Cities are routers in network society
It is a principal aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system.
(McLuhan, 1964. Understanding Media)
The medium is the message, McLuhan says. Culture conforms to the shape of communication.
Our medium is the internet, a network that instantaneously propagates electrical impulses around the globe. What does it mean to share this global nervous system?
Our specialist and fragmented civilization of center-margin structure is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanized bits into an organic whole. This is the new world of the global village.
(McLuhan, 1964)
Like our biological nervous system, the internet creates a kind of holistic field of awareness, at odds with the logic of industrial society, a logic of narrow specialization and hierarchy. Instead, we find ourselves in a condition closer to our state of nature, a new kind of oral culture, where power flows like gossip over the network.
And if you ask me, this transformation predicted by McLuhan is coming to a head. Our 18th century institutions are imploding, 4chan drives national politics, and missiles are launched from the boys groupchat. We live in network society now.
I’m trying to orient myself to this new reality, using McLuhan as a guide. This post is a bit of a brain dump exploring two themes I think will be important: cities and nomads.
Among the people of the world, strange new vortices of power will appear unexpectedly. (McLuhan, 1964)
Since Westphalia, a lot of history has been driven by the nation/country/state. McLuhan would point out that this is a byproduct of organizing society around broadcast technologies, first literature, then airwaves. Now we’re organized around networks. How does this change the political packet size?
Broadcast technologies tend to produce normal distribution curves. Power is thickest at the center of the broadcast, and trails off toward the margin. You can see the social hierarchy in the shape of the curve.
What about networks? Networks generate dancing landscapes with strong power laws that collide, causing unpredictable cascades. Survival under these VUCA conditions often means adopting a barbell strategy.
Anything that promotes ease of travel and communications has a positive effect on state growth and expansion, and vice versa, anything that creates barriers to movement has a negative effect. (Turchin, 2012)
Up to the point just short of electrification, increase of speed produces division of function, and of social classes, and of knowledge. At electric speed, however, all that is reversed. (McLuhan, 1964)
A broadcast has natural borders. There is a center that emits, and a margin that receives. A border begins where the sphere of the broadcast ends.
A network has no border and no center, only hubs and edges. And networks interact with existing borders in strange ways. Networks flow around and through borders like water. Connections constantly form and break, as the network adapts.
The network interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
(John Gilmore)
Broadcasting is centralized, one-to-many, homogenizing. The same message is sent everywhere, to everyone. Conformism is the ground condition. Collective action happens through shared ideology.
Networks are decentralized, many-to-many. This has radical atomizing, individualizing effects. At the same time, cascades, triggered by broadcast-scale gossip, produce new emergent collective behaviors. These collective behaviors have a will all their own, and the individuals that manifest them may believe radically different, even opposing things.
If bell curves build empires, networks, with their power laws and dancing landscapes, unbundle us into nodes and edges, cities and nomads.
Cities are densely-connected hubs in the network, exhibiting steep power laws that drop off rapidly as you move out from the city center. They are islands in the net, with people and packets routed between.
Village and city-state essentially are forms that include all human needs and functions. (McLuhan, 1964)
Cities are “real” in ways that nations are not. They are made of atoms, not ideologies. A city offers a minimum viable infrastructure stack: food, water, shelter, security, all bundled into one platform, benefiting from dense network effects and economies of scale. An operating system for life.
Cities look to me to be our most characteristic technology. We didn’t really get interesting as a species until we became able to do cities—that’s when it all got really diverse, because you can’t do cities without a substrate of other technologies. There’s a mathematics to it — a city can’t get over a certain size unless you can grow, gather, and store a certain amount of food in the vicinity. Then you can’t get any bigger unless you understand how to do sewage. If you don’t have efficient sewage technology the city gets to a certain size and everybody gets cholera.
(William Gibson, Paris Review, Summer 2011)
How do cities emerge? Well, Paris and London are river cities. Constantinople sits at the end of the Silk Road. New York is a port. Cities seem to emerge around some stock or flow of resources, like rainforests emerge around precipitation patterns, and life emerges around energy gradients.
Cities outlive civilizations. You can see this in the oldest cities, like Rome, where layers of civilizations accrue like geological strata.
Cities are like compost heaps—just layers and layers of stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally adjacent.
(William Gibson, 2011)
How long does a city live? Probably as long as the underlying resources continue to flow.
Instead of being automated themselves—fragmented in task and function—as had been the tendency under mechanization, men in the electric age move increasingly to involvement in diverse jobs simultaneously, and to the work of learning, and to the programming of computers… Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his paleolithic ancestors.
(McLuhan, 1964)
Understanding Whole Systems
Shelter and Land Use
Industry and Craft
Communications
Community
Nomadics
Learning
(Table of Contents, The Whole Earth Catalog, 1968)
Every technology retrieves something from the past. McLuhan posits that networks retrieve nomadics.
And indeed, a lot of technological innovation seems directionally aligned with networked nomadism. The energy transition is pushing us to electrify everything. Solar panels and lithium batteries allow for cheap decentralized power generation. Software drives miniaturization and ephemeralization in many areas.
The really big theme I’d like to emphasize… is the importance of being able to substitute a control system—sensors and computers—for actual materials. We are actually now replacing atoms with bits.
(Saul Griffith, Otherlab. Soft not Solid @ O’Reilly)
The upshot is that you can construct a pretty viable nomadic stack today for a few thousand bucks: solar panel, battery, Starlink, induction stovetop, pressure cooker, laptop…
There are already more than 40 million digital nomads worldwide today. We should expect that number to increase, both due to networks, and to climate migration.
Industrialization demanded specialization and fixed roles for working with special-purpose machines. By contrast, electricity, automation, computing, are all general-purpose technologies. Computer-driven tools like CNC routers, 3D printers, and robotic arms can be programmed for an open-ended range of tasks on the fly. McLuhan sees networks pushing more and more of production into this software-defined direction. You get the picture he envisions something like dark factories.
So, AI and automation increasingly absorb the scalable aspects of production. That leaves us to putty over the cracks. “Work” takes on a DIY/jugaad quality, focused on creatively hacking together powerful resources to solve contextual problems.
You have access to a pocket supercomputer, hundreds of AI agents, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. What can you do with that?
We are suddenly threatened with a liberation that taxes our inner resources of self-employment and imaginative participation in society. This would seem to be a fate that calls men to the role of artist in society.
(McLuhan, 1964)
A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.
(Introduction to The Whole Earth Catalog, Spring 1969)
Maybe The Whole Earth Catalog and the 1960’s back to the land movement weren’t wrong, just early? Maybe they were hints of a future that was already here, just not evenly distributed.
The first cities were parties. People didn’t live there full-time. Places like Göbekli Tepe were Schelling points where nomads would gather in summer to party and hook up and trade.
“The line is blurring between remote workers and tourists,” Bloomberg reports, “For years, cities, states and regions have been competing to lure corporate headquarters and offices… But the remote revolution is upending this traditional model of economic development. The last two years of pandemic have accelerated previous trends, shining a spotlight on an alternative to the corporate sweepstakes, one in which cities chase the workers themselves.”
With people going nomad, cities take on the role of ritual pilgrimage site once again.
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. (McLuhan)
As usual, artists are ahead of the game. Every year, for the last 39 years, Burning Man has constructed and dismantled a city as performance art. Mars College offers a freeschool in the desert with a DIY off-grid residential program. Edge Esmerelda takes the hacker house and expands it into a pop-up city.
Distant Early Warning System: cities are routers in network society.
Queries:
I’m surrounded by smart readers, and so I would love your help with some of the questions I’ve been exploring:
Due to a life plot twist, I’m moving to Nairobi, Kenya in two weeks. Who should I meet?
There’s a kind of “spherical cow” version of networked manufacturing where everything gets manufactured on-demand via 3D printing, robotics, etc. However, last time I explored this area, there were bottlenecks preventing decentralized manufacturing from reaching scales where it displaces traditional manufacturing… Stuff like 3D printer feed rates, etc. Where are these bottlenecks? Which are likely to be permanent? Which are likely to experience breakthroughs?
I’ve been completely floored while revisiting McLuhan’s Understanding Media. Who else is thinking deeply about these themes? Who should I read?
Reply to this email and let me know!