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Stairway to Heaven
Stairway to Heaven
“Let us stop talking about collapse, peak oil, and global weirding and begin a conversation about what is cool and what is uncool.“
In Nine to Five Jane Fonda’s character, Judy Bernly, is the office newbie. In a scene evoking Lucille Ball on the assembly line, she pushes too many buttons on an enormous Xerox machine and fills the floor with blizzard drifts of copy paper.
Technocornucopians see the world of the future as a great 3D printer with an unlimited supply reservoir. Push a few buttons and we can fulfill everyone’s wildest dreams. What need have we for terror or strife? Vivek Wadhwa, vice president of innovation and research for Singularity University says:
The next decade will be the most innovative decade in human history: technologies are advancing so rapidly, entire industries will be wiped out and new ones created out of nowhere. … We don’t think about man-machine convergence or all this sci-fi stuff. We talk about practical implementation of today’s technologies — harnessing advancing technologies to do good for mankind.
Think of each piece of paper flying out of Judy Bernly’s grasp as just another great solution searching for a problem. Go ahead Judy, push that button again. The machine will know what to do.
It’s not true that we can’t solve big problems through technology. We can, we must, but these four elements must all be present: Political leaders and the public must care to solve a problem; institutions must support its solution; It must really be a technological problem; and we must understand it. The Apollo mission, which has become a kind of metaphor for technology’s capacity to solve big problems, met these criteria. But it is an irreproducible model for the future. It is not 1961.
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Progress in an Uncertain World
Progress in an Uncertain World
Strong Towns is often accused of offering doom-and-gloom diagnoses of problems but being light on solutions. “You don’t tell us what we can actually DO to fix our insolvent cities,” goes the response. “You’re just so negative all the time.” This is not true, but I also don’t think it’s true that these criticisms are made in bad faith.
Rather, I think we have articulated a vision of what should be done to build Strong Towns, and done so in great detail. But that vision is heavy on experimentation and small-scale risk-taking (with potentially great rewards). It is heavy on civic engagement and grassroots action. And it is notably light on technocratic policy interventions: to the extent we talk about policy, it’s often about what policy makers should NOT do, not what they should.
There is a good reason for this, and those with a technocratic mindset (i.e. that the problems of cities will be fixed by top-down, data-driven policy tinkering) would do well to consider it.
The City as Ecosystem
Chuck occasionally has called mathematician and risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb the “patron saint of Strong Towns thinking.” I strongly urge anyone who has not read Taleb to pick up his books—Antifragile if you’re only going to read one, but also Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. They are deeply intellectual and cross-disciplinary, but not overly wonky: accessible and entertaining for non-academic readers.
The central thesis of Taleb’s work is that complex systems are inherently unpredictable and prone to “Black Swan” events: unforeseeable and unprecedented cataclysmic changes. It’s not that we haven’t figured out yet how to completely predict their behavior; it’s that it is far from even mathematically possible for us to do so. Think of a natural ecosystem. Global weather patterns. The stock market. The human body. A city.
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Let’s Talk About Solutions, Not Fake Fixes
Let’s Talk About Solutions, Not Fake Fixes
Since the status quo has no workable Plan B to “growth” in an economy in which household incomes have declined 8.5% in a supposedly expanding economy, real solutions must arise outside the status quo.
It’s a lot easier to talk about what’s wrong with the status quo and fake fixes than it is to talk about real solutions–for a number of reasons.
1. It’s clear to virtually everyone who isn’t being paid to make absurd claims that everything is peachy that the status quo is failing, so discussing the failings is like shooting fish in a barrel.
2. Grousing indignation (at all the failings) is an easy state to sustain; solving problems is an entirely different and not-so-easy state to sustain.
3. Emotional numbness brought on by financial distress and exhaustion reduces interest in solutions–there doesn’t seem to be any when you’re exhausted.
4. The predatory, parasitic status quo generates social fragmentation and an incoherence that breeds disassociation and alienation, neither of which are conducive to discussing solutions.
5. Since the status quo has no workable Plan B to “growth” in an economy in which household incomes have declined 8.5% in a supposedly expanding economy, real solutions must arise outside the status quo, which means the vested interests will lose their stranglehold on wealth and power. This is a no-no, so any solutions that lead to this are marginalized, ridiculed, labeled “impossible,” etc.
6. To solve a problem we must first diagnose the problem correctly. The correct diagnosis of the current pathological status quo is: the problem is not X,Y or Z–the problem is the system itself.
I am indebted to correspondent Tom R. for extracting what might be the core diagnosis of our ills from my discussion with Max and Stacy: “We’ve been brainwashed into financializing the human experience.” (at the 9:20 mark)
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