Interplace

Hello Interactors,

I was in Santa Barbara recently having dinner on a friend’s deck when a rocket’s contrail streaked the sky. “Another one from Vandenberg,” he said. “Wait a couple minutes — you’ll hear it.” And we did. “They’ve gotten really annoying,” he added. He’s not wrong. In early 2024, SpaceX launched seven times more tonnage into space than the rest of the world combined, much of it from Vandenberg Space Force Base (renamed from Air Force Base in 2021). They’ve already been approved to fly 12,000 Starlink satellites, with filings for 30,000 more.

This isn’t just future space junk — it’s infrastructure. And it’s not just in orbit. What Musk is doing in the sky is tied to what he’s building on the ground. Not in Vandenberg, where regulation still exists, but in Starbase, Texas, where the law doesn’t resist — it assists. There, Musk is testing how much sovereignty one man can claim under the banner of “innovation” — and how little we’ll do to stop him.

TOWNS TO THRUST AND THRONE

Musk isn’t just defying gravity — he’s defying law. In South Texas, a place called Starbase has taken shape along the Gulf Coast, hugging the edge of SpaceX’s rocket launch site. What looks like a town is really something else: a launchpad not just for spacecraft, but for a new form of privatized sovereignty.

VIDEO: Time compresses at the edge of Starbase: a slow-built frontier where launch infrastructure rises faster than oversight. Source: Google Earth

This isn’t unprecedented. The United States has a long lineage of company towns — places where corporations controlled land, housing, labor, and local government. Pullman, Illinois is the most famous. But while labor historians and economic geographers have documented their economic and social impact, few have examined them as legal structures of power.

That’s the gap legal scholar Brian Highsmith identifies in Governing the Company Town. That omission matters — because these places aren’t just undemocratic. They often function as quasi-sovereign legal shells, designed to serve capital, not people.

Incorporation is the trick. In Texas, any area with at least 201 residents can petition to become a general-law municipality. That’s exactly what Musk has done. In a recent vote (212 to 6) residents approved the creation of an official town — Starbase. Most of those residents are SpaceX employees living on company-owned land…with a Tesla in the driveway. The result is a legally recognized town, politically constructed. SpaceX controls the housing, the workforce, and now, the electorate. Even the mayor is a SpaceX affiliate. With zoning powers and taxing authority, Musk now holds tools usually reserved for public governments — and he’s using them to build for rockets, not residents…unless they’re employees.

VIDEO: Starbase expands frame by frame, not just as a company town, but as a legal experiment — where land, labor, and law are reassembled to serve orbit over ordinance. Source: Google Earth

Quinn Slobodian, a historian of neoliberalism and global capitalism, shows how powerful companies and individuals increasingly use legal tools to redesign borders and jurisdictions to their advantage. In his book, Cracked Up Capitalism, he shows how jurisdiction becomes the secret weapon of the capitalist state around the world. I wrote about a techno-optimist fantasy state on the island of Roatán, part of the Bay Islands in Honduras a couple years ago.

It isn’t new. Disney used the same playbook in 1967 with Florida’s Reedy Creek District — deeding slivers of land to employees to meet incorporation rules, then governing without real opposition. Highsmith draws a straight line to Musk: both use municipal law not to serve the public, but to avoid it. In Texas, beach access is often blocked near Starbase — even when rockets aren’t launching. A proposed bill would make ignoring an evacuation order a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by jail.

Even if Starbase never fully resembles a traditional town, that’s beside the point. What Musk is really revealing isn’t some urban design oasis but how municipal frameworks can still be weaponized for private control. Through zoning laws, incorporation statutes, and infrastructure deals, corporations can shape legal entities that resemble cities but function more like logistical regimes.

And yet, this tactic draws little sustained scrutiny. As Highsmith reminds us, legal scholarship has largely ignored how municipal tools are deployed to consolidate corporate power. That silence matters — because what looks like a sleepy launch site in Texas may be something much larger: a new form of rule disguised as infrastructure.

ABOVE THE LAW, BELOW THE LAND

Elon Musk isn’t just shaping towns — he’s engineering systems. His tunnels, satellites, and rockets stretch across and beyond traditional borders. These aren’t just feats of engineering. They’re tools of control designed to bypass civic oversight and relocate governance into private hands. He doesn’t need to overthrow the state to escape regulation. He simply builds around it…and in the case of Texas, with it.

Architect and theorist Keller Easterling, whose work examines how infrastructure quietly shapes political life, argues that these systems are not just supports for power — they are power. Infrastructure itself is a kind of operating system for shaping the city, states, countries…and now space.

Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite constellation, provides internet access to users around the world. In Ukraine, it became a vital communications network after Russian attacks on local infrastructure. Musk enabled access — then later restricted it. He made decisions with real geopolitical consequences. No president. No Congress. Just a private executive shaping war from orbit.

And it’s not just Ukraine. Starlink is now active in dozens of countries, often without formal agreements from national regulators. It bypasses local telecom laws, surveillance rules, and data protections. For authoritarian regimes, that makes it dangerous. But for democracies, it raises a deeper question: who governs the sky?

Right now, the answer is: no one. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 assumes that nation-states, not corporations, are the primary actors in orbit. But Starlink functions in a legal grey zone, using low Earth orbit as a loophole in international law…aided and abetted by the U.S. defense department.

VIDEO: Thousands of Starlink satellites, visualized in low Earth orbit, encircle the planet like a privatized exosphere—reshaping global communication while raising questions of governance, visibility, and control. Source: Starlink

The result is a telecom empire without borders. Musk commands a growing share of orbital infrastructure but answers to no global regulator. The International Telecommunication Union can coordinate satellite spectrum, but it can’t enforce ethical or geopolitical standards. Musk alone decides whether Starlink aids governments, rebels, or armies. As Quinn Slobodian might put it, this is exception-making on a planetary scale.

Now let’s go underground. The Boring Company digs high-speed tunnels beneath cities like Las Vegas, sidestepping standard planning processes. These projects often exclude transit agencies and ignore public engagement. They’re built for select users, not the public at large. Local governments, eager for tech-driven investment, offer permits and partnerships — even if it means circumventing democratic procedures.

Taken together — Starlink above, Boring Company below, Tesla charging networks on the ground — Musk’s empire moves through multiple layers of infrastructure, each reshaping civic life without formal accountability. His systems carry people, data, and energy — but not through the public channels meant to regulate them. They’re not overseen by voters. They’re not authorized by democratic mandate. Yet they profoundly shape how people move, communicate, and live.

Geographer Deborah Cowen, whose research focuses on the global logistics industry, argues that infrastructure like ports, fiber-optic cables, and pipelines have become tools of geopolitical strategy. Logistics as a form of war by other means.

Brian Highsmith argues this is a form of “functional fragmentation” — breaking governance into layers and loopholes that allow corporations to sidestep collective control. These aren’t mere workarounds. They signal a deeper shift in how power is organized — not just across space, but through it.

This kind of sovereignty is easy to miss because it doesn’t always resemble government. But when a private actor controls transit systems, communication networks, and even military connectivity — across borders, beneath cities, and in orbit — we’re not just dealing with infrastructure. We’re dealing with rule.

And, just like with company towns, the legal scholarship is struggling to catch up. These layered, mobile, and non-territorial regimes challenge our categories of law and space alike. What these fantastical projects inspire is often awe. But what they should require is law.

AMNESIA AIDS THE AMBITIOUS

Elon Musk may dazzle with dreams full-blown, but the roots of his power are not his own. The United States has a long tradition of private actors ruling like governments — with public blessing. These aren’t outliers. They’re part of a national pattern, deeply embedded in our legal geography: public authority outsourced to private ambition.

The details vary, but the logic repeats. Whether it’s early colonial charters, speculative land empires, company towns, or special districts carved for tech campuses, American history is full of projects where law becomes a scaffold for private sovereignty. Rather than recount every episode, let’s just say from John Winthrop to George Washington to Walt Disney to Elon Musk, America has always made room for men who rule through charters, not elections.

Yet despite the frequency of these arrangements, the scholarship has been oddly selective.

According to Highsmith, legal academia has largely ignored the institutional architecture that makes company towns possible in the first place: incorporation laws, zoning frameworks, municipal codes, and districting rules. These aren't neutral bureaucratic instruments. They're jurisdictional design tools, capable of reshaping sovereignty at the micro-scale. And when used strategically, they can be wielded by corporations to create functional states-within-a-state — governing without elections, taxing without consent, and shaping public life through private vision.

From a critical geography perspective, the problem is just as stark. Scholars have long studied the uneven production of space — how capital reshapes landscapes to serve accumulation. But here, space isn’t just produced — it’s governed. And it’s governed through techniques of legal enclosure, where a patch of land becomes a jurisdictional exception, and a logistics hub or tech campus becomes a mini-regime.

Starbase, Snailbrook, Reedy Creek, and even Google’s Sidewalk Labs are not just spatial projects — they're sovereign experiments in spatial governance, where control is layered through contracts, tax breaks, and municipal proxies.

But these arrangements don’t arise in a vacuum. Cities often aren’t choosing between public and private control — they’re choosing between austerity and access to cash. In the United States, local governments are revenue-starved by design. Most lack control over income taxes or resource royalties, and depend heavily on sales taxes, property taxes, and development fees. This creates a perverse incentive: to treat corporations not as entities to regulate, but as lifelines to recruit and appease.

Desperate for jobs and investment, cities offer zoning concessions, infrastructure deals, and tax abatements, even when they come with little democratic oversight or long-term guarantees. Corporate actors understand this imbalance — and exploit it. The result is a form of urban hostage-taking, where governance is bartered piecemeal in exchange for the promise of economic survival.

A more democratized fiscal structure — one that empowers cities through equitable revenue-sharing, progressive taxation, or greater control over land value capture — might reduce this dependency. It would make it possible for municipalities to plan with their citizens instead of negotiating against them. It would weaken the grip of corporate actors who leverage scarcity into sovereignty. But until then, as long as cities are backed into a fiscal corner, we shouldn’t be surprised when they sell off their power — one plot or parking lot at a time.

Highsmith argues that these structures demand scrutiny — not just for their economic impact, but for their democratic consequences. These aren't just quirks of local law. They are the fault lines of American federalism — where localism becomes a loophole, and fragmentation becomes a formula for private rule.

And yet, these systems persist with minimal legal friction and even less public awareness. Because they don’t always look like sovereignty. Sometimes they look like a housing deal. A fast-tracked zoning change. A development district with deferred taxes. A campus with private shuttles and subsidized utilities. They don't announce themselves as secessions — but they function that way.

We’ve been trained to see these projects as innovation, not governance. As entrepreneurship, not policy. But when a company owns the homes, builds the roads, controls the data, and sets the rules, it’s not just offering services — it’s exercising control. As political theorist Wendy Brown has argued, neoliberalism reshapes civic life around the image of the entrepreneur, replacing democratic participation with market performance.

That shift plays out everywhere: universities run like corporations, cities managed like startups. Musk isn’t the exception — he’s the clearest expression of a culture that mistakes private ambition for public good. Musk once tweeted, “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.”

In a New York Times article, Jill Lepore quoted Banks as saying his science fiction books were about “’hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism.’ He also expressed astonishment that anyone could read his books as promoting free-market libertarianism, asking, ‘Which bit of not having private property and the absence of money in the Culture novels have these people missed?’”

The issue isn’t just that we’ve allowed these takeovers — it’s that we’ve ignored the tools enabling them: incorporation, annexation, zoning, and special districts. As Brian Highsmith notes, this quiet shift in power might not have surprised one of our constitution authors, James Madison, but it would have troubled him. In Federalist No. 10, Madison warned not of monarchs, but of factions — small, organized interests capturing government for their own ends. His solution was restraint through scaling oppositional voices.

“The inference to which we are brought is, that the causes of faction cannot be removed...and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”— James Madison, Federalist No. 10 (1787)

Today, the structure meant to restrain factions has become their playbook. These actors don’t run for office — they arrive with charters, contracts, and capital. They govern not in the name of the people, but of “efficiency” and “innovation.” And they don’t need to control a nation when a zoning board will do.

Unchecked, we risk mistaking corporate control for civic order — and repeating a pattern we’ve barely begun to name.

We were told, sold, and promised a universe of shared governance — political, spatial, even orbital. But Madison didn’t trust promises. He trusted structure. He feared what happens when small governments fall to powerful interests — when law becomes a lever for private gain. That fear now lives in legal districts, rocket towns, and infrastructure built to rule. Thousands of satellites orbit the Earth, not launched by publics, but by one man with tools once reserved for states. What was once called infrastructure now governs. What was once geography now obeys.

Our maps may still show roads and rails and pipes and ports — but not the fictions beneath them, or the factions they support.

References:

Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Zone Books.

Cowen, D. (2014). The deadly life of logistics: Mapping violence in global trade. University of Minnesota Press.

Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. Verso Books.

Highsmith, B. (2022). Governing the company town: How employers use local government to seize political power. Yale Law Journal.

Madison, J. (1787). Federalist No. 10. In A. Hamilton, J. Madison, & J. Jay, The Federalist Papers. Bantam Books (2003 edition).

Slobodian, Q. (2023). Crack-Up Capitalism: Market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy. Metropolitan Books.

Hello Interactors,

This week, I’ve been reflecting on the themes of my last few essays — along with a pile of research that’s been oddly in sync. Transit planning. Neuroscience. Happiness studies. Complexity theory. Strange mix, but it keeps pointing to the same thing: cities aren’t just struggling with transportation or housing. They’re struggling with connection. With meaning. With the simple question: what kind of happiness should a city make possible? And why don’t we ask that more often?

STRANGERS SHUNNED, SYSTEMS SIMULATED

The urban century was supposed to bring us together. Denser cities, faster mobility, more connected lives — these were the promises of global urbanization. Yet in the shadow of those promises, a different kind of city has emerged in America with growing undertones elsewhere: one that increasingly seeks to eliminate the stranger, bypass friction, and privatize interaction.

Whether through algorithmically optimized ride-sharing, private tunnels built to evade street life, or digital maps simulating place without presence for autonomous vehicles, a growing set of design logics work to render other people — especially unknown others — invisible, irrelevant, or avoidable.

I admit, I too can get seduced by this comfort, technology, and efficiency. But cities aren’t just systems of movement — they’re systems of meaning. Space is never neutral; it’s shaped by power and shapes behavior in return. This isn’t new. Ancient cities like Teotihuacan (tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN) in central Mexico, once one of the largest cities in the world, aligned their streets and pyramids with the stars. Chang’an (chahng-AHN), the capital of Tang Dynasty China, used strict cardinal grids and walled compounds to reflect Confucian ideals of order and hierarchy. And Uruk (OO-rook), in ancient Mesopotamia, organized civic life around temple complexes that stood at the spiritual and administrative heart of the city.

These weren’t just settlements — they were spatial arguments about how people should live together, and who should lead. Even Middle Eastern souks and hammams were more than markets or baths; they were civic infrastructure. Whether through temples or bus stops, the question is the same: What kind of social behavior is this space asking of us?

Neuroscience points to answers. As Shane O’Mara argues, walking is not just transport — it’s neurocognitive infrastructure. The hippocampus, which governs memory, orientation, and mood, activates when we move through physical space. Walking among others, perceiving spontaneous interactions, and attending to environmental cues strengthens our cognitive maps and emotional regulation.

This makes city oriented around ‘stranger danger’ not just unjust — but indeed dangerous. Because to eliminate friction is to undermine emergence — not only in the social sense, but in the economic and cultural ones too. Cities thrive on weak ties, on happenstance, on proximity without intention. Mark Granovetter’s landmark paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, showed that it's those looser, peripheral relationships — not our inner circles — that drive opportunity, creativity, and mobility. Karl Polanyi called it embeddedness: the idea that markets don’t float in space, they’re grounded in the social fabric around them.

You see it too in scale theory — in the work of Geoffrey West and Luís Bettencourt — where the productive and innovative energy of cities scales with density, interaction, and diversity. When you flatten all that into private tunnels and algorithmic efficiency, you don’t just lose the texture — you lose the conditions for invention.

As David Roberts, a climate and policy journalist known for his systems thinking and sharp urban critiques, puts it: this is “the anti-social dream of elite urbanism” — a vision where you never have to share space with anyone not like you. In conversation with him, Jarrett Walker, a transit planner and theorist who’s spent decades helping cities design equitable bus networks, also pushes back against this logic.

He warns that when cities build transit around avoidance — individualized rides, privatized tunnels, algorithmic sorting — they aren’t just solving inefficiencies. They’re hollowing out the very thing that makes transit (and cities) valuable and also public: the shared experience of strangers moving together.

The question isn’t just whether cities are efficient — but what kind of social beings they help us become. If we build cities to avoid each other, we shouldn’t be surprised when they crumble as we all forget how to live together.

COVERAGE, CARE, AND CIVIC CALM

If you follow urban and transit planning debates long enough, you’ll hear the same argument come up again and again: Should we focus on ridership or coverage? High-frequency routes where lots of people travel, or wide access for people who live farther out — even if fewer use the service? For transit nerds, it’s a policy question. For everyone else, it’s about dignity.

As Walker puts it, coverage isn’t about efficiency — it’s about “a sense of fairness.” It’s about living in a place where your city hasn’t written you off because you’re not profitable to serve. Walker’s point is that coverage isn’t charity. It’s a public good, one that tells people: You belong here.

That same logic shows up in more surprising places — like the World Happiness Report. Year after year, Finland lands at the top. But as writer Molly Young found during her visit to Helsinki, Finnish “happiness” isn’t about joy or euphoria. It’s about something steadier: trust, safety, and institutional calm. What the report measures is evaluative happiness — how satisfied people are with their lives over time — not affective happiness, which is more about momentary joy or emotional highs.

There’s a Finnish word that captures this. It the feeling you get after a sauna: saunanjälkeinen raukeus (SOW-nahn-yell-kay-nen ROW-keh-oos) — the softened, slowed state of the body and mind. That’s what cities like Helsinki seem to deliver: not bliss, but a stable, low-friction kind of contentment. And while that may lack sparkle, it makes people feel held.

And infrastructure plays a big role. In Helsinki, the signs in the library don’t say “Be Quiet.” They say, “Please let others work in peace.” It’s a small thing, but it speaks volumes — less about control, more about shared responsibility. There are saunas in government buildings. Parents leave their babies sleeping in strollers outside cafés. Transit is clean, quiet, and frequent. As Young puts it, these aren’t luxuries — they’re part of a “bone-deep sense of trust” the city builds and reinforces. Not enforced from above, but sustained by expectation, habit, and care.

My family once joined an organized walking tour of Copenhagen. The guide, who was from Spain, pointed to a clock in a town square and said, almost in passing, “The government has always made sure this clock runs on time — even during war.” It wasn’t just about punctuality. It was about trust. About the quiet promise that the public realm would still hold, even when everything else felt uncertain. This, our guide noted from his Spanish perspective, is what what make Scandinavians so-called ‘happy’. They feel held.

Studies show that most of what boosts long-term happiness isn’t about dopamine hits — it’s about relational trust. Feeling safe. Feeling seen. Knowing you won’t be stranded if you don’t have a car or a credit card. Knowing the city works, even if you don’t make it work for you.

In this way, transit frequency and subtle signs in Helsinki are doing the same thing. They’re shaping behavior and reinforcing social norms. They’re saying: we share space here. Don’t be loud. Don’t cut in line. Don’t treat public space like it’s only for you.

That kind of city can’t be built on metrics alone. It needs moral imagination — the kind that sees coverage, access, and slowness as features, not bugs. That’s not some socialist’s idea of utopia. It’s just thoughtful. Built into the culture, yes, but also the design.

But sometimes we’re just stuck with whatever design is already in place. Even if it’s not so thoughtful. Economists and social theorists have long used the concept of path dependence to explain why some systems — cities, institutions, even technologies — get stuck. The idea dates back to work in economics and political science in the 1980s, where it was used to show how early decisions, even small ones, can lock in patterns that are hard to reverse.

Once you’ve laid train tracks, built freeways, zoned for single-family homes — you’ve shaped what comes next. Changing course isn’t impossible, but it’s costly, slow, and politically messy. The QWERTY keyboard is a textbook example: not the most efficient layout, but one that stuck because switching systems later would be harder than just adapting to what we’ve got.

Urban scholars Michael Storper and Allen Scott brought this thinking into city studies. They’ve shown how economic geography and institutional inertia shape urban outcomes — how past planning decisions, labor markets, and infrastructure investments limit the options cities have today. If your city bet on car-centric growth decades ago, you’re probably still paying for that decision, even if pivoting is palatable to the public.

CONNECTIONS, COMPLEXITY, CITIES THAT CARE

There’s a quote often attributed to Stephen Hawking that’s made the rounds in complexity science circles: “The 21st century will be the century of complexity.” No one’s entirely sure where he said it — it shows up in systems theory blogs, talks, and books — but it sticks. Probably because it feels true.

If the last century was about physics — closed systems, force, motion, precision — then this one is about what happens when the pieces won’t stay still. When the rules change mid-game. When causes ripple back as consequences. In other words: cities.

Planners have tried to tame that complexity in all kinds of ways. Grids. Zoning codes. Dashboards. There’s long been a kind of “physics envy” in both planning and economics — a belief that if we just had the right model, the right inputs, we could predict and control the city like a closed system. As a result, for much of the 20th century, cities were designed like machines — optimized for flow, separation, and predictability.

But even the pushback followed a logic of control — cul-de-sacs and suburban pastoralism — wasn’t a turn toward organic life or spontaneity. It was just a softer kind of order: winding roads and whispered rules meant to keep things calm, clean, and contained…and mostly white and moderately wealthy.

If you think of cities like machines, it makes sense to want control. More data, tighter optimization, fewer surprises. That’s how you’d tune an engine or write software. But cities aren’t machines. They’re messy, layered, and full of people doing unpredictable things. They’re more like ecosystems — or weather patterns — than they are a carburetor. And that’s where complexity science becomes useful.

People like Paul Cilliers and Brian Castellani have argued for a more critical kind of complexity science — one that sees cities not just as networks or algorithms, but as places shaped by values, power, and conflict. Cilliers emphasized that complex systems, like cities, are open and dynamic: they don’t have fixed boundaries, they adapt constantly, and they respond to feedback in ways no planner can fully predict.

Castellani extends this by insisting that complexity isn’t just technical — it’s ethical. It demands we ask: Who benefits from a system’s design? Who has room to adapt, and who gets constrained? In this view, small interventions — a zoning tweak, a route change — can set off ripple effects that reshape how people move, connect, and belong. A new path dependence.

This is why certainty is dangerous in urban design. It breeds overconfidence. Humility is a better place to start. As Jarrett Walker puts it, “there are all kinds of ways to fake your way through this.” Agencies often adopt feel-good mission statements like “compete with the automobile by providing access for all” — which, he notes, is like “telling your taxi driver to turn left and right at the same time.” You can’t do both. Not on a fixed budget.

Walker pushes agencies to be honest: if you want to prioritize ridership, say so. If you want to prioritize broad geographic coverage, that’s also valid — but know it will mean lower ridership. The key is not pretending you can have both at full strength. He says, “What I want is for board members… to make this decision consciously and not be surprised by the consequences”.

These decisions matter. A budget cut can push riders off buses, which then leads to reduced service, which leads to more riders leaving — a feedback loop. On the flip side, small improvements — like better lighting, a public bench, a frequent bus — can set off positive loops too. Change emerges, often sideways.

That means thinking about transit not just as a system of movement, but as a relational space. Same with libraries, parks, and sidewalks. These aren’t neutral containers. They’re environments that either support or suppress human connection. If you design a city to eliminate friction, you eliminate chance encounters — the stuff social trust is made of.

I’m an introvert. I like quiet. I recharge alone. But I also live in a city — and I’ve learned that even for people like me, being around others still matters. Not in the chatty, get-to-know-your-neighbors way. But in the background hum of life around you. Sitting on a bus. Browsing in a bookstore. Walking down a street full of strangers, knowing you don’t have to engage — but you’re not invisible either.

There’s a name for this. Psychologists call it public solitude or sometimes energized privacy — the comfort of being alone among others. Not isolated, not exposed. Just held, lightly, in the weave of the crowd. And the research backs it up: introverts often seek out public spaces like cafés, libraries, or parks not to interact, but to feel present — connected without pressure.

In the longest-running happiness study ever done, 80 years, Harvard psychologist Robert Waldinger found that strong relationships — not income, not status — were the best predictor of long-term well-being. More recently, studies have shown that even brief interactions with strangers — on a bus, in a coffee shop — can lift mood and reduce loneliness. But here’s the catch: cities have to make those interactions possible.

Or they don’t.

And that’s the real test of infrastructure. We’ve spent decades designing systems to move people through. Fast. Clean. Efficient. But we’ve neglected the quiet spaces that let people just be. Sidewalks you’re not rushed off of. Streets where kids can safely bike or play…or simply cross the street.

Even pools — maybe especially pools. My wife runs a nonprofit called SplashForward that’s working to build more public pools. Not just for fitness, but because pools are public space. You float next to people you may never talk to. And still, you’re sharing something. Space. Water. Time.

You see this clearly in places like Finland and Iceland, where pools and saunas are built into the rhythms of public life. They’re not luxuries — they’re civic necessities. People show up quietly, day after day, not to socialize loudly, but to be alone together. As one Finnish local told journalist Molly Young, “During this time, we don’t have... colors.” It was about the long gray winter, sure — but also something deeper: a culture that values calm over spectacle. Stability over spark. A kind of contentment that doesn’t perform.

But cities don’t have to choose between quiet and joy. We don’t have to model every system on Helsinki in February. There’s something beautiful in the American kind of happiness too — the loud, weird, spontaneous moments that erupt in public. The band on the subway. The dance party in the park. The loud kid at the pool. That kind of energy can be a nuisance, but it can also be joyful.

Even Jarrett Walker, who’s clear-eyed about transit, doesn’t pretend it solves everything. Transit isn’t always the answer. Sometimes a car is the right tool. What matters is whether everyone has a real choice — not just those with money or proximity or privilege. And he’s quick to admit every city with effective transit has its local grievances.

So no, I’m not arguing for perfection, or even socialism. I’m arguing for a city that knows how to hold difference. Fast and slow. Dense and quiet. A city that lets you step into the crowd, or sit at its edge, and still feel like you belong. A place to comfortably sit with the uncertainty of this great transformation emerging around us. Alone and together.

REFERENCES

Castellani, B. (2014). Complexity theory and the social sciences: The state of the art. Routledge.

Cilliers, P. (1998). Complexity and postmodernism: Understanding complex systems. Routledge.

David, P. A. (1985). Clio and the economics of QWERTY. The American Economic Review.

Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology.

Hawking, S. (n.d.). The 21st century will be the century of complexity. [Attributed quote; primary source unavailable].

O’Mara, S. (2019). In praise of walking: A new scientific exploration. W. W. Norton & Company.

Roberts, D. (Host). (2025). Jarrett Walker on what makes good transit [Audio podcast episode]. In Volts.

Storper, M., & Scott, A. J. (2016). Current debates in urban theory: A critical assessment. Urban Studies.

Waldinger, R., & Schulz, M. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world’s longest scientific study of happiness. Simon & Schuster.

Walker, J. (2011). Human transit: How clearer thinking about public transit can enrich our communities and our lives. Island Press.

West, G., & Bettencourt, L. M. A. (2010). A unified theory of urban living. Nature.

Young, M. (2025). My miserable week in the ‘happiest country on earth’. The New York Times Magazine.

Hello Interactors,

This week, the European Space Agency launched a satellite to "weigh" Earth's 1.5 trillion trees. It will give scientists deeper insight into forests and their role in the climate — far beyond surface readings. Pretty cool. And it's coming from Europe.

Meanwhile, I learned that the U.S. Secretary of Defense — under Trump — had a makeup room installed in the Pentagon to look better on TV. Also pretty cool, I guess. And very American.

The contrast was hard to miss. Even with better data, the U.S. shows little appetite for using geographic insight to actually address climate change. Information is growing. Willpower, not so much.

So it was oddly clarifying to read a passage Christopher Hobson posted on Imperfect Notes from a book titled America by a French author — a travelogue of softs. Last week I offered new lenses through which to see the world, I figured I’d try this French pair on — to see America, and the world it effects, as he did.

PAPER, POWER, AND PROJECTION

I still have a folded paper map of Seattle in the door of my car. It’s a remnant of a time when physical maps reflected the reality before us. You unfolded a map and it innocently offered the physical world on a page. The rest was left to you — including knowing how to fold it up again.

But even then, not all maps were neutral or necessarily innocent. Sure, they crowned capitals and trimmed borders, but they could also leave things out or would make certain claims. From empire to colony, from mission to market, maps often arrived not to reflect place, but to declare control of it. Still, we trusted it…even if was an illusion.

I learned how to interrogate maps in my undergraduate history of cartography class — taught by the legendary cartographer Waldo Tobler. But even with that knowledge, when I was then taught how to make maps, that interrogation was more absent. I confidently believed I was mediating truth. The lines and symbols I used pointed to substance; they signaled a thing. I traced rivers from existing base maps with a pen on vellum and trusted they existed in the world as sure as the ink on the page. I cut out shading for a choropleth map and believed it told a stable story about population, vegetation, or economics. That trust was embodied in representation — the idea that a sign meant something enduring. That we could believe what maps told us.

This is the world of semiotics — the study of how signs create meaning. American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce offered a sturdy model: a sign (like a map line) refers to an object (the river), and its meaning emerges in interpretation. Meaning, in this view, is relational — but grounded. A stop sign, a national anthem, a border — they meant something because they pointed beyond themselves, to a world we shared.

But there are cracks in this seemingly sturdy model.

These cracks pose this question: why do we trust signs in the first place? That trust — in maps, in categories, in data — didn’t emerge from neutrality. It was built atop agendas.

Take the first U.S. census in 1790. It didn’t just count — it defined. Categories like “free white persons,” “all other free persons,” and “slaves” weren’t neutral. They were political tools, shaping who mattered and by how much. People became variables. Representation became abstraction.

Or Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century Swedish botanist who built the taxonomies we still use: genus, species, kingdom. His system claimed objectivity but was shaped by distance and empire. Linnaeus never left Sweden. He named what he hadn’t seen, classified people he’d never met — sorting humans into racial types based on colonial stereotypes. These weren’t observations. They were projections based on stereotypes gathered from travelers, missionaries, and imperial officials.

Naming replaced knowing. Life was turned into labels. Biology became filing. And once abstracted, it all became governable, measurable, comparable, and, ultimately, manageable.

Maps followed suit.

What once lived as a symbolic invitation — a drawing of place — became a system of location. I was studying geography at a time (and place) when Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and GIScience was transforming cartography. Maps weren’t just about visual representations; they were spatial databases. Rows, columns, attributes, and calculations took the place of lines and shapes on map. Drawing what we saw turned to abstracting what could then be computed so that it could then be visualized, yes, but also managed.

Chris Perkins, writing on the philosophy of mapping, argued that digital cartographies didn’t just depict the world — they constituted it. The map was no longer a surface to interpret, but a script to execute. As critical geographers Sam Hind and Alex Gekker argue, the modern “mapping impulse” isn’t about understanding space — it’s about optimizing behavior through it; in a world of GPS and vehicle automation, the map no longer describes the territory, it becomes it.

Laura Roberts, writing on film and geography, showed how maps had fused with cinematic logic — where places aren’t shown, but performed. Place and navigation became narrative. New York in cinema isn’t a place — it’s a performance of ambition, alienation, or energy. Geography as mise-en-scène.

In other words, the map’s loss of innocence wasn’t just technical. It was ontological — a shift in the very nature of what maps are and what kind of reality they claim to represent. Geography itself had entered the domain of simulation — not representing space but staging it. You can simulate traveling anywhere in the world, all staged on Google maps. Last summer my son stepped off the train in Edinburgh, Scotland for the first time in his life but knew exactly where he was. He’d learned it driving on simulated streets in a simulated car on XBox. He walked us straight to our lodging.

These shifts in reality over centuries weren’t necessarily mistakes. They unfolded, emerged, or evolved through the rational tools of modernity — and for a time, they worked. For many, anyway. Especially for those in power, seeking power, or benefitting from it. They enabled trade, governance, development, and especially warfare. But with every shift came this question: at what cost?

FROM SIGNS TO SPECTACLE

As early as the early 1900s, Max Weber warned of a world disenchanted by bureaucracy — a society where rationalization would trap the human spirit in what he called an iron cage. By mid-century, thinkers pushed this further.

Michel Foucault revealed how systems of knowledge — from medicine to criminal justice — were entangled with systems of power. To classify was to control. To represent was to discipline. Roland Barthes dissected the semiotics of everyday life — showing how ads, recipes, clothing, even professional wrestling were soaked in signs pretending to be natural.

Guy Debord, in the 1967 The Society of the Spectacle, argued that late capitalism had fully replaced lived experience with imagery. “The spectacle,” he wrote, “is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

Then came Jean Baudrillard — a French sociologist, media theorist, and provocateur — who pushed the critique of representation to its limit. In the 1980s, where others saw distortion, he saw substitution: signs that no longer referred to anything real. Most vividly, in his surreal, gleaming 1986 travelogue America, he described the U.S. not as a place, but as a performance — a projection without depth, still somehow running.

Where Foucault showed that knowledge was power, and Debord showed that images replaced life, Baudrillard argued that signs had broken free altogether. A map might once distort or simplify — but it still referred to something real. By the late 20th century, he argued, signs no longer pointed to anything. They pointed only to each other.

You didn’t just visit Disneyland. You visited the idea of America — manufactured, rehearsed, rendered. You didn’t just use money. You used confidence by handing over a credit card — a symbol of wealth that is lighter and moves faster than any gold.

In some ways, he was updating a much older insight by another Frenchman. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he wasn’t just studying law or government — he was studying performance. He saw how Americans staged democracy, how rituals of voting and speech created the image of a free society even as inequality and exclusion thrived beneath it. Tocqueville wasn’t cynical. He simply understood that America believed in its own image — and that belief gave it a kind of sovereign feedback loop.

Baudrillard called this condition simulation — when representation becomes self-contained. When the distinction between real and fake no longer matters because everything is performance. Not deception — orchestration.

He mapped four stages of this logic:

* Faithful representation – A sign reflects a basic reality. A map mirrors the terrain.

* Perversion of reality – The sign begins to distort. Think colonial maps as logos or exclusionary zoning.

* Pretending to represent – The sign no longer refers to anything but performs as if it does. Disneyland isn’t America — it’s the fantasy of America. (ironically, a car-free America)

* Pure simulation – The sign has no origin or anchor. It floats. Zillow heatmaps, Uber surge zones — maps that don’t reflect the world, but determine how you move through it.

We don’t follow maps as they were once known anymore. We follow interfaces.

And not just in apps. Cities themselves are in various stages of simulation. New York still sells itself as a global center. But in a distributed globalized and digitized economy, there is no center — only the perversion of an old reality. Paris subsidizes quaint storefronts not to nourish citizens, but to preserve the perceived image of Paris. Paris pretending to be Paris. Every city has its own marketing campaign. They don’t manage infrastructure — they manage perception. The skyline is a product shot. The streetscape is marketing collateral and neighborhoods are optimized for search.

Even money plays this game.

The U.S. dollar wasn’t always king. That title once belonged to the British pound — backed by empire, gold, and industry. After World War II, the dollar took over, pegged to gold under the Bretton Woods convention — a symbol of American postwar power stability…and perversion. It was forged in an opulent, exclusive, hotel in the mountains of New Hampshire. But designed in the style of Spanish Renaissance Revival, it was pretending to be in Spain.

Then in 1971, Nixon snapped the dollar’s gold tether. The ‘Nixon Shock’ allowed the dollar to float — its value now based not on metal, but on trust. It became less a store of value than a vessel of belief. A belief that is being challenged today in ways that recall the instability and fragmentation of the pre-WWII era.

And this dollar lives in servers, not Industrial Age iron vaults. It circulates as code, not coin. It underwrites markets, wars, and global finance through momentum alone. And when the pandemic hit, there was no digging into reserves.

The Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet with keystrokes — injecting trillions into the economy through bond purchases, emergency loans, and direct payments. But at the same time, Trump 1.0 showed printing presses rolling, stacks of fresh bills bundled and boxed — a spectacle of liquidity. It was monetary policy as theater. A simulation of control, staged in spreadsheets by the Fed and photo ops by the Executive Branch. Not to reflect value, but to project it. To keep liquidity flowing and to keep the belief intact.

This is what Baudrillard meant by simulation. The sign doesn’t lie — nor does it tell the truth. It just works — as long as we accept it.

MOOD OVER MEANING

Reality is getting harder to discern. We believe it to be solid — that it imposes friction. A law has consequences. A price reflects value. A city has limits. These things made sense because they resist us. Because they are real.

But maybe that was just the story we told. Maybe it was always more mirage than mirror.

Now, the signs don’t just point to reality — they also replace it. We live in a world where the image outpaces the institution. Where the copy is smoother than the original. Where AI does the typing. Where meaning doesn’t emerge — it arrives prepackaged and pre-viral. It’s a kind of seductive deception. It’s hyperreality where performance supersedes substance. Presence and posture become authority structured in style.

Politics is not immune to this — it’s become the main attraction.

Trump’s first 100 days didn’t aim to stabilize or legislate but to signal. Deportation as UFC cage match — staged, brutal, and televised. Tariff wars as a way of branding power — chaos with a catchphrase. Climate retreat cast as perverse theater. Gender redefined and confined by executive memo. Birthright citizenship challenged while sedition pardoned. Even the Gulf of Mexico got renamed. These aren’t policies, they’re productions.

Power isn’t passing through law. It’s passing through the affect of spectacle and a feed refresh.

Baudrillard once wrote that America doesn’t govern — it narrates. Trump doesn’t manage policy, he manages mood. Like an actor. When America’s Secretary of Defense, a former TV personality, has a makeup studio installed inside the Pentagon it’s not satire. It’s just the simulation, doing what it does best: shining under the lights.

But this logic runs deeper than any single figure.

Culture no longer unfolds. It reloads. We don’t listen to the full album — we lift 10 seconds for TikTok. Music is made for algorithms. Fashion is filtered before it’s worn. Selfhood is a brand channel. Identity is something to monetize, signal, or defend — often all at once.

The economy floats too. Meme stocks. NFTs. Speculative tokens. These aren’t based in value — they’re based in velocity. Attention becomes the currency.

What matters isn’t what’s true, but what trends. In hyperreality, reference gives way to rhythm. The point isn’t to be accurate. The point is to circulate. We’re not being lied to.We’re being engaged. And this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

Which through a Baudrillard lens is why America — the simulation — persists.

He saw it early. Describing strip malls, highways, slogans, themed diners he saw an America that wasn’t deep. That was its genius he saw. It was light, fast paced, and projected. Like the movies it so famously exports. It didn’t need justification — it just needed repetition.

And it’s still repeating.

Las Vegas is the cathedral of the logic of simulation — a city that no longer bothers pretending. But it’s not alone. Every city performs, every nation tries to brand itself. Every policy rollout is scored like a product launch. Reality isn’t navigated — it’s streamed.

And yet since his writing, the mood has shifted. The performance continues, but the music underneath it has changed. The techno-optimism of Baudrillard’s ‘80s an ‘90s have curdled. What once felt expansive now feels recursive and worn. It’s like a show running long after the audience has gone home. The rager has ended, but Spotify is still loudly streaming through the speakers.

“The Kids' Guide to the Internet” (1997), produced by Diamond Entertainment and starring the unnervingly wholesome Jamison family. It captures a moment of pure techno-optimism — when the Internet was new, clean, and family-approved. It’s not just a tutorial; it’s a time capsule of belief, staged before the dream turned into something else. Before the feed began to feed on us.

Trumpism thrives on this terrain. And yet the world is changing around it. Climate shocks, mass displacement, spiraling inequality — the polycrisis has a body count. Countries once anchored to American leadership are squinting hard now, trying to see if there’s anything left behind the screen. Adjusting the antenna in hopes of getting a clearer signal. From Latin America to Southeast Asia to Europe, the question grows louder: Can you trust a power that no longer refers to anything outside itself?

Maybe Baudrillard and Tocqueville are right — America doesn’t point to a deeper truth. It points to itself. Again and again and again. It is the loop. And even now, knowing this, we can’t quite stop watching. There’s a reason we keep refreshing. Keep scrolling. Keep reacting. The performance persists — not necessarily because we believe in it, but because it’s the only script still running.

And whether we’re horrified or entertained, complicit or exhausted, engaged or ghosted, hired or fired, immigrated or deported, one thing remains strangely true: we keep feeding it. That’s the strange power of simulation in an attention economy. It doesn’t need conviction. It doesn’t need conscience. It just needs attention — enough to keep the momentum alive. The simulation doesn’t care if the real breaks down. It just keeps rendering — soft, seamless, and impossible to look away from. Like a dream you didn’t choose but can’t wake up from.

REFERENCES

Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans.). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1957)

Baudrillard, J. (1986). America (C. Turner, Trans.). Verso.

Debord, G. (1994). The Society of the Spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1967)

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books.

Hind, S., & Gekker, A. (2019). On autopilot: Towards a flat ontology of vehicular navigation. In C. Lukinbeal et al. (Eds.), Media’s Mapping Impulse. Franz Steiner Verlag.

Linnaeus, C. (1735). Systema Naturae (1st ed.). Lugduni Batavorum.

Perkins, C. (2009). Philosophy and mapping. In R. Kitchin & N. Thrift (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Elsevier.

Raaphorst, K., Duchhart, I., & van der Knaap, W. (2017). The semiotics of landscape design communication. Landscape Research.

Roberts, L. (2008). Cinematic cartography: Movies, maps and the consumption of place. In R. Koeck & L. Roberts (Eds.), Cities in Film: Architecture, Urban Space and the Moving Image. University of Liverpool.

Tocqueville, A. de. (2003). Democracy in America (G. Lawrence, Trans., H. Mansfield & D. Winthrop, Eds.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1835)

Weber, M. (1958). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (T. Parsons, Trans.). Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original work published 1905)

Hello Interactors,

Every week it seems to get harder to ignore the feeling that we're living through some major turning point — politically, economically, environmentally, and even in how our cities are taking shape around us. Has society seen this movie before? Spoiler: we have, and it has many sequels.

History doesn't repeat exactly, but it sure rhymes, especially when competition for power increases, climates collapse, and the urban fabric unravels and rewinds. Today, we'll sift through history’s clues, peek through some fresh conceptual lenses, and consider why the way we frame these shifts matters — maybe more now than ever.

PRESSURE POINTS AT URBAN JOINTS

Let’s ground where we all might be historically speaking. Clues from long-term historical patterns suggests social systems go through periodic cycles of integration, expansion, and crisis. Historical quantitative data reveals recurring waves of structural-demographic pressure — moments when inequality, elite overproduction, and resource strain converge to produce instability.

By quantitative historian Peter Turchin’s account, we are currently drifting through some kind of inflection point. His 2010 essay in Nature anticipated the early 2020s as a period of peak instability that started around 1970. That’s when people earning advanced degrees, entering law, finance, media, and politics skyrocketed from the 1970s onward. Meanwhile, the number of elite positions (like Senate seats, Supreme Court clerkships, high level corporate positions) remained fixed or even shrank. This created decades of increased income inequality, elite competition, and declining public trust that created conditions for events like the rise of Trump, polarization, and institutional gridlock.

The symptoms are familiar to us now, and they are markers that echo previous systemic ruptures in U.S. history.

In the 1770s, colonial grievances and elite competition led to a historic revolutionary realignment. It also coincided with poor harvests and food insecurity that amplified unrest. The 1860s brought civil war driven by slavery and sectional conflict. It too occurred during a period of climate volatility and crop failures. The early 20th century saw the Gilded Age unravel into labor unrest and the Great Depression, following years of drought and economic collapse in the Dust Bowl. The 1960s through 1980s unleashed social protest, stagflation, and the shift toward neoliberal governance amid fears of resource scarcity and rising pollution. In each case, ecological shocks layered onto political and economic pressures — making transformation not only likely, but necessary.

Spatial patterns shifted alongside these political ruptures — from rail hubs and company towns to low flung suburban rings and high-rise financialized skylines. Cities can be both staging grounds creating these shifts and mirrors reflecting them. As material and symbolic anchors of society, they reflect where systems are strained — and where new forms may soon take root.

Urban transformation today is neither orderly nor speculative — it is reactive. These socio-political, economic, and ecological shifts have fragmented not just the city, but the very frameworks we use to understand it. And with urban scale theory as a measure, change is accelerating exponentially. This means our conceptual tools to understand these shifts best respond just as quickly.

Let’s dip into the academic world of contemporary urban studies to gauge how scholars are considering these shifts. Here are three lenses that seem well-suited to consider our current landscape…or perhaps those my own biases are attracted to.

Urban Political Ecology. This sees the city as a socio-natural process — shaped by uneven flows of energy, capital, and extraction. This approach, developed by critical geographers like Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika, highlights how environmental degradation is often tied to social inequality and political neglect. Matthew Gandy, an urban geographer who blends political theory and environmental history, adds to this view. He shows how infrastructure — from water systems to waste networks — shapes urban nature and power.

The Jackson, Mississippi water crisis, for example, revealed how ecological stress and decades of disinvestment resulted in a disheartening breakdown. In 2022, flooding overwhelmed Jackson's aging water system, leaving tens of thousands without safe drinking water — but the failure had been decades in the making. Years of underfunding, political neglect, and systemic racism had hollowed out the city’s infrastructure.

Or take Musk's AI data center called Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee. It’s adjacent to historically Black neighborhoods and uses 35 methane gas-powered turbines that emit harmful nitrogen oxides (NOx) and other pollutants. It’s reported to be operating without proper permits and contributes to air quality issues these communities already have long experienced. These crises are vivid cases of what urban political ecologists warn about: how marginalization and disinvestment manifest physically in infrastructure failure, disproportionately affecting already vulnerable populations.

Platform Urbanism. This explains much of the growing visible and invisible restructuring of urban space. From delivery networks to sidewalk surveillance, digital platforms now shape land use and behavioral patterns. Urban theorists like Sarah Barns and geographer Agnieszka Leszczynski describe these systems as shadow planners — zoning isn’t just on paper anymore; it’s encoded in app interfaces and service contracts. Shoshana Zuboff, a social psychologist and scholar of the digital economy, pushes this further.

She argues that platforms are not just intermediaries but extractive infrastructures. They’re designed to shape behavior and monetize it at scale. As platforms replace institutions, their spatial footprint expands. For example, Amazon has redefined regional land use by building vast fulfillment centers and reshaping delivery logistics across suburbs and exurbs. Or look at Uber and Lyft. They’ve altered curbside usage and traffic patterns in major cities without ever appearing on official planning documents. These changes demonstrate how digital infrastructure now directs physical development — often faster than public institutions can respond.

Neoliberal Urbanism. Though widely critiqued, this remains the dominant lens. Despite growing backlash, deregulated markets, privatized services, and financialized real estate continue to shape planning logic and policy defaults. Urban theorists like Neil Brenner and economic geographer Jamie Peck describe this as a shift from managerial to entrepreneurial cities — where the suburbs sprawl, the towers rise, and exclusion is reproduced not by public design input, but by tax codes, ownership models, and legacy zoning. Like many governing systems, the default is to preserve the status quo. Institutions, once entrenched, tend to perpetuate existing frameworks — even in the face of mounting social or ecological stress.

For example, in many U.S. cities, exclusionary zoning laws have long restricted the construction of multi-family housing in favor of single-family homes — limiting supply, reinforcing segregation, and driving up housing costs. Even modest attempts at reform often meet local resistance, revealing how deeply these rules are woven into planning culture.

These lenses aren’t just theoretical — they are descriptively powerful. They reflect what is, not what could be. But describing the present is only the first step.

NEW NOTIONS OF URBAN MOTIONS

It’s worth considering alternative conceptual lenses rising in relevance. These are not yet changing the shape of cites at scale, but they are shaping how we think about our urban futures. Historically, new conceptual lenses have often emerged in the wake of the kind of major social and spatial disruptions already covered.

For example, the upheavals of the 19th century. This rapid industrialization, urban crowding, and public health crises gave rise to modern, industrial-era city planning. The mid-20th century crises helped institutionalize zoning and modernist design, while the neoliberal turn of the late 20th century elevated market-driven planning models.

Emerging conceptual lenses of the 21st century are grounded in complexity, care, informality, and computation. These are responses to the fragmented plurality of our planetary plight — characteristic of the current calamity of our many crises, or polycrisis. Frameworks for thinking and imagining cities gain traction in architecture and planning studios, classrooms, online and physical activist spaces, and experimental design projects. They’re not yet dominant, but they are gaining ground. Here are a few I believe to be particularly relevant today.

Assemblage Urbanism. This lens views cities not as coherent wholes, but as contingent networks that are always in the making. The term "assemblage" comes from philosophy and anthropology. It refers to how diverse elements — people, materials, policies, and technologies — come together in temporary, evolving configurations. This lens resists top-down models of urban design and instead sees cities as patchworks of relationships and improvisations.

Introduced by scholars like Ignacio Farias, an urban anthropologist focused on technological and infrastructural urban change, and AbdouMaliq Simone, a sociologist known for his work on African cities and informality, this approach offers a vocabulary for complexity and contradiction. It examines cities made of sensors and encampments, logistics hubs and wetlands.

Colin McFarlane, a geographer who studies how cities function and evolve — especially in places often overlooked in mainstream planning — shows how urban learning spreads through these networks that cross places and scales. As the built environment becomes more fragmented and multi-scalar, this lens offers a way to map the friction and fluidity of emergent urban life.

Postcolonial and Feminist Urbanisms. This lens challenges who gets to define the city, and how. Ananya Roy, a scholar of global urbanism and housing justice, Jennifer Robinson, a geographer known for challenging Western-centric urban theory, and Leslie Kern, a feminist urbanist focused on gender and public space, all center the voices and experiences often sidelined by mainstream planning: women, racialized communities, and the so-called Global South. These are regions, not always in the Southern Hemisphere, that have historically been colonized, exploited, or marginalized by dominant empires of the so-called Global North.

These frameworks put care, informality, and embodied experience in the foreground — not as soft supplements to be ‘considered’, but as central to urban survival. They ask: whose knowledge counts and whose mobility is prioritized? In a world of precarity and patchwork governance, these lenses offer both critique and more fair and balanced paths forward.

Typological and Morphological Studies. These older, traditional lenses are reemerging through new tools. Once associated with the static physical form of cities, these traditions are finding renewed relevance through machine learning and spatial data. These approaches originate from architectural history and geography, where typology refers to recurring building patterns, and morphology to the shape and structure of urban space. Scholars like Saverio Muratori and Gianfranco Caniggia, both architects, emphasized interpreting urban fabric as a continuous, evolving record of social life.

As mentioned last week, British geographer M. R. G. Conzen introduced town-plan analysis, a method for understanding how plots and street systems change over time. Today, this lineage is extended by Laura Vaughan, an urbanist who studies how spatial form reflects social patterns, and Geoff Boeing, a planning scholar using computational tools to analyze and visualize urban form also mentioned last week.

AI models now interpret urban imagery, using historical patterns to predict future trends. This approach is evolving into a kind of algorithmic archaeology. However, unchecked it could reinforce existing spatial norms instead of challenging them. This stresses the importance of reflection, ethics, and debate about the implications and outcomes of these models…and who benefits most.

While these lenses don’t yet dominate design codes or capital flows, they do shape how we think and talk about our cities. And isn’t that where all transformation begins?

CHOOSING PATHS IN AFTERMATHS

Concepts don’t emerge in a vacuum. History shows us how they arise from the anxiety and urgency of uncertainty. As historian Elias Palti reminds us, frameworks gain traction when once dominant and grounding meanings begin crumbling under our feet. That’s when we invent or seek new ways to make sense of our shifting ground.

Donna Haraway, a pioneering feminist scholar in science and technology studies, urges us to stay with this mess and imagine new futures from within it. She describes these moments as opportunities to 'stay with the trouble' — to resist closure, dwell in complexity, and imagine alternatives from within the uncertainty.

Historically, moments of systemic crisis — from the 1770s to the 1840s, the 1930s to the 1960s — have sparked shifts not just in spatial form, but in the conceptual tools used to understand and design it. Revolutionary and reformist movements have often carried with them new ways of seeing: Enlightenment ideals, socialist critiques, environmental consciousness, and decolonial frameworks. We may be living through another such moment now — where the cracks in the old invite us to rethink the categories that built it.

In 1960, five years before I was born, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave a speech called “Wind of Change”. It was a public acknowledgement of the decline of British empire and the rise of anti-colonial nationalism around the globe. Delivered in apartheid South Africa, it was a rare moment of elite recognition that a global shift in political and spatial order was already underway. Britain’s imperial dominance was fading just as American dominance was solidifying.

Today, we see echoes of that moment. The U.S. is facing economic fragmentation, growing inequality, and diminishing global legitimacy, while China asserts itself as a counterweight. Resistance and unrest in places like Palestine, Ukraine, Yemen, Congo, Sudan, Kashmir, (and many more) mirror the turbulence of previous historic transitions. Once again, the global “winds of change” are shifting, strengthening, and unpredictably swirling. It can be disorienting.

But the frameworks I’ve outlined above are more than cold attempts at academic neutral observations, they can serve as lenses of orientation. They help guide what we see, what we measure, and what we ignore. And in doing so, they shape what futures become possible.

Some frameworks are widely used but lack ethical depth. Others are less common but are full of imagination and ethical reconfigurations. The lenses we prioritize in public policy, early education, design, and discussion will shape whether our future systems perpetuate existing inequalities or purge them.

This is not just an academic choice. It's a civic one.

While macro forces of capital or climate are beyond our control, it is possible to shape the narratives that impact our responses. The question remains whether space should continue being optimized for logistics and financial speculation, or if there is potential to focus on ecological repair, historical redress, and spatial justice.

Future developments will be influenced by current thoughts. The most impactful decision in urban design may come down to us all being more intentional in selecting the concepts that guide us forward.

REFERENCES

Hello Interactors,

Cities are layered by past priorities. I was just in Overland Park, Kansas, where over the last 25 years I’ve seen malls rise, fall, and shift outward as stores leave older spaces behind.

When urban systems shift — due to climate, capital, codes, or crisis — cities drift. These changes ripple across scales and resemble fractal patterns, repeating yet evolving uniquely.

This essay traces these patterns: past regimes, present signals, and competing questions over what's next.

URBAN SCRIPTS AND SHIFTING SCALES

As cities grow, they remember.

Look at a city’s form — the way its streets stretch, how its blocks bend, where its walls break. These are not neutral choices. They are residues of regimes. Spatial decisions shaped by power, fear, belief, or capital.

In ancient Rome, cities were laid out in strict grids. Streets ran along two axes: the cardo and decumanus. It made the city legible to the empire — easy to control, supply, and expand. Urban form followed the logic of conquest.

As cartography historian, O. A. W. Dilke writes,

“One of the main advantages of a detailed map of Rome was to improve the efficiency of the city's administration. Augustus had divided Rome into fourteen districts, each subdivided into vici. These districts were administered by annually elected magistrates, with officials and public slaves under them.”

In medieval Europe, cities got messy. Sovereignty was fragmented. Trade replaced tribute. Guilds ran markets as streets tangled around church and square. The result was organic — but not random. It reflected a new mode of life: small-scale, interdependent, locally governed.

In 19th-century Paris, the streets changed again. Narrow alleys became wide boulevards. Not just for beauty — for visibility and force. Haussmann’s renovations made room for troops, light, and clean air. It was urban form as counter-revolution.

Then came modernism. Superblocks, towers, highways. A form that made sense for mass production, cheap land, and the car. Planning became machine logic — form as efficiency.

Each of these shifts marked the arrival of a new spatial calculus — ways of organizing the built environment in response to systemic pressures. Over time, these approaches came to be described by urbanists as morphological regimes: durable patterns of urban form shaped not just by architecture, but by ideology, infrastructure, and power.

The term “morphology” itself was borrowed from biology, where it described the structure of organisms. In urban studies, it originally referred to the physical anatomy of the city — blocks, plots, grids, and streets. But today the field has broadened. It’s evolved into more of a conceptual lens: not just a way of classifying form, but of understanding how ideas sediment into space. Today, morphology tracks how cities are shaped — not only physically, but discursively and increasingly so, computationally.

Urban planning scholar Geoff Boeing calls urban form a “spatial script.” It encodes decisions made long ago — about who belongs where, what gets prioritized, and what can be seen or accessed.

Other scholars treated cities like palimpsests — a term borrowed from manuscript studies, where old texts were scraped away and overwritten, yet traces remained. In urban form, each layer carries the imprint of a former spatial logic, never fully erased.

Michael Robert Günter (M. R. G.) Conzen, a British geographer, pioneered the idea of town plan analysis in the 1960s. He examined how street patterns, plot divisions, and building forms reveal historical shifts. Urban geographer and architect, Anne Vernez Moudon brought these methods into contemporary urbanism. She argued that morphological analysis could serve as a bridge between disciplines, from planning to architecture to geography.

Archaeologist Michael E. Smith goes further. Specializing in ancient cities, Smith argues that urban form doesn’t just reflect culture — it produces it. In early settlements, the spatial organization of plazas, roads, and monuments actively shaped how people understood power, social hierarchy, and civic identity. Ritual plazas weren’t just for ceremony — they structured the cognitive and social experience of space.

Urban form, in this sense, is conceptual. It’s how a society makes its world visible. And when that society changes — politically, economically, technologically — so does its form. Not immediately. Not neatly. But eventually. Almost always in response to pressure from the outside.

INTERVAL AND INFLECTION

Urban morphology used to evolve slowly. But today, it changes faster — and with increasing volatility. Physicist Geoffrey West, and other urban scientists, describes how complex systems like cities exhibit superlinear scaling: as they grow, they generate more innovation, infrastructure, and socio-economic activity at an accelerating pace. But this growth comes with a catch: the system becomes dependent on continuous bursts of innovation to avoid collapse. West compares it to jumping from one treadmill to another — each one running faster than the last.

What once took centuries, like the rise of industrial manufacturing, is now compressed into decades or less. The intervals between revolutions — from steam power to electricity to the internet — keep shrinking, and cities must adapt at an ever-faster clip just to maintain stability. But this also breeds instability as the intervals between systemic transformations shrink. Cities that once evolved over centuries can now shift in decades.

Consider Rome. Roman grid structure held for centuries. Medieval forms persisted well into the Renaissance. Even Haussmann’s Paris boulevards endured through war and modernization. But in the 20th century, urban morphology entered a period of rapid churn. Western urban regions shifted from dense industrial cores to sprawling postwar suburbs to globalized financial districts in under a century — each a distinct regime, unfolding at unprecedented speed.

Meanwhile, rural and exurban zones transformed too. Suburbs stretched outward. Logistics corridors carved through farmland. Industrial agriculture consolidated land and labor. The whole urban-rural spectrum was redrawn — not evenly, but thoroughly — over a few decades.

Why the speed?

It’s not just technology. It’s the stacking of exogenous shocks. Public health crises. Wars. Economic crashes. Climate shifts. New empires. New markets. New media. These don’t just hit policy — they hit form.

Despite urbanities adaptability, it resists change. But when enough pressure builds, it breaks and fragments — or bends fast.

Quantitative historians like Peter Turchin describe these moments as episodes of structural-demographic pressure. His theory suggests that as societies grow, they cycle through phases of expansion and instability. When rising inequality, elite overproduction, and resource strain coincide, the system enters a period of fragility.

The ruling class becomes bloated and competitive, public trust erodes, and the state’s ability to mediate conflict weakens. At some point, the social contract fractures — not necessarily through revolution, but through cumulative dysfunction that demands structural transformation.

Cities reflect that process spatially. The street doesn’t revolt. But it reroutes. The built environment shows where power has snapped or shifted. Consider Industrial Modernity. Assuming we start in 1850, it took roughly 100 years before the next regime took shape — the Fordist-Suburban Expansion starting in roughly 1945. It took around 30-40 years for deregulation to hit in the 80s. By 1995 information, communication, and technology accelerated globalization, financialization, and the urban regime we’re currently in — Neoliberal Polycentrism.

Neoliberal Polycentricism may sound like a wonky and abstract term, but it reflects a familiar reality: a pattern of decentralized, uneven urban growth shaped by market-driven logics. While some scholars debate the continued utility of the overused term 'neoliberalism' itself, its effects on the built environment remain visible. Market priorities continue to dominate and reshape spatial development and planning norms.

It is not a wholly new spatial condition. It's the latest articulation of a longer American tradition of decentralizing people and capital beyond the urban core. In the 19th century, this dynamic took shape through the rise of satellite towns, railroad suburbs, and peripheral manufacturing hubs. These developments were often driven by speculative land ventures, private infrastructure investments, and the desire to escape the regulatory and political constraints of city centers.

The result was a form of urban dispersal that created new nodes of growth, frequently insulated from municipal oversight and rooted in socio-economic and racial segregation. This early polycentricism, like fireworks spawning in all directions from the first blast, set the stage for later waves of privatized suburbanization and regional fragmentation. Neoliberalism would come to accelerate and codify this expansion.

It came in the form of edge cities, exurbs, and special economic zones that proliferated in the 80s and 90s. They grew not as organic responses to demographic needs, but as spatial products of deregulated markets and speculative capital. Governance fragmented. Infrastructure was often privatized or outsourced. As Joel Garreau’s 1991 book Edge City demonstrates, a place like Tysons Corner, Virginia — a highway-bound, developer-led edge city — embodied this shift: planned by commerce, not civic vision. A decade later, planners tried to retrofit that vision — adding transit, density, and walkability — but progress has been uneven, with car infrastructure still shaping much of daily life.

This regime aligned with the rise of financial abstraction and logistical optimization. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman argue in Underground Empire, digital finance extended global capitalism’s reach by creating a networked infrastructure that allowed capital to move seamlessly across borders, largely outside the control of democratic institutions. Cities and regions increasingly contorted themselves to host these flows — rebranding, rezoning, and reconfiguring their form to attract global liquidity.

At the same time, as historian Quinn Slobodian notes, globalism was not simply about market liberalization but about insulating capital from democratic constraint. This logic played out spatially through the proliferation of privatized enclaves, special jurisdictions, and free trade zones — spaces engineered to remain separate from public oversight while remaining plugged into global markets.

In metro cores, this led to vertical Central Business Districts, securitized plazas, and speculative towers. In the suburbs and exurbs, it encouraged the low-density, car-dependent landscapes that still propagate. It’s still packaged as freedom but built on exclusion. In rural zones, the same logic produces logistics hubs, monoculture farms, and fractured small towns caught precariously between extraction and abandonment.

SEDIMENT AND SENTIMENT

What has emerged in the U.S., and many other countries, is a fragmented patchwork: privatized downtowns, disconnected suburbs, branded exurbs, and digitally tethered hinterlands…often with tax advantages. All governed by the same regime, but expressed through vastly different forms.

We’re in a regime that promised flexibility, innovation, and shared global prosperity — a future shaped by open markets, technological dynamism, and spatial freedom. But that promise is fraying. Ecological and meteorological breakdown, housing instability, and institutional exhaustion are revealing the deep limits of this model.

The cracks are widening. The pandemic scrambled commuting rhythms and retail flows that reverberate to this day. Climate stress reshapes assumptions about where and how to build. Platforms restructure access to space as AI wiggles its way into every corner. Through it all, the legitimacy of traditional planning models, even established forms of governing, weakens.

Some historians may call this an interregnum — a space between dominant systems, where the old still governs in form, but its power to convince has faded. The term comes from political theory, describing those in-between moments when no single order fully holds. It's a fitting word for times like these, when spatial logic lingers physically but loses meaning conceptually.

The dominant spatial logic remains etched in roads, zoning codes, and skylines — but its conceptual scaffolding is weakening. Whether seen as structural-demographic strain or spatial realignment, this is a moment of uncertainty.

The systems that once structured urban life — zoning codes, master plans, market forecasts — may no longer provide a stable map. And that’s okay. Interregnums, as political theorist Christopher Hobson reminds us, aren’t just voids between orders — they are revealing. Moments when the cracks in dominant systems allow us to see what had been taken for granted. They offer space to reflect, to experiment, and to reimagine.

Maybe what comes next is less of a plan and more of a posture — an attitude of attentiveness, humility, and care. As they advise when getting sucked out to sea by a rip tide: best remain calm and let it spit you out where it may than try to fight it.

Especially given natural laws of scale theory suggests these urban rhythms are accelerating and their transitions are harder to anticipate. Change may not unfold through neat stages, but arrive suddenly, triggered by thresholds and tipping points. Like unsuspectingly floating in the warm waters of a calm slack tide, nothing appears that different until rip tide just below the surface reveals everything is.

In that sense, this drifting moment is not just prelude — it is transformation in motion. Cities have always adapted under pressure — sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly. But they rarely begin anew. Roman grids still anchor cities from London to Barcelona. Medieval networks persist beneath tourist maps and tangled streets. Haussmann’s boulevards remain etched across Paris, shaping flows of traffic and capital. These aren’t ghosts — they’re framing. Living sediment.

Today’s uncertainty is no different. It may feel like a void, but it’s not empty. It’s layered. Transitions build on remnants, repurposing forms even as their meanings shift. Parcel lines, zoning overlays, server farms, and setback requirements — these are tomorrow’s layered manuscripts — palimpsests.

But it's not just physical traces we inherit. Cities also carry conceptual ones — ideas like growth, public good, infrastructure, or progress that were forged under earlier regimes.

As historian Elias Palti reminds us, concepts are not fixed. They are contingent, born in conflict, and reshaped in uncertainty. In moments like this, even the categories we use to interpret urban life begin to shift. The city, then, is not just a built form — it's a field of meaning. And in the cracks of the old, new frameworks begin to take shape. The work now is not only to build differently, but to think differently too.

REFERENCES

Dilke, O. A. W. (1985). Greek and Roman Maps. Cornell University Press.

Boeing, Geoff. (2019). “Spatial Information and the Legibility of Urban Form.” Journal of Planning Education and Research, 39(2), 208–220.

Conzen, M. R. G. (1960). “Alnwick, Northumberland: A Study in Town Plan Analysis.” Institute of British Geographers Publication.

Moudon, Anne Vernez. (1997). “Urban Morphology as an Emerging Interdisciplinary Field.” Urban Morphology, 1(1), 3–10.

Smith, Michael E. (2007). “Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities: A New Approach to Ancient Urban Planning.” Journal of Planning History, 6(1), 3–47.

West, Geoffrey. (2017). Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies. Penguin Press.

Turchin, Peter. (2016). Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History. Beresta Books.

Garreau, Joel. (1991). Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. Doubleday.

Farrell, Henry, & Newman, Abraham. (2023). Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy. Henry Holt.

Slobodian, Quinn. (2023). Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. Metropolitan Books.

Hobson, Christopher. (2015). The Rise of Democracy: Revolution, War and Transformations in International Politics since 1776. Edinburgh University Press.

Palti, Elias José. (2020). An Archaeology of the Political: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. Columbia University Press.

Hello Interactors,

Spring at Interplace brings a shift to mapping, GIS, and urban design. While talk of industrial revival stirs nostalgia — steel mills, union jobs, bustling Main Streets — the reality on the ground is different: warehouses, data centers, vertical suburbs, and last-mile depots. Less Rosy the Riveter, more Ada Lovelace. Our cities are being shaped accordingly — optimized not for community, but for logistics.

FROM STOREFRONTS TO STEEL DOORS

Let’s start with these two charts recently shared by the historian of global finance and power Adam Tooze at Chartbook. One shows Amazon passing Walmart in quarterly sales for the first time. The other shows a steadily declining drop in plans for small business capital expenditure. Confidence shot up upon the election of Trump, but dropped suddenly when tariff talks trumped tax tempering. Together, these charts paint a picture: control over how people buy, build, and shape space is shifting — fast.

It all starts quietly. A parking lot gets fenced off. Trucks show up. Maybe the old strip mall disappears overnight. A few months later, there’s a low, gray building with no windows. No grand opening. Just a stream of delivery vans pulling in and out.

This isn’t just a new kind of facility — it’s a new kind of urban and suburban logic.

Platform logistics has rewritten the rules of space. Where cities were once shaped by factories and storefronts, now they’re shaped by fulfillment timelines, routing algorithms, and the need to move goods faster than planning commissions can meet.

In the past, small businesses were physical anchors. They invested in place. They influenced how neighborhoods looked, felt, and functioned. But when capital expenditures from local firms drop — as that second chart shows — their power to shape the block goes with it.

What fills the vacuum is logistics. And it doesn’t negotiate like the actors it replaces.

This isn’t just a retail story. It’s a story about agency — who gets to decide what a place is for. When small businesses cut back on investment, it’s not just the storefront that disappears. So does the capacity to influence a block, a street, a community. Local business owners don’t just sell goods — they co-create neighborhoods. They choose where to open, how to hire, how to design, and what kind of social space their business offers. All of that is a form of micro-planning — planning from below. France, as one example, subsidizes these co-created neighborhoods in Paris to insure they uphold the romantic image of a Parisian boulevard.

But without subsidies, these actors are disappearing. And in the vacuum, big brands and logistics move in. Not softly, either. Amazon alone added hundreds of logistics facilities to U.S. land in the past five years. Data centers compete for this land. Meta recently announced a four million square foot facility in Richland Parish, Louisiana. It will be their largest data center in the world.

These buildings are a new kind of mall. They’re massive, quiet, windowless buildings that optimize for speed, not presence. This is what researchers call logistics urbanization — a land use logic where space is valued not for what people can do in it, but for how efficiently packages and data can pass through it.

The shift is structural. It remakes how land is zoned, how roads are used, and how people move — and it does so at a scale that outpaces most municipal planning timelines. That’s not just a market change. It’s a change in governance. Because planners? Mayors? Even state reps? They're not steering anymore. They're reacting.

City managers once had tools to shape growth — zoning, permitting, community input. But logistics and tech giants don’t negotiate like developers. They come with pre-designed footprints and expectations. If a city doesn’t offer fast approval, industrial zoning, and tax breaks, they’ll skip to the next one. And often, they won’t even say why. Economists studying these state and local business tax incentives say these serve as the “primary place-based policy in the United States.”

It forces a kind of economic speed dating. I see it in my own area as local governments vie for the attention (and revenue) of would-be high-tech suitors. But it can be quiet, as one report suggests:

“This first stage of logistical urbanization goes largely unnoticed insofar as the construction of a warehouse in an existing industrial zone rarely raises significant political issues.”(2)

This isn’t just in major cities. Across the U.S., cities are bending their long-term plans to chase short-term fulfillment deals. Even rural local governments routinely waive design standards and sidestep public input to accommodate warehouse and tech siting — because saying no can feel like missing out on tax revenue, jobs, or political wins.(2)

What was once a dynamic choreography of land use and local voices becomes something flatter: a data pipeline.

It isn’t all bad. Fulfillment hubs closer to homes mean fewer trucks, shorter trips, and lower emissions. Data centers crunching billions of bits is better than a PC whirring under the desk of every home. There is a scale and sustainability case to be made.

But logistic liquidity doesn’t equal optimistic livability. It doesn’t account for what’s lost when civic agency fades, or when a city works better for packages than for people. You can optimize flow — and still degrade life.

That’s what those two charts at the beginning really show. Not just an economic shift, but a spatial one. From many small decisions to a few massive ones. From storefronts and civic input to corporate site selection and zoning flips. From a lived city to a delivered one.

Which brings us to the next shape in this story — not the warehouse, but the mid-rise. Not the loading dock, but the key-fob lobby. Different function. Same logic.

HIGH-RISE, LOW TOUCHYou’ve seen them. The sleek new apartment buildings with names like The Foundry or Parc25. A yoga room, a roof deck, and an app for letting in your dog walker. “Mixed-use,” they say — but it’s mostly private use stacked vertically.

It’s much needed housing, for sure. But these aren't neighborhoods. They're private bunkers with balconies.

Yes, they’re more dense than suburban cul-de-sacs. Yes, they’re more energy-efficient than sprawl. But for all their square footage and amenity spaces, they often feel more like vertical suburbs — inward-facing, highly managed, and oddly disconnected from the street.

The ground floors are usually glazed over with placeholder retail: maybe a Starbucks, a Subway, or nothing at all…often vacant with only For Lease signs. Residents rarely linger. Packages arrive faster than neighbors can introduce themselves. There’s a gym to bench press, but no public bench or egress. You’re close to hundreds of people — and yet rarely bump into anyone you didn’t schedule.

That’s not a design flaw. That’s the point.

These buildings are part of a new typology — one that synchronizes perfectly with a platform lifestyle. Residents work remote. Order in. Socialize through screens. The architecture doesn’t foster interaction because interaction isn’t the product. Efficiency is.

Call it fulfillment housing — apartments designed to plug into an economy that favors logistics and metrics, not civic social fabrics. They’re located near tech centers, distribution hubs, and delivery corridors, and sometimes libraries or parks outdoors. What matters is access to bandwidth and smooth entry for Amazon and Door Dash.

And it’s not just what you see on the block. Behind the scenes, cities are quietly reengineering themselves to connect these structures to the digital twins — warehouses and data centers. Tucked into nearby low-tax exurbs or industrial zones, together they help reshape land use, strain energy grids, and anchor the platform economy.

They’re infrastructure for a new kind of urban life — one where presence is optional and connection to the cloud is more important than to the crowd.

Even the public spaces inside these buildings — co-working lounges, shared kitchens, “community rooms” — are behind fobs, passwords, and management policies. Sociologists have called this the anticommons: everything looks shared, but very little actually is. It's curated collectivity, not true community.

And it's not just isolation — it’s predictability. These developments are built to minimize risk, noise, conflict, friction. Which is also to say: they’re built to minimize surprise. The kind of surprise that once made cities exciting. The kind that made them social.

Some urban scholars describe these spaces as part of a broader “ghost urbanism” — a city where density exists without depth. Where interaction is optional. Where proximity is engineered, but intimacy is not. You can be surrounded by life and still feel like you're buffering.

The irony is these buildings often check every sustainability box. They’re LEED-certified. Near transit. Built up, not out. From a local emissions standpoint, they beat the ‘burbs’. But their occupant’s consumption, waste, and travel habits can create more pollution than homebody suburbanites. And from a civic standpoint — the standpoint of belonging, encounter, spontaneity — they’re often just as empty.

And so we arrive at a strange truth: a city can be efficient, dense, even walkable — and still feel ghosted. Because what we’ve optimized for isn’t connection. It’s delivery — to screens and doorsteps. What gets delivered to fulfillment housing may be frictionless, but it’s rarely fulfilling.

DRONES, DOMICILES, AND DISCONNECTIONI admit there’s a nostalgia for old-world neighborhoods as strong as nostalgia for industrial cities of the past. Neighborhoods where you may run into people at the mailbox. Asking someone in the post office line where they got their haircut. Sitting on the porch, just waitin’ on a friend. We used to talk about killing time, now we have apps to optimize it.

It’s not just because of screens. It’s also about what kinds of space we’ve built — and what kind of social activity they allow or even encourage.

In many suburbs and edge cities, the mix of logistics zones, tech centers, and residential enclaves creates what urban theorists might call a fragmented spatial syntax. That means the city no longer “reads” as a continuous experience. Streets don’t tell stories.

There’s no rhythm from house to corner store to café to school. Instead, you get jump cuts — a warehouse here, a cul-de-sac there, a fenced-in apartment complex down the road. These are spaces that serve different logics, designed for speed, security, or seclusion — but rarely for relation. The grammar of the neighborhood breaks down. You don’t stroll. You shuttle.

You drive past a warehouse. You park in a garage. You enter through a lobby. You take an elevator to your door. There’s no in-between space — no casual friction, no civic ambiguity, no shared air.

These patterns aren’t new. But they’re becoming the norm, not the exception. You can end up living in a place but never quite arrive.

Watch most anyone under 35. Connection increasingly happens online. Friendships form in Discord servers, not diners. Parties are planned via private stories, not porch swings. You don’t run into people. You ping them.

Sometimes that online connection does spill back into the real world — meetups, pop-ups, shared hobbies that break into public space. Discord, especially, has become a kind of digital third place, often leading to real-world hangouts. It’s social. Even communal. But it’s different. Fleeting. Ephemeral. Less rooted in place, more tied to platform and notifications.

None of this is inherently bad. But it does change the role of the neighborhood as we once knew it. It’s no longer the setting for shared experience — it’s just a backdrop for bandwidth. That shift is subtle, but it adds up. Without physical places for civic life, interactions gets offloaded to platforms. Connection becomes mediated, surveilled, and datafied. You don’t meet your neighbors. You follow them. You comment on their dog through a Ring alert.

This is what some sociologists call networked individualism — where people aren’t embedded in shared place-based systems, but orbit through overlapping digital networks. And when digital is the default, the city becomes a logistics problem. Something to move through efficiently…or not. It certainly is not something we’re building together. It’s imposed upon us.

And so we arrive at a kind of paradox:We’re more connected than ever. But we’re less entangled.We’re more visible. But we’re less involved.We’re living closer. But we don’t feel near.

The irony is the very platforms that hollow out public space are now where we go looking for belonging. TikTok isn’t just where we go to kill time — it’s where we go to feel seen. If your neighborhood doesn’t give you identity, the algorithm will.

Meanwhile, the built environment absorbs the logic of logistics. Warehouses and data centers at the edge. Mid-rises in the core. Streets engineered for the throughput of cars and delivery vans. Housing designed for containment. And social life increasingly routed elsewhere.

It all works. Until you want to feel something.

We’re social creatures, biologically wired for connection. Neuroscience shows that in-person social interactions regulate stress, build emotional resilience, and literally shape how our brains grow and adapt. It’s not just emotional. It’s neurochemical. Oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin — the chemistry of belonging — fire most powerfully through touch, eye contact, shared space. When those rituals shrink, so does our sense of meaning and safety.

And that’s what this is really about. Historically cities weren’t just containers for life. They’re catalysts for feeling. Without shared air, shared time, and shared friction, we lose more than convenience. We lose the chance to feel something real — to be part of a place, not just a node in a network.

What started with two charts ends here: a world where local agency, social spontaneity, and even emotion itself are being restructured by platform logic. The city still stands. The buildings are there. The people are home. But the feeling of place — the buzz, the bump, the belonging — gets harder to find.

That’s the cost of efficiency without empathy. Of optimizing everything but meaning.

And that’s the city we’re building. Unless we build something else. We’ll need agency. And not just for planners or developers. For people.

That’s the work ahead. Not to reject the platform city. But to remake it — into something more livable. More legible. More ours.

Hello Interactors,

It’s March Madness time in the states — baskets and brackets. I admit I'd grown a bit skeptical of how basketball evolved since my playing days. As it happens, I played against Caitlin Clark’s dad, from nearby Indianola, Iowa! Unlike the more dynamic Brent Clark, I was a small-town six-foot center, taught never to face the basket and dribble. After all, it was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s era of back-to-the-hoop skyhooks.

By college, however, I was playing pickup games in California, expected to handle the ball, shoot, dish, or drive. Just like Caitlin! The players around me were from East LA, not Indianola. Jordan was king, and basketball wasn't just evolving — it was about to explode. It’s geographic expansion and spatial dynamism has influenced how the game is played and I now know why I can’t get enough of it.

BOARDS, BOUNDARIES, AND BREAKING FREE

There was one gym in my hometown, Norwalk, Iowa, where I could dunk a basketball. The court was so cramped, there was a wall right behind the backboard. It was padded to ease post layup collisions! But when I timed it right, I could run and jump off the wall launching myself into the air and just high enough to dunk.

This old gym, a WPA project, was built in 1936 and was considered large at the time relative to population. It felt tiny by the time I played there during PE as a kid and on weekend pickup games as a teen — though it was still bigger than anything my parents experienced in rural Southern Iowa.

Basketball began as a sport of spatial limitation. James Naismith invented the game in 1891 — 45 years prior to my dunk gym’s grand opening. The game was invented to be played in a YMCA gym in Springfield, Massachusetts. This building dictated the court's dimensions, movement, and strategy.

Naismith’s original 13 rules emphasized order—no dribbling or running, only passing to move the ball. Early basketball wasn’t about individual drives but about constant movement within a network of passing lanes, with players anticipating and reacting in real time.

The original peach baskets were hung ten feet high on a balcony railing, with no backboards to guide shots. Misses bounced unpredictably, adding a vertical challenge and forcing players to think strategically about rebounding. Since the baskets had bottoms, play stopped after every score, giving teams time to reset and rethink.

Soon the bottom of the basket was removed, and a backboard was introduced — originally intended to prevent interference from spectators batting opponents shots from the balcony. The backboard fundamentally altered the physics of play. Now a player could more predictably bank shots of the backboard and invent new rebounding strategies.

When running while dribbling was introduced in the late 1890s, basketball’s rigid spatial structure loosened. No longer confined to static passing formations, the game became a fluid system of movement. These innovations transformed the court into an interactive spatial environment, where angles, trajectories, and rebounds became key tactical elements.

According to one theory of spatial reformulation through human behavior, structured spaces like basketball courts evolved not solely through top-down design, but through emergent patterns of use, where movement, interaction, and adaptation shape the space over time.

By the 1920s, the court itself expanded—not so much in physical size but in meaning. The game had spread beyond enclosed gymnasiums to urban playgrounds, colleges, and professional teams. Each expansion further evolved basketball’s spatial logic. Courts in New York’s streetball culture fostered a tight and improvisational style. Players developed elite dribbling skills and isolation plays to navigate crowded urban courts.

Meanwhile, Midwestern colleges, like Kansas where Naismith later coached, prioritized structured passing and zone defenses, reflecting the systemic, collective ethos of the game’s inventor. This period reflects microcosms of larger social and spatial behaviors. Basketball, shaped by its environment and the players who occupied it, mirrored the broader urbanization process. This set the stage for basketball’s transformation and expansion from national leagues to a truly global game.

The evolution of basketball, like the natural, constructed, and cultural landscapes surrounding it, was not static. Basketball was manifested through and embedded in cultural geography, where places evolve over time, accumulating layers of meaning and adaptation. The basketball court was no exception. The game burst forth, breaking boundaries. It branched into local leagues, between bustling cities, across regions, and globetrotted around the world.

TACTICS, TALENT, AND TRANSNATIONAL TIES

The year my ego-dunk gym was built, basketball debuted in the 1936 Olympics. That introduced the sport to the world. International play revealed contrasting styles, but it wasn’t until the 1990s and 2000s that basketball became a truly global game — shaped as much by European and African players as by American traditions.

Europe’s game focused on tactical structures and spatial awareness. In the U.S., basketball was built within a high school and college system, but European basketball mimicked their club-based soccer academy model. It still does. In countries like Serbia, Spain, and Lithuania, players are taught the game from a tactical perspective first — learning how to read defenses, move without the ball, and make the extra pass. European training emphasizes court vision, spacing, and passing precision, fostering playmakers wise to the spatial dynamics of the game.

Geography also plays a role in the development of European basketball. Countries like Serbia and Lithuania, which have a strong history of basketball but relatively smaller populations, could not rely on the sheer athletic depth of players like the U.S. Instead, they had to refine skill-based, systematic approaches to the game. This helped to ensure every player developed what is commonly called a “high basketball IQ”.

They also exhibit a high level of adaptability to team-oriented strategies. European basketball exemplifies this, blending the legacy of former socialist sports systems — which prioritized collective success — with contemporary, globalized styles. This structured process explains why European players like Nikola Jokić, Luka Dončić, and Giannis Antetokounmpo often arrive in the NBA with an advanced understanding of spacing, passing, and team concepts.

Jokić’s story is particularly revealing. Growing up in Serbia, he didn’t just play basketball — he played water polo, a sport that demands high-level spatial awareness and precision passing. In water polo, players must make quick decisions without being able to plant their feet or rely on sheer speed. Although, at seven feet tall, Jokić could probably sometimes touch the bottom of the pool!

These skills translated perfectly to his basketball game, where his passing ability, patience, and ability to manipulate defenders make him one of the most unique playmakers in NBA history. Unlike the American model, where taller players are often pushed into narrowly defined roles as rebounders and rim protectors (like I was), European training systems emphasize all-around skill development regardless of height.

This is why European big men like Jokić, Gasol, and Nowitzki excel both in the post and on the perimeter. Europe's emphasis on technical education and tactical intelligence fosters versatile skill sets before specialization. This adaptability has made fluid, multi-positional play the norm, prioritizing efficiency and team success over individual spectacle.

If European basketball emphasizes structure, the African basketball pipeline fosters adaptability and resilience — not as inherent traits, but as responses to developmental conditions. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu popularized this as habitus, where individuals unconsciously shape their skills based on their social and material environments. With limited formal infrastructure, many African players learn in fluid, improvised settings, refining their game through necessity rather than structured coaching.

Unlike U.S. and European players, who train in specialized systems from an early age, African players often develop versatile, positionless skill sets. Their careers frequently involve migrating through different leagues and coaching styles.

A great example is Joel Embiid. He didn’t start playing basketball until he was 15. Growing up in Cameroon, he initially played soccer and volleyball. These sports both contributed to his basketball development in unexpected ways. Soccer helped him refine elite footwork, now a required trait of the post game, while volleyball sharpened his timing and hand-eye coordination — hence his dominance as a shot-blocker and rebounder.

This multi-sport background is common among African players. Many grow up playing soccer first, which explains why so many African-born big men in the NBA — Hakeem Olajuwon, Serge Ibaka, and Pascal Siakam — have exceptional footwork and agility.

Like Jokić’s water polo background shaped his passing, soccer’s fluidity influences how many African players move on the court. Beyond skills, migration plays a key role, as many leave home as teens to develop in European leagues or U.S. schools. Constant adaptation to new environments builds mental resilience, essential for professional sports. (just ask Luka Dončić after suddenly being traded to the Lakers!)

Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai describes this as evolving ethnoscapes and how globalization drives global cultural flows. Practices, traditions, and ideas reshape both new destinations and home cultures as identities become blended across cultures and borders. African players embody this, adapting their games across multiple basketball traditions.

Look at Embiid moving from Cameroon to the U.S., adapting to American basketball while retaining his cross-sport instincts. Or Giannis Antetokounmpo, he was born in Greece to Nigerian parents, played soccer as a kid, and now blends European teamwork and fancy footwork with NBA strength training and explosiveness. Like the game itself, basketball is shifting as players from diverse domains deliver new directions, playing patterns, and philosophies.

CULTURE, COURTS, AND CROSSOVERS

The influx of European and African players has not only changed the NBA, it’s also changed how American players play overseas.

Sports psychologist Rainer Meisterjahn studied American players in foreign leagues, revealing struggles with structured European play and coaching. Initially frustrated by the lack of individual play and star focus, many later gained a broader understanding of the game. Their experience mirrors that of European and African players in the NBA, proving basketball is now a shared global culture.

While the NBA markets itself as an American product, its style, strategies, and talent pool are increasingly internationalized. The dominance of ball movement and tactical discipline coupled with versatility and adaptability have fundamentally reshaped how the game is played.

Media has help drive basketball’s global expansion. Sports media now amplifies international leagues, exposing fans (like me) to diverse playing styles. Rather than homogenizing, basketball evolves by merging influences, much like cultural exchanges that shaped jazz (another love of mine) or global cuisine (another love of mind) — blending styles while retaining its core.

The game is no longer dictated by how one country plays; it is an interwoven, adaptive sport, constantly changing in countless ways. The court’s boundaries may be tight, but borderless basketball has taken flight.

Basketball has always been a game of spatial negotiation. First confined to a small, hardwood court, it spilled out of walls to playgrounds, across rivalrous cross-town leagues, to the Laker-Celtic coastal battles of the 80s, and onto the global stage. Yet its true complexity is not just where it is played, but how it adapts. The game’s larger narrative is informed by the emergent behaviors and real-time spatial recalibration that happens every time it’s played.

Basketball operates as an interactive system where every movement creates new positional possibilities and reciprocal responses. Player interactions shape the game in real time, influencing both individual possessions—where spacing, passing, and movement constantly evolve — and the global basketball economy, where styles, strategies, and talent migration continuously reshape the sport.

On the court, players exist in a constant state of spatial adaptation, moving through a fluid network of shifting gaps, contested lanes, and open spaces. Every pass, cut, and screen forces a reaction, triggering an endless cycle of recalibration and emergence.

The most elite players — whether it’s Nikola Jokić manipulating defensive rotations with surgical passing or Giannis Antetokounmpo reshaping space in transition — don’t just react to the game; they anticipate and reshape the very structure of the court itself. This reflects the idea that space is not just occupied but actively redefined through movement and interaction, continuously shaped by dynamic engagement on and off the court.

This logic of adaptation extends to the community level where basketball interacts with urban geography, shaping and being shaped by its environment. Urban basketball courts function as micro-environments, where local styles of play emerge as reflections of city life and its unique spatial dynamics.

The compact, improvisational play of street courts in Lagos mirrors the spatial density of urban Africa, just as the systemic, team-first approach of European basketball reflects the structured environments of club academies in Spain, Serbia, and Lithuania. As the game expands, it doesn’t erase these identities — it integrates them. New forms of hybrid styles reflect decades-old forces of globalization.

Basketball’s global expansion mirrors the complex adaptive networks that form during the course of a game. Interconnected systems evolve through emergent interactions. And just as cities develop through shifting flows of people, resources, and ideas, basketball transforms as players, styles, and strategies circulate worldwide, continuously reshaping the game on the court and off.

The court may still be measured in feet and lines, but the game it contains — psychologically, socially, and geographically — moves beyond those boundaries. It flows with every fluent pass, each migrating mass, and every vibrant force that fuels its ever-evolving future.

REFERENCES

Hillier, B. (2012). Studying cities to learn about minds: Some possible implications of space syntax for spatial cognition. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design.

Naismith, J. (1941). Basketball: Its Origins and Development. University of Nebraska Press.

Baur, J. W. R., & Tynon, J. F. (2010). Small-scale urban nature parks: Why should we care? Leisure Sciences, Taylor & Francis.

Callaghan, J., Moore, E., & Simpson, J. (2018). Coordinated action, communication, and creativity in basketball in superdiversity. Language and Intercultural Communication, Taylor & Francis.

Meinig, D. W. (1979). The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays. Oxford University Press.

Andrews, D. L. (2018). The (Trans)National Basketball Association: American Commodity-Sign Culture and Global-Local Conjuncturalism.

Galeano, E. (2015). The Global Court: The Rise of International Basketball. Verso.

Ungruhe, C., & Agergaard, S. (2020). Cultural Transitions in Sport: The Migration of African Basketball Players to Europe. International Review for the Sociology of Sport

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press.

Meisterjahn, R. J. (2011). Everything Was Different: An Existential Phenomenological Investigation of U.S. Professional Basketball Players' Experiences Overseas.

Ramos, J., Lopes, R., & Araújo, D. (2018). Network dynamics in team sports: The influence of space and time in basketball. Journal of Human Kinetics.

Ribeiro, J., Silva, P., Duarte, R., Davids, K., & Araújo, D. (2019). Team sports performance analysis: A dynamical system approach. Sports Medicine.

Hello Interactors,

From election lies to climate denial, misinformation isn’t just about deception — it’s about making truth feel unknowable. Fact-checking can’t keep up, and trust in institutions is fading. If reality is up for debate, where does that leave us?

I wanted to explore this idea of “post-truth” and ways to move beyond it — not by enforcing truth from the top down, but by engaging in inquiry and open dialogue. I examine how truth doesn’t have to be imposed but continually rediscovered — shaped through questioning, testing, and refining what we know. If nothing feels certain, how do we rebuild trust in the process of knowing something is true?

THE SLOW SLIDE OF FACTUAL FOUNDATIONS

The term "post-truth" was first popularized in the 1990s but took off in 2016. That’s when Oxford Dictionaries named it their Word of the Year. Defined as “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, the term reflects a shift in how truth functions in public discourse.

Though the concept of truth manipulation is not new, post-truth represents a systemic weakening of shared standards for knowledge-making. Sadly, truth in the eyes of most of the public is no longer determined by factual verification but by ideological alignment and emotional resonance.

The erosion of truth infrastructure — once upheld by journalism, education, and government — has destabilized knowledge credibility. Mid-20th-century institutions like The New York Times and the National Science Foundation ensured rigorous verification. But with rising political polarization, digital misinformation, and distrust in authority, these institutions have lost their stabilizing role, leaving truth increasingly contested rather than collectively affirmed.

The mid-20th century exposed truth’s fragility as propaganda reshaped public perception. Nazi ideology co-opted esoteric myths like the Vril Society, a fictitious occult group inspired by the 1871 novel The Coming Race, which depicted a subterranean master race wielding a powerful life force called "Vril."

This myth fed into Nazi racial ideology and SS occult research, prioritizing myth over fact. Later, as German aviation advanced, the Vril myth evolved into UFO conspiracies, claiming secret Nazi technologies stemmed from extraterrestrial contact and Vril energy, fueling rumors of hidden Antarctic bases and breakaway civilizations.

Distorted truths have long justified extreme political action, demonstrating how knowledge control sustains authoritarianism. Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, Jewish-German intellectuals who fled the Nazis, later warned that even democracies are vulnerable to propaganda. Adorno (1951) analyzed how mass media manufactures consent, while Arendt (1972) showed how totalitarian regimes rewrite reality to maintain control.

Postwar skepticism, civil rights movements, and decolonization fueled academic critiques of traditional, biased historical narratives. By the late 20th century, universities embraced theories questioning the stability of truth, labeled postmodernist, critical, and constructivist.

Once considered a pillar of civilization, truth was reframed by French postmodernist philosophers Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard as a construct of power. Foucault argued institutions define truth to reinforce authority, while Baudrillard claimed modern society had replaced reality with media-driven illusions. While these ideas exposed existing power dynamics in academic institutions, they also fueled skepticism about objective truth — paving the way for today’s post-truth crisis.

Australian philosophy professor, Catherine (Cathy) Legg highlights how intellectual and cultural shifts led universities to question their neutrality, reinforcing postmodern critiques that foreground subjectivity, discourse, and power in shaping truth. Over time, this skepticism extended beyond academia, challenging whether any authority could claim objectivity without reinforcing existing power structures.

These efforts to deconstruct dominant narratives unintentionally legitimized radical relativism — the idea that all truths hold equal weight, regardless of evidence or logic. This opened the door for "alternative facts", now weaponized by propaganda. What began as a challenge to authoritarian knowledge structures within academia escaped its origins, eroding shared standards of truth. In the post-truth era, misinformation, ideological mythmaking, and conspiracy theories thrive by rejecting objective verification altogether.

Historian Naomi Oreskes describes "merchants of doubt" as corporate and political actors who manufacture uncertainty to obstruct policy and sustain truth relativism. By falsely equating expertise with opinion, they create the illusion of debate, delaying action on climate change, public health, and social inequities while eroding trust in science. In this landscape, any opinion can masquerade as fact, undermining those who dedicate their lives to truth-seeking.

PIXELS AND MYTHOLOGY SHAPE THE GEOGRAPHY

The erosion of truth infrastructures has accelerated with digital media, which both globalizes misinformation and reinforces localized silos of belief. This was evident during COVID-19, where false claims — such as vaccine microchips — spread widely but took deeper root in communities with preexisting distrust in institutions. While research confirms that misinformation spreads faster than facts, it’s still unclear if algorithmic amplification or deeper socio-political distrust are root causes.

This ideological shift is strongest in Eastern Europe and parts of the U.S., where institutional distrust and digital subcultures fuel esoteric nationalism. Post-Soviet propaganda, economic instability, and geopolitical tensions have revived alternative knowledge systems in Russia, Poland, and the Balkans, from Slavic paganism to the return of the Vril myth, now fused with the Save Europe movement — a digital blend of racial mysticism, ethnic nostalgia, and reactionary politics.

Above ☝️is a compilation of TikTok videos currently being pushed to my 21 year old son. They fuse ordinary, common, and recognizable pop culture imagery with Vril imagery (like UFO’s and stealth bombers) and esoteric racist nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and hyper-masculine mythologies.

A similar trend appears in post-industrial and rural America, where economic decline, government distrust, and cultural divides sustain conspiratorial thinking, religious fundamentalism, and hyper-masculine mythologies. The alt-right manosphere mirrors Eastern Europe’s Vril revival, with figures like Zyzz and Bronze Age Pervert offering visions of lost strength. Both Vril and Save Europe frame empowerment as a return to ethnic or esoteric power (Vril) or militant resistance to diversity (Save Europe), turning myth into a tool of political radicalization.

Climate change denial follows these localized patterns, where scientific consensus clashes with economic and cultural narratives. While misinformation spreads globally, belief adoption varies, shaped by economic hardship, institutional trust, and political identity.

In coal regions like Appalachia and Poland, skepticism stems from economic survival, with climate policies seen as elitist attacks on jobs. In rural Australia, extreme weather fuels conspiracies about government overreach rather than shifting attitudes toward climate action. Meanwhile, in coastal Louisiana and the Netherlands, where climate impacts are immediate and undeniable, denial is rarer, though myths persist, often deflecting blame from human causes.

Just as Vril revivalism, Save Europe, and the MAGA manosphere thrive on post-industrial uncertainty, climate misinformation can also flourish in economically vulnerable regions. Digital platforms fuel a worldview skewed, where scrolling myths and beliefs are spatially glued — a twisted take on 'think globally, act locally,' where fantasy folklore becomes fervent ideology.

FINDING TRUTH WITH FRACTURED FACTS…AND FRIENDS

The post-truth era has reshaped how we think about knowledge. The challenge isn’t just misinformation but growing distrust in expertise, institutions, and shared reality. In classrooms and research, traditional ways of proving truth often fail when personal belief outweighs evidence. Scholars and educators now seek new ways to communicate knowledge, moving beyond rigid certainty or radical relativism.

Professor Legg has turned to the work of 19th-century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, whose ideas about truth feel surprisingly relevant today. Peirce didn’t see truth as something fixed or final but as a process — something we work toward through questioning, testing, and refining our understanding over time.

His approach, known as pragmatism, emphasizes collaborative inquiry, self-correction, and fallibilism — the idea that no belief is ever beyond revision. In a time when facts are constantly challenged, Peirce’s philosophy offers not just a theory of truth, but a process for rebuilding trust in knowledge itself.

For those unfamiliar with Peirce and American pragmatism, a process that requires collaborating with truth deniers may seem not only unfun, but counterproductive. But research on deradicalization strategies suggests that confrontational debunking (a failed strategy Democrats continue to adhere to) often backfires. Lecturing skeptics only reinforces belief entrenchment.

In the early 1700’s Britain was embroiled in the War of Spanish Succession. Political factions spread blatant falsehoods through partisan newspapers. It prompted Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, to observe in The Art of Political Lying (1710) that

"Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired."

This is likely where we get the more familiar saying: you can't argue someone out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into. Swift’s critique of propaganda and public gullibility foreshadowed modern research on cognitive bias. People rarely abandon deeply held beliefs when confronted with facts.

Traditionally, truth is seen as either objectively discoverable (classical empiricism) — like physics — or constructed by discourse and power (postmodernism) — like the Lost Cause myth, which recast the Confederacy as noble rather than pro-slavery. It should be noted that traditional truth also comes about by paying for it. Scientific funding from private sources often dictates which research is legitimized. As Legg observes,

“Ironically, such epistemic assurance perhaps rendered educated folk in the modern era overly gullible to the written word as authority, and the resulting ‘fetishisation’ of texts in the education sector has arguably led to some of our current problems.”

Peirce, however, offered a different path:

truth is not a fixed thing, but an eventual process of consensus reached by a community of inquirers.

It turns out open-ended dialogue that challenges inconsistencies within a belief system is shown to be a more effective strategy.

This process requires time, scrutiny, and open dialogue. None of which are very popular these days! It should be no surprise that in today’s fractured knowledge-making landscape of passive acceptance of authority or unchecked personal belief, ideological silos reinforce institutional dogma or blatant misinformation. But Peirce’s ‘community of inquiry’ model suggests that truth can’t be lectured or bought but strengthened through collective reasoning and self-correction.

Legg embraces this model because it directly addresses why knowledge crises emerge and how they can be countered. The digital age has resulted in a world where beliefs are reinforced within isolated networks rather than tested against broader inquiry. Trump or Musk can tweet fake news and it spreads to millions around the world instantaneously.

During Trump’s 2016 campaign, false claims that Pope Francis endorsed him spread faster than legitimate news. Misinformation, revisionist history, and esoteric nationalism thrive in these unchecked spaces.

Legg’s approach to critical thinking education follows Peirce’s philosophy of inquiry. She helps students see knowledge not as fixed truths but as a network of interwoven, evolving understandings — what Peirce called an epistemic cable made up of many small but interconnected fibers. Rather than viewing the flood of online information as overwhelming or deceptive, she encourages students to see it as a resource to be navigated with the right tools and the right intent.

To make this practical, she introduces fact-checking strategies used by professionals, teaching students to ask three key questions when evaluating an online source:

* Who is behind this information? (Identifying the author’s credibility and possible biases)

* What is the evidence for their claims? (Assessing whether their argument is supported by verifiable facts)

* What do other sources say about these claims? (Cross-referencing to see if the information holds up in a broader context)

By practicing these habits, students learn to engage critically with digital content. It strengthens their ability to distinguish reliable knowledge from misinformation rather than simply memorizing facts. It also meets them where they are without judgement of whatever beliefs they may hold at the time of inquiry.

If post-truth misinformation reflects a shift in how we construct knowledge, can we ever return to a shared trust in truth — or even a shared reality? As institutional trust erodes, fueled by academic relativism, digital misinformation, and ideological silos, myths like climate denial and Vril revivalism take hold where skepticism runs deep. Digital platforms don’t just spread misinformation; they shape belief systems, reinforcing global echo chambers.

But is truth lost, or just contested? Peirce saw truth as a process, built through inquiry and self-correction. Legg extends this, arguing that fact-checking alone won’t solve post-truth; instead, we need a culture of questioning — where people test their own beliefs rather than being told what’s right or wrong.

I won’t pretend to have the answer. You can tell by my bibliography that I’m a fan of classical empiricism. But I’m also a pragmatic interactionist who believes knowledge is refined through collaborative inquiry. I believe, as Legg does, that to move beyond post-truth isn’t about the impossible mission of defeating misinformation — it’s about making truth-seeking more compelling than belief. Maybe even fun.

What do you think?

Hello Interactors,

Since his return to office, Trump hasn’t just taken power — he’s trying to reshape the landscape. From border crackdowns and sick real estate fantasies to federal purges by strongman stooges, his policies don’t just enforce control — they seek to redraw the lines of democracy itself.

Strongmen don’t wait for crises — they create them. They attempt to manipulate institutions, geographies, and public trust until there’s so much confusion it makes anything they do to ease it acceptable. I dug into how authoritarianism thrives on instability and contemplate some ways to alter it.

DEMAND DOMINATION THROUGH DOUBT AND DISORDER

I was once a strongman, or at least I could summon one when needed. I could override the part of my brain that protects me from injury and tap into something primal — something that made me feel invincible. A surge of adrenaline convinced my brain I could not only hurl myself into another person but through them, painlessly.

I played rugby. What I experienced is known as Berserker State, or berserkergang—a shift in brain activity and hormone surges that cause extreme arousal and altered perception. Rugby is a sport where people spend over an hour pretending they’re not hurt. That’s in contrast to soccer, where people spend over an hour pretending they are. 😬 But while rugby is violent, it’s not played with violent intent. Players may be tough, but they don’t seek to hurt each other — at least, not permanently.

That’s in stark contrast to figures like Trump or the new FBI deputy director, Dan Bongino — men who cultivate a different kind of "strongman" identity. They like to wield aggression not as a tool for sport, but as a weapon against others. Bongino is a tough guy on steroids — literally, or at least he acts like it. His wide-eyed rage on his online show suggests a performance of strength, a constant need to assert dominance.

But people like Trump and Bongino weren’t born this way; they were molded by insecurity, myths, and a long history of toxic masculinity.

Psychologist Brian Lowery challenges the idea that identity is something stable and fixed. Instead, in his 2023 book, Selfless, he argues that identity is socially constructed—shaped by interactions, cultural narratives, and institutions. In times of stability, people feel secure in who they are. But when faced with economic instability, cultural shifts, or political crises, identity becomes fragile and unstable. Some people lash out. Some, like myself on the rugby field, may go berserk. Others — like Trump and Bongino — build their entire personas around control. In the end, it’s just bluster, bravado, because they behave like a jerk.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman takes this argument further, showing how growing inequality and precarity drive people toward authoritarianism and fundamentalism. When the world feels chaotic, strongman leaders and rigid ideologies provide the comforting illusion of order and control — even if they fail to address the root problems. Bauman warns that these leaders scapegoat the vulnerable, suppress truth, and mystify the real causes of inequality — all while presenting themselves as the only force capable of restoring stability.

But authoritarianism isn’t just about psychology — it’s also shaped by real-world conditions. Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues that authoritarian rule isn’t just about individual strongmen — it’s embedded in systems that use violence and spatial control to uphold racial and class hierarchies. Identity insecurity isn’t just a feeling; it’s a reaction to real structural forces like economic displacement, aggressive policing, and militarized borders. Strongman leaders don’t just exploit insecurity — they thrive where instability is built into everyday life.

In 2020 Journalist Shane Burley examined how white nationalist groups tap into these anxieties, embedding themselves in mainstream politics by offering disaffected individuals a sense of belonging through authoritarian ideologies. The Alt-Right doesn’t just recruit based on political beliefs — it recruits based on a fear of displacement and loss. Authoritarianism isn’t just ideological; it emerges from instability, reinforced by systems of control like aggressive policing and restrictive immigration policies.

Strongmen don’t just seize on fear — they stoke, sculpt, and steer it, spinning crises into control. Through media manipulation and crisis narratives, they mold public perception and then mandate obedience.

SPINNING STRIFE INTO SUPREMACY

Once fear is felt — it can be harnessed. Political elites capitalize on uncertainty, framing crises in ways that make authoritarian measures seem necessary. Feldman & Stenner, political psychologists specializing in the study of authoritarianism and ideological behavior, argue that authoritarian attitudes intensify when people perceive instability, whether real or exaggerated.

Their research highlights how threat perception — not just personal ideology — activates authoritarian tendencies, leading individuals to prioritize conformity, obedience, and strong leadership in times of social or political uncertainty. By defining threats and controlling the narrative, leaders turn uncertainty into urgency, making repression feel not only justified but necessary.

Crisis narratives work because they reshape reality. Right-wing populists blame immigrants, global elites, and cultural change, painting national identity as under siege. Meanwhile, progressive authoritarian movements often frame reactionary forces, corporate elites, and slow-moving institutions as existential threats, demanding immediate, drastic action.

Mikhail Bakunin, a 19th-century anarchist and revolutionary who was both a friend and fierce critic of Karl Marx, warned that revolutionary leaders who claim to act in the people’s name often end up seeking power for themselves. He accused Marx and Engels of designing a system where they, not the workers, would ultimately rule. In 1873 he wrote,

“The Marxists maintain that only a dictatorship—their dictatorship, of course—can create the will of the people, while our answer to them is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but to perpetuate itself.”

Both right and left-wing authoritarianism use fear to rally supporters, silence opposition, and create a sense of emergency where only their leadership can restore order.

Media control plays a key role in reinforcing these crisis narratives. In 2019, it was exposed how Trump advisor Stephen Miller deliberately inserted white nationalist rhetoric into U.S. policy. He used far-right media to amplify unverified crime statistics and frame immigration as a civilizational threat. This wasn’t just ideological posturing — it was a calculated effort to embed fear into governance, making xenophobia a political weapon.

But crisis narratives don’t just shape perception; they translate into policy. ICE raids and the Muslim ban turned entire communities into symbols of danger, reinforcing the idea that certain groups are inherent threats. Militarized borders, aggressive policing, and detention centers didn’t just enforce laws — they reinforced the notion that outsiders must be feared. The state stands as fear’s fierce enforcer, embedding oppression in order and power in place.

This dual strategy — controlling the narrative and enforcing it through space — creates a self-reinforcing cycle. When people see more policing in "dangerous" areas, they assume the danger was real all along. When borders become militarized, they don’t just frame outsiders as threats — they enforce state power over Indigenous lands.

The U.S. foundation stands on the reservation system, the suppression of the American Indian Movement, and the crackdown on Standing Rock from 1890 to 2016. This is how authoritarianism isn’t just imposed — it’s sustained. Fear becomes a governing principle, and governance becomes a system of control. Crises are never solved — only maligned, magnified, or momentarily managed.

BREAKING THE CYCLE OF CRISIS AND CONTROL

Authoritarianism feeds on instability. It thrives in moments of crisis, when people feel insecure about their place in society, fearful of rapid change, and unsure of who to trust. As historian Alexandra Minna Stern shows in Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate, far-right groups have mainstreamed authoritarian rhetoric, repackaging extremism as populist conservatism and framing strongman rule as the only defense against societal collapse. But authoritarianism is not confined to one ideology. Different movements, across the political spectrum, use crisis narratives to justify coercion.

Some frame threats as coming from the outside, while others see danger emerging from within. But the burden of these crisis narratives is not evenly distributed — the historically marginalized powerless pay the price when panic fuels policy.

* Nationalist movements depict outsiders — immigrants, racial minorities, queer communities, and religious groups — as existential threats. Border militarization, mass surveillance, and authoritarian crackdowns are justified as necessary to preserve “national security” and maintain cultural homogeneity. These policies disproportionately harm those already marginalized. They deepen structural inequalities through exclusion, criminalization, and violence.

* Radical movements on the left often focus on reactionary forces — corporations, conservative institutions, or privileged elites — as dangers to progress. While calls for justice are vital, ideological purity tests and coercion can sometimes alienate marginalized activists. People of color, queer individuals, and various other members the poor working class are forced to navigate rigid expectations. They’re not always accepted or embraced for their own lived experience and material struggles.

While both reactionary nationalism and ideological rigidity can rely on crisis-driven politics to justify control, the scale, methods, and impact differ. Authoritarianism, in any form, thrives by exploiting social fractures — especially those along lines of race, class, and identity. Resisting this requires dismantling not just strongmen but the very conditions that allow these crisis narratives to justify exclusion and repression in the first place.

Instead of centering political resistance around individual leaders, what if democratic societies addressed the root causes that make authoritarianism attractive or inevitable. That would require focusing on solutions that break the cycle of crisis-driven politics.

We need pluralistic national identities that aren’t rooted in exclusionary fears.

I can imagine a stable democracy that creates belonging without requiring an enemy. But too often, we’ve seen reactionary nationalism frame identity through exclusion —out-groups are viewed as threats to be feared. At the same time, skewed ideological purity tests along a spectrum of progressive movements can create new kinds of exclusion, pushing aside marginalized activists who don’t perfectly conform to rigid political expectations — a fate and flaw of America’s binary governmental system.

What if, instead, national identity was rooted in civic participation, shared democratic values, and social trust? Imagine a society where people feel secure in their belonging — where they are less susceptible to politicians or movements that demand fear-based loyalty.

The weakening of democratic institutions allows more authoritarianism to creep in under the guise of stability. Like DOGE. We’ve seen it happen elsewhere: courts stacked with political loyalists, journalists jailed or silenced, maps gerrymandered, or elections rigged under the pretense of "security."

When institutions are compromised, strongmen don’t need to overthrow democracy outright with tanks in the streets and MAGA banners unfurled at the White House — they dismantle it from within. Hitler’s rise in 1933 didn’t begin with a coup but with the erosion of institutional checks — using crises like the Reichstag Fire to justify emergency powers, purging opposition, and bending the judiciary to his will. Strengthening judicial independence, free media, and election protections ensures that bad political actors — and their enablers — can’t weaponize fear to dismantle democratic norms.

Economic insecurity is one of authoritarianism’s most powerful recruiting tools. When people can’t afford rent, healthcare, or basic necessities, the appeal of a leader who promises order — no matter the belief or the cost — grows stronger. But anyone who’s ever tried to grow a plant knows that real long term security for growth comes not from repression but from investment. Here are a few examples:

* Denmark’s “flexicurity” model protects workers by ensuring job loss doesn’t mean desperation, balancing labor rights with economic adaptability.

* Finland’s universal basic income pilot tested how direct financial support can reduce crisis-driven populism.

* Portugal’s harm reduction approach to drug policy shows that community-driven safety programs reduce crime more effectively than militarized policing.

We can’t afford to keep fighting authoritarianism after it takes hold — we must build a society where it has no room to grow. The best barrier to crisis-fueled control is building a world where crisis takes no toll. When fear isn’t fed and panic isn’t planned, strongmen lose their grip on the land.

Rugby, like any sport, taught me that rules aren’t just constraints — they’re what make the game possible. Without them, it’s not a sport, just a free-for-all where the strongest dominate. But rules alone aren’t enough. The game works because players believe in them, because they trust that everyone is playing under the same conditions, that power has limits, and that fairness is enforced.

Democracy isn’t so different. It’s not just laws or institutions that hold it together — it’s the shared belief that the system works well enough to be worth preserving. But what happens when people stop believing that? We can see what happens when people think (or know) the game is rigged, that the rules only serve the powerful, or that breaking them is the only way to win.

That’s when authoritarianism thrives. It doesn’t rise because people love oppression — it rises because people fear disorder more than they fear control. When strongmen present themselves as the only ones who can restore stability, they’re assuming we’re willing to sacrifice a few freedoms along the way.

The strongman’s power isn’t just enforced by words — it’s mapped onto other countries, cities, borders, and institutions. As Indigenous and Black resistance scholars reminds us, control isn’t only about who governs — it’s about who is allowed to move, who is confined, and whose communities are turned into sites of surveillance and fear. When authoritarian leaders redraw the boundaries of belonging, they don’t just control laws; they control the ground people stand on.

So, the real question isn’t just how to resist authoritarianism. It’s how to ensure people don’t give up on the game altogether. How do we build a society where order doesn’t require coercion, and freedom doesn’t lead to chaos?

There’s obviously no single answer, but maybe it starts with refusing to let fear dictate our choices. Democracy shouldn't be about choosing between control and collapse — it should be about maintaining the fragile, necessary balance between them. And that balance isn’t automatic. It’s something we have to constantly pr

minnotect, defend, and — when needed — rebuild, brick by brick, border by border, rule by rule…without being a jerk or going berserk.

Hello Interactors,

The land on which we stand can demand where we politically stand. But what happens when that land shifts, shakes, burns or blows away? Recent Southern U.S. floods displaced thousands. Disasters don’t just destroy — they can redraw political lines.

With second round of Trumpster fires deepening divides, geography and ideology matter more than ever. As climate crises, economic upheaval, and political struggles intensify, the question isn’t just where people live — but what they’ll fight for. History shows that when the ground shifts, so does power.

SHIFTING LANDS AND LOYALTIES

From fertile fields to frenzied financial hubs, geography molds the mindset of the masses. Where people live shapes what they fear, fight for, and find familiar. Farmers in the Great Plains worry about wheat yields and water rights, while coastal city dwellers debate rent control and rising tides.

But political geography isn’t just about climate and crops — it’s about power, privilege, and the collective making of place. No space is neutral; as evidenced by the abrupt renaming of an entire gulf. History and the present are filled with examples of territories being carved and controlled, gerrymandered, and gentrified.

The recent floods in the South serve as a stark reminder of how geography has historically upended political identity. Especially during Black History Month. The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was a devastating deluge that displaced thousands of Black sharecroppers, washing away not only homes but also old political loyalties.

The Republican-controlled federal government, led by President Calvin Coolidge, took a hands-off approach, refusing to allocate federal aid and instead relying on Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to coordinate relief efforts through the Red Cross.

However, aid distribution was dominated by white Southern landowners, who withheld resources from Black communities. They forced many into quasi-forced labor camps under the guise of relief. Hoover, later touting his role in disaster response to win the 1928 presidency, was ultimately seen by many Black voters as complicit in their mistreatment.

This failure accelerated Black voters’ gradual shift away from the Republican Party, a realignment that would deepen under FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s. The flood was not just a natural disaster — it was a political reckoning. Who received help and who was abandoned shaped party loyalties for generations to come.

Yet, history proves that political realignments are rarely one-sided or uniform. While Black voters were shifting toward the Democratic Party, another Southern political identity crisis was brewing. Southern white conservatives — longtime Democrats due to the party’s historical ties to segregation — began their own political migration in the mid-to-late 20th century.

The Civil Rights Movement and desegregation led many white Southerners to feel alienated from the Democratic Party, pushing them toward what was once unthinkable — the Republican Party. This shift cemented a racialized realignment, with Black voters backing Democrats and Southern white conservatives reshaping the GOP into today’s right-wing stronghold.

Both political shifts were responses to crisis — one to environmental disaster and racial exclusion, the other to social change and perceived status loss. The fact that geography remained constant but political identities flipped highlights a crucial truth: where people live matters, but how they respond to change depends on identity, history, and power.

The political path of any place isn’t just shaped by its space — it’s who claims the land, who crafts the law, and who casts a crisis as chaos or cause.

SORTED, SEPARATED, AND STUCK

Geography shapes political identity but doesn’t dictate it. Human agency, economics, and psychology influence where people live and how they vote. Over time, self-sorting creates ideological enclaves, deepening polarization instead of fostering realignment.

Psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner’s Social Identity Theory explains why people align with in-groups and see out-groups as threats, as identity shapes self-esteem and belonging. This leads to in-group favoritism, out-group bias, and polarization, especially when power or resources feel like a zero-sum game.

But Optimal Distinctiveness Theory (ODT) adds another layer to this understanding. Developed by Marilynn Brewer, building on Social Identity Theory, ODT proposes that people need to feel a sense of belonging to a group while also maintaining individuality within it.

This balancing act between assimilation and uniqueness explains why political identities are not just about partisanship — they encompass culture, lifestyle, and even geography. Individuals self-sort both by community and distinction within their chosen political and social environments.

Modern political sorting has made partisanship an all-encompassing identity. It aligns with race, religion, and even consumer habits. This process has been amplified by geography, as people increasingly move to communities where they feel they “fit in” while also distinguishing themselves within their political faction.

ODT helps explain why urban progressives might distinguish themselves through niche ideological positions (e.g., Socialists in Brooklyn vs. Tech libertarians in San Francisco), while rural conservatives in swing states may lean into Christian nationalism or libertarianism (e.g. Christian nationalists in rural Pennsylvania vs. Tea Party libertarians in rural Wisconsin).

American political power is unevenly distributed. The Senate majority can be won with just 17% of the population, and the Electoral College inflates rural influence. The 10 smallest states hold 3% of the population but 20% of Senate seats and 6% of electoral votes. This imbalance amplifies rural conservative power, giving certain regions outsized political sway.

ODT also helps explain why political polarization has deepened over time rather than softened with economic shifts. Historically, political realignments occurred when crisis moments forced cross-cutting alliances — like when poor white and Black farmers joined forces during the Populist Movement of the 1890s to challenge banking and railroad monopolies.

However, these coalitions often fell apart due to racial and regional pressures. The Populist Party was ultimately absorbed into the Democratic Party’s white Southern wing, leaving Black farmers politically stranded. They still are. Around 1890 Black farmers made up an estimated 14% of farmers in America, now it’s fewer than 2% due to racist lending practices, discriminatory federal policies, land dispossession, and systemic barriers to credit and resources.

Today, realignments are rare because identity-based partisanship satisfies both belonging and distinctiveness (ODT). Rural conservatives see themselves not just as Republicans but as defenders of a distinct way of life, reinforcing identity through regional pride, gun rights, and religion. Urban liberals, meanwhile, develop sub-identities — progressives, moderates, democratic socialists — within the broader Democratic Party. This illusion of uniformity masks deep internal ideological divides.

This sorting shapes where people live, what they watch, and which policies they support. The false consensus effect deepens political silos, as rural conservatives and urban progressives assume their views are widely shared. When elections defy expectations, the result is shock, anger, and further retreat into ideological camps.

This explains why U.S. political alignments resist economic and geographic shifts that once drove realignments. Where hardship once built coalitions, modern partisanship acts as a psychological refuge. The question is whether climate change, automation, or mass migration will disrupt these patterns — or cement them. Will today’s anxieties redraw party lines, or will political sorting persist, turning geography into a fortress for the familiar, deepening division and partisan pride?

FROM REALITY TV TO ALTERNATE REALITY

If geography and identity sketch borders of polarization, then media is the Sharpie darkening the divide. The digital age hardens these political divides, where confirmation bias runs rampant and algorithms push people to one side of the ideological line or the other.

In a recent interview, political psychologist and polarization expert Liliana Hall Mason, known for her research on identity-based partisanship and rising affective polarization, recalled a 2012 TiVO study that analyzed TV viewing habits of Democrats and Republicans. The study found that among the top 10 most-watched TV shows for each party, there was zero overlap — Democrats and Republicans were consuming completely separate entertainment. Cultural, and presumably geographical, divergence was already well underway in the 2010s.

Republicans favored shows like Duck Dynasty while Democrats gravitated toward satirical cartoons like Family Guy​. While it predates TiVO, I was more of a King of Hill fan, myself. I thought Hank Hill humanized conservative rural life without glorifying extremism while critiquing aspects of modernity without being elitist. Hulu has announced its return sometime this year.

But Republicans and Democrats today don’t even consume the same reality — they don’t watch the same news, follow the same influencers, trust the same institutions, or even shop at the same grocery stores. Will both tune into watch Hank Hill walk the tight rope of a pluralistic suburban American existence?

This media-driven fragmentation fuels geographic sorting, as political preferences influence where people choose to live. A person might leave a liberal city for a conservative suburb, or vice versa, based on what media tells them about their “kind of people.” Over time, partisan enclaves harden, reducing exposure to opposing viewpoints and making political shifts less likely.

When political identities are so deeply entrenched that losing an election feels like an existential crisis, the risk of political violence rises. Mason’s research on rising authoritarian attitudes and partisan animosity shows that political opponents aren’t just seen as rivals anymore — they’re seen as enemies.

January 6th, 2021, wasn’t an anomaly — it was the inevitable explosion of years of identity-based sorting and status-threat rhetoric. The rioters who stormed the Capitol weren’t just protesting an election loss; they saw themselves as defenders of a nation slipping from their grasp, fueled by a deep-seated fear of demographic change, progressive policies, and shifting cultural power.

Studies show that people who feel their group is losing influence are more likely to justify violence, particularly when they perceive existential threats to their way of life. Right-wing media reinforced these fears, political leaders legitimized them, and geographic and social sorting further entrenched them. In an era where partisan identity feels like destiny, and grievance is turned into a rallying cry, the potential for future political violence remains dangerously real.

History teaches us that political geography isn’t destiny — alignments shift when necessity forces cooperation. As the world faces climate crises, economic instability, and mass migration, new political realignments will emerge. The question is whether they will lead to solidarity or further strife.

At the end of the Mason interview, she mentions the role anger and enthusiasm play in political motivations. This concept is part of the Norwegian philosopher and social theorist, Jon Elster, who is best known for his work on rational choice theory, emotions in politics, and historical institutionalism. He has written extensively on how emotions like anger, enthusiasm, resentment, and hope shape political behavior and social movements, especially in historical contexts like the French Revolution and modern populist movements.

Anger mobilizes movements, making people willing to fight for change or push back against it. The Populist farmers of the 1890s, the labor activists of apartheid South Africa, and the displaced communities of Partition-era India all channeled rage into resistance. At the same time, enthusiasm — a belief in the possibility of transformation — is what sustains coalitions beyond crisis moments. The formation of the EU, the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, and Brazil’s leftist labor movement all survived because hope outlasted grievance.

Political movements often begin with anger, but only survive through enthusiasm. This is why some burn out quickly (Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party) while others reshape history (the Civil Rights Movement, Brexit, Trump’s populism). Looking ahead, the political geography of the future will be shaped by whichever emotion proves stronger.

Will fear and resentment deepen polarization, or will shared enthusiasm for economic justice, environmental sustainability, and democratic resilience create new cross-cutting alliances? The past suggests both are possible. But if history has one lesson, it’s that the lines on the map are never as fixed as they seem — and neither are the people who live within them.

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