really a fascinating meditation on the freedoms and burdens fragmented political spheres vs centralist attempts to order and rationalize them and then decentralist romanticizations in reaction. balance it strikes me is the thing, but balance so often is just a nice name for conflict. https://lateralthinkingtechnology.wordpress.com/2024/06/19/the-cult-of-the-patchwork-chinese-modernity-1978-2012-and-the-holy-roman-empire/ ht @guan