batteries as power sources is what made it possible for Samuel Morse to revolutionize long-distance communication, profoundly effecting commerce, governance, and daily life. As he wrote in his first public demonstration, “What hath God wrought?”
The mechanists gained further favor as more and more scientists, inventors, and eventually economists succumbed to the allure of reductionism. They believed understanding complex phenomena could be done by studying their simplest, most fundamental, and mechanistic parts. Including body parts.
ECHOES OF THE INDUSTRIAL AGE
It was around the time of Morse’s tinkering that Mary Shelley reissued ‘Frankenstein’. She revealed in her 1831 forward how she was influenced by the scientific and philosophical ideas of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This included galvanism, the debates around vitalism, and the Romantic movement's reaction to the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason and science.
This was also a period marked by significant political, social, and technological upheavals. The consolidation of nation-states and the expansion of political power were central themes of this era, leading to debates over government intervention and the balance between order and liberty. Shelley's narrative, set against this backdrop, can be seen as a reflection on the consequences of unchecked ambition and the ethical responsibilities of creators, themes that are increasingly relevant in today's discussions about artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and other forms of technological innovation.
Moreover, Shelley's personal history and the socio-political context of her time deeply informed the themes of her novel. As the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneering feminist thinker, Shelley was exposed from an early age to, what were then, radical ideas about gender, society, and individual rights. Her own experiences of loss, isolation, and vulnerability were compounded by the societal upheavals of the Little Ice Age and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. "Frankenstein" is imbued with a profound sense of existential questioning. It critiques the dehumanizing aspects of technological and industrial progress — themes that resonate with many today.
Like the early parts of the Industrial Revolution, we are living in a period of transforming economies, social structures, and daily life, ushering in new forms of labor, consumption, and environmental impact. The creation of Shelley’s ‘Creature’ can be seen as a metaphor for the unforeseen consequences of industrialization, including the alienation of individuals from their labor, from nature, and from each other.
Shelley's narrative warns of the dangers of valuing power and progress over empathy and ethical consideration, a warning that remains pertinent as society grapples with the implications of rapid technological advancement and environmental degradation. Mechanistic reductionism, with its emphasis on dissecting complex phenomena into their most basic parts, undeniably continues to dominate much of science, technology, and conventional thought.
Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," while serving as a cautionary tale about the hubris and potential perils of unchecked scientific and technological ambition, has paradoxically also fueled the collective imagination, inspiring generations to dream of creating a human-like entity from disparate parts and mechanisms.
Yet, there is an emerging renaissance that harks back to the holistic perspectives reminiscent of early vitalism. As scientists increasingly traverse interdisciplinary boundaries, embracing the principles of holism and complexity science, they are uncovering new patterns, principles, and laws that echo the intuitions of early vitalists.
The groundbreaking research of Michael Levin at Tufts University, with its focus on bioelectric patterns and their role in development and regeneration, offers a compelling empirical bridge to Blumenbach’s ‘formative drive’. While Levin's work eschews the metaphysical aspects of a "life force," it uncovers the intricate bioelectric networks that guide the form and function of organisms, echoing vitalism's fascination with the organizing principles of life.
This shift acknowledges that life's essence may not be fully captured by reductionist views alone. Levin shows how it’s not the mechanisms of DNA that unlock the mysteries of biological organization but the communication between cells and their environment. It points towards a more integrated understanding of the natural world that respects the intricate interplay of its myriad components.
Shelley’s pondering remains relevant today, “perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth." Either way, "Frankenstein" continues to remind us of the need for humility and ethical consideration. After all, as we navigate the complex frontier between mechanistic ambition and our fragile, emergent, and interconnected life neurobiology tells us our own neural connections are being reshaped by both environmental interactions and cognitive activity, reflecting principles of embedded cognition those early vitalists would surely endorse.
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Hello Interactors,
It’s been a while since we’ve been together. I took some time over the holiday break. We often think of parents spoiling kids upon their return from college, but I’m the one who feels spoiled.
We’re squarely in the winter season up north and that means I’ll be exploring human behavior. With all the talk of AI, I thought I’d start with its root inspiration — the neuron. How did these come to be?
Let’s find out.
As I stand here today, the earth’s declination angle is slowly inching toward zero as its orbital tilt brings us closer to spring. This will trigger a host of biological and biochemical chain reactions. Plants awake, buds break, birds migrate, insects propagate, amphibians’ mate, seeds germinate, furs abate, and soils emanate. Algae plumes bloom, and our own metabolism’s resume.
This shared sensing of environmental change makes common sense because we can sense it with our own senses. Less common is making sense of what we can’t sense. That’s what I’m trying to make sense of. Let’s start with cells.
Cells can also make sense of their environment, and of each other. Consensus belief says cellular life emerged nearly 3.7 billion years ago on a rotating and orbiting earth that had already been oscillating in a predictable pattern for 750 million years.
Early cellular organisms learned to predict these patterns, as the theory goes, getting an evolutionary leg up on the competition. This knowledge was then stored in the cell. I was surprised to learn a cell can store information.
Ricard Solé is a prominent researcher who applies complex systems concepts to biology. He explained in a recent podcast how cells perform associative learning through reactions to different external stimuli — a process fundamental to the evolution of cognition. This learning involves associating a specific signal with a stressor in a cell’s environment. Over time, they learn to respond to the signal, even in the absence of the original stressor. A bit like a Pavlovian response.
This information is then stored within the cell. Cells have complex signaling networks that gather information from the cell membrane and transmit it internally from the membrane to the genome or nucleus. These signals act as boolean "genetic switches." The switch involves pairs of genes that negatively regulate each other, creating a kind of memory storage system. As one gene tries to regulate the other, that gene is trying to do the same. Like two magnets competing to repel or attract. This leads to a binary outcome — the conflict produces a specific protein, or it does not. This process is akin to the binary electronic circuitry found in signaling networks used to process and store information on a computer. (more on that in future posts on this topic)
Cells that can respond to the environment, or conditions within itself, can secrete something into their environment. But if there are no other cells to receive them as signals or with the intention to propagate their stored information, this operation serves no function. Over evolutionary time, however, cells began to form functionalities. For example, through expressions formed from their genetic circuitry, the cells that make up your liver and kidney evolved to conduct basic metabolic functions. Meanwhile, the cells that make up neurons in your brain evolved to send and receive information — to communicate with each other. A major step in evolution.
Another major evolutionary step, according to Solé, came with interneurons. These are neurons that form connections between sensory neurons to process information between them. Many neurons connected by many interneurons form arrays of neural circuits capable of more complex information processing. Organisms that don’t have interneurons, like plants, pose a real biological and evolutionary disadvantage among energy competing biological organisms. Though, they created their own biological functions that are so wondrous they induce jealousy, like photosynthesis. Imagine getting fed by lying in the sun with your feet in the sand. Did I mention it’s winter in the gloomy northwest?
Solé believes the invention of interneurons provided the critical step toward a key component in the evolution of complex organisms like us, but also organisms that came before us like jellyfish. Jellyfish are made of a distributed ‘nerve net’ composed of sensory neurons, motor neurons, and interneurons similar to ours. This network conducts basic processing for various sensory and motor functions. For example, it can sense elements of its environment, like water currents and temperatures, which then trigger responses like swimming or eating.
Directed locomotion in response to sensory information processing serves as another critical step on the path of evolution — predation. Not only is the jellyfish sensing the water around them, but they’re also sensing the presence of predators and their nervous system conspires to act accordingly. As remarkable and complex a jellyfish is at storing information that allows it to predict and act to internal and external stimuli, it took another evolutionary leap to yield the kind of complex neural networks and biological systems we humans rely on.
In the words of Ricard Solé, “we tend to think [we humans], unfortunately for our planet, [] have been very, very successful.” He considers humans ‘ecological engineers’ because we can “transform the planet by changing flows of energy and matter at massive scales.” The question remains (as we transform the planet in ways that make it harder for us and the organisms we rely on to survive) is our evolutionary journey entering a phase transition? Are we teaching our cells a new lesson to be stored away for future generations, or another failed biological experiment nearing the end of the relentless and brutal path of evolutionary trial and error?
Paraphrasing the esteemed biologist E. O. Wilson, Solé offers that “if humans were not here, there would be the planet of the ants”. Ants have a form of collective intelligence that also allow them to transform the planet at massive scales, but to also survive seemingly insurmountable odds.
Is there something to be learned from ants? An ant, on its own, is as unremarkable as it is doomed. Can the same be said for us? Who are we without other humans? And even when we’re alone, are we really? We host an entire ecosystem of microorganisms for which we are mutually dependent for survival. Some feed on us, some try to kill us, while others conspire with our cells in competition and collaboration to make sense of each other — including the cells that make neurons. What kind of intelligence will they we need to survive another trip around the sun?
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Hello Interactors,
It’s been a great year hear at Interplace with subscriptions hitting (and hovering) around 1000 subscribers! Thank you!
And thanks to Substack’s recommendation engine, the vast majority of those came from Steven Sinofsky’s Hardcore Software newsletter. Thank you!
Sadly, the utility of this recommendation engine also means those Nazi newsletters Substack chooses to sponsor will also spread. It’s their choice of free speech as a publisher and seller. Just like this 1930s Aryan bookstore who was fine attracting Nazi customers because, like Substack, they believed select, uncensored ‘truth brings liberation’.
I’m not thrilled to be sorted alongside such publications, but I’m also not thrilled to be embedded among local and national right wing extremists in a country that has yet to fully come to terms with it’s own racial ideology. An ideology that intermingles jingoism and militarism propped up with related economic policies. Yes, I have the choice (and privilege) to move, but finding places void of right-wing extremism and zombie neoliberalism is getting harder and harder these days.
2024 is a big election year in the U.S. One that will surely influence this course and our nation’s discourse. Abusive forms of AI is sure to play a role in it. So, I was curious what would happen if I took my top five most viewed posts of 2023 and ask ChatGPT to provide connections between them and summarize a conclusion.
I’m impressed. Not only with the how Large Language Models (LLMs) emulate perceived human intelligence, but with the consistency with which my own convictions and intentions emerge throughout these five posts. ChatGPT, like a good LLM, is providing an illusion of consistency and coherency in my writing! It’s a reflection of external linguistic patterns arranged in a literary image of my internal goals for Interplace — an emulation of perceived intelligence! Be careful out there.
I hope everyone has a healthy and happy 2024. Please remember this interpretation of my own intention as you set your new year’s resolutions:
“our collective actions contribute to the fabric of our environments, and through awareness and choice, we have the power to reshape them for the better.”
And now, ChatGPT’s Interplace summary of 2023.
The five blocks of text you provided seem to be excerpts from different discussions or articles that, although varied in focus, share common themes about the intersection of human behavior, spatial cognition, and the environment, whether it be through the lens of a television show, research in geography, urban planning, psychological studies, or societal needs.
* Clarkson’s Farm: The Grand Tour of the Rural-Urban Divide:
This text illustrates how a TV show can provide a microcosm of the broader societal issues, including the divide between rural and urban life, environmental impact, and social stratification. It suggests that the antics of the show's host, Jeremy Clarkson, inadvertently reveal the interconnectedness of society and the environment.
* A Geography Revolution: Complexity and Connection in Successor Evolution:
This section discusses the advancement in cognitive geography, moving away from traditional, rigid spatial models to those that account for the complex, iterative interactions between people and their environments. It challenges conventional Euclidean views and advocates for a more dynamic, holistic approach to spatial cognition.
* The Universal Uniformity of Urban Mobility:
Here, the focus is on urban mobility and how patterns of movement within cities are universally similar, as demonstrated by visitation power laws. The text raises concerns about equity and inclusivity in urban planning, suggesting that current models serve those with resources while potentially neglecting others. It also touches on how legislative changes can influence urban structure and the potential for creating more walkable neighborhoods.
* Will Work for Food. A Quirk or Accrued?:
This text compares human behavior with that of rats in a study about driving and satisfaction. It draws parallels between the cognitive benefits of novel experiences and the laborious nature of maintaining a car, suggesting that there may be more rewarding alternatives to driving, such as walking, which provide more cognitive stimulation and a sense of agency.
* Hierarchy of Needs or Just More Greed?:
The final text reflects on the individual's power to enact change within large-scale systems, as evidenced by shifts in behavior during the pandemic. It questions whether adherence to traditional socio-economic constructs serves our needs and posits that conscious, alternative choices could lead to significant societal transformations.
Summary:
The amalgamation of these texts presents a nuanced examination of human-environment interactions. At the core is an understanding that our spaces, whether physical like farms and cities or conceptual like cognitive maps, are not static but are shaped by our interactions, decisions, and movements. From Clarkson's representation of rural life to the universal patterns of urban mobility, we see a pattern of uniformity in our behaviors that transcends geography and culture.
The discussion on cognitive geography suggests that embracing complexity in our understanding of space can lead to more equitable and representative models of human-environment interaction. This is echoed in the exploration of urban mobility, where data reflects not just how we move, but also the socio-economic hierarchies that dictate our movement. The potential for change is highlighted by the example of legislation affecting urban density, indicating a path towards more sustainable and equitable urban living.
The comparison of human behavior to that of rats reveals a deeper commentary on our choices and their psychological impacts. The reward system driving both rats and humans to undertake certain tasks like driving is complex and influenced by our environment. This complexity is further unpacked in the final text, which suggests that individual choices can lead to macro-scale changes in society. This ties back to the first text, where a television show, through its portrayal of the rural-urban divide, unintentionally showcases the interconnectivity of our choices and their impact on the world.
In essence, these texts argue for a more conscious and nuanced approach to how we view and shape our environments. They call for a departure from reductionist thinking, advocating for a recognition of the complex, interconnected nature of our world, and a reevaluation of our choices and their ramifications. Whether through the lens of a TV show, urban planning, geography, psychology, or societal behavior, the message is clear: our collective actions contribute to the fabric of our environments, and through awareness and choice, we have the power to reshape them for the better.
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Hello Interactors,
On the day before many around the world pull out ‘T’was the Night Before Christmas’ to read to their kids, maybe drop a little context to the origins of this tale. This is an excerpt from a longer post I did in 2021 on Black Friday.
It touches on how the rising wealth in New York leading up to 1900 brought about shifts in attitudes around how the powerful elite should deal with ‘the masses’ of poor, and increasingly urban, immigrants. Included are themes emerging today like immigration, laws outlawing voting to non-property owners, and even calls for an end to democracy.
‘T’was the Night Before Christmas’ was intended for the elite literate ruling class. It can be interpreted as a nostalgic romantic tale about how Christmas should be less about sharing with ‘the unruly masses’ — communally seeking good tidings — and more about barricading private homes from potential invasion and keeping your wealth to yourself. It’s a fantasy about letting a poor, kind peddler in a red tattered coat labor to bring gifts to affluent kids, quietly and calmly through the chimney of a fancy New York apartment.
Merry Christmas!
CLOTHES WERE ALL TARNISHED WITH ASHES AND SOOT
But the dawn of a new century, and the industrial age, brought a shift in attitudes around Christmas. The elite, like in centuries past, distanced themselves from the occasion. As urban cities grew and jobs shifted from the farm to the factory, winter brought new dynamics to the onset of the season. Some factories closed in the cold months as did shipyards along frozen waters.
This brought unemployment and idle time to laborers. Whereas historically wealthy farm owners were willing to amuse the working class in a societal roll reversal – through transient and theatrical wassailing – the urban elite power structures were unwilling to participate. But it didn’t stop the working class from venting.
The once faint mockery of their employers – imbued with subtle hints of revenge should they not offer them gifts, food, or alcohol – turned fierce and riotous in the 1800s. Papers in both England and the United States barely mention Christmas at all between 1800 and 1820. But that was about to change.
In the first decade of 1800, one of New York’s most influential men, John Pintard, became particularly peeved by the seasonal banditti. He reminisced on ‘better days’ when the rich and the poor got drunk together. And while he wished his wealthy friends reveled more among themselves, he grew concerned that “the beastly vice of drunkenness among the lower laboring classes is growing to a frightful excess…”
And in a familiar tone, echoed to this day by many, he feared “thefts, incendiaries, and murders—which prevail—all arise from this source.” Which is why he helped create the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism. This was an organization that sought to curb money directed at care for the poor, but to also stop them from begging and drinking. The white elite ruling class of the 1820s –- as well as many in the 2020s – complained of what one New York paper described as, “[t]he assembling of Negroes, servants, boys and other disorderly persons, in noisy companies in the streets, where they spend the time in gaming, drunkenness, quarreling, swearing, etc., to the great disturbance of the neighborhood.”
Pintard was also hopelessly nostalgic. He founded the New York Historical Society in 1804 and was instrumental in establishing Washington’s Birthday, the Fourth of July, and Columbus Day as national holidays. Pintard also introduced America’s icon of nostalgia, Santa Claus. Seeking a patron saint for the New York Historical Society, and for all of New York City, he commissioned an illustration to be painted of St. Nicholas giving presents to children. While the icon was not intended to be seasonal, it was nonetheless printed on December 6th, St. Nicholas Day, in 1810.
He pined for the days when the rich and powerful could rule over what was becoming a burgeoning working class. In 1822, as Jefferson had just passed a law allowing non-property owners to vote, Pintard wrote to his daughter,
“All power is to be given, by the right of universal suffrage, to a mass of people, especially in this city, which has no stake in society. It is easier to raise a mob than to quell it, and we shall hereafter be governed by rank democracy.… Alas that the proud state of New York should be engulfed in the abyss of ruin.”
WHAT TO MY WONDERING EYES SHOULD APPEAR
1822 was also the year his friend, and wealthy land owner, Clement Clark Moore, wrote what was to become the most influential Christmas poem ever: “A Visit from St. Nicholas” or as it is known today, “T’was The Night Before Christmas.”
This single poem, written for the elite upper class, encapsulates the nostalgia of wassailing Pintard and his friends pined for, while self-indulgently feeling good about themselves for ‘giving to the needy.’ Moore did this by substituting the unruly lower working class, begging for gifts from their master, with children expecting presents on Christmas morning.
He kept the gift giving mysticism of the centuries old St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, but removed the judgmental elements of a Bishop who may make them feel guilty for maintaining class divide by making him “merry”, “droll”, “rosy”, and “plump.” He also made him a lower class “peddler”. And while Santa made a loud noise “on the lawn” with a “clatter”, just as a lower class wassailer would have, he was but a small and unthreatening “right jolly old elf” who kindly left toys he had labored over for the children.
And he asked nothing in return. With a “wink of his eye” and a “finger aside his nose” (a gesture meaning “just between you and me”) Moore gave the privileged class, who were fearful of home invasions at Christmas time, assurance they “had nothing to dread.” All they needed to do, was keep their wealth within the family and buy their kids and friends gifts at Christmas time. Forget the poor, they thought, they’re as hopeless as democracy.
The vision and version of Christmas and Santa Claus that Moore provided his haughty affluent peers, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, was soon to be read by a growing middle class and an increasingly literate lower class. That’s as true then as it is today.
And while Moore was a country squire who never worked a day in his life, and hated the gridding up of property in a growing New York City, he grew to love the money he earned selling off family property he inherited. Geographer Simeon DeWitt was chopping Manhattan into a Roman style grid to make room for a population that grew from 33,000 in 1790 to nearly 200,000 by the time Moore’s poem was written in 1822. He even included a chimney in his poem for Santa to climb down as a way for city folk to better relate to a scene he’d rather have happened in his bucolic hills of a New York of yore – an area today we call Chelsea.
Reference:
The Battle for Christmas. A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday. Stephen Nissenbaum. 1997
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Hello Interactors,
This is the last post on economics for 2023. Next up for winter is human behavior. This post bridges where we left off with traditional colonial nation-states by talking about how similar philosophies are motivating the formation of neocolonial micro-states. What causes people to seek freedom in new places by limiting the freedom of those found in such places?
Let’s dig in…
THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
In 2009 the venture capitalist, techno-optimist, and libertarian political activist Peter Thiel ‘reasoned’.
“[he] no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible.”
He said,
“The great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.”
Back then Thiel was introducing his ‘seasteading’ project — building or repurposing platforms in ocean waters not covered by international law as micro-nations.
He continues to lead his friends and followers, like tech mogul Marc Andreessen, toward these promised lands. They seek sophisticated legal spaces opportunistically drawn inside pre-existing territories with curious jurisdictions, legal structures, and rights. They take on names like ‘innovation hubs’ or ‘high-tech parks’ — techno-libertarian utopian ‘enclaves’ and ‘havens’ for those willing to adopt and adhere to their techno-optimist religion.
My last two posts talked about the creation of nation-states by powerful governments over the centuries and how they contributed to the current wars in Ukraine and Palestine. But there are also battles in the courtroom between these neocolonial libertarian venture capitalists and the people resisting colonization.
This is why, as The Economist says,
these libertarian colonies “will have their own government, write their own laws, manage their own currency and, eventually, hold their own elections.”
And they have the backing of powerful European and U.S. governments. Sound familiar?
The original European colonial nation-states were qausi-governmental entities conceived by rich and powerful private entities to further enrich themselves — often at the expense of local people and land. It’s a concept that emerged out the European Enlightenment boosted by new scientific discoveries, technologies, and philosophies.
Thinkers like John Locke advocated for the concept of natural rights, including life, liberty, and property, which belonged inherently to individuals. These ideas inspired people to seek places where they could express personal autonomy and the freedom to pursue one's own goals and desires free of rule. This contrasted with long held beliefs that placed collective or communal goals above individual aspirations.
The Enlightenment is also often associated with the Age of Reason. Influential philosophers like René Descartes and Immanuel Kant emphasized the role of reason in understanding the world and making decisions. They argued that individuals should use their capacity for rational thought to question traditional authorities and beliefs, thus promoting a more individualistic approach to knowledge and truth. Reason is the hallmark of libertarian political philosophy today.
But they’re not alone. Rationalism has long been a cornerstone of human understanding, though faces many challenges today. Advances in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy reveal that rationality is not a neutral tool but is often influenced by power structures, cultural biases, and subjective experiences. What is considered 'rational' can vary across different cultural and social contexts.
For example, the ‘rational actor’ theory on which mainstream economics rests doesn’t factor in confirmation bias — favoring information that confirms preexisting beliefs. A growing number of neuroscientists are revealing confirmation bias triggers activity in brain regions involved in reward processing, suggesting some biases may be rooted in fundamental neural mechanisms.
One of the preexisting beliefs of early Enlightenment thinkers, theologians, and colonial settlers is the idea that morality and ethics are not solely dictated by external authorities (like the church or state) but can be discerned through personal reasoning and rational introspection. This led to a more personal and individualistic approach to moral decisions. This may a form of confirmation bias suggesting moral principles should be followed out of a sense of personal duty over a duty to the community.
This shift played a crucial role in shaping modern Western societies, influencing everything from political theory to personal identity.
These ideas are intermingled in European colonialism and state-making. European powers, perceiving themselves as more 'civilized' and 'rational', used these beliefs to legitimize the domination of other peoples, whom they considered less enlightened or rational. This paternalistic view was used to rationalize the spread of European control and influence across the globe, often disregarding the autonomy and cultural values of colonized peoples.
While Enlightenment thinkers championed personal freedom and autonomy, these ideals were selectively applied. Colonial powers often deny these rights to the people in their newly formed colonies, leading to a glaring contradiction between Enlightenment ideals and colonial practices. This paradox is what fuels anti-colonial movements to argue for independence and self-determination just as colonizers did against their religious, feudal, and imperial tyrants.
The individualistic approach to morality and ethics of the Enlightenment era led to significant debates and critiques regarding the moral implications of colonialism that are alive today.
Some Enlightenment thinkers, like Denis Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire and later the abolitionists, criticized colonialism and slavery on moral grounds. Even early American colonizers like Roger Williams, John Woolman, and Thomas Paine criticized the inhumane treatment of Native Americans and the unjust rights of exploitation of land and labor. However, the cloak of moral and civilizational superiority ultimately justified colonial practices then and now.
LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL
Are these neocolonial ‘zones of opportunity’ just another cloak of moral and civilizational superiority that ultimately justifies total disregard for the autonomy and cultural values of the local people and land? And like other attempts to support colonization, are they endorsed by powerful governments and Western financial institutions? Yes, they are.
In 2013, the Honduran government under President Juan Orland Hernández, after controversially reconstituting its Supreme Court, passed the "ZEDEs law" to create "Zones for Employment and Economic Development." These zones, inspired by former World Bank Economist Paul Romer's Charter City concept, involved selling Honduran territory to foreign investors at low costs.
The Society for the Socioeconomic Development of Honduras, later known as Honduras Próspera LLC, was established in Biden’s home Company State and tax haven, Delaware.
Próspera is funded by Peter Thiel and Marc Andreesen and was envisioned as a libertarian utopia.
They want to develop a ‘zone’ in Crawfish Rock, a small, historically significant community located on the island of Roatán, part of the Bay Islands in Honduras. Its English-speaking origins can be traced back to the early 19th century when the British Empire exerted influence over the region, leading to a significant influx of English-speaking Black Caribbean descendants.
Over the years, Crawfish Rock has maintained its unique cultural and linguistic identity, with English remaining the primary language, a testament to its historical ties to the British colonial era and the diverse migration patterns in the Caribbean. An organization has formed to protect these people, their homes, and their heritage — as well as other areas like it in Honduras from ‘neocolonial invasion’.
The Vice President of the Crawfish Rock governing council Venessa Cardenas Woods put it plainly,
“If you take away our land, if you take away our cultural heritage, our way of living, you take away everything, the entire identity of the group as English-speaking blacks, then you would be eliminating an entire people.”
Meanwhile, Prospera’s President, Joel Bomgar, who also happens to be a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, believes,
“The concept of free private cities and charter cities, specifically what Próspera is trying to do, is the most transformative project in the world.”
Bomgar previously started and then sold a remote access software company for support technicians.
Lest you think this is purely a conservative GOP libertarian affair, it was the Obama administration that created a “U.S. Strategy for Engagement in Central America.” Optimistically stating,
“While the United States will need to invest significant resources in such an effort, the success of the strategy will depend far more on the readiness of Central American governments to continue to demonstrate political will and undertake substantial political and economic commitments to bring about positive change in the region.”
Their efforts and dollars instead supported a government coup and the rise of Hernández which ultimately reshaped the Honduras constitution, reassembled the supreme court, and forced the formation of U.S. backed ‘zones’ into law. The coup was unanimously condemned by the UN General Assembly.
In a made-for-tv twist, fast forward to 2022, Honduran President Juan Orland Hernández was arrested, detained, and then extradited at the request of the United States government on drug and arms charges. The Hondurans then elected Xiomar Castro as the country’s first female president. She is also the wife of Manuel Zelaya who was ousted in the coup. Her mandate is political platform, social justice, poverty reduction, and opposition to neoliberal policies.
She wasted no time. The Honduran Congress voted unanimously to repeal ‘zone’ laws and appointed a committee to oversee their elimination. Próspera also wasted no time. Months later the corporation filed a $10.7 billion dollar claim against the Honduran government. This equates to 80% of the Honduran total governmental expenditures. They claim it’s a violation of the U.S. Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR).
Members of the U.S. Congress and Biden administration sought to defend and expand CAFTA provisions to further protect U.S. investments. This system of public-private strong-arming of weaker countries is embedded in U.S. bilateral investment treaties. It can create legal and power imbalances that allow corporations to sue governments for regulations affecting profits without reciprocal accountability for corporate crimes — including violations of the very labor laws and environmental protections Libertarians seek to avoid in the creation of their so-called ‘havens’.
The Biden administration's approach to international trade law and the ongoing case of Honduras challenges existing trade norms. Honduras is actively resisting this system, with President Castro's government seeking to reform the international trade system and restrict corporate power from neocolonial expansion.
As Honduras prepares to lead the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in 2024, this issue is set to become a central topic in hemispheric discussions. The case underscores the importance of eliminating unfair provisions from U.S. trade agreements to safeguard democracy against corporate interventions. The stakes are high, not just financially but also in terms of the autonomy of cultural values, community identity, and environmental protections.
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Hello Interactors,
Part 2 talks about the failures of borders, some recent alarming and revealing data about America’s ‘shared identity’, and some potential paths toward embracing the shaky state of states.
Let’s get into it…
NEWLY PROMISED LANDS
Part 1 left us at the Paris Peace Conference and Western-style cartographic geo-political mandates. Amidst these mandates was an admission by one leader that these arrangements would need subsequent alterations. Take this quote, for example:
“There are many complicated questions connected with the present settlements which perhaps can not be successfully worked out to an ultimate issue by the decisions we shall arrive at here.
I can easily conceive that many of these settlements will need subsequent reconsideration, that many of the decisions we make shall need subsequent alteration in some degree; for, if I may judge by my own study of some of these questions, they are not susceptible of confident judgments at present.”
These are the words of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in January of 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference. Sadly, ‘subsequent alterations’ over the last century have proven a tougher challenge than Wilson may have fully appreciated.
Whether his intentions were noble or not, rigidly draw borders on maps are obviously failing to truly encapsulate and represent the diverse and multifaceted spectrum of human communities — especially in a world where the negative effects of climate change know no such borders.
Could it be that identities and experiences resist being neatly delineated by Cartesian maps inherently based on political philosophies steeped in Cartesian dualities? Is it conceivable that nations and nation-states should not be confined to a singular, homogeneous identity?
Perhaps they are incapable of such definition. It may be these concepts have reached their limits. A suggestion that can compound feelings of uncertainty about what lies ahead in tumultuous times. This discomfort drives many to search for past eras that seemed more safe and certain — a time when there appeared to be a common shared national identity.
The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) seeks such shared identities among those living in the United States in their annual ‘American Values Survey.’ It’s one of the more respected surveys offering a pulse on American views of religion, culture, and politics. They recently released their 2023 results which can serve as one pulse on national identity. They project, based on their statistically valid sample, that
“Three in ten Americans (31%) agree that ‘God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world. Just less than half of Republicans (49%) agree with this, compared with 26% of independents and only 18% of Democrats.”
PRRI data also reveals,
“Those who most trust conservative media (66%) and Fox News (54%) among television news sources are much more likely than those who choose no television source (29%) or mainstream media sources (24%) to agree that God intended America to be a new promised land.”
“Two-thirds of Republicans (66%) believe things have changed for the worse since the 1950s, compared with half of independents (50%) and only 30% of Democrats.”
The 1950s are often remembered as a time of economic prosperity, cultural growth, and the rise of the middle class in America. This era is seen as the embodiment of the 'American Dream,' with a booming post-World War II economy, expanding consumer culture, and significant advancements in technology and suburban living.
The period is characterized by strong family values, community cohesion, and distinct gender roles, often contrasted with the rapid social changes and complexities of modern life. Television, automobiles, and household appliances symbolize this era's progress and American ingenuity, reflecting a sense of unity and optimism about the United States' role in the world.
However, this romanticized view of the 1950s overlooks many critical social and political issues of the time, including racial segregation, gender inequality, and the fear and paranoia of McCarthyism. The decade, while remembered for its strong leadership and perceived lack of political division, also faced significant challenges.
The popular nostalgia for this era often represents a simplified and selective interpretation, failing to fully recognize the complexities and struggles that defined the 1950s, and inadvertently promoting a cartoonish, oversimplified version of history.
This difference in opinion is increasingly leading more Americans to embrace violence as a means of establishing a ‘shared identity.’
“Americans who believe that the country has changed for the worse since the 1950s are more than twice as likely as those who say that it has changed for the better to agree that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country (30% vs. 14%).”
MAPPING THE AMORPHOUS
The idea “that God intended America to be a new promised land” is what many believe is the ‘shared identity’ representing the nation-state of America. It’s derivative of visions across centuries of European expansionism and colonialism prior to dominance of the United States of America as a nation and economic juggernaut.
Just as feudalism marked the beginning of a new social order and the political-economic apparatus of the nation-state, I wonder if our modern-day lords of geopolitical economic power are similarly controlling the toiling vassals and serfs — especially in regions with particularly low-wage labor.
The modern-day dynamics between the economically dominant Western and Northern Hemispheres offer metaphors to feudalism. Much like the concentration of wealth among feudal lords, powerful nations hold a significant portion of global wealth and resources, leading to pronounced economic disparities with less developed areas.
This situation mirrors the decentralized power structure of feudal times, where today's global landscape is fragmented, with Western and Northern countries wielding substantial influence, creating varying levels of power and development worldwide.
The strong economic and political alliances within these hemispheres, akin to feudal loyalties to local lords, often exacerbate global divisions leading to patterns of regional allegiances and wider communal divides.
Furthermore, the influence exerted by these dominant regions over global policies, economic trends, and cultural norms is reminiscent of the control feudal lords had over their territories. They shape international trade, governance, and cultural exchanges in ways that echo the hierarchical and power-centric nature of feudal societies. This power and dominance, under the guise of a ‘shared identity’ is then used as leverage in exchange for military and monetary protection for survival.
Survival was very much on the minds of those living through the 15th-17th centuries. Generation after generation witnessed catastrophic meteorological events brought on by the Little Ice Age. This had devastating impacts on people around the world and played a significant role in shaping the social, political, and economic structures that followed. Might we be on the verge of a new world order?
Survival is also on the minds of those suffering the travesties of wars nation-state border disputes create. Including those living the through the lead up to and aftermath of World War I and World War II.
I wonder how those feelings of uncertainty compare to feelings of uncertainty today. Scholar, podcaster, and fellow Substack writer Christopher Hobson recently reflected on quotes from intellectuals struggling to make sense of the aftermath of World War I and II. Here’s a quote from the 1922 Austrian writer, Robert Musil, in his book ‘Helpless Europe: A Digressive Journey’ that could just as easily be written today.
“And so we arrive at the present day. The life that surrounds us is devoid of ordering concepts.”
Cartesian maps of nation-states are politically charged, legally binding ordering concepts, but their certainty is imagined. When Woodrow Wilson cautioned the agreements at the Paris Peace Conference are "not susceptible of confident judgments" he was suggesting the matters in question were too intricate, uncertain, or evolving to allow for definitive, confident decisions.
Wilson is indicating that, due to the complexity and fluidity of the issues, any judgments or decisions made during the conference might be provisional and subject to change.
Let’s consider some alternatives traditional mapping of nation-states.
* Could psychogeographic maps, reflecting the emotional landscapes of diverse groups, provide a more nuanced understanding of human geography?
* Perhaps powerful nations and states should be leading exercises in participatory mapping offering communities themselves more accurate and meaningful representations of their own spaces and identities.
* Maybe counter-mapping or decolonial mapping practices that challenge the established narratives and power structures inherent in traditional cartography could offer new perspectives to those so sure of a ‘shared identity’?
* Critical Geographic Information Science can reveal underlying patterns of inequality and socio-political dynamics commonly overlooked, shifting conceptions of what could be?
* And in a world increasingly influenced by feminist perspectives, how might feminist cartography reshape our understanding of spaces and places, especially in relation to gender dynamics?
These questions, rooted in the alternatives to Cartesian cartography, invite us to consider new paradigms in mapping and understanding of human geography. They are emerging as new tools just as anthropography was emerging at the time of the Paris Peace Agreements.
We are clearly in need of a new shared understanding that could offer new directions in our politics, economics, and global societies, but we should heed the advice of Woodrow Wilson and be cautious of our confidence.
Christopher Hobson encourages mindfulness and carefulness as we attempt to make sense of what comes next. He suggests we
“…resist the lure of comfortable frames and easy explanations, and instead to fully reckon with ‘the brittleness of the world’ and what potentialities might be present in these conditions.”
Perhaps it’s best to embrace the shaky state of states and the ambiguity of the unknown as we try to make sense of the state of our world. As Hobson offers,
“The post-Cold War era has passed, (hyper)globalization has peaked, the unipolar moment has finished, neoliberalism has perhaps entered its zombie phase.”
We live in…
“A time defined by what it is no longer, what is ‘not quite here, but yet at hand’.”
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Hello Interactors,
There’s a lot of talk of states these days. Palestine and Israel, one state or two? Ukraine and Russia. One state or two? The United States. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one…right? What about that one D.C. federal district, or those five territories, and a bunch of ‘minor’ islands? And don’t forget the many tribal nations within the nation-state of the United States which can often spread across many state borders!
I started writing about all this and it got long, so I’m broke it two. Ex uno plures, from one, many. I suppose there’s a lesson in all this. No matter how fixed a given state of affairs may appear, we have to be prepared for bifurcations and reconfigurations.
Let’s dig in!
THE RISE OF STATES
I easily confuse states with nations. Nations are loosely defined as a group of people with a shared identity. A nation-state is a political structure represented by a territorial boundary claiming to contain a common identity. I used the words ‘loosely’ and ‘claim’ because so many territorially bounded areas or nations contain a multitude of identities. The United States, a notoriously diverse country, is a great example.
Nations and nation-states seem to have chicken-and-egg origin story. I believe those who claim the nation-state rose out of folks like those early European colonizers. Fueled by the thought of amassing wealth, land, and power once only believed to be wrangled by feudal lords and monarchs, influential and enterprising European intellectually ‘entlightened’ elites pooled their resources and got to work.
The idea of a nation-state, and their bordered geographic territories, began to take shape through 14th-17th century Europe. The late Middle Ages and the rising Renaissance witnessed a gradual decline of feudalism and the rise of centralized monarchies who were incented to consolidate power within defined territorial boundaries. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years' War in Europe, is often cited as a key moment in the history of nations as it established the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity fundamental to the nation-state concept.
The 18th and 19th centuries saw the rise of nationalism, a significant driving force behind the nation-state concept. Nationalism emphasized a shared identity based on language, culture, and ethnicity, often aligned with a specific geographic territory. The French Revolution (1789–1799) and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars accelerated the spread of these ideas across Europe.
Language invention and reconstitution burgeoned across Europe. One example is from 1820 Finland. Born out of an interest in Finnish tradition and culture a groundswell of nationalism by Finnish writers, teachers, pastors, and attorneys took hold. They stitched together their collective past stories and dialects and published dictionaries and grammar guides that differentiated them from the Swedes. This forged a more confident and self-determined government and national identity defined by their borders and their language.
In 1819 the first publication of Ukrainian grammar was printed. Russian grammar was defined just 17 years prior. By 1830 more Ukrainian writers were published in their native language. This is the date that established the language as a bonding element of Ukrainian nationalism. In 1846 the first Ukrainian nationalist organization was founded. And not by a politician with a sovereign agenda, but by a historian.
The 19th century also saw the unification of various nation-states. Notable examples include the unification of Italy in the 1860s and Germany in the 1870s. These unifications were driven by shared cultural, linguistic, and ethnic identities, as well as by political and economic interests.
It took Germany just 40 years to rise as a dominant and powerful nation-state in Europe. This led to tensions around Europe, especially with France and Britain. But it was a Serbian nationalist group and their assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in 1914 that triggered war. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and Europe erupted into World War I.
The United States entered the war in 1917, in part fearing a potential alliance between neighboring Mexico and Germany. This was also the same year they began preparing for peace agreements and the redistricting of territories of nation-states.
In 1918 U.S. President Woodrow Wilson boarded a ship for Paris bringing with him a team of cartographers to create materials for the Paris Peace Conference. This included chief cartographer Mark Sylvester William Jefferson who had invented a form of thematic mapping based on ethnography, demography, and population distribution called anthropography.
Comfortable with nearly thirteen languages, he and a team of ethnographers, linguists, and anthropologists set up offices in a Paris hotel. They drew convincing maps used by Wilson and his allies to sell other world leaders on the formation of nation-states that would best serve their interests. U.S. interest in one of those nation-states invented in Paris remains today — Ukraine.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER, ALLIED BY RANCOR
Out of this conference emerged the first worldwide intergovernmental organization, the League of Nations. With it came a set of treaties that shifted power principally to the United States, Great Britain, and France while mandating political power to newly drawn, U.S. directed, and ethnically and linguistically determined nation-state maps.
Just four years after the formation of the League of Nations, in 1923, the League of Nations turned their attention to the Middle East declaring Palestine a state. A British mandate, it was based on a cartographic line originally drawn in 1906 by the British and the French between Palestine and Egypt. This was the first internationally recognized boundary in the Middle East.
Having already colonized Egypt as part of their growing empire, England then wanted control of the Suez Canal. So they invented another border that awarded them the Sinai Peninsula. Then, in 1916, the English and French met in secret to create a dividing line between Egypt and Turkey. They decided Egypt would go to England and Turkey would go to France. Four years later they determined Lebanon and Syria would go to France, and Palestine and Mesopotamia to England.
It took the end of the second World War in 1947 for the League of Nations, now rebranded the United Nations, to recommend a plan to divide Palestine into two “independent Jewish and Arab states.”
The Jewish organization that had long been helping resettle the area begrudgingly accepted the proposal, but most of the Arab contingent did not. In 1948 the British mandate expired, hundreds of Palestinians were expelled, 78% of the land was handed to Israel, and before the year was up the region had their first Arab-Israeli war. And here, again, like in Ukraine, today we have borders and states defined by the West roiled in controversy and war.
History reveals how European and American colonialism spread the concept of the nation-state globally. And economics were a central theme. Local and regional agrarian and mercantile economies of the 17th century led to regional specialization, with certain areas developing specific industries based on their geographic advantages. This specialization then influenced economic structures within nation-states and their interactions with other states. Those with common religion, language, or cultures conspired against the ‘others’.
Natural resource acquisition, deprivation, and distribution brought needs for trade routes and resource accessibility at a time when the world was being both mapped and explored by Europeans. Geographic features that facilitated or hindered trade, such as rivers, seas, mountains, and plains, all impact the development and power of nation-states. For example, access to trade routes along the Dnieper River has played a critical role in trade and distribution from Greece to Kiev dating all the way back to the first millennium BC.
The Suez Canal was built it in the late 1800s by the French and remains an important international trade route to this day. The industrial revolution and subsequent urbanization and modernization that followed all hinge on economic geography. And its nation-state status that awards a nation’s entry into competing and cooperating or demoralizing and destroying.
I’d like to think cartographers like Jefferson, and social scientists like him, were well-intentioned and hopeful they could use human identities forged from language, culture, ethnicity, race, creed, or tribes to empower and protect vulnerable peoples politically and socially. Perhaps they believed these cartographic mandates, sensitive to human geography, could lead to peaceful and eternal coexistence.
But it seems fictitious fixed borders drawn on a map fail to convey, capture, and contain the amorphous and pluralistic panoply of peoples. Maybe identities can’t be drawn by a Cartesian map using political philosophies rooted in Cartesian dualities. Maybe nations and nation-states shouldn’t be defined by one common shared identity. Maybe they can’t. Maybe these concepts have run their course and we don’t yet know what comes next.
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Hello Interactors,
A series of U.S. federal legislation under the Biden administration has spawned a manufacturing boom at a scale not seen in decades. Unfortunately, the country is repeating the same socio-economic, land use, and transportation policy mistakes that have lead to many of the ills we’re seeking to remedy. Are we missing an opportunity to build back better?
A MANUFACTURING RENAISSANCE
Clearcut a forest and build a factory. Now build an even bigger parking lot around the factory for workers and make them drive from miles around to work. Parts and supplies? Yeah, those will have to be trucked in too. Now, stand here in front of the camera and wave this earth flag alongside a U.S. flag and brag about job growth and how EV’s are going to re-green the earth.
This scene captures what’s currently unfolding across the United States. Legislation such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, alongside increased Department of Defense spending, is catalyzing a 'manufacturing renaissance' in the United States with a supposed emphasis on infrastructure improvement, clean energy, and national security.
Paradoxically, this familiar pattern in economic geography is partially responsible for the historical socio-economic inequities and environmental destruction the U.S. is struggling to remedy. Research by Drexel University’s Nowak Metro Finance Lab, in cooperation with the Aspen Institute’s Latinos and Society Program, is investigating the spatial dimensions of this shift, seeking to enhance opportunities for minority-owned businesses within this new economic landscape.
They’ve uncovered how the burgeoning manufacturing boom in the United States is showcasing a remarkable geographic distribution of investment and industry specialization significantly benefiting a diverse array of states and metropolitan areas. A substantial portion of funding aimed at bolstering the semiconductor supply chain is pouring into states like Arizona, Texas, New York, Ohio, and Indiana.
Additionally, to streamline supply chain efficiencies, battery plants are emerging alongside automotive factories in a vertical alignment from Michigan to Georgia. On the energy front, the Eastern seaboard is focusing on offshore wind power, while states such as California, Arizona, and Texas lead in solar panel production. This broad dispersion of high-tech manufacturing indicates a shift towards a more equitable distribution of economic growth across the nation.
This industrial transformation is not only geographically dispersed across many states and regions, but also spread to the outskirts of metropolitan areas. This raises challenges in harnessing this growth for the benefit of all, particularly Black- and Latino-owned firms and workers. It’s shaping into another form of ‘white flight’ where firms seek the cheapest land away from populated areas, which typically are exurban and rural farmland and forests, toward smaller cities and towns which are predominantly white. And mostly poor, offering a needed economic boost.
However, these regions, cities, and towns have also historically deprioritized public transit alongside decades of car dependent land use policies. So whatever jobs and growth these new manufacturing facilities bring, they’re destined to also bring more cars, which means more traffic, more pollution, and more time alone in cars isolated from interactions with community members. Meanwhile, the decades of neglect and decay of our rail network also means more truck traffic.
I’m reminded of geographer David Harvey's concept of the 'spatial fix'. It suggests capital movement, including the re-shoring of manufacturing, seeks new low-cost geographical frontiers to overcome drains on profit and expansion. This exploitation of geographical ‘space’ through industrial policy and investment reflects a 'fix' for capital investments and investors. By now, however, the meaning of the word 'fix' has less to do with a correction and more to do with an addiction.
There’s an addiction to a dynamic complex interplay of local and global economic geographies — a form of economic development and spatial restructuring that has shown to bring about both positive and negative outcomes. Parking lots and roads may have paved the way for many to cruise to a better quality of life, but the quality of the paradise we call home — our communities, cities, health, and environments — are suffering, if not lost, from decades of addiction.
This boom, while creating opportunities for some, may continue to be a bust for many. They may also spawn new forms of social stratification. The concentration of certain industries in specific regions, for example, could lead to a polarization of skill sets and economic opportunities. This, in turn, may result in localized booms benefiting a segment of society while leaving others behind, thereby reinforcing regional disparities rather than truly leveling the playing field and remedy the disparities that already plague this country.
Furthermore, the inter-regional competition for investment can spark a race to the bottom in terms of labor standards and environmental regulations. The suburbanization of industry, while beneficial for regional decentralization, often neglects urban cores leaving central areas, and underprivileged members of society, to grapple with the growing donut hole of decay from decades of lack of investment and attention.
This shift raises questions about the urban-rural divide, land use, and environmental sustainability. The dispersion of these new manufacturing initiatives does indeed offer opportunities for restructuring regional economies. There is potential for the country to move towards a multi-nodal metropolitan model where economic activities are spread across a wider area, including existing urban centers. Provided it is managed with an eye towards sustainability and inclusivity…and today it is not.
POWER, PEOPLE, AND PLACE
Now would be an ideal time to update and expand transportation infrastructure like rail and public transit to address decades of decay and neglect. By enhancing connectivity, metropolitan areas and their cities can become more resilient and inclusive, enabling a diverse workforce to access employment opportunities.
This would help mitigate socio-economic inequities while reducing car dependencies and the country’s outsized contribution to local, regional, and worldwide transportation related pollution. While renewable energy investments are worthy, as are roads, bridges, pipes, and electrical grids, most federal, state, and local transportation dollars are spent bolstering car sales and car dependency and all the physical, psychological, social, economic, and environmental health declines it’s shown to contribute to.
These infrastructure deficiencies underscore a more profound need for more adaptive strategies that align with principles found in complexity science, like resiliency. The resilience of these increasingly brittle social systems is tested not only by burgeoning demands but also by the unpredictable shocks like those experienced during the pandemic.
Increasing frequency and amplitude of weather shocks also reveal the fragility of underinvested frameworks. The capacity to adapt to emerging needs and stresses — be it climate change impacts, congestion, or energy supply — requires a systemic rethinking that transcends traditional silos of urban planning and regional economic development.
Moreover, the underrepresentation of minority-owned firms in strategic sectors, as still found in federal spending patterns, hints at an oversight resulting in an exasperation of existing inequalities and social tensions. As the report demonstrates, these will likely persist unless addressed through targeted interventions. As we learned with the BLM movement, and similar social movements in the past, interventions must start by understanding lived experiences and power relationships on the ground, locally and regionally. This is essential to building the socio-economic political systems that enable or disempower them.
Space and place are often viewed by the powerful and by policy makers as neutral, abstracted points, polygons, and numbers on a map or spreadsheet. But they’re more than that.
The work of geographer Doreen Massey reminds us space is a product of interrelations and interactions at all scales across institutions and individuals and therefore can’t be regarded as neutral. In her influential book “Space, Place and Gender” she reveals how space is politically and socially charged — imbued with power relations. She introduced the idea of "power geometry" to describe the complex and dynamic ways in which different social groups and individuals are positioned within the "flows" of the globalized world.
Recent global events and current local investments across the country are examples of power geometry. We can see how different social and political groups have distinct relationships with these new flows and movements — how they are able to command space and assert influence over it. Some have the power to shape networks and connections across space, which includes the ability to accelerate the pace of movement and interaction for themselves, while others are placed in positions where they are restricted or excluded. This can be true even for those who can afford to own cars and those who cannot.
Owning a car, while a necessity for most, is still a form of power that when asserted only serves to diminish the power of those who do not. Many of these new manufacturing hubs are being built to build more cars and computer chips for them by people who need cars to get to work. This reveals the powerful influence the federal government has over the global geographic geometry required to build cars, and their parts, the local geometries needed to build the plants, and the car dependent network of roads needed for employees. Cars are miraculous modern appliances until they are concentrated within clustered collections of cities which then become problem areas for which firms seek a spatial fix.
Even as federal investment feeds the manufacturing of more cars, along with more regional development that requires more roads and maintenance, society laments climbing car related deaths, worry about the effects of social isolation that can lead to decreased physical and mental health, stress over income disparities, all while watching a polluted planet burn. It all seems as counter intuitive as it does counterproductive. The more we invest in perpetuating car dependency the less money and attention is put toward more healthy and resilient alternatives.
As this new industrial sprawl unfolds, sustainable transportation becomes increasingly vital for connecting industrial zones with urban centers, addressing the dislocation of workspaces, and fostering economic and social robustness and resiliency. We need to urge policymakers to consider the broader implications of the current manufacturing boom on the social fabric of the nation. If we don’t take a comprehensive, diversified, and integrative approach to planning our regions and economies we not only risk perpetuating existing social and environmental woes, but also suffering collapse from another unforeseen emergent disaster.
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Hello Interactors,
Trick-or-treat! It’s that time of year for Americans, and a growing population worldwide, to dawn a favorite costume and consume copious amounts of candy. It’s also a time for kids to parade for treats and for adults to decorate with ghoulish goblins, ghosts, and other frightful festoons. And excuse to cosplay without criticism.
Americans will spend an ungodly amount of money on this conspicuous occasion. Like most holidays in America, it’s a chance to fire up the capitalist contraption and watch money burn like a Halloween bonfire. But why? How did this holiday emerge and what does it all really mean?
Let’s find out.
CANDY, COSTUMES, AND CONTESTATIONS
I once handed out toothpaste to trick-or-treaters at Halloween. Trick your teeth. My wife’s dad was a dentist and we ended up with a box of toothpaste samples. Realizing we forgot to buy candy to hand out at Halloween, we poured the box of samples into a bowl. Kids loved it, and so did their teeth.
Some parents giggled, many groaned, and some thought it was downright mean. Realizing kids will happily take just about anything from the bowl, some years we’ve even opted for pencils, erasers, and stickers. We’re so mean.
But let’s face it, Halloween, in its modern form, is mostly about candy and costumes. The National Retail Federation (NRF) estimates 68% of Americans will spend a total of $3.6 billion on candy handouts this Halloween. That’s up from $3.1 billion last year. Burp.
Nearly three quarters of the country are expected to buy decorations to the tune of $3.9 billion dollars. The percentage of folks intent on buying costumes have hit an all-time NRF high of 69%, up from 67% last year, amounting to $4.1 billion dollars. All told, they project the average American Halloweener will spend around $108 this year. It’s all been climbing since Covid. Either we need sugar to sooth each other, or costumes to excuse each other. Or both.
Their data suggests those aged 25–44 are the most eager to spend, claiming social media inspires early costume and decoration ideas and decisions. Adult spending on themselves and their pets dwarfs spending on kid costumes accounting for nearly three of the four billion dollars in total spend…and climbing. Adult spending increased a whopping 18% from a year ago.
The NRF says to expect a lot of Spiderman and princess costumes on kids, pets as pumpkins, and a variety of adult witches, ghosts, and vampires. And Barbie. Lots of Barbie. It seems trendy pop culture is challenging the traditional spooky gothic culture Hallows Eve is known for. Though there are some interpretations of history that suggest Halloween really was more of a moment of merriment among the masses than some pagan spiritual spook fest.
A quick search on the history of Halloween and you’ll quickly learn it comes from Ireland via a Celtic festival called Samhein (pronounced “sow-win”). Irish immigrants then brought it to America in the 1800s and here we are. Searching on Samhein will reveal text that says it stems from a spiritual festival by pagans — a religious celebration with imagery of mysticism and the occult where people on earth attempt connections with the dead through fire and rituals. It was believed to be the interaction of pagan people and place seeking interactions with people of another time and place.
But a more truthful approximation of historical fact reveals the story of Samhein may be a victim of what one historian calls a combination of “fakelore and folklore”. Professor Robert Davis studies religious and cultural education at the University of Glasgow as it relates to people, place, and social change. He writes that much of Irish history stems from the work of a seventeen-century historian named Geoffrey Keating. Davis joins a chorus of critics who argue Keating's work, while beautifully written, is mostly a form of exaggerated romantic nationalism.
Keating wrote during a time when Irish history and culture were under threat from English influence and rule. Critics believe his narratives therefore assert a particularly noble Irish identity and history, which led him to possibly embellish or reinterpret certain historical events or figures. Keating was also a Catholic priest, which influenced his historical interpretations. Including the notion that these ancient Irish clans and respective nobility were Catholic.
His intertwining of religious and secular perspectives is seen as a reflection of Keating's worldview. But it doesn’t always live up to academic scrutiny expected from histography. But because Keating was also a poet and had a compelling command of the Irish language, his writing was accessible and enjoyable. This further endeared him to readers while also allowing his work to endure. His influence is present today despite his critics, as evidence by the dominant narrative surrounding Sanhein found in history books and online.
Keating’s recalling of this autumnal event is unique in its reference to mythological religiosity by pagans of the past. There are legal and agricultural Irish texts and calendars that indeed show there was a festival on or around November 1, just no mention of any worship for the dead, paranormal occurrences from the ‘underworld’, or the observance of a celebratory ‘Eve’ stemming from some form of ancient pre-Christian calendar. These pagan accounts are commonly associated with Sanhein and thus Halloween and appear to all lead to Keating himself. Meanwhile, his interpretation has since branched into every account of history paraded as historical fact.
Historical records from neighboring regions like Wales and Scotland also show no evidence of Halloween-like celebrations occurring, apart from those areas populated by Irish immigrants! But like in Ireland, there were indeed agrarian celebrations commemorating the end of the harvest season. And those included autumnal festivities we may recognize today as Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and even New Year.
SONGS, SPIRITS, AND THE SOUL OF TRICK-OR-TREATING
Keating wasn’t alone in weaving pagan lore into Christian mythology and dogma. He probably picked up from the Christian bible. The Roman Catholic Church, especially in its earliest centuries, borrowed heavily from the imagery and ceremony of pagan folklore and fakelore to lure non-Christians into their faith. This summer our family went to see the Swedish rock band, Ghost, who’s leader, Tobias Forge, leverages this history, and its imagery, on stage and in costume to call attention to this appropriation. It’s a presentation, I might add, fit for Broadway.
Indeed, Pope Gregory III of the Roman Catholic Church, established All Saints Days as November 1st in the 8th Century and eventually made its way to the British Isles. Also known as All Hallows Day. The word “Hallow” stems from the Old English word “hālig” which means “holy”. The celebration before All Hallows Days, on October 31st, or on the “evening” or “even” — as commonly shortened in Old English, which could also be written and pronounced as ‘e’en’ — became known as Halloween.
Halloween most likely originates from the rotation of the earth and the shift in seasons. Fall has always been a time of collecting what food you can, sharing any abundance with less fortunate community members, and mourning the loss of organic life that relies on photosynthesis. A requirement for keeping animals like us alive. It’s a time to take stock, hunker down, and hope you survive the impending harsh winter.
It was also a convenient time to take spoiled and fermented fruits to make wine and be merry. Fields and piles of debris were set ablaze in preparation for next season. Migrant field workers, with no rows to plough or crops to pick, went door to door in search of food, clothing, work, or compassion. It’s not hard to see how these rituals stemming from the rhythm of life could be woven into religious tales of death, renewal, and purifying fire — but also compassion and charity.
Professor Davis believes the best image of the history of Halloween can be resurrected by the lyrics of the songs sung in the British Isles on Halloween, Hallows Day, and even a third day of celebration less known today, All Souls Day. These songs were sung at gatherings, but also by beggars going door-to-door seeking food or gifts. It’s a tradition known as “souling”, but today many of us would recognize it as either trick or tricking, thanksgiving feast, or caroling. All three of which, are born — one way or other — out of the loss of sun in the northern hemisphere brought on by a tilting earth.
Here's one song Professor Davis offers up as representative of the spirit of Halloween.
A soul, a soul, a soul cakePlease, good missus, a soul cakeAn apple, a pear, a plum or a cherryAny good thing to make us all merryOne for Peter, two for PaulThree of Him who made us all
God Bless the master of this house, the mistress alsoAnd all the little children who around your table growLikewise your men and maidens, your cattle and your storeAnd all that dwells within your gatesWe wish you ten times more
The lanes are very dirty and my shoes are very thinI’ve got a little pocket I can put a penny inIf you haven’t got a penny, a half penny will doIf you haven’t got a half penny, then God bless you.
This song reveals the fusion of the wants and needs that come with scarcity and misfortune blended with the hope and charity promised by various forms of Christianity. Professor Davis puts it best, Halloween is
“Steeped in the peculiar religious imagery of Halloween, with its refining fires, its muffled imploring voices and its traffic with the supernatural.” Together they attempt to bridge “the past, the present and the future into a momentarily inspiring alignment around the axis of hope.”
I’m reminded that where I grew up in Iowa, home to many an Irish immigrant — including one of my Grandparents — we had to tell a joke before we were given candy while out trick-or-treating. I wonder if this derives from ‘souling’?
My wife and I insist on jokes before little goblins and witches are allowed to dip into the candy bowl. How mean. Maybe this year, we’ll demand a song. Spiderman has a good soundtrack, and so does Barbie. But a song from Ghost might be most appropriate. “Hunter’s Moon” anyone? The B-side is “Halloween Kills”.
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Hello Interactors,
This post brings new meaning to the phrase ‘reading the tea leaves’.
Watching my tea diffuse recently, I got to thinking about how humans diffuse around the globe like tea particulates in a teacup. Some migrate intentionally, others are forced, and some are lured across borders — as if by osmosis, like tea through a strainer.
It’s tea time somewhere in the world, so grab a cup and let’s go…
DRINKING DYNAMICS AND HUMAN DIFFUSION
I’m a tea drinker. I relish the ritual of tea-making, watching the clear water transform in hue, be it the gentle embrace of green tea or the profound depths of black. Hydrogen and its oxygen friends, in a fervent state, eagerly extract molecules from the tea elements, diffusing them throughout the cup until a balance or 'teaquilibrium' is reached.
However, this seemingly simple diffusion reflects deeper laws of thermodynamics; it's not merely turning twigs into tea. This transformation is part of a grander system — from the tea leaf's growth in specific conditions, its journey through processing, to ultimately gracing my cup. The tea species' continued evolutionary existence and popularity can be attributed to its taste, aroma, and color. So much so that the fragile leaf bears historical weight — wars have been waged for such traits.
Whether in a teacup, an ecosystem, or an economy, these processes reveal a system's tendency towards certain outcomes, showcasing nature's ceaseless drive for equilibrium and long-term persistence.
This parallels the evolution of humans and how they interact with people and place. Over millennia, humans have been driven to seek better environments, whether they offer more food, safety, or other resources. This behavior, while not consciously directed toward the grand "purpose" of the species, has clear benefits in terms of survival and reproductive success.
Kinetic agitation in the physical and social world is what lead humans to diffuse around the globe — to pass through permeable boundaries intent on achieving equilibrium and long-term persistence. And these days, the world is very agitated and humans are diffusing in record numbers.
Wars and political conflicts, combined with economic hardships, are driving global migrations, including South and Central Americans north to the U.S. border. Political repression and discrimination are pushing individuals to search for more tolerant societies. Environmental challenges, from droughts to rising sea levels, are displacing both intra and intercontinental populations, including inhabitants watching their Pacific Islands become submerged. By the end of 2022 108 million people were forcibly displaced — and growing. That’s up from 40 million in 2010.
But it’s not all crises driven. With some of the largest populations in the world rising out of poverty more and more migrate in search of better educational opportunities and the prospect of a brighter future.
When I was hiring at Microsoft in the early 1990s, the U.S. government was issuing many more work visas than today. The increasing interconnectedness of the world, through technology and transportation, allowed me to hire skilled professionals from other nations. Today people are on massive waitlists hoping to migrate to tech hubs in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Which can be cruel. Some are heavily recruited, offered jobs, and then forced to live in precarity; putting their lives on hold, they wait as the visa lottery unfolds.
But many of those making their way to the U.S. border aren’t being recruited. Not directly anyway. They’re being drawn, through a semi-permeable legal membrane called a border, from areas of low job concentration to high. Agitated by a variety of circumstances, they seek goals and equilibrium in their lives in a quest to persist.
CAPITALISM, MIGRATION, AND THE OSMOSIS OF LABOR
Companies and corporations are also goal seeking. They seek to maximize profits. Just as cells have evolved mechanisms for osmotic balance, capitalism has evolved to maximize capital accumulation. And low-wage migrant workers have evolved as a mechanism to achieve this goal.
Daniel Costa is the Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute. In September of 2023 he testified in front of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions on the ‘The Impact of Biden’s Open Border on the American Workforce’.
He said,
“Without immigrant workers, many sectors of the economy would cease to function adequately—whether it be the construction of buildings, crop production, or information technology services.”
And according to the Immigration Research Initiative, the range of jobs is wide:
“the majority of immigrants are in middle- or upper-wage jobs—with 48% employed in middle-wage jobs, earning more than 2/3 of median earnings for fulltime workers (or $35,000 per year) and 17% are in upper-wage jobs, earning more than double the median.”
However,
“immigrants are ‘disproportionately likely to be in low-wage jobs. In all, 35 percent of immigrants are in jobs paying under $35,000, compared to 26 percent of U.S.-born workers.”
As throughout the history of the United States, America runs on immigrants. Even, or at times, especially, undocumented workers. Estimated at just 5% of the overall labor market, a 2017 report from the Institute on Taxation and Public Policy states
“undocumented immigrants contribute significantly to state and local taxes, collectively paying an estimated $11.74 billion a year.” In California alone, there are an estimated three million undocumented workers accounting for $3.1 billion in state and local taxes.
They estimate
“immigrants nationwide pay on average an estimated 8 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes (this is their effective state and local tax rate). To put this in perspective, the top 1 percent of taxpayers pay an average nationwide effective tax rate of just 5.4 percent.”
Despite the contributions of nearly eight million undocumented workers, they have no legal status making them ripe for exploitation by employers. And should these workers complain about unfair or unsafe working conditions or unpaid wages, they risk retaliation and deportation.
A 2009 survey of 4300 undocumented workers revealed 37% were illegally paid below minimum wage compared to 16% of U.S.-born workers. And nearly 90% of them said they were not paid overtime wages — a crime that would likely trigger litigation by U.S.-born workers.
One of the primary legal avenues for migrants seeking work in the U.S. is through temporary "nonimmigrant" visas. In 2019, over 2 million migrant workers, representing about 1% of the labor force, were in the U.S. under such programs. Despite their legal status, these workers are highly vulnerable to exploitation, often burdened by illegal recruitment fees that lead to debt bondage. Upon arrival, many find the promised job non-existent, and some even fall victim to human trafficking, including forced involvement in the sex industry.
STEEPING IN THE OSMOTIC TENSION OF CAPITALISM AND MIGRATION
Meanwhile, there are companies across the nation calling on Biden and Congress to fast-track legal authorization of immigrant workers. Just last month, 100 New York CEOs signed an open letter to Biden calling on him to act, stating there is
“a compelling need for expedited processing of asylum applications and work permits for those who meet federal eligibility standards.”
This summer politicians in several states were also calling for the same to fill jobs.
Meanwhile, congress would rather ‘build the wall’. They’ve allocated funding for immigration enforcement at a rate eight times greater than immigration court adjudications and asylum and refugee activities. $37 billion is directed towards Border Patrol and ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations, compared to $3.5 billion for immigration courts and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Refugee, Asylum, and International Operations Directorate.
This only leads to more procedural lags that inadvertently promote workplace exploitation, leading to issues like the rise of illicit child labor. Immigrant children don’t choose to work for little to no wages, the uncaring U.S. economic system draws them in — like hot water drawing molecules from a tea leaf.
Some say the United States is ‘swamped’ and can’t accommodate immigrants. And yet Costa Rica has taken in over 270,000 forcibly displaced migrants accounting for 5% of their tiny, and relatively poor, country. Columbia has absorbed two million Venezuelans providing them legal status and a right to remain there for ten years.
I think the immigrant situation in America and the exploitation of the disadvantaged, a hallmark and remnant of the slavery that is the foundation of this country, puts migration and cruel capitalism at a crossroads. The osmotic pull of the capitalist market is triggered by profit seeking maximization that draws vulnerable populations into exploitive roles.
And we consumers are complicit. We have our own selfish maximizing intentions, like seeking and demanding the lowest price. The collective behavior of consumers shapes this market, leading to emergent outcomes like the exploitation of vulnerable populations.
I think about that as I sip my tea. A product most likely grown and processed in unfavorable labor conditions filled with complications and contradictions. All to allow tea-making to be a simple and affordable act. One that also demonstrates an interplay of various forces and principles, from the immediate diffusion of flavor to the broader forces of evolutionary biology and even economics.
These processes exemplify how systems, whether a cup of tea, an ecosystem, or an economy gravitate towards certain outcomes. Whether the actors in these systems act with intentionality or not, the drive towards these outcomes is unmistakable. As we witness people struggling to diffuse through membranes into or within countries, agitated by natural, political, social, or economic forces, I think about their immediate quest for equilibrium and their longer-term quest for persistence.
And then I think about myself and my oxygen counterparts, molecules of the warm clear water, how much are we helping to create this osmotic tension? I fully recognize I am a participant in a form of cruel capitalism that has its own immediate quest for profit maximization and long-term persistence. I too am seeking equilibrium and a longer-term persistence. And it seems for now, in the U.S. anyway, that means more cruel capitalism as both political parties are swayed by this brand of capitalism —intent on maintaining their own equilibrium in their own longer-term quest for persistence.
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Hello Interactors,
Cued by shifting hues comes a call for the leaves to fall. Which means Interplace, like the weather, turns to the tumultuous territory of economics. Economics, like fall weather, is not all that predictable — both systems morph in response to layers of interconnected webs of complex systems that adapt, respond, and influence social, environmental, and political interactions.
I recently heard Sean Carroll, an influential theoretical physicist known for his work in quantum mechanics, interview Samuel Bowles, an influential economist specializing in economic inequality. They covered an array of topics including the history and future of economics, and physics, in response to growing attention to complexity science.
They harkened back to the industrial age and a time when physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, and newly emerging economists were collaborating — building theories, models, steam engines, looms, and calculation machines. It was a complicated time, rich with invention, but also relatively simple by today’s standards.
Hearing this history in the context of the current U.S. United Auto Workers strike made me wonder if perhaps Biden’s fascination with ‘building back better’ America’s industrial past is rooted in a nostalgic yearning for a simpler past.
This labor action arouses a sense of nationalism and nostalgia for the 'good old days' that Trump ignited but Biden just may have usurped. But the industrial sector, however romanticized, now represents a small fraction of jobs in America.
Humans have a penchant for simplifying complex narratives, yearning for an era where gears of industry moved in predictable cycles much like the changing seasons. But these two scientists highlight how the economy in which we exist has advanced in complexity and is ripe for evolution.
Now let’s go.
FROM CLASSIC TO COMPLEX: THE ECONOMIC SHIFT
In the interview, Bowles talks of the history of economic thought, beginning with Adam Smith, an intellectual pillar of the Industrial Revolution and an acclaimed father of economics. Adam Smith's notion of the 'invisible hand,' lauded for its portrayal of self-regulating markets, is heavily scrutinized today.
This famous metaphor has long been the cornerstone of classical economics and conservative politics, purporting that individual self-interest inadvertently contributes to the overall good of society in ‘invisible’ ways. Bowles explains how Smith could observe, amidst the new factory economy in Scotland — complete with newly built cotton mills and shirt factories — how the shirt buyer and seller both acted according to their self-interest. And then, almost as if by magic, an efficient allocation of resources emerged and along with it a social contract.
In simple transactions, like buying a shirt, Bowles illustrates how Smith's model functions well. The seller sets a price based on the costs of production and a desire for profit; the buyer accepts this price based on their valuation of the shirt. The transaction is smooth, the contract 'complete,' and market forces work to adjust supply, demand, and pricing in a seemingly natural order.
He offers another historical example that perpetuated the illusion of simple economic models of physics in economics. One of the early influential neoclassical economists, Irving Fisher, built a physical hydraulic model in the early 1900s as part of his dissertation. He used interconnected tanks and pipes to simulate supply and demand. It provided a visceral example of a 'complete contract' where the variables are manageable and the outcomes somewhat foreseeable.
Reflecting on this, Bowles offers,
“Now, there are all kinds of models like that in economics in which the metaphor really is transportation, things moving from here to there.”
However, this 'invisible hand' stumbles when confronted with the complex market forces of the labor required to manufacture a good like a shirt. Bowles believes it wasn’t until 1972, when the Nobel prize winner in economics, Kenneth Arrow, complicate the image of the ‘invisible hand’ as it relates to the labor market.
His work, particularly his Impossibility Theorem, mathematically demonstrated the challenges inherent in collective decision-making and the limits of market efficiency. Whereas the transaction of buying a shirt can be fully described and agreed upon by both parties, making it a 'complete contract,' labor contracts often can't offer this level of specificity and predictability.
Contracts in labor markets become fuzzy. They’re incomplete abstractions that only offer one guarantee — that an employee be present on the job. Their performance is harder to guarantee. Without constant observation of performance, the employer has no guarantees a worker is working hard or hardly working.
But the employer, capable of paying more than the minimum wage to ensure good performance, holds sway over the employee’s behavior. So, if an employee wants to keep their job, they’d better work as hard as possible — until, sometimes, it becomes impossibly hard.
Labor unions, like the United Auto Workers, exist to even this power imbalance by bargaining for fair wages and working conditions. How do they bargain? By choosing to not do the one thing their contract requires – be present on the job. This forces a negotiation, a conversation.
And this is where Bowles, and other economists, are looking to take the field of economics, stating,
“…in recent years, some economists, myself included, have been more attracted to the idea that economic interactions are more like a conversation. So, we should really be thinking about linguistics. That is, I'm having a conversation with you, and in saying what I'm saying now, I'm anticipating your response. And very often I'm having a conversation with somebody with some intention that I would like this person to agree to go to see a film with me, or to agree to work on a paper, and so on. But I'm anticipating what that person's intention is too, of course, in endless regress.”
COMPLEXITY OF COOPERATION: GAME THEORY AND THE REAL WORLD
Finding common ground, coming to agreement, typically requires both parties to have to give something up — to compromise. Economists often lean on a branch of mathematics to model these interactions called Game Theory. Game Theory offers methods to analyze scenarios where the outcome for each participant depends on the choices of all involved.
One experiment used to explore game theory is called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In this scenario, two prisoners must decide whether to cooperate and remain silent upon interrogation or betray each other to the authorities. Although cooperation would yield a better outcome for both, the rational choice for each individual, given the uncertainty of the other's action, is to betray, often leading to a suboptimal result for all involved.
Bowles has spent a good chunk of his career using this dilemma in experiments worldwide to explore issues of trust, collaboration, and the challenges that emerge when incentives may not align with collective well-being. He’s gone so far as to explore whether the human species is genetically predisposed to selfishness or altruism. His conclusions are published in the book "A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution."
Bowles concludes in the interview that there is
“strong experimental evidence that we are generous in many circumstances. We have models and data which suggests that there might even be a genetic predisposition. And of course, we know there are many cultural reasons why we'd be taught to be that way.”
Of course, every critic of altruism will bring up free-loaders — people who contribute relatively little but aren’t shy about taking their fair share. In Bowles experiments, he’s found “free-riders” are routinely punished even at the expense of self-interest.
In a multi-round public goods game resembling an expanded Prisoner's Dilemma, initial contributions to a shared good start off high but dwindle as players notice others free riding. When a punishment mechanism is introduced, like allowing participants to spend some of their earnings to penalize free-riders, contributions to the public good surge back up, eventually rendering punishment unnecessary.
This dynamic suggests that human behavior in such systems is nuanced: while people are initially willing to cooperate, they adapt to avoid being exploited. Moreover, when given the chance, they actively invest to punish free riders, even at a personal cost.
Bearing this in mind, Bowles believes “if you're thinking of a new economic paradigm, you have to come down on that somehow.” Bowles believes there’s enough evidence today to say it’s wrong to believe humans are purely rational, intelligent actors who act in their own self interest. In his words, “You can't say we're selfish and really smart.”
Instead, he says
“The bumper sticker for my paradigm is ‘People are a lot dumber and nicer than economists think.’”
I like Samuel Bowles use of a linguistics lens to explore economic systems. It’s a compelling touchpoint where natural and social sciences converge around interactions. The nuances of real world economics, he suggests, can be explored but not defined by sterile, mathematical models. We need methodologies that unravel those nested webs of complexities influenced by cultural narratives, historical and political context, and social relationships.
These dynamics are exemplified in the ongoing negotiations between the United Auto Workers and their employers and politicians — talks that encapsulate more than mere contractual details but a convoluted and ever-changing web of expectations, intentions, and power dynamics.
As society evolves, Bowles advocates for a commensurate evolution in our economic models, one that can accommodate these rich human interactions. It signifies a shift from seeking objective certainties to acknowledging the inherently uncertain, dynamic, and complex landscape of the intricate systems that define our world.
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Hello Interactors,
After dropping our kids at college, my wife and I spent some time on Cape Cod. She had gone here as a kid for summer family vacations to enjoy the sand and salty air, and she wasn’t alone.
Now people come from all over the world to visit this soggy, sandy, stretch of land surrounded by sea. But it’s capacity is being tested, cresting waves are gobbling the coast, as warming water turns sea life into ghosts. It’s survived this long, but how long can it carry on?
ON SCARGO POND
Situated beneath Scargo Hill, the highest point on Cape Cod, is a pond most people call Scargo Lake. With permission from a lakeside homeowner, my wife and I recently descended its bank through the brush and bramble to swim in the calm, warm water. The stairs are supported by partially submerged glacial rocks deposited around 14,000 years ago.
The pond itself is one of hundreds of kettle ponds, giant divots formed by the glacier. After coming to its final resting spot at the edge of what was to be called the Atlantic Ocean, the mountain of ice melted leaving a sandy, spongey cape dimpled with ponds of melted glacier water. The runoff from Scargo Hill now feeds this pond as it makes its eventual journey back into the sky or salty sea.
One of the rocks deposited near the stairs is the size of a Volkswagon Beetle. Its permanence stands in stark contrast to the drifting fine sand of the famed Cape Cod beaches. No amount of rainfall will budge this boulder, but recent ravenous runoff has reshaped this ravine of late. Another reminder, along with the shifting sands, that despite illusions of permanence earth’s natural forces are unyielding.
Cape Cod is dripping with illusions of permanence. The man who built these stairs was a friend and colleague of my father-in-law. His name was Rudy. He was an esoteric retired dentist, who in retirement, took his proclivity for tinkering with teeth – a profession hellbent on slowing inevitable decay – to nurture nostalgia’s permanence.
His basement was like a touristy roadside attraction with a replica of a small 1950s diner booth, walls adorned with posters and pictures of the past, coin operated amusement park gadgets from the early 20th century, and a favorite of mine – a player piano.
Rudy liked to spool up his appropriately favorite song, the 1957 pop hit song Old Cape Cod. Rudy would sing along with these opening lyrics:
If you're fond of sand dunes and salty airQuaint little villages here and thereYou're sure to fall in love with Old Cape Cod
The song was written by a Boston-area housewife who, like Rudy, was so fond of vacationing on the cape. New England tourism, including Cape Cod, was just getting underway in the 1950s. A 1953 article in the publication Economic Geography reports,
“To many New England communities, the past few decades have been a time of economic readjustment and expansion…This current reversal of trend is largely the result of New England’s growing tourist industry, the income from which in 1951 amounted to $957,000,000.”
That would be over ten billion dollars today.
Recent analysis from the National Park Service reports over 300 million visitors streamed through Cape in 2022 resulting in $23 billion dollars of direct spending. Clearly a lot of people are fond of sand dunes and salty air, quaint little villages here and there, as more and more people fall in love with old Cape Cod.
Not everyone thought Cape Cod would be a tourist destination. One hundred years before the cape’s 1950s popularity, Henry Thoreau wrote in his book, Cape Cod,
“The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for those New-Englanders who really wish to visit the sea-side. At present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them…Such beaches as are fashionable are here made and unmade in a day, I may almost say, by the sea shifting its sands.”
Thoreau was visiting the Cape at a time when the allusivity of shifting sands posed a real threat to Cape Cod tourists and residents. After chatting with the lighthouse keeper of The Highland Light, the eastern most U.S. lighthouse and the first to greet sailors venturing from Europe to Boston, Thoreau believed even this beacon of permeance was threatened. He writes,
“According to the light-house keeper, the Cape is wasting here on both sides, though most on the eastern. In some places it had lost many rods within the last year, and, erelong, the light-house must be moved. We calculated, from his data, how soon the Cape would be quite worn away at this point, ‘for,’ said he, ‘I can remember sixty years back.’”
Thoreau surmised the lighthouse keeper would likely outlive the lighthouse. While it indeed was moved a short distance and rebuilt, it remains today as one of many Cape Cod tourist attractions. It’s not just the lighthouse that’s been preserved all these years, but the very grounds that surround it.
SAND DOOMS
One hundred years before Thoreau’s visit, the harbor just north of the Highland Lighthouse, East Harbor, – at the narrowest segment of the cape – was erased. Tides from a powerful storm had sucked the eastern sands to sea breaching the harbor and severing the narrow, but contiguous, land mass in two. Provincetown, at the tip of the cape, was stranded on a newly formed island.
Alarmed by this development, the federal government rushed to plant sea grass and install fencing to build sand dunes and fill the gap. As part of the restoration program residents were encouraged, and threatened by law, to plant beach grass every spring. Within a few years expansive dunes began to form.
Over the proceeding decades and well into the 1800s of Thoreau’s visit, the practice of planting grass and installing fences had created another problem. The dunes had grown so extensive that the East Harbor was filling in with sand. In 1826, the state government issued a study that determined the dunes had extended more than four miles. This prompted the government to encourage more grass planting to block the spreading sand.
As Thoreau wrote,
“I was told that about thirty thousand dollars ($1,000,000 today) in all had been appropriated to this object, though it was complained that a great part of it was spent foolishly, as the public money is wont to be. Some say that while the government is planting beach-grass behind the town for the protection of the harbor, the inhabitants are rolling the sand into the harbor in wheelbarrows, in order to make house-lots...Thus Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens, as it were, by a myriad little cables of beach-grass, and, if they should fail, would become a total wreck, and erelong go to the bottom.”
Beach grass planting is what has kept Cape Cod from becoming a total wreck and the beaches intact. But that 1826 report also noted that it was the removal of trees and shrubs that compounded the spread of sand in the first place. It was European settlers wrecking East Harbor in the eighteenth century by cutting down trees, letting the wind blow the sand away, resulting in the East Harbor being breached by the sea due to too little sand. And then, a century later, more settlers were wrecking East Harbor with too much sand through the planting of beach grass – destining it to be a vast sand dune.
Today East Harbor is hemmed in on the west by a highway atop a dike and sand dunes to the east still protected by sea grass. The highway was part of a reclamation project completed in 1868, just three years after Thoreau was there. This thin band of highway atop decades of accumulated sand and sod has turned the harbor into what some call Pilgrim Lake.
Since 1868 this body of water has gone from a salty marine environment into a manmade freshwater pond with a host of environmental problems. The stagnant water caused massive sand fly outbreaks, the proliferation of non-native plants, and large-scale fish kills. In 2001 one such kill prompted the installation of a 700 foot long, four-foot diameter culvert equipped with a valve for one-way drainage of stagnant water to the sea. After a year of little progress, authorities decided to keep the valve open to let salty tide water back into the harbor. By 2005 the invasive carp and cat-tail populations had declined, shellfish, sticklebacks, silversides, and sea squirts returned, and the water turned clear again.
Tourists have also bloomed to nuisance levels on Cape Cod. They’re drawn to sand dunes and salty air with quaint little villages here and there. My father-in-law’s friend, Rudy, wasn’t the only one intent on preserving the past. Much effort, with private and government money, has gone into preserving a certain historic cultural and environmental ideal of Cape Cod rooted in a colonial past. Out of Boston you pass Plymouth rock on Pilgrim Highway all the way to Pilgrim Lake. One of the roads I run down on the cape is called Whig, the nineteenth century conservative political party.
There is a lot of talk of conservation, preservation, and recreation on Cape Cod, but not so much about reservations. Even though the state is named after the Massachusett people. The Wampanoag people have lived in and around what is now Cape Cod since soon after that glacier melted. And they’re still there. One tribe resides on an island once connected to the mainland called Martha’s Vineyard. The other is on Cape Cod in Mashpee where nearly three thousand Mashpee Wampanoag are enrolled in the tribe. Mashpee is an anglicized word for Mâseepee: mâs means "large" and upee means "water" referring to the largest lake on Cape Cod – Mashpee Pond – where they were forced to settle by colonizers.
For the native humans to thrive in the harsh conditions the cape for nearly ten thousand years required a way of living that worked with or mimicked nature. You’d think the ‘enlightened’ European colonizers would have recognized this. Surely some did, especially in the beginning, but clearly, we’re still learning.
THE SHIFTING SANDS
My wife and I saw a significant reshaping of one beach we have frequented over the years. Waves had clearly taken a bigger bite than usual. To remediate and maintain the beach for tourists, the city had imported a swath of sand to supplant the loss. But it wasn’t the fine white sand that makes Cape Cod beaches so attractive, it was the brownish, dirty, gritty sand used to make concrete.
It seemed a desperate and uncertain attempt at holding on to the allusive certainty of the past – a temporary patch covering the truth in a nostalgic myth of sand dunes and salty air. It’s a story that props up quaint little villages here and there. Should the truth be known of the impermanence of the cape, people may stop falling in love with old Cape Cod.
I couldn’t help noting the conflicting and contrasting nature of Cape Cod. Like the beach grass planted to preserve their primary tourist attraction – beaches – from the effects of wind, only to be thwarted by a rising and increasingly hostile sea. Or the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History’s display on the Wampanoag people portrayed as a distant past even though they thrive today. And the quaint neighborhood road signs that occasionally read Thickly Settled amidst a cape that itself has become thickly settled.
The tourism industry props up a nostalgic illusory image of a past that reaches just far enough back in time to perpetuate the story of colonial control, but not so far as to recognize a more native coexistent past. It’s part of a coordinated effort, buoyed by private and public dollars, to futilely maintain the physical geography of a sea-bound land mass largely made of sand and marsh. And for the most part, it’s all done for the tourism industry.
I can’t help but see it as a snake eating its own tail. The commodification of nature that is being destroyed by commodification. The increased commercialization of “local” only serves to increase property prices thus pushing out locals. Overcrowded tourism degrades the tourism experience. And a depleting of the very resources on which they depend, like water. And it’s all occurring amidst a changing climate.
In recent years Cape Cod has experienced levels of coastal hypoxia not recorded prior to 2017. Coastal hypoxia, or "dead zones," involves a decrease in oxygen levels in coastal waters. Most evidence points to the cause being – surprise – human-induced factors such as nutrient pollution from freshwater runoff and wastewater discharge.
In the last few summers, the bottom waters in Cape Cod Bay have suffered from low oxygen levels, which is unusual. Factors like warmer water, layering of water temperatures, and altered wind patterns are creating an environment prone to low oxygen near the seabed. These climate shifts are seriously affecting the types of plants and animals in and around Cape Cod. My wife and I would not have been swimming Scargo Lake last summer due to an outbreak of a harmful bacteria.
Cape Cod, like most of the colonized world, is a victim of cultural and environmental disruption. The influx of tourists since the mid twentieth century, like the influx of European colonizers centuries before, have disrupted the lifestyles and cultures of the very local communities they sought to enjoy. Instead, locals, like the Wampanoag before them, have been exploited and expunged leaving Cape Cod enshrined in a commercial haze of cultural hypoxia and an influx of mono-cultural human species. And it’s all surrounded by a coastal dead zone, an increasingly angry sea, shifting and volatile wind, and an uncertain future.
I can see centuries of colonial behavior more like an invasive species. We’ve been introduced to new habitats where we didn't historically exist, and we have disrupted native ecosystems. We grow our populations rapidly and seek to outcompete native species, natural resources, and ecosystems. Like invasive species we exploit and deplete local resources, alter food chains, and ecosystem dynamics. It’s all led to the transformation of landscapes and widespread habitat alteration.
But we humans, as native populations demonstrate, have unique capacities for complex decision-making, culture, and technology, which can be harnessed for both positive and negative impacts on ecosystems. Moreover, humans have the capacity to recognize and mitigate their impacts, making conscious efforts toward conservation and sustainability. And indeed, the ongoing restoration of East Harbor shows how possible this can be.
But to do this on a global scale requires us to not think of ourselves or the past as a stationary rock deposited by a glacier, but as a grain of sand at the beach. Grains of sand, when combined, give rise to complex emergent phenomenon like dunes and beaches. These emergent structures are not present in individual grains but emerge from their interactions with others and their co-arrangement.
Let’s grow even fonder of the sand dunes and salty air. If we want to maintain quaint little villages here and there, embrace uncertainty and reject despair. Let’s fall in love with the cape as the Wampanoag did, not the allusive nostalgic one experienced as a kid.
References
The Impact of Tourism on the Economy of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Lewis M. Alexander. Economic Geography. 1953.
Tourism to Cape Cod National Seashore contributes $750 million to local economy. U.S. National Park Service. 2023.
Thoreau, Henry David. Cape Cod. Neeland Media LLC. Kindle Edition.
Unprecedented summer hypoxia in southern Cape Cod Bay: an ecological response to regional climate change? Scully, et al. Biogeosciences. 2022.
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Hello Interactors,
Our family got sucked into watching the Amazon Prime show, Clarkson’s Farm. As a suburban Iowa boy who knew just enough farmers to know how hard it is, I found this show relatable. Apart from the entertaining allure of many staged reality shows, I realized it also highlights topics I investigate here on Interplace. Especially the interaction of the ‘rural’ and ‘urban’…or lack thereof.
Let me know in the comments if you’ve watched this show and what you think!
I’ll be taking a little break from writing in the coming weeks and will return in September.
Until then, let’s go!
THE RURAL-URBAN DIVIDE
My son is a car guy. As such, he turned our family onto the pied piper of car guys, the British journalist turned media celebrity, Jeremy Clarkson. Clarkson is most known for his part in the shows ‘Top Gear’ and ‘The Grand Tour’ but has turned his attention to farming in recent years complete with his own show called "Clarkson's Farm." It’s a simple yet complicated narrative that unfurls like the intricate English countryside hedgerows he commissioned for his farm in an episode we watched recently.
The show chronicles Jeremy, a controversial climate change denying fossil fuel lover who expresses glee at polluting the natural environment, fulfilling a fantasy of becoming a farmer. A city boy naively embarking on a journey to become a farm boy. “How hard can this be?”, he insinuates, as his hired companion, Kaleb, a true farm boy, continually saves him from one disaster after another. Kaleb left the show earlier this year to help the Royal Agricultural University teach young people how to farm. A move that appears to be motivated by what Jeremy’s farm manager called his ‘stupidest idea yet’ – to raise pigs.
Clarkson is comfortable with stupid ideas leading to disasters having been sued, fired, and defamed on countless occasions for making racist, misogynistic, and other statements in bad taste while joyfully wallowing in the attention, fame, and revenue that comes in the aftermath. An enigmatic media magnet with sociopathic tendencies.
But I’m finding Clarkson’s Farm oddly intriguing as a snapshot of the interaction of people and place. It weaves threads of common human endeavors, the natural environment, and the evolving rhythms of modern society. He, and the show’s producers, intertwine personal, social, political, and environment struggles like meandering streams of the show’s British rural landscape. Clarkson is a bit like the menacing disease spreading badger featured in another episode – a curious creature exploring and exploiting the winding lanes and hidden corners of a quiet countryside. Both a bane and a boon. A nuisance and a neighbor.
His show also echoes intriguing themes explored among urban and rural geographers alike. They, like Clarkson, are playing with what it means to blend the rural with the urban. Jeremy's personal, social, and political journey within the pastoral tapestry of the Cotswold’s north of Oxford is interwoven with the ecosystems found in the mosaic of fields, woodlands, and waterways that define its countryside. A strand of a larger tapestry that challenges, like Jeremy has, the notion of rural and urban in the growing urbanization of our planet.
Planetary urbanization, as a thesis, has drawn scrutiny among some critical human geographers who call for a profound shift in the approach to understanding 'urban' and 'rural' spaces on a global scale. The origins of planetary urbanization can be traced back to Henri Lefebvre's pioneering hypothesis, first introduced in his 1970 work "The Urban Revolution" suggesting society has undergone complete urbanization. He subsequently furthered the notion that globalization has created a complete integration and interdependence of urban and non-urban spaces each with their own boundaries and borders.
Jeremy's agricultural odyssey unfolds in this realm where these distinctions of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ become pronounced as Jeremy’s lack of comfort and knowledge of the ‘rural’ is set against the younger Caleb’s lack of experience and familiarity of the ‘urban’. The show attempts to script a blurring and harmonizing of the ‘urban’ and the ‘rural’ only to be foiled by the unrelenting rhythm of uncertainty and emergent behavior of human and non-human nature – including a global pandemic, local politics, and global and local economics.
Clarkson’s Farm, and the concept of planetary urbanization, is challenged by the spatial boundary urbanization has artificially created. It legitimizes Lefebvre's proposition that urbanization extends far beyond traditional urban centers, suggesting that rural spaces, as well as elements such as wilderness areas, oceans, the atmosphere, and even the planetary sub-surface, contribute to a global urban fabric. After all, anyone in the world can go to Jeremy’s website to buy his food products and swag.
But the show also raises questions about the specificity and boundaries of the 'urban' and underscores the need for a renewed urban theory that transcends the traditional confines of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘country’ and ‘city’, or ‘rural’ and ‘urban’. Scholars have raised concerns about the potential intellectual colonization and methodological biases inherent in theories of planetary urbanization. Particularly, the erasure of the 'rural' in socio-political power and in this theoretical framework has lead to 'rural' becoming a marginalized category.
Indeed, Jeremy does his fair bit of this in the show where he frequently looks down his nose at Kaleb’s lack of exposure to more ‘sophisticated’ urban culture. Meanwhile, Kaleb is not shy about looking down his nose at Jeremy for his lack of exposure to more ‘sophisticated’ rural culture. But ultimate, Jeremy – and by extension ‘urban’ culture – wield the most power and influence over the world and people like Kaleb. Just as ‘urban’ research and theories dominate academia, the media, and public culture.
BLURRING BORDERS
Critics contend planetary urbanization’s exclusive focus on the urban sphere risks overshadowing the critical importance of rural spaces as nodes in global networks of resource provisioning. Post-colonial scholars highlight the dangers of perpetuating colonialist narratives by centering solely on urban processes and ignoring the rich histories and contributions of rural societies.
"Clarkson's Farm" and the planetary urbanization thesis, rooted in the ideas of Lefebvre, becomes like the bordered farm properties in the show, with blotches of natural occurring landscapes, networks of roads mingling with streams each flowing through the countryside. Just as theories of planetary urbanization seek to uncover the power dynamics and class struggles that shape our urban and rural landscapes while also perpetuating them, Jeremy's farming journey does the same.
While planetary urbanization has led to many insights, its grounding in neo-Marxist political economy has also led to a certain reductionism. It neglects the rich interplay of life and agency found in species beyond humans in dimensions that extend beyond the surface of the earth into the atmosphere and below the ground. This exclusion stems from a perspective that normalizes and justifies the slow creep of urbanism that further entrenches artificial boundaries with the rural.
This fusion offers yet another lens into Clarkson’s farm that reveals the delicate balance between individual actions of Jeremy and other human actors, livestock and other animal actors, plants and other organism actors, the weather and other atmospheric actors, and the soil and other chemical actors. Each of which contributes and reacts to unfolding and unpredictable systemic behavior creating an intricate weave of complex adaptive systems.
In our acceptance of reductionist thinking, we may inadvertently be overlooking the holistic potential of planetary thinking. Planetary thinking extends beyond human interactions on the Earth's surface, embracing verticality and encompassing not only terrestrial but also atmospheric and subterranean connections.
The ideology more aligned with this perspective comes from the French philosopher’s Deleuze and Latour. Their ideas offer a contrasting perspective that challenges the boundaries between human and non-human, urban and rural. Just as Lefebvre's thesis emphasizes the societal shift toward complete urbanization, the Deleuzian and Latourian lens blurs these distinctions entirely arguing everything is constantly changing and evolving and everything is connected, with no clear boundaries between humans and non-humans. In the interplay between these ideologies, we find a dance—a dance that mirrors the shifting, and often awkward, patterns of human-world interaction observed in "Clarkson's Farm."
Geography and sociology researchers Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski at Lancaster University introduce the term 'planetary multiplicity' to describe a planet capable of self-transformation influenced by the interactions of these blurred external forces. They argue that in the wake of unyielding forest fires, rising seas, the changing composition of soil, water, and atmosphere, and even altered adaptation of species, that the planet is being forced to transform itself in multiple ways – and in ways we human’s may not be accustomed to or able to control. This reminds me of Jeremy, a man of wealth, privilege, and control, forced to deal with an unyielding multitude of natural and human-made external forces in ways he may not be accustomed to…or able to control.
For me, “Clarkson's Farm" has transformed from a mere show about a controversial but entertaining car journalist into a thought-provoking journey — a proxy for some of the academic insights describing real-world complexities I find myself drawn to. It's a well filmed and produced journey that invites us to the beautiful but complex British countryside – invariably traversing beyond Jeremy’s crooked farm rows and groomed hedges, to venture into realms that echo the timeless wonders of rural life.
As we meander through the countryside of nosey neighbor narratives, local politics, and the drama of farm life – all in the comfort of a Land Rover or Lamborghini tractor – I’m reminded, in multiple interdependent ways, that despite the intricate pretense of a choreographed TV show, we exist individually as but a small part of a larger vibrant ecosystem that is ever-evolving, ever-surprising, and ever-enchanting. But collectively, especially as urban masses, we are no doubt a large part of an ever-increasing, ever-consuming, and ever-uncertain outsized geological and atmospheric force.
Meanwhile, mainstream society, like Clarkson, remain fixed in reductionist thinking that continues to empower a few in the name of exploitation and marginalization of many. Kaleb left the show to be a dad and help teach young farmers while Jeremy attempts to continue to leverage his money, power, and influence in his fantasy of jumping over the imagined border of an urban elite to an everyday farmer. But maybe by exposing the world to rural life, Jeremy inadvertently demonstrated just how interconnected we all are with the world.
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Hello Interactors,
Summer is waning and nature’s energy is draining. Meanwhile, record heat and fires in the northern hemisphere remind us the sun has yet to relent. But plants know what to do to prepare.
They slow down and repair. They store and restore through the winter snore for when the sun comes back for more. Why can’t we humans, and our societies, learn this rhythm of life? Maybe we’re just not as smart as plants. Yet.
Hey, Interplace hit 1,000 subscribers! 🙌🏼
Thanks, Interactors, for your energy and care. While I do this mostly for my own education, it’s nice to see people join the journey. Please give me a like and a hello so Interplace can continue to grow!
Now let’s go…
IS A FALL UPON US?
I can sense summer ending. And so can plants. They’re in the waning days of the growing season as they deftly adapt their metabolism – triggered by subtle shifts in the environment. As the sunlight fades and temperatures dip, the once vibrant act of photosynthesis slows – a signal from a rotating earth to take a pause. The production of glucose, their lifeblood, drops, but the tireless rhythm of respiration continues its steady beat.
Plants astutely sense the inevitable chill embarking on a strategic storage mission, hoarding precious energy and nutrients in their vaulted roots and stems. Stiffening to embrace the chilling challenge, they undergo a metamorphosis augmenting their resilience to freezing temperatures. Some species, like many of my sedums, channel their remaining vigor into blossoms and seeds before a winter's nap.
A plants' photochemical metabolic efficiency and prowess not only evokes wonder and admiration, but a bit of jealousy. Imagine being able to generate energy just by lying in the sun.
Metabolism is a biological process that determines how fast energy is exchanged between an organism and its surroundings. It transforms what's around us into fuel for maintenance, growth, and reproductive abundance.
This concept isn't just limited to individual organisms, but collections of organisms. Like groups of social humans. 'Sociometabolism' expands the idea of biological metabolism to human societies – how energy flows between a society and its environment, and how it's used within that society.
The sources of energy are different for each context. Biological metabolism relies mostly on light captured by plants which is then consumed by other living beings. A continuous metabolic flow through the entire food chain.
Sociometabolism can be more versatile. Sure, it involves consuming biomass for food or fuel, but it also encompasses energy generated from other sources – like fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, and wind power.
Both biological metabolism and a big chunk of sociometabolism depend heavily on consuming biological materials, whether it's plants or animals. This connects them closely to the flow of essential elements, like carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Metabolism on earth is interconnected in a massive web of resource exchange.
Geographer Yadvinder Malhi wondered how much metabolic energy flows through the biosphere. He took a stab at estimating in a 2014 paper on “The Metabolism of a Human-Dominated Planet.” With the sun as the primary source of energy for the biosphere, he calculates about 174 petawatts (PW) of solar energy reaches the planet's upper atmosphere.
To put that in perspective, an old-fashioned 100-watt (W) lightbulb requires .1 kilowatts (KW) of energy. A 1000-watt drill requires 1 KW of energy. If one kilowatt is 103 W, then one petawatt is a whopping 1015 W. The sun is giving the planet 1 followed by 15 zeroes times 174 watts worth of energy! Plants and bacteria capable of photosynthesizing capture a portion of this solar energy through photosynthesis and store it as carbon-based chemical bonds.
This captured energy is quantified as Gross Primary Productivity (GPP), and the biosphere's GPP is approximately 210 petagrams of carbon per year. Converting GPP to energy units, the global photosynthetic metabolism is estimated at 265 terawatts (TW) or 1012 W. Sixty percent of that productivity comes from the land biosphere and 40% from the marine biosphere, representing only 0.2% of total surface solar energy.
Of that 0.2%, around 50-70% is used by plants and phytoplankton to metabolize and 30-50% is directed towards growing biomass. This biomass, in turn, is gobbled up by plant eaters, bacteria, and fungi. Fueling the ecosystem then requires about 75 TW of energy on land and 57 TW in the oceans to generate all the biomass energy available for other organisms to consume. Including humans. Given these numbers, how does our human metabolism stack up?
Imagine an 11x17 (A3) piece of paper sitting atop a leafy tree in a tropical forest in South America with the sun directly above. The amount of solar energy hitting that paper equals the energy required for an average sized active adult to metabolize one of our primary fuel sources – sugar. The equivalent of a 120 W light bulb. Cut the paper in half and that’s what would be required for an average-sized adult human to metabolize sugar while resting.
Any other mammal our size would require roughly the same amount of energy. However, we allocate energy differently than other mammals due to our relatively large brains. Nearly one-quarter to one-third of our energy, when resting, goes to feeding our brain. As a result, we dedicate proportionately less energy to growing biomass than a mammal of our size. In fact, we grow at a rate more akin to a reptile with similar mass. Malhi offers up a boa constrictor as a suitable comparison.
FROM HUNT AND FARM TO THE FAT FARM
That big brain of ours invents creative ways to consume energy relative to our biosphere family members. Especially when we humans congregate, socialize, and invent. Human sociometabolism has increased over our existence from hunting and gathering as other organisms do (preagriculture age), to controlling, appropriating, and domesticating plants and animals (agricultural age), to the use of biomass, fossil fuels, and other forms of energy to power inventions that feed our growing, and seemingly insatiable, sociometabolism (industrial age).
Even as increasingly more energy is now required to fuel servers to feed the current global wave of AI hysteria (information age), all three of these previous stages of sociometabolism still exist. It’s not so much that humans went from one stage to another, but more we added each stage to the other. Today, some communities and societies do more or less of hunting and gathering, farming, powering machines, or running software than others. Taken together, we are all part of human sociometabolism.
To quantify humanity's sociometabolism, Malhi considers both energy flows, which can be obtained from energy statistics in those societies that collect and publish them, and material flows, specifically the flow of biomass used for human or livestock nutrition. While energy flows are more easily accessible in contemporary contexts, material flows were a crucial aspect of the metabolism in pre-industrial societies and continue to hold significance in modern societies as well.
Malhi took some numbers from another study in 2008 that puts aspects of these sociometabolic transitions into perspective.
* In a measure of population density per square kilometer, humans went from one human per 0.02–0.10 square kilometers in Preagricultural, to 40 in Agricultural, to 400 in Industrial.
* Farmers as a percentage of the human population went from zero in Preagricultural, to greater than 80% in Agricultural, to less than 10% in Industrial.
* Sociometabolism as watts per capita went from 300 W in Preagricultural, to 2000 W in Agricultural, to 8000 W in Industrial.
* Total energy use per unit area (W per square kilometer) went from 6-30 W in Preagricultural, to 82,000 in Agricultural, to 3,300,000 in Industrial.
* The share of plant and animal metabolism required to feed our own sociometabolism went from 0.0002% in Preagricultural, to 3-6% in Agricultural, to 210% in Industrial.
However, our big brains did invent ways to become more efficient with energy use. The percentage of biomass energy needed to fuel human sociometabolism went from greater than 99% in the Preagricultural age – that is, if you didn’t use your limited energy to hunt or gather – and/or socialize – you’d likely die, to greater than 95% in Agricultural – in other words, farming reduced the area needed to find food but still required a lot of energy, to 10-30% in Industrial – now those humans most advantaged by machines could use less of their own energy to live (and presumably store more energy in the form of fat).
Human sociometabolism, for a vast and growing segment of the world’s population, has emerged as significantly smaller than the biological metabolism of the African savannah landscape where our species, Homo sapiens, first appeared. By Malhi’s calculations, our sociometabolism differs from theirs by six orders of magnitude.
For over a million years, Homo sapiens, and its ancestral Homo species, lived as hunter-gatherers. They improved little in resource gathering efficiency, despite gradual brain expansion and technological advancements. In this period, our metabolic impact on the planet remained relatively modest, likely lesser than that of much larger mammals like elephants and mammoths. However, a significant shift occurred about ten thousand years ago with the Neolithic revolution and the introduction of farming, marking a pivotal moment in human history.
The question is, is there enough energy on this planet to feed growing insatiable sociometabolisms? The trends don’t run in our favor unless human societies evolve as plants did. To survive, they cued into the natural rhythm of a rotating earth to form their own rhythm of life. Some ancient plants failed to ease their hyperactive, energy consuming process of photosynthesis. They didn’t take a break, conserve energy in their vaulted roots, repair damaged cells, and prepare for another trip around the sun. And evolution punished them. Now they’re fossilized carbon buried deep in the ground fueling our human sociometabolism.
Are we humans, as a species, future fossils in our waning days of a failed evolutionary experiment? Have we learned to slow our pace of consumption, conserve and store our energy? Can we evolve our sociometabolism by inventing rhythmic ways to seasonally repair and prepare ourselves and our societies for another growth spurt later in the journey around the sun? Are we, as a global society and species, adaptive thriving plants with an evolving future, or another example of failed future fossils?
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Hello Interactors,
Our family took a trip to San Diego to visit friends. We got to spend some time in the warm Southern California water at a time when the news was filled with stories about sensational oceanic anomalies. Was the warm water we felt an anomaly? How certain could I be and how certain can anyone be about climatic statistical anomalies?
Let’s unpack it.
BOOGIE WOOGIE FREAK OUT
I felt the current sucking my legs out to sea as a wave formed behind me. I struggled to hurl myself, and my boogie board, toward the beach to meet the momentum of the rising wave. “KICK, KICK, KICK”, I yelled to my son who was next to me.
Then came the welling and humbling sensation born out of the magnitude of a swelling ocean wave. As it crested a smile crossed my face and the force propelled me down the wave’s sloping curve. I looked over and realized not only had my son caught the wave, but my daughter and wife had too. The whole family was giggling and kicking amidst the seafoam of an exhausted but rewarding wave.
I’d forgotten how exhilarating boogie boarding is. I was first introduced to it when I lived in Hermosa Beach, California in the mid-eighties. I’m kicking myself for not learning to surf that year. I didn’t even try until a few years later at the very beach we found ourselves boogie boarding – Moonlight Beach in Encinitas, California.
I spent a summer working at a newspaper there in 1987 laying out ads on their newly purchased Mac SE alongside the art director and one full-time designer. They were both surfers and decided to take me out one day. I remember my shoulders being sore for a week from paddling. Let’s just say I paddled more than I surfed.
The water is relatively warm in San Diego which makes it a nice place to surf and boogie board. Not only is it the southern most major city in California and thus the warmest, it can also be the recipient of warm water flowing up the coast from Mexico.
It was cloudy, cool, and a little rainy the day we were boogie boarding with friends making the water feel particularly warm. I wondered how much warmer the water there might be compared to when I was feebly attempting to stand on a surfboard for the first time. I wondered if climate change had demonstrably warmed the surface water after all these years.
Ocean flow and temperatures have been all over the news in the last week or so. Take, for example, this ABC news story that was amplified by a post from John Gibbons, aka @thinkorswim, on that site we’ll all continue to call Twitter. According to John’s profile he likes to ‘freak out and speak out’ on the ‘climate emergency’ but warned he didn’t want to sound ‘alarmist’ when he shared a graph one scientist called ‘gobsmacking’.
It’s a chart of a set of standard deviations — the number of points a number falls above or below an average number. How much it deviates from an average. In this case the number represents the average extent ice has covered a particular area in the Antarctic Sea from 1989 to 2023 as compared to the average between the years 1991-2020.
From 1989 to 2022 the number didn’t deviate from the average much more than 3 or -3 standard deviations, but by June of 2023 it deviated well below -6, or ~6.4 standard deviations.
It makes 2023 look like an exceptionally bad year thus far for a really important element of our climate system: sea ice. These sheets of ice play a significant role in how the Earth's climate behaves. For example, we know it affects how much sunlight is reflected into space (planetary albedo), how the atmosphere moves (atmospheric circulation), the productivity of ocean life, and how heat and salt circulate in the ocean (thermohaline circulation).
Which gets us to another big piece of oceanic news this week; the fate of AMOC (pronounced “AY-mock). The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is a large-scale ocean current system in the Atlantic Ocean and Danish scientists predicted it’s flow will slow or even stall before the end of the century.
Like polar ice sheets, AMOC is also a critical component of the Earth's climate system. It’s responsible for transporting warm, salty water from the tropics to the northern latitudes and then returning cold, less salty water southward through currents deep in the ocean. This circulation pattern helps regulate the climate by redistributing heat while also influencing weather patterns across the North Atlantic region and beyond.
One of the authors of the study, Susanne Ditlevsen, is a professor of statistics at the University of Copenhagen. She told the New York Times that “climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.” Given this, she was surprised they could predict the timing of a collapse.
NUMBING NUMBERS
Should we be shocked by statistics yielding whacky numbers or suspicious of the models that produce them? Some scientists are calling for scrutiny of climatic models, encouraging more nuanced discussion of these alarming predictions.
While there is reason to be scared, we should not be scared to reason.
‘Gobsmacking’ numbers from scientists and mathematicians make for good click bait, and indeed can offer legitimate alarm bells, but they also can give the illusion of certainty and can distract us from all that remains uncertain, nuanced, or all together unknowable.
This view was expressed by the climate scientist John Kennedy who scrutinizes the mythology of mathematical certainty and lionizes the phraseology of scientific humility. He called out the gobsmacked scientist ABC quoted about the ‘six-sigma event’ in the Antarctic who was quoted as such,
“To say unprecedented isn’t strong enough,” Dr Doddridge said, “For those of you who are interested in statistics, this is a five-sigma event. So it’s five standard deviations beyond the mean. Which means that if nothing had changed, we’d expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years. It’s gobsmacking.”
To show just how cautious we should be with these numbers, while Dr. Doddridge translated the standard deviations into a 1 in 7.5-million-year event, another math professor and climate watcher noted “6.4 standard deviations would correspond to odds of about 1-in-13,000,000,000 (1-in-13 billion).”
Kennedy, who is decidedly not a climate denialist, also cautions that tracking ice extent in Antarctica has only been occurring for 45 years. This doesn’t mean the once-in-the-lifetime-of-the-Earth’s-existence event isn’t happening, but that it’s derived from a relatively miniscule time span. He suggests we might be better served to let people know that there is much more we don’t know about trends of the ice extent around Antarctica than we do know.
Furthermore, there isn’t a scientist out there who will say what this all means, how it happened, and when it might happen again. For all we know, within the next few years we may see an equally anomalous event in the other direction. After all, Kennedy points out,
“Up to around 2014, extent had been trending gradually upwards. Not by a huge amount, but it definitely wasn’t dropping. It hit a record high in 2014. Then it dropped off a cliff. By 2017, it was record low. It bounced back to “normal” in 2020 and now we are where we are.
He goes on to note the cautious language the IPCC uses to describe these changes.
“In conclusion, the observed small increase in Antarctic sea ice extent during the satellite era is not generally captured by global climate models, and there is low confidence in attributing the causes of the change.“
and
“For Antarctic sea ice, there is no significant trend in satellite-observed sea ice area from 1979 to 2020 in both winter and summer, due to regionally opposing trends and large internal variability. Due to mismatches between model simulations and observations, combined with a lack of understanding of reasons for substantial inter-model spread, there is low confidence in model projections of future Antarctic sea ice changes, particularly at the regional level.“
and
“There remains low confidence in all aspects of Antarctic sea ice prior to the satellite era owing to a paucity of records that are highly regional in nature and often seemingly contradictory.”
Kennedy concludes that,
“My concern is that because Antarctic sea ice has suddenly dropped, a lot of people have forgotten what we don’t know. This feeds into the alarmingly large, shonky, yet definitive-sounding numbers like one in 7.5 million years, which then get into headlines, and spread across social media like the clappers. When Antarctic sea ice inevitably does its next weird thing, everyone will suddenly remember what we don’t know and that isn’t, it must be said, a great look.”
He's got a point.
SEA ANOMOLIES
So, what of the warming waters of San Diego? Has the temperature demonstrably changed since I was swimming there 36 years ago? Like all ocean water, it is warming. However, on any given day it may be warmer or cooler relative to past years. It’s this cyclical variability of complex systems coupled with spotty, uncertain, and incomplete data that makes predictions and smoking guns so hard to pin down.
It’s hard to tell what pattern is emerging from this chart dating back to 2000. The peak temperature in 2016 was due a record heat wave, but as you see it was followed up a year later with a significant drop. However, there were measurements in June that indicated “a weak El Niño was associated with above-average sea surface temperatures (SSTs) across the equatorial Pacific Ocean” as part of another oceanic circulation pattern known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). So, it’s possible these warm waters made their way to Encinitas. It’s hard to tell.
It's also possible ENSO is partially responsible for Antarctica’s sea ice variability. Climate scientist Zack Labe writes that,
“These patterns of climate variability modulate the transport of heat in the Southern Ocean, storm activity, and patterns of low-level surface winds – all of which significantly affect Antarctic sea ice (a lot more than air temperature does).”
He continues,
“If we see a dramatic change in the large-scale atmospheric circulation in the next few weeks/months, it is very possible that sea ice levels could return closer to average. This is good news, as it implies that we are not necessarily guaranteed to see another new minimum record at the end of next summer.”
But Zack is one the of scientists John Kennedy praises for his humility and willingness to not have definitive answers no matter how attractive they may be to media outlets and their consumers. He writes,
“…even though many scientists (including myself) are often responding with I don’t know for why Antarctic sea ice is so low right now, we do know quite a bit. It’s just that this is very complicated to disentangle so quickly, and there is no simple one-way causal factor to communicate. We have many clues, but scientists need more data and experiments to state their conclusions more confidently (“we” are cautious to avoid making sweeping conclusions by nature of training).
Attributing the why is also very challenging in real-time, especially for understanding the role of climate change in the Antarctic. The normal scientific research process is so much longer than the media cycle. Studies just focusing on 2023’s Antarctic sea ice levels, for instance, will likely be published for at least the next five years or more.”
This much we do know: Antarctic sea ice has been gradually increasing over the past four decades, but there have been some record low levels of sea ice. As we’re seeing now. These changes vary in different regions of Antarctica, with some areas experiencing more ice while others have seen decreases. Wind patterns play a significant role in driving these changes, but the observations are limited, and climate models still struggle to fully explain them.
The annual growth and melting of Antarctic sea ice is a unique and regular phenomenon amidst the year-to-year variations. It plays a crucial role in the exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean, providing a habitat for the diverse ocean ecosystems. Including the habitats I was swimming in last week. Understanding and modeling these processes is essential given their significance but doing so is admittedly very tricky.
The factors contributing to extreme sea ice events include both atmospheric and oceanic drivers. They’re influenced by local changes within Antarctica and remote impacts from other regions like the Pacific Ocean. The combination of anomalous winds and upper ocean heat can lead to significant sea ice deviations and records at specific times. While predicting summer sea ice conditions based solely on the previous winter is challenging, changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation might bring sea ice levels closer to average, offering hope to avoid new minimum records.
Researchers will obviously continue to study sea ice trends to better determine if it's driven by internal variability or unexpected responses to circulation trends in the Northern Hemisphere. But given all these anomalies and uncertainties, it's important to dig into reliable sources, seek knowledge of our complex ecosystems, and be cautious of, or avoid all together, unnecessary hype.
It’s a bit like trying to catch every wave you see. It can become exhausting, disappointing, and with time…depressing. But when you learn to read the ocean from experts, gain some experience, and have some patience, rewards – sometimes exhilarating – do come.
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Hello Interactors,
My last post on fractals led me to refamiliarized myself with the man who coined the term, Benoit Mandelbrot, and his influential work on the fractal-like wonders of nature. I didn’t realize he was following in the footsteps of 19th century mathematicians critical of the absolutist purity of Euclidean geometry – themes I recently explored here and here.
My journey led me to a memory of a plane landing on a plane and the complexities that surface on the surface.
Please don’t be shy. Leave a comment or a like. Or just hit reply with a smiley face and a hello!
Now let’s go…
I have a childhood memory, fueled by a crayon drawing, of watching a plane land at the Des Moines airport. My dad was returning home after a business trip. Over time, this memory transformed into a riddle most likely inspired by high school calculus. The riddle posed a question: as the distance between the plane and the runway progressively decreases, when does it equal zero? My pondering was rooted in the observation that, at a microscopic level, the rubber of the tire and the rough surface of the concrete never truly merge into zero. The presence of black streaks on the tarmac from rubber left behind served as evidence. According to classical physics, at an atomic level, the distance between a landing plane and the runway approaches zero but never truly reaches it.
This is because the outermost electron clouds of the atoms in both the tires and the runway surface repel each other due to electromagnetic forces, creating a minute gap between them, measured in angstroms (10 to the power of -10 meters). However, from a practical standpoint, classical mechanics tells us that at a macroscopic level, the plane does make contact with the runway and eventually comes to a stop. Classical mechanics focuses on the behavior of objects on a larger scale, which outweighs the effects observed at the microscopic level. The mechanics of "touchdown" do not rely on atomic physics to achieve zero distance for the safe arrival of our loved ones.
In my childhood crayon drawings, I depicted the runway as a straight line and the plane's wheels as a circle. Yet, this representation itself is a macroscopic interpretation of reality. If we were to examine my marks with a magnifying glass, we would see fragmented wax resting on the textured paper's peaks and valleys rather than perfectly straight lines or round circles. Similarly, we would find fragments of rubber deposited on the peaks and valleys of the concrete runway.
In the realm of high school calculus, the line representing the runway and the circle representing the wheel would be precisely drawn on rigid gridded paper using a plastic flowchart template, akin to the tools my dad used to pseudocode his COBOL programs he no doubt was debugging with his colleagues in Toronto.
Mathematically, I would have described the landing as the height of the plane decreasing as a function of time, incorporating concepts like velocity and acceleration. This interplay between decreasing height and time signifies the plane's motion until it decelerates and reaches a minimum altitude, indicating touchdown. I would have positioned the circle of my plastic template precisely on the flat line, accompanied by an equation describing the moment of touchdown.
However, in 1982, two years before I was in calculus and the year I was learning geometry, mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot published "The Fractal Geometry of Nature," a highly influential book. Mandelbrot's work highlighted the importance of mathematics that deviated from the traditional Euclidean curves and shapes. Introduced by ‘modern’ mathematicians like Georg Cantor and Giuseppe Peano a century earlier, the days of regarding mathematics as absolutely pure and unquestioning were being questioned.
Mandelbrot offers why we were set on this smooth, well-worn trajectory of Euclidian mathematical purity,
“The fact that mathematics, viewed by its own creators as ‘absolutely pure,’ should respond so well to the needs of science is striking and surprising but follows a well-worn pattern. That pattern was first set when Johannes Kepler concluded that, to model the path of Mars around the Sun, one must resort to an intellectual plaything of the Greeks–the ellipse. Soon after, Galileo concluded that, to model the fall of bodies toward the Earth, one needs a different curve–a parabola. And he proclaimed that ‘the greatest book [of nature]...is written in mathematical language and the characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures…without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.’ In the pithy words of Scottish biologist D’Arcy Thompson: ‘God always geometrizes.’”
Of the work of Cantor’s set theory and Peano’s space-filling curves, the theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman J Dyson wrote,
“These new structures were regarded by contemporary mathematicians as ‘pathological.’ They were described as a ‘gallery of monsters,’ kin to the cubist painting and atonal music that were upsetting established standards of taste in the arts at about the same time. The mathematicians who created the monsters regarded them as important in showing that the world of pure mathematics contains a richness of possibilities going far beyond the simple structures that they saw in nature.”
Mandelbrot's research delved into the exploration of fractals, which he described as broken shapes, distinct from the smooth Euclidean curves. These fractals opened new possibilities, allowing for the modeling of complex phenomena found in nature. Mandelbrot's fractal geometry was brought to life through computer-generated images of landscapes and clouds, reflecting the generative algorithms found in nature. These images showcased the jagged, impure, and fractured lines that emerged, challenging the simplicity of Euclidean shapes.
Mandelbrot emphasized that drawing a line between just two points on a square Euclidean plane oversimplifies reality. Instead, he considered the fracturing that occurs when lines connect every point in a square or a cube. In fact, the term "fractal" itself derives from the Latin adjective "fractus," meaning "broken." Mandelbrot highlighted the relevance of fractals lying between the shapes of Euclid, akin to fractions lying between integers.
Mandelbrot offers that
“When mathematicians concluded about a century ago that the seemingly simple and innocuous notion of ‘curve’ hides profound difficulties, they thought they were engaging in unreasonable and unrealistic hairsplitting. They had not determined to look out at the real world to analyze it, but to look in at an ideal in the mind. The theory of fractals shows that they had misled themselves.”
Mandelbrot's work demonstrated that the seemingly simple crayon drawing of my dad's plane landing concealed profound difficulties. My self-imposed brain teaser was was not an exercise in unreasonable hair-splitting, but rather an analysis of the real world. Fractals, I now know, provide a mathematical framework to quantify irregularities found in natural structures and allow for the analysis and modeling of complex systems exhibiting patterns at different scales.
Mandelbrot's groundbreaking ideas expanded on Cantor and Peano to illuminate the vast possibilities and richness of mathematics beyond the limitations of traditional Euclidean structures. These concepts empower us to better understand the complexities of the natural world and prevent us from being misled by overly idealized notions. Thanks to their work, we are better equipped to explore and comprehend the intricate beauty of the natural world. Even the jagged wax deposits of the line depicting a runway in my childhood drawing.
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