We'll have to see then, won't we?

One of the major challenges of the twenty-first century that will have to be faced is the fundamental question as to whether human-engineered social systems, from economies to cities, which have only existed for the past five thousand years or so, can continue to coexist with the “natural” biological world from which they emerged and which has been around for several billion years. To sustain more than 10 billion people living in harmony with the biosphere at a standard of living and quality of life comparable to what we now have requires that we develop a deep understanding of the principles and underlying system dynamics of this social-environmental coupling.
Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Part 10. The Vision of a Grand Unified Theory of Sustainability, page 409

Why companies die but cities do not

Despite their apparent bumbling inefficiencies, cities are places of action and agents of change relative to companies, which by and large usually project an image of stasis unless they are young.

Companies typically operate as highly constrained top-down organizations that strive to increase efficiency of production and minimize operational costs so as to maximize profits. In contrast, cities embody the triumph of innovation over the hegemony of economies of scale. […]

Cities…operate in a much more distributed fashion, with power spread across multiple organizational structures from mayors and councils to businesses and citizen action groups. No single group has absolute control. As such, they exude an almost laissez-faire, freewheeling ambience relative to companies, taking advantage of the innovative benefits of social interactions whether good, bad, or ugly.

Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Part 5. Why Companies Die, But Cities Don't, page 406 (with some light editing and re-ordering of paragraphs)

Slow to change, hard to kill

…Perhaps the most salient feature [of cities] is how relatively slowly fundamental change actually occurs.

Cities that were overperforming in the 1960s, such as Bridgeport and San Jose, tend to remain rich and innovative today, whereas cities that were underperforming in the 1960s, such as Brownsville, are still near the bottom of the rankings.

Roughly speaking, all cities rise and fall together, or to put it bluntly: if a city was doing well in 1960 it’s likely to be doing well now, and if it was crappy then, it's likely to be crappy still.

Once a city has gained an advantage, or disadvantage, relative to its scaling expectation, this tends to be preserved over decades. In this sense, either for good or for bad, cities are remarkably robust and resilient—they are hard to change and almost impossible to kill. Think of, Detroit and New Orleans, and more drastically of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, all of which have to varying degrees survived what were perceived as major threats to their very existence. All are actually doing fine and will be around for a very long time.

It takes decades for significant change to be realized. This has serious implications for urban policy and leadership because the timescale of political processes by which decisions about a city’s future are made is at best just a few years, and for most politicians two years is infinity. Nowadays, their success depends on rapid returns and instant gratification in order to conform to political pressures and the demands of the electoral process. Very few mayors can afford to think in a time frame of twenty to fifty years and put their major efforts toward promoting strategies that will leave a truly long-term legacy of significant achievement.

Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Part 9. The Structure Of Wealth, Innovation, Crime, And Resilience: The Individuality And Ranking Of Cities, page 354

Cities are time accelerator machines

…So it's hardly news that the pace of life has been accelerating, but what is surprising is that it has a universal character that can be quantified and verified by analyzing data. Furthermore, it can be understood scientifically using the mathematics of social networks by relating it to the positive feedback mechanisms that enhance creativity and innovation, and which are the source of the many benefits and costs of social interaction and urbanization.

In this sense cities are time accelerator machines. The contraction of socioeconomic time is one of the most remarkable and far-reaching features of modern existence.

Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Page 328.

Lengths and areas are not always what they seem to be

…Even though your lungs are only about the size of a football with a volume of about 5 to 6 liters (about one and a half gallons), the total surface area of the alveoli, which are the terminal units of the respiratory system. where oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged with the blood, is almost the size of a tennis court and the total length of all the airways is about 2,500 kilometers, almost the distance from Los Angeles to Chicago, or London to Moscow. Even more striking is that if all the arteries, veins, and capillaries of your circulatory system were laid end to end, their total length would be about 100,000 kilometers, or nearly two and a half times around the Earth or over a third of the distance to the moon…and all of this neatly fits inside your five-to-six-foot-tall body. It’s quite fantastic and yet another amazing feature of your body where natural selection has exploited the wonders of physics, chemistry, and mathematics.

…Lengths and areas are not always what they seem to be.

Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Page 151.

The grungy reality of the physical world

It is surprising that despite the enormous amount of recent research on the structure, organization, and mathematics of social networks, almost none acknowledge, let alone embrace, their direct and necessary coupling to the grungy reality of the physical world. And that physical world is primarily that of the urban environment.
Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017

Effectively forgotten

“We have proved the commercial profit of sun power. . . and have more particularly proved that after our stores of oil and coal are exhausted the human race can receive unlimited power from the rays of the sun.”
— Inventor Frank Schuman, 1916, as quoted in the New York Times: American Inventor Uses Egypt's Sun for Power — Appliance Concentrates the Heat Rays and Produces Steam, Which Can Be Used to Drive Irrigation Pumps in Hot Climates (uncredited author), 2 July 1916

In 1897 Frank Schuman prototyped a solar energy generator, to great acclaim. But, as Benjamin West, in his book Scale, observes, “The discovery and development of cheap oil in the 1930s discouraged the advancement of solar energy, and Shuman’s vision and basic design were effectively forgotten until the first energy crises of the 1970s.”

Logarithmic scale

The Accelerating Pace of Major Paradigm Shifts. The same data is shown in both linear and logarithmic scales. From Scale by Geoffrey West.

The Accelerating Pace of Major Paradigm Shifts. The same data is shown in both linear and logarithmic scales. From Scale by Geoffrey West.

Because it conveniently allows quantities that vary over a vast range to be represented on a line on a single page of paper such as this, the logarithmic technique is ubiquitously used across all areas of science. The brightness of stars, the acidity of chemical solutions (their pH), physiological characteristics of animals, and the GDPs of countries are all examples where this technique is commonly utilized to cover the entire spectrum of the variation of the quantity being investigated.
Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017

The Sony hack, 2014

A major cyberattack against the United States in 2014 was a clear example of how civilians can bear the brunt of such operations. Almost all cybersecurity experts and the FBI believe that the Sony Pictures hack that year originated in North Korea. A hostile country hit a U.S. civilian target with the intention of destabilizing a major corporation, and it succeeded. Sony’s estimated cleanup costs were more than $100 million. The conventional warfare equivalent might look like the physical destruction of a Texas oil field or an Appalachian coal mine. If such a valuable civilian resource had been intentionally destroyed by a foreign adversary, it would be considered an act of war.
In cyberwar, there are no rules: Why the world desperately needs digital Geneva Conventions, by Tarah M. Wheeler, Foreign Policy, 12 September 2018. Thinking about this in a new light today as we head to war with Iraq.

What would it be like to see with your skin?

OtherMindsIMG_8613_875w.JPG

In the octopus's case there is a conductor, the central brain. But the players it conducts [the animal's limbs] are jazz players, inclined to improvisation, who will accept only so much direction. Or perhaps they are players who receive only rough, general instructions from the conductor, who trusts them to play something that works. [...]

Now we learn that an octopus can see with its skin. The skin is not only affected by light — something true of quite a few animals — but it responds by changing its own delicate, pixel-like color-controlling machinery.

What could it be like to see with your skin? There could be no focusing of an image. Only general changes and washes of light could be detected. We don't yet know whether the skin's sensing is communicated to the brain, or whether the information remains local. Both possibilities stretch the imagination. If the skin's sensing is carried to the brain, then the animal's visual sensitivity would extend in all directions, beyond where the eyes can reach. If the skin's sensing does not reach the brain, then each arm might see for itself, and keep what it sees to itself.

From Other Minds: The octopus and the evolution of intelligent life, by Peter Godfrey-Smith, 2016.

Blowing up in our faces

We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements - transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting - profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, 1996. Page 28.
“It is not exactly that ‘nothing matters’…It is that nothing matters long enough to matter.”
“His tornado of news-making has scrambled Americans’ grasp of time and memory, producing a sort of sensory overload that can make even seismic events — of his creation or otherwise — disappear from the collective consciousness and public view … if memory serves, which it generally does not anymore.”
The Year the News Accelerated to Trump Speed, by Matt Flegenheimer, New York Times, 29 December 2017

Pantheon of reads from 2019

Looking through my notes and research on this last day of 20-frikkin-19. Of everything I read this year (written this year nor not), these articles, threads, and stories took me someplace new. My own personal pantheon.

  1. The Spy who came home: Why an expert in counterterrorism became a beat cop
    By @bentaub91, New Yorker, May 7, 2018 issue https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/the-spy-who-came-home

    (A visit with the remarkable @SkinnerPm)

  2. Greta Thunberg's remarks at at Davos
    The Guardian, 25 Jan 2019 https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate


    "Adults keep saying: 'We owe it to the young people to give them hope.' But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic… And then I want you to act"

  3. The Insect Apocalypse Is Here: What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?
    By @brookejarvis. NYT Magazine, Feature. 27 Nov 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html


    "The most disquieting thing [was] the deeper worry…that a whole insect world might be quietly going missing"

  4. Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
    By @NathanielRich, NY Times, 1 August 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html


    "Their efforts were shrewd, passionate, robust. And they failed. What follows is their story, and ours."

  5. See No Evil
    By @miriamkp, @logic_magazine, Issue #4, Scale, Spring 2018 https://logicmag.io/scale/see-no-evil/


    [About the pernicious effects of supply chains]

    ”supply chains are murky—just in very specific ways. We’ve chosen scale, and the conceptual apparatus to manage it, at the expense of finer-grained knowledge that could make a more just and equitable arrangement possible.”

  6. Danna's Explainer On Why Pundit (Analyst) Panels Are Bad
    By @dannagal, Dr. Danna Young, 26 November 2019 https://twitter.com/dannagal/status/1067070003986530304


    "The game frame pits parties and groups against one another in an artificially constructed battle that fails to engage with the underlying issue."

  7. How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse
    By Douglas Rushkoff, The Guardian, 24 July 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity


    "The future became… a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively."

  8. How Social Media Took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump
    By @zeynep, Zeynep Tufekci, MIT Tech Review, 14 August 2018 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611806/how-social-media-took-us-from-tahrir-square-to-donald-trump/


    “How did digital technologies go from empowering citizens and toppling dictators to being used as tools of oppression & discord?”

  9. Raúl Carrillo on the failure of The Big Names
    @raulACarrillo, 5 March 2019 https://twitter.com/RaulACarrillo/status/1103020064494768128


    "at Harvard, I had the privilege of learning economics from the Big Names…But the Big Names do not know -- or refuse to acknowledge -- what’s actually going down."

  10. “25 Years of Wired Predictions: Why the future never arrives”
    By @davekarpf David Karpf, Wired, 18 Sept 2018 https://www.wired.com/story/wired25-david-karpf-issues-tech-predictions/


    “The notion that the future of politics might, with the internet, become less rational and more dogmatic was scarcely explored.”

Looking back on it, it's a pretty dark list — but then again I think we're in a pretty dark place. (If you want some light, pay attention to people like @SkinnerPm, mentioned above, and follow their example.) I'm grateful to the many thinkers, writers, and doers who are helping all of us understand and think more clearly about the world we're living in — and who are giving us the courage to act.

Bonus Material

Et tu, Instagram?

“Facebook is notorious for allowing anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy theorists to organize and spread their messages to millions—the two most-shared news stories on Facebook in 2019 so far are both false.

“But Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are not where young people go to socialize. Instagram is.

“[Instagram] is likely where the next great battle against misinformation will be fought…”
Instagram Is the Internet’s New Home for Hate: As other social networks wage a very public war against misinformation, it’s thriving on Instagram, by Taylor Lorenz, The Atlantic, 21 March 2019

Kidfluencers

Samia is now 4 and has 143,000 followers on Instagram and 203,000 subscribers on YouTube. Her feeds are mostly populated with posts of her posing and playing, but they also feature paid promotions for brands like Crayola and HomeStyle Harvest chicken nuggets. […]

Another parent shared the prices commanded by the parent’s child on the condition of anonymity, citing concern that the disclosures could harm negotiations with brands. The parent said brands might pay $10,000 to $15,000 for a promotional Instagram post while a sponsored YouTube video might earn $45,000. A 30- to 90-second shout-out in a longer video can cost advertisers between $15,000 and $25,000.

Who Are Online, Recruited by Advertisers and 4 Years Old? Kidfluencers: Brands are giving lucrative endorsements to young children on YouTube and Instagram, by By Sapna Maheshwari, New York Times, March 1, 2019 (Hedline and sub-heading are as appeared in the NYT app)

Assume they are fake

In the past, it often made sense to believe something until it was debunked; in the future, for certain information or claims, it will start making sense to assume they are fake. Unless they are verified.”

If this sounds like a suspicious and bureaucratic world—far from John Perry Barlow’s famous vision of a digital world in which ideas could travel without “privilege or prejudice” — it’s important to remember the alternative: a societal fracturing into a million epistemic communities, all at war with one another over the nature of truth.

The Imperfect Truth About Finding Facts In A World Of Fakes, by Zeynep Tufekci, Wired, 18 February 2019
“The location-tracking ‘MiSafe’ smartwatch may not be as safe as the name proclaims. According to security researchers from Pen Test Partners, the watches are easy to hack as they do not encrypt the data they use or secure each child’s account. The researchers found that they could track children’s movements, surreptitiously listen in to their activities and make spoof calls to the watches that appeared to be from parents.”
— MiSafe’s Child-Tracking Smartwatches Are Easy To Hack, posted by BeauHD on Friday November 16, 2018 @07:03PM from the not-so-safe-after-all dept