@laprice Yes. Citizens’ assemblies! I think they could be a really good institution, but a tricky part is, like jury duty, they should be compulsory. Otherwise self-selection to participate is a source of bias. people propose various kinds of stratified sortition to address it, and then we’re arguing over whether we’ve chosen the right characteristics to represent and the quality of statistical moves we make, whether perhaps some intentionally tendentious bias has been introduced.

@laprice (better utopian than dystopian, as so many among the most powerful seem enthusiastically to have become!)

@louis I don’t think that’s right. I think both with cities and with the internet, it’s not at all about the real-estate. It’s about the people. How available is attention, activity, interaction. 1/

@louis Yes, hypothetically, you can buy a domain, shove something on it, and it’s possible to become a vibrant hive. But the actual distribution of human attention has shifted very dramatically, as all of us who do run independent websites know very well. It matters a great deal how thick or thin that long tail is. It was thick. It is now very thin. 2/

@louis Your website can still become the exception, and every entrepreneur, then and now — in the broadest sense, including cultural entrepreneurs — must overestimate the probability of their own success relative to what an “objective” outsider would estimate for anything to happen. But those “objective” odds are much uglier than they used to be, and that’s a real change in the landscape. The landscape is made of people, not domains. 3/

@louis Similarly, the scarcities of good city are also much more a function of social and political phenomena than they are of the weight, the objective cost or scarcity of city real estate. Asia is where cities still thrive. They build a great deal at high density, and limit (as China is now, at extraordinary cost) the degree to which rentierism overtakes the use of space as space. 4/

@louis Both in “real” space and cyberspace (how retro!), the problems of human flourishing are at this point much more about how we organize and govern the humans than they are about any objective incapacities or scarcities. /fin

@louis It’s the internet I wanted. I think my experience of cities and my experience of the internet have been pretty parallel. Utopian early experiences and ideals, collapse into isolation and oppression and rentierism, disillusionment. 1/

@louis I still spend most of my life on the internet. I still prefer cities to suburbs and exurbs, when I can afford them. But my experience of both is suffused with an overwhelming sense of disappointment. 2/

@louis Perhaps one should write that off as the normal course of time, naive hopes and youth eventually make contact with constraints and the indignities of aging. Perhaps I am deluded, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. I think I really did experience a much richer (in a non cashflow sense) internet, and cities much more open and lively and free. I take these experiences as an existence proof, these things are possible. We are just failing to achieve them. /fin

@louis I’m not sure. Again, this is an insight of me 30 years ago rather than now, an adolescent in Baltimore, drawn to the center of a dangerous city which became an icon of freedom from a stultifying suburban life (which I have now reproduced in the Sunshine State). 1/

@louis At that time, cities—especially Baltimore City—were not expensive. Everything was owned, sure, but a lot of it was dilapidated, underutilized rather than exploited. Culture could take root in spaces otherwise going to seed. 2/

@louis Cities seem mostly dead to me now, for the reasons you point out. I lived 8 years in San Francisco, but there was no art scene, no culture, in the sense I admired and aspired to as a kid in Baltimore. It was all too upscale, galleries of expensive shit, an opera and a ballet but nothing reminiscent of the punk scene that made mosh pits of random spaces back then. 3/

@louis In Baltimore back in the day, there was an upscale art scene, but also a downscale, improvisational one, thriving in the cracks. And the two were permeable to one another. Symphony people drew nourishment from popup galleries in condemned warehouses converted to artist colonies. 4/

@louis (In my recent SF years, the only hint of culture like that came from Oakland. The Ghost Ship fire both brought it to my attention, and I suspect signaled the end of it.) 5/

@louis I still yearn for that archetype of freedom, one that comes from the fact that, under some circumstances, in a city, all of space and attention and interaction can be cheap and at the ready, even though everything is owned. 6/

@louis But I concede in practice it’s hard to find now. New York, “the greatest city in the world”, is a museum to itself. It is too expensive for actual culture to thrive, except maybe in rough or immigrant neighborhoods in the boroughs. The whole thing is like Broadway, a once vibrant cultural form endlessly and expensively reproduced as commercial activity. 7/

@louis Success in a capitalist sense — “efficient” exploitation of owned properties, maximizing the rents captured at the expense of the surplus of the users of spaces, the inhabitants of cities, have rendered cities currently oppressive. Your critique does hold.

But it was not always and everywhere thus. It does not have to be. /fin