Posts Tagged ‘equity’
“It’s easy to meet expenses – everywhere we go, there they are.”*…
… And those expenses seem to keep rising. Ben Brubaker weighs in on one ever-more-timely culprit…
Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price. Unhappy with their meager profits, they meet one night in a smoke-filled tavern to discuss a secret plan: If they raise prices together instead of competing, they can both make more money. But that kind of intentional price-fixing, called collusion, has long been illegal. The widget merchants decide not to risk it, and everyone else gets to enjoy cheap widgets.
For well over a century, U.S. law has followed this basic template: Ban those backroom deals, and fair prices should be maintained. These days, it’s not so simple. Across broad swaths of the economy, sellers increasingly rely on computer programs called learning algorithms, which repeatedly adjust prices in response to new data about the state of the market. These are often much simpler than the “deep learning” algorithms that power modern artificial intelligence, but they can still be prone to unexpected behavior.
So how can regulators ensure that algorithms set fair prices? Their traditional approach won’t work, as it relies on finding explicit collusion. “The algorithms definitely are not having drinks with each other,” said Aaron Roth, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.
Yet a widely cited 2019 paper showed that algorithms could learn to collude tacitly, even when they weren’t programmed to do so. A team of researchers pitted two copies of a simple learning algorithm against each other in a simulated market, then let them explore different strategies for increasing their profits. Over time, each algorithm learned through trial and error to retaliate when the other cut prices — dropping its own price by some huge, disproportionate amount. The end result was high prices, backed up by mutual threat of a price war.
Implicit threats like this also underpin many cases of human collusion. So if you want to guarantee fair prices, why not just require sellers to use algorithms that are inherently incapable of expressing threats?
In a recent paper, Roth and four other computer scientists showed why this may not be enough. They proved that even seemingly benign algorithms that optimize for their own profit can sometimes yield bad outcomes for buyers. “You can still get high prices in ways that kind of look reasonable from the outside,” said Natalie Collina, a graduate student working with Roth who co-authored the new study…
Read on for more on recent findings that reveal that even simple pricing algorithms can make things more expensive: “The Game Theory of How Algorithms Can Drive Up Prices,” from @benbenbrubaker.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
See also the charmingly-understatedly-titled “AI-Driven Personalized Pricing May Not Help Consumers.“
* anonymous
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As we muse on malign mechanisms, we might recall that it was on this date in 1787 that the first in a series of eighty-five essays by “Publius,” the shared pen name of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, appeared in the Independent Journal, a New York newspaper. Known collectively as The Federalist Papers, they were an effort to urge New Yorkers to support ratification of the Constitution approved by the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787. While aimed at New Yorkers, the essays were reprinted in newspapers (and pamphlets) across the fledgling nation.
In Federalist Paper #12, Alexander Hamilton (later the first Secretary of the Treasury) articulated an argument for the economic advantages of a united government under the proposed Constitution– and sketched the outline of the financial and commercial regime we’ve built since.
Your correspondent is heading into a series of meeting sufficiently intense that (R)D will be on brief hiatus. Regular service should resume on October 30.
“Enough is abundance to the wise”*…
The “new” idea of Abundance is having a moment. The estimable David Karpf worries that the folks behind it are blowing their opportunity…
I guess I would call myself “Abundance-curious.”
There is a version of the Abundance agenda that I quite vocally agree with. My interpretation of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s central argument was something along these lines:
- Government should have a strong hand in establishing, directing, and funding social priorities.
- In the course of setting these priorities, government should endeavor to get out of its own way.
Klein and Thompson are pretty firmly in favor of government intervention and industrial policy. They aren’t just saying “growth is good and we should all cheer for developers!” They are instead saying something more along the lines of, if the government thinks something – housing, clean energy, etc – is a priority, then the government should proactively support that goal. Put money behind it. Don’t leave everything to the “will of the markets.” And, oh yeah, if the government wants to build high-speed rail or housing (etc etc) then the government should get out of its own damn way and make it can actually fulfill those promises.
I pretty enthusiastically agree with all of these points. We ought to rebuild administrative capacity and get back into having government make governance decisions. Government ought to be both proactive and responsive. And often the best way to make a better future possible is to devote public money towards promoting public goods.
I also quite like several of the people operating under that banner, and quite like some of their ideas as well. (Specifically: government should fund more things, we should have more administrative capacity, and the accretion of procedural checks-with-no-balance has had plenty of regrettable consequences.)
And hey, they’re having a moment. Good for them.The term is rapidly becoming an empty signifier, though. Tesla’s new master plan boasts of “sustainable abundance.” The Silicon Valley variant of the abundance agenda is just warmed-over techno-optimism — less “let’s rebuild the administrative state and make government work again!” and more “the government should hand big sacks of money to tech startups and exempt them from taxes and regulations. Let our genius builders build!”
The Abundance 2025 conference [happened] in DC [last] week, and the speakers range from pro-housing YIMBYs to a guy arguing for “deportation abundance.”
Yikes.
Steve Teles has taken a good-faith shot at sorting through the mess:
It would not be hard to conclude that the emergence of these various flavors of abundance betrays the inherent squishiness and incoherence of the concept. And it is true that abundance is not a systematic ideology attached to a specific political coalition, as are conservatism or democratic socialism. But that doesn’t mean that it is ideological vaporware. As someone who has been working on many of these ideas for a decade or more, I think it is time to nail down just what sort of idea abundance is.
Abundance stirs confusion in part because, unlike contemporary conservatism and progressivism, it is not an idea that emerged to justify a specific party-political, coalitional, material, or cultural project. Given that abundance has been embraced by post-colonial socialists, techno-futurist capitalists, and Democratic centrists, it is best conceptualized as an alternative dimension that cuts across existing ideologies without entirely superseding them, defined by a new set of problems and tools for addressing them.
Abundance is fundamentally “syncretic,” spreading by attaching itself to a variety of different cultural practices and political projects, rather than by preserving its doctrinal purity.
He goes on to define the central unifying idea:
At its base, Abundance is best understood as having one central aspiration that requires tackling two interlocking challenges. The aspiration is to escape from a political economy defined by artificial scarcity, to create a world in which we solve problems primarily by unlocking supply.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Abundance says “we should solve problems by creating more,” and invites the competing political coalitions to draw their own conclusions on what constitutes a problem. (And, also, more of what, exactly?)
Syncretic terms like this run the risk of falling apart though. If DOGE is part of the Abundance movement, and the people DOGE is illegally firing is also part of the Abundance movement… If the Green New Deal is Abundance but oh hey also the Claremont Institute is Abundance too, then Abundance ceases to mean anything at all. The term is already washed.
(Q: Are Curtis Yarvin, Balaji Srinivasan, and the other Network State neomonarchists part of the Abundance movement? A: yes, that’s “dark abundance.”)
I can empathize with the instinct to try to build the broadest possible coalition. I can see why making your new “movement” seem like the one big cross-partisan idea right now feels like a win. But it is a temporary, pyrrhic victory.
Strategy is a verb. The act of strategizing involves making choices that help you accomplish goals and wield power. The Abundance movement does not appear to be making any choices whatsoever. That’s the fast track to irrelevance.
Just saying, if *I* was part of the Abundance movement, I would be cautioning people that it sure would be nice to accomplish something, anything at all, before the idea gets entirely co-opted and loses all meaning. If the Abundance folks insist on advancing a syncretic proposal so broad that it pointedly has nothing to say about what problems ought to be solved, then they are quickly going to find that their clever-new-phrase means nothing at all.
The fate of every successful political movement is that they eventually face co-optation and counteraction. But usually you want to rack up some actual victories before it happens…
“What *Isn’t* Abundance?” from @davekarpf.bsky.social (in his valuable newsletter, The Future, Now and Then).
See also: “Varieties of Abundance” from @niskanencenter.bsky.social, and “How to Blow Up a Planet” from @nybooks.com.
[Edit: late add of a piece from the ever-insightful Rusty Foster that dropped just after this was first posted: “Abundance of What.”]
* Euripides
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As we muse on more, we might send abundant bountiful greetings to William Bligh; he was born on this date in 1754. A British naval officer, over a 50 year career, he rose to the rank of Vice-Admiral and served as colonial governor of New South Wales. But he is remembered for his role in the most famous mutiny in history: in 1879, the first officer and crew “removed” Bligh from his command of (and set him and his few supporters adrift from) HMAV Bounty.
“Humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than given credit for”*…
We looked earlier at the shrinking away of public companies in the U.S., both as a product of consolidation (of operations and of ownership) and of the (potentially dangerous) growth, in their stead, of private equity. University of Michigan professor Jerry Davis has a more optimistic take…
Public corporations have been dominant institutions in the American economy since the dawn of the 20th century. Whether due to their greater efficiency or power, listed corporations spread across nearly all industries. “Capitalism” in America was synonymous with “corporate capitalism,” and the number of exchange-listed companies grew with the size of the economy.
Yet since the late 1990s, the number of listed corporations has dropped by half in the US, underwritten by new technologies that lower the cost of assembling an enterprise. Meanwhile, neglected alternatives to the public corporation both old (e.g., mutuals, cooperatives) and new (e.g., open source, platform coops) have proven surprisingly durable. Given the manifest pathologies of shareholder capitalism, the combination of these two trends may suggest pathways out of our current dilemma…
[David explains how both consolidation among listed companies and the rise of private equity have contributed to this drop, but then raises a third, more general explanation…]
A more encompassing interpretation is that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have drastically changed the basic economic calculus of what an enterprise looks like and how it might be funded. In the US context, this has meant that companies prefer “buy” to “make,” as transaction cost enthusiasts might describe it. I coined the term Nikefication to describe the process of vertical dis-integration that reconfigured American industry during the 1990s and 2000s and the options it opens for alternative forms of enterprise, described in detail in previous books…
The vertical dis-integration of the American economy was driven by Wall Street and enabled by ICTs. Ironically, the result is that the capital requirements to create and scale a business can be much lower, reducing the rationale to go public in the first place. Indeed, IPO prospectuses routinely convey that the point of the IPO is not to raise capital, but to create a market for the company’s shares to enable VCs and employees to cash out – which is not the most persuasive pitch to potential buyers, and perhaps helps account for the disastrous post-IPO performance of most new listings.
The asset-lite model means fewer public companies, but it also suggests new possibilities for non-corporate forms that may be more human-scale and democratic. Nike’s profit-driven, asset- and employee-lite model is not the only option enabled by new technologies.
By “noncorporate” I mean forms of economic organization that are not owned by outside shareholders, although they may be legally organized as a corporation. These include mutuals (where consumers or members are also the owners); cooperatives (where workers, producers, or consumers are the owners); municipal enterprises (where citizens or governments own the enterprise); nonprofits; and open source projects. These forms are far more prevalent than one might expect, and in some cases they dominate their industry (e.g., property insurance, server software).
Noncorporate forms of enterprise have proven surprisingly resilient in the US. The Fortune 500 list for 2022 includes at least a dozen mutual insurance companies, including State Farm (#44), New York Life (#71), and Nationwide (#83). The single largest shareholder of over 350 of the 1000 largest American corporations is Vanguard—also a mutual. Land o’ Lakes (#213) is an agricultural cooperative owned by its producer-members, as are Ocean Spray and Blue Diamond. Ace Hardware is a retail cooperative in which local stores can be attuned to local needs and tastes yet gain the economies of scale of a large-scale brand. Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s brilliant book Collective Courage documents that cooperative forms thrived in African-American communities for generations – often overlooked by those who find data about the economy solely through online databases. And the US is home to nearly 5000 credit unions, which by law are not-for-profits, owned by their members.
Stanford Law professor Ron Gilson once quipped that if shareholders didn’t exist, they would have to be invented. That’s not quite true: plenty of American enterprises do quite well without shareholders. Indeed, civilization itself might be better without them. As I have written elsewhere, “nearly every major societal pathology in the West today – certainly in the USA – is caused or exacerbated by profit-oriented corporations,” including the opioid epidemic, the obesity crisis, the return of nicotine addiction among the young, democracy-undermining social media, and a climate catastrophe underwritten by the fossil fuel industry. Shareholder capitalism may be a suicide pact. Conversely, cooperatives are inherently democratic and accountable…
Institutional alternatives to public corporations are well-established in the US, and in some cases they lead their industry, such as mutuals in finance and insurance. But cooperatives have historically been thin on the ground here compared to Europe. According to the Democracy At Work Initiative, there were 612 worker cooperatives in 2021 –a 30% increase over 2019, but still a tiny number.
Perhaps the digital revolution has finally created the conditions for cooperatives to thrive. Research from the pre-digital era suggests that one of the factors limiting cooperatives is, for want of a better term, the transaction costs of democracy. A lot of workers’ time spent in meetings to engage in dialogue, debate, and polling is a price that corporate dictatorships don’t have to bear. But newer tools have dramatically reduced the transaction costs of democracy: the same smartphones that enable pervasive corporate surveillance also allow worker voice at scale on a continuous basis.
It is not just transaction costs that have declined: the required assets to start a business are also much cheaper now to own or rent. Capital equipment such as Computer Numerical Control tools, powered by software, gets better and cheaper much the same way other software-powered tools do. (Compare the price of a color laser printer in 1990 to one today.) This is also true of the software required to run an enterprise. It is possible to buy a knockoff version of the enterprise software underlying the Uber app for under $10,000 – and the Drivers Coop in New York is creating a version to “franchise” the locavore driver-owned coop alternative to Uber. The ICTs that dis-integrated the corporate economy have opened space for noncorporate alternatives that might be more democratic and human-scaled.
There are reasons for optimism here. Platform cooperatives merge the benefits of coops with accessible technology, and have been especially effective in industries in which the required new capital investment is low (home cleaning, home health aides, transit). Trebor Scholz’s new book Own This! provides details on the opportunities here. Municipally- or cooperative-owned fabrication facilities can enable enterprises with limited capital to launch and thrive. If the required investment to start a business is low, then the range of alternative institutions, including coops, is correspondingly larger.
The technologies exist to create low-cost alternatives to public corporations. Maybe we are not stuck with the legacy of 20th century corporate capitalism after all…
An optimistic (and aspirational) take on what might follow the economic reign of the public company: “Is This the End of Corporate Capitalism?” from @vanishingcorp via @iftf.
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As we ponder proprietorship, we might recall that, on this date in 1933 the hospitality industry got a boost as Congress ratified the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution– repealing the 18th Amendment, which had prohibited the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol. Prohibition had gone into effect in 1920 in an effort to reduce crime and improve public health, but it had backfired: despite massive public investment in enforcement, there was a sharp rise in organized crime (c.f.: bootleggers like Al Capone stepping in to supply black market booze) and the emergence of a “scofflaw” attitude on the part of a public that wanted its alcohol.
“Infrastructure is much more important than architecture”*…
.. much, much more important, as Debbie Chachra explains in a piece featured once before in (R)D. It’s excerpted here again, with special emphasis on our power grid…
We use exogenous energy every day to exceed the limits of what our bodies can do. Artificial light compensates for our species’ poor night vision and gives us control over how we spend our time, releasing us from the constraints of sunrise and sunset. So valuable is artificial light that it’s a reliable correlate of wealth and economic development: researchers use the growing brightness of regions over time, as quantified from satellite images taken at night, as a proxy measure—more resources, more light. The southern half of the Korean Peninsula and the ocean surrounding it is ablaze with light; while North Korea has just faint threads of light leading out from Pyongyang, a result of decades of imposed scarcity.
Energy in the form of mechanical work also replaces our body’s labour, from the domestic scale—all the technologies for textiles, for example, from spinning and weaving to sewing and laundry—to scales that are nearly impossible for human bodies alone, like building skyscrapers and bridges. And we use mechanical energy to move our bodies and ferry goods around: transportation. Exogenous energy also makes our living environments more comfortable; for a long time, this was mostly limited to heating, but in the twentieth century, the technologies of refrigeration and air conditioning became widespread. The newest uses of energy are telecommunications technologies—from Morse code to TikTok, they turn electrons into bits of information, facilitating human connections on a global scale.
In fact, this ability to access more energy than our bodies themselves can provide is—all but literally—baked into being a human. All cultures eat cooked food (and no animals cook their food). While it’s not required to survive, strictly speaking, heating food breaks it down, making the nutrients more bioavailable; in essence, the food becomes more nutritious. Learning to cook our food is thought to have been an important contributor to the development of our calorie-dense brains and all that followed, helping to free humans from the ongoing labour of foraging and eating that occupies most animals. But the near-necessity of cooking food then requires a different labour: for most women on most of the planet, obtaining fuel for cooking remains their primary daily occupation.
“Care at Scale”
How is that we in the U.S. have more-or-less abundant power? Brian Potter explains the evolution of our electric grid…
Abundant electricity is a defining feature of the modern era. At the turn of the 20th century electrical power was a rare, expensive luxury: in 1900 electricity provided less than 5% of industrial power in the US, and as late as 1907 was in only 8% of US homes. Today, however, 89.6% of the world’s population has access to electricity (97.3% if you just consider urban areas), and Wikipedia’s “list of countries by electrification rate” has 123 countries sharing the top spot at 100% electrification.
Electrical service is considered critical in a way that’s different from most other services. Even a brief interruption in electrical power is considered a serious problem in industrialized countries where power outage durations are typically measured in minutes per year. To put this in perspective, the average yearly outage time in the US is around 475 minutes per year, which is considered especially unreliable despite representing ~99.9% uptime. By comparison, Germany averaged just 12.7 minutes of power outages per year in 2021—a remarkable 99.998% uptime.
Electricity’s transition from a luxury good to the foundation of modern life happened quickly. By 1930, electricity was available in nearly 70% of US homes, and supplied almost 80% of industrial mechanical power. By 1950, the US was tied together by an enormous network of high-voltage transmission lines…
“The Birth of the Grid” (and Part Two) from @_brianpotter.
Keep an eye out for @debcha‘s forthcoming book, How Infrastructure Works.
* Rem Koolhaas
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As we think systemically, we might recall that it was on this date in 1752 that Benjamin Franklin and his son tested the relationship between electricity and lightning by flying a kite in a thunder storm. Franklin was attempting a (safer) variation on a set of French investigations about which he’d read. The French had connected lightning rods to a Leyden jar, but one of their experiments electrocuted the investigator. Franklin– who was, of course, no fool– used a kite; the increased height/distance from the strike reduces the risk of electrocution. (But it doesn’t eliminate it: Franklin’s experiment is now illegal in many states.)
In fact (other) French experiments had successfully demonstrated the electrical properties of lightning a month before, but word had not yet reached Philadelphia.
The Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing created this vignette (c. 1860), which was used on the $10 National Bank Note from the 1860s to 1890s
“Do for the future what you’re grateful the past did for you. (Or what you wish the past had done for you.)”*…
A love letter to infrastructure…
The Nobel Prize–winning developmental economist Amartya Sen describes income and wealth as desirable “because, typically, they are admirable general-purpose means for having more freedom to lead the kind of lives we have reason to value. The usefulness of wealth lies in the things that it allows us to do—the substantive freedoms it helps us to achieve.” This is also a fairly good description of infrastructural systems: they’re a general-purpose means of freeing up time, energy, and attention. On a day-to-day basis, my personal freedom doesn’t come from money per se—it mostly comes from having a home where these systems are built into the walls, which became abundantly clear during the coronavirus pandemic. Stable housing and a salary that covered my utility bills meant that, with the exception of food and taking out the trash, all of my basic needs were met without my ever even having to go outside. It’s worth noting that this is an important reason why guaranteed housing for everyone is important—not just because of privacy, security, and a legible address, but also because our homes are nodes on these infrastructural networks. They are our locus of access to clean water and sewage, electricity, and telecommunications.
But the real difference between money and infrastructural systems as general-purpose providers of freedom is that money is individual and our infrastructural systems are, by their nature, collective. If municipal water systems mean that we are enduringly connected to each other through the landscape where our bodies are, our other systems ratchet this up by orders of magnitude. Behind the wheel of a car, we are a cyborg: our human body controls a powered exoskeleton that lets us move further and faster than we ever could without it. But this freedom depends on roads and supply chains for fuels, to say nothing of traffic laws and safety regulations. In researcher Paul Graham Raven’s memorable formulation, infrastructural systems make us all into collective cyborgs. Alone in my apartment, when I reach out my hand to flip a switch or turn on a tap, I am a continent-spanning colossus, tapping into vast systems that span thousands of miles to bring energy, atoms, and information to my household. But I’m only the slenderest tranche of these collective systems, constituting the whole with all the other members of our federated infrastructural cyborg bodies.
…
The philosopher John Rawls once offered up a thought experiment, building on the classic question: How best should society be ordered? His key addition was the concept of a “veil of ignorance”: not just that you would live in the society you designed, but that you wouldn’t know ahead of time what role you would have within it. So, while you might want to live in a world where you are an absolute ruler whose every whim is fulfilled by fawning minions, the veil of ignorance means that there is no guarantee you wouldn’t be one of the minions—in fact, given the numerical odds, it’s a lot more likely. Positing a veil of ignorance is a powerful tool to consider more equitable societies.
Seen from this perspective, shared infrastructural systems provide for the basic needs of—and therefore grant agency to—members of a community in a way that would satisfy Rawls. Universal provision of water, sewage, electricity, access to transportation networks that allow for personal mobility, and broadband internet access creates a society where everyone—rich or poor, regardless of what you look like or believe—has access to at least a baseline level of agency and opportunity.
But here’s the kicker: it’s not a thought experiment. We’ve all passed through Rawls’s veil of ignorance. None of us chooses the circumstances of our birth. This is immediate and inarguable if you’re the child of immigrants. If one of the most salient facts of my life is that I was born in Canada, it’s also obvious that I had nothing to do with it. But it’s equally true for the American who proudly traces their family back to ancestors who came over on the Mayflower, or the English family whose landholdings are listed in the Domesday Book. Had I been born in India, my infrastructural birthright would have been far less robust as an underpinning for the life of agency and opportunity that I am fortunate to live, which stems in large part from the sheer blind luck (from my perspective) of being born in Canada.
…
Our infrastructural systems are the technological basis of the modern world, the basis for a level of global wealth and personal agency that would have been unthinkable only a few centuries ago. But those of us who have been fortunate enough to live as part of a collective cyborg have gained our personal agency at an enormous moral cost. And now anthropogenic climate change is teaching us that there are no others, no elsewhere.
For millennia, these systems have been built out assuming a steady, predictable landscape, allowing us to design long-lived networks where century-old aqueducts underlay new college campuses. But this predictability is becoming a thing of the past. More heat in the atmosphere means warmer weather and shifting climates, with attendant droughts, wildfires, and more frequent and severe hurricanes. But it also increases uncertainty: as the effects of greenhouse gases compound, we may reach tipping points, trigger positive feedback loops, and face other unprecedented changes to climates. Engineers can’t design systems to withstand hundred-year storms when the last century provides little guide to the weather of the next. No matter where in the world you reside, this is the future we will all have to live in. The only question that remains is what kind of world we want to build there.
Our shared infrastructural systems are the most profound and effective means that we’ve created to both relieve the day-to-day burdens of meeting our bodies’ needs and to allow us to go beyond their physiological limits. To face anthropogenic climate change is to become a civilization that can respond to this shifting, unpredictable new world while maintaining these systems: if you benefit from them today, then any future in which they are compromised is recognizably a dystopia. But that “dystopia” is where most of the world already lives. To face anthropogenic climate change ethically is to do so in a way that minimizes human suffering.
Mitigation—limiting the amount of warming, primarily through decarbonizing our energy sources—is one element of this transition. But the true promise of renewable energy is not that it doesn’t contribute to climate change. It’s that renewable energy is ubiquitous and abundant—if every human used energy at the same rate as North Americans, it would still only be a tiny percentage of the solar energy that reaches the Earth. Transforming our energy systems, and the infrastructural systems that they power, so that they become sustainable and resilient might be the most powerful lever that we have to not just survive this transition but to create a world where everyone can thrive. And given the planetwide interconnectedness of infrastructural systems, except in the shortest of short terms, they will be maintained equitably or not at all.
Ursula Franklin wrote, “Central to any new technology is the concept of justice.” We can commit to developing the technologies and building out new infrastructural systems that are flexible and sustainable, but we have the same urgency and unparalleled opportunity to transform our ultrastructure, the social systems that surround and shape them. Every human being has a body with similar needs, embedded in the material world at a specific place in the landscape. This requires a different relationship with each other, one in which we acknowledge and act on how we are connected to each other through our bodies in the landscapes where we find ourselves. We need to have a conception of infrastructural citizenship that includes a responsibility to look after each other, in perpetuity. And with that, we can begin to transform our technological systems into systems of compassion, care, and resource-sharing at all scales, from the individual level, through the level of cities and nations, all the way up to the global.
Our social relationships with each other—our culture, our learning, our art, our shared jokes and shared sorrow, raising our children, attending to our elderly, and together dreaming of our future—these are the essence of what it means to be human. We thrive as individuals and communities by caring for others, and being taken care of in turn. Collective infrastructural systems that are resilient, sustainable, and globally equitable provide the means for us to care for each other at scale. They are a commitment to our shared humanity.
Bodies, agency, and infrastructure: “Care At Scale,” from Debbie Chachra (@debcha), via the indispensable Exponential View (@ExponentialView). Eminently worth reading in full.
See also: “Infrastructure is much more important than architecture“; and resonantly, “Kim Stanley Robinson: a climate plan for a world in flames.”
* Danny Hillis’ “Golden Rule of Time,” as quoted by Stewart Brand in Whole Earth Discipline
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As we build foundations, we might recall that it was on this date in 1904 that the first balloon used for meteorologic research in the U.S. was released near St. Louis, Missouri. The balloon carried instruments that measured barometric pressure, temperature, and humidity, that returned to Earth when the balloon burst.
The first weather balloon was launched in France in 1892. Prior to using balloons, the U.S. used kites tethered by piano wire– the downsides being the limited distance kites could ascend (less than 2 miles), the inability to use them if the wind was too light or too strong, and potential for the kites to break away.
Since this first launch, millions of weather balloons have been launched by the National Weather Service and its predecessor organizations.
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