At the opening of the twentieth century, sponge divers plunged into the crystalline water off the coast of Greece. They brought up with them a strange object: a box that housed a sophisticated system of gears. This device, known as the Antikythera mechanism, would baffle scholars for decades. An astronomical tool, the mechanism is the first known machine that automated scientific predictions. A recent 

 suggests, “it could have automated many of the calculations needed for its own design—the first steps to the mechanization of mathematics and science.”

The complexity of its gears bespeaks an engineering prowess, specialized knowledge, and divisions of labor we prescribe not to the ancient, but to ourselves. “It challenges all our preconceptions about the technological capabilities of the ancient Greeks,” continues the 

 paper. Indeed, the Antikythera mechanism makes us rethink the uniqueness of modernity, history, and our own relationship with the past.


Who can define modernity? Whigs say it means the asymptotic alleviation of suffering closely coupled to the expansion of rights and trade; reactionaries describe it as the erosion of all tradition, the purgation of deep ties, and the hyper-rationalization of all human relations. What they share is the assumption that modernity breaks with what came before it, and revised core assumptions about human life. More specifically, it permanently altered our ability to inherit what were foundational convictions about the nature of human history. When did this break with the past take place?

In 1528, Duke William IV of Bavaria commissioned a series of historical paintings. Albrecht Altdorfer’s 

 stands as the most famous. Consider its grandeur, its accuracy.

The battle, which took place in 333 BC, inaugurated the Hellenistic era. Altdorfer’s painting captures the chaos and intimacy of the conflict between the Greeks, the Macedonians, and the Persians—a web of men on foot and horseback knitted together by the blades of their swords and the tips of their spears.

Altdorfer went so far as to enumerate the number of combatants, the dead, the injured, and listed them on the battle standards of their armies. Yet as specific and historical as this painting is, it was also meant to convey something about the era in which he painted it. In 1529, Maximilian’s serf-army met the Turks on the field of battle, a doomed siege of Vienna. In Altdorfer’s painting, the Persians wear turbans, mirroring Maximilian’s foes. Implicitly, the painting assumes a unity between past and present.

“The event that Altdorfer captured was for him at once historical and contemporary,” writes philosopher Reinhart Kosselleck. “Alexander and Maximilian, for whom Altdorfer had prepared the drawings, merge in an exemplary manner; the space of historical experience enjoys the profundity of generational unity.” No doubt, Koselleck mentions, the absence of gunpowder and rifles makes the assumption of this unity easier. Though Altdorfer painted this epic with an ancient assumption about the nature of history, he did so at the beginning of modernity right when those ancient assumptions about history were about to change.

The ancients had every reason to believe in the unity of history. For millennia, human life was constrained by limited access to productive energy. Respect for natural limits and the search for the natural standards that course through the political philosophical work of the Ancients can be read as a response to the very real concern of resource scarcity—what could be more injurious for a regime than the depletion of its stores?

The urban polities that produced the intellectuals who struggled to puzzle out these problems had the most to worry about when it came to sustaining their energy supply. The size of traditional cities depended on two things: fuel wood and charcoal, each source constrained by low power density of phytomass production. Classical “cities had to draw on nearby areas at least 30 times their size for fuel supply,” writes energy expert Vaclav Smil. “This reality restricted their growth even where other resources, such as food and water, were adequate.”

Such constraints are the story of most of human history. As the British agriculturalist Arthur Standish put it in 1611: “And so may it be conceived, no wood, no kingdom.” And yet ten years after Standish wrote these words, the early coal economy would begin to outpace the ancient reliance on wood.

In this light, we can approach the “natural standard” that so occupied the ancient philosophers as an attempt to harmonize political life with the slim margins of energy that bound their world. And we can see their assumption of the continuity between past and present as a justified understanding of the similarity of energy-sourcing technologies. Perhaps this is one reason why the essential virtue of the ancients was moderation. Once we began to exit the traditional ancient energy economy, the entire philosophical edifice of our ancient forebears appeared up for debate. The exit from ancient commitments accelerated as the coal economy deepened. Intellectual, social, and economic developments co-emerged with our thermodynamic refinements. Energy was not the only prime mover, but it was one of the most potent, insofar as every domain of human life demands its use.

But this origin story is not the usual account. The most popular account of modernity in the public consciousness belongs to the nineteenth century and flies under the banner of the Industrial Revolution. The nature of this so-called revolution has been greatly distorted by received accounts that post-date its arrival. From the propaganda of the Industrial Revolution come our most durable myths about modernity.

II. The Propaganda of the Industrial Revolution

The story of the Industrial Revolution goes like this: from around 1750 onwards, a steady increase in income began. And after 1900, the increase accelerated rapidly. The period between the early and late nineteenth century, the story goes, proved critical. As Angus Maddison has pointed out in a study of global GDP between 1AD and 2003, "Since 1820 the total product of the countries considered has increased seventy-fold, population nearly five-fold, per capita product fourteen-fold and real per capita consumption by almost tenfold. Annual working hours are down by half and life expectancy has doubled." None of this wealth could have been possible without a radical expansion of human facility with harnessing and exploiting greater and greater amounts of energy.

The term for this apparent discontinuity in energy abundance is the Industrial Revolution. And while many European economies expanded their industrial capabilities, no place was more pivotal than England, which had been in the process of replacing its wood-based economy with coal thanks to the advent of Devonshire ironmonger Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine in the early 1700s. To put this growth in perspective, by 1820, coal provided the equivalent power as that of a woodland area roughly the size of Britain’s entire surface area. Twenty years later, coal’s energy provision doubled, then doubled again in 1860, only to double once more by 1890.

The diffusion of coal power radically reshaped society. City-size was no longer limited by access to woodfuel and thus urban areas grew denser. Class dynamics shifted as the insurgent bourgeoisie rose to prominence on the back of the new energy-intensive industries. The workforce flocked from farms to cities with grievances, desires, and demands of their own. Coal also brought us the most consequential of modern achievements: electricity. We take electricity for granted now, but when it first arrived people could scarcely believe it was real. A local Indiana newspaper reporting on the first ever arclight demonstration in its townsquare in the late 19th century, writes that the light caused men to fall to their knees in astonishment.

Before electricity, buildings could only stand so high--who wants to walk up all those stairs? Elevators changed that. Children could now study at night, which increased the use of libraries. Cities no longer stank of horse manure and urine; sewage systems removed human contributions to the stench. Women could more safely walk home at night and, confined as they were to the domestic sphere in that era, housework took less of a toll on their bodies—no more scalding their hands on irons hot from the stove.

But there are at least two problems with the typical account of the Industrial Revolution. The first has to do with this so-called rate of energy increase. If we compare world gross domestic product from 1 AD to the beginning of this millennium, we’ll see a hockey stick that begins its curve upward around the early 19th century. Likewise, as scholar John Constable 

, if we graph 5% compound interest on a single US dollar, we see a similar pattern. I’m not arguing that no rate increase of energy occurred, but that, as Constable points out, “there doesn’t have to be a revolution, a major discontinuity at the foot of the curve,” to explain the second graph. If rate increase isn't necessary to account for the ramp up in energy abundance, then perhaps what we call the Industrial Revolution did not span decades, but hundreds of years—small refinements in agriculture, sail, and tools compounding until taking off exponentially. That would hardly qualify as a revolution.

But surely those who lived through the 19th century knew what they were talking about. Especially in England, the Promethean epicenter of the Industrial Revolution. No doubt, late 18th and early 19th century British philosophy, literature, and economics must appear festooned with the phrase. Who could live through a revolution and not know it? But surveying the literature, Constable writes:

"The field of modern economics was founded in the English language by Adam Smith, T. R. Malthus, and David Ricardo during exactly this period, 1750 to 1820. Not one of them uses the term Industrial Revolution or anything like it. Robert Owen, the idealist social thinker and factory owner, wrote extensively about the changes in the manufacturing system but never used the term…[Thomas] Carlyle came close, in Sartor Resartus (1834, but written in 1830/31), when he spoke of steam engines “rapidly enough overturning the whole old system of Society” in favor of “Industrialism,”...Given Carlyle’s knowledge of the French Revolution that is surely significant. John Stuart Mill…did use the term once in his Principles of Political Economy of 1848, but he wasn’t referring to England and he didn’t use capitals. Neither Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), nor Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) use the term…It doesn’t even appear in mid-century standard textbooks like Fawcett’s Manual of Political Economy (1863). Perhaps most striking of all, W. S. Jevons, one of the greatest mid-century economists, wrote an entire book on The Coal Question, published in 1865, arguing vigorously that coal lay at the root of modern British wealth, and used the term “industrial revolution” only once, and though in reference to England it is not capitalized."

If the Brits didn’t recognize what was happening as a revolution, then where did this phrase come from? Constable locates its first usage in France in the late 1820s. Though J.B. Say, Professor of Economics at the College de France, described the effects of cotton spinning in England as economically “revolutionary,” in 1837 his student Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui expressed his surprise that moderate, unrevolutionary Britain was seeing quicksilver economic modernization. Blanqui wrote in his History of the Political Economy of Europe:

"While the French Revolution was making its great social experiments over a volcano, England was beginning hers on the solid ground of the industries. […] The conditions of labor underwent the greatest modification they have experienced since the origin of society. Two machines, henceforth immortal, the steam-engine and the spinning-machine, overturned the old commercial system and gave birth almost simultaneously to material products and social questions unknown to our fathers…However, hardly was the industrial revolution born from the brain of those two men of genius, Watt and Arkwright, when it took possession of England."

Frederich Engels then borrowed the term from Blanqui and his closest friend, Karl Marx, took it from him. Blanqui is French, Marx and Engels German. The phrase wouldn’t appear in English again until the late 1880s when two American translators brought Blanqui’s work to the attention of Arnold Toynbee, a tutor in political economy at Balliol College in Oxford. He died three years later, but soon after that his influential Lectures on the English Industrial Revolution were published. Four years after that, in 1887, the phrase made its first appearance in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

As the diffusion of the meme of the Industrial Revolution deepened, so did our perception of modernity as the great solvent of our forebears’ lifeworld. Rather than radical continuity, a new lexicon of radical departures began to permeate Western thought. The idea of historical progress—in both utopian and pragmatic modes—began to overtake tradition. With the advent of the electrified oil economies came consumer society, which held that the world could be endlessly revised through novel technology and consumer goods. After the so-called Industrial Revolution nothing would or could be the same.

This misperception of the historical timeline has not come without consequences.

I refuse to downplay the benefits of modernity—the general uplift in material quality of life cannot be overstated. Nor is material improvement the only metric of success. But to describe modernity as an unalloyed good is also a mistake.

Progressives like to delude themselves into believing that engineering novelty will arrive like an angel of history, supplying mankind with the necessary technical fixes to all problems. This tendency can cater to a politics of “bare life,” where the point of society is to alleviate suffering through third-party management. It also promotes a pernicious twist of mind that treats the past as little more than the manure of ignorance out of which our newer, truer virtues flower. This devolves into relativism and then to a sticky nihilism that pervades politics and culture. What is our present moment other than another meaningless step towards moral improvements that, in hindsight, will make us look like monsters to any who remember us? And what is our present moment other than the triumph of our current preferences and sentiments over the barbaric mongoloids dragging their knuckles across the pages of our history books? It’s an untenable stance.

The conservative position reduces itself to nostalgia for an Arcadia that never quite existed. Often progressives point this out, failing to understand that the tendency towards nostalgia is a misguided attempt to recover what they condemn: memory, some kind of tie to what has come before that we can receive, maintain, and pass down. Yet the nostalgia deadlock entraps conservatives into a reactive position in which they defend fantasies they mistake for tradition. From this cage they cannot synthesize a way forward informed by those who have come before us.

Regardless, what both camps share is territory: they agree that we live after a radical and sudden break with the past. Whereas progressives cheer the endless revision of life, conservatives lament it. Yet progressives flail in a sense of meaninglessness while conservatives cower in impotence. Perhaps this is why most of civic life in the West is defined by a single word: crisis. How can the current state of affairs continue? Surely, collapse must come, whether from eco-pocalypse or decadence. There persists a secret hope that the ending will settle the score. What appears as a durable state of panic about various catastrophes discloses the secret fear held left and right: they can scarcely imagine a future at all. The real crisis of modernity is not crisis itself, but the fear of ongoingness.

But as the Antikythera mechanism suggests, modernity was neither sudden and thus not as radical as we are often led to believe. Our received wisdom about modernity blocks us from asking a vital question that helps resolve the tensions held by the left and the right, evidenced everywhere in the magisterial relics of the ancient world: what can we build today that will redound for generations, for millennia?


Several years ago, when Notre Dame caught fire, I wondered if we still had the ability to build something so durable. Could grandparents pass professions onto the children and then grandchildren and so on to create common goods so fantastic in this day and age? To begin to answer, I had to start with what we had already built. A surprising answer arrived: nuclear power plants.

Unlike other power plants, nuclear can be refurbished. Reactors can last, at this point, 80 years, though that is nowhere near a hard expiration date. It is possible to simply keep reworking and repairing them, like so many ships of Theseus, for as long as our progeny desires safe, clean, affordable energy. And it is likely that they will. In fact, they will likely need more of it. They may even outlast our current political regimes, our current paradigms. Fission produces so much energy with so little fuel, we cannot even say the atomic age has really begun. Rather, we’re in the first rustlings of what would be a world that onboards uranium the way mankind did coal.

No doubt, building more nuclear reactors does not solve our various predicaments. There is no “one weird trick.” But it does provide us with a practical societal project that gives us the chance to fundamentally reframe how we approach the modern experience. We could be laying the groundwork for what will become Ancient Earth Nuclear—industrial cathedrals that outlive all of our aspirations save that we have bequeathed the coming generations with the equipment they need to take up the task of living in much the same way that we have. Could there be a more ancient, a more human impulse than that?

What can we build today that will redound for generations, for millennia?

The Industrial Revolution Never Happened

“Digital man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” So we have been told by a wide array of Jeremiahs as Web 2.0’s manifold discontents have become impossible to ignore. Accounts of the exact nature and cause of this fall from grace vary, but they share a grounding assumption that the assemblage of technologies known as “the internet” once embodied (or at least had the potential to) certain fundamental political values—free expression, privacy, individuality—and at some point ceased to do so.

This prelapsarian vision was influentially inscribed in a founding text of the tech canon, composed in 1996: John Perry Barlow’s cyber-libertarian “

Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

.” Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist exemplary of the ideological migration historian Fred Turner has 

 “from counterculture to cyberculture,” declared to the world’s governments that “the global social space we are building [is] naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.” As recently as ten years ago, when the success of a number of insurrections against tyrannical governments were being credited to Facebook and Twitter, this proclamation still resonated. Now, its optimism is barely recognizable.

It turned out, of course, that Barlow and like-minded cyber-utopians had a great deal to fear, and tech observers of all stripes have found cause for disillusionment over the past half-decade and some. It is hard to listen to the political right for long these days without hearing denunciations of Democratic-aligned Silicon Valley oligarchs and their employees, and the censorship to which they have subjected their political enemies. For its part, the liberal establishment, which during Barack Obama’s presidency had eagerly promoted the internet as a tool of global democratization, abandoned this view after Donald Trump’s victory and the rise of an international right-populist insurgency, and concluded instead that digital technology was a vehicle for dangerous authoritarianism.

In the end, the mainstream liberal narrative of digitally facilitated authoritarianism became self-fulfilling, but in reverse: the fear of fascist takeover legitimated the escalation of online censorship as well as the extensive clandestine collusion between state and corporate actors, as recently revealed in the Twitter files. The result has been the escalation of the right’s rhetorical backlash against digital liberal tyranny. From either side, the internet no longer looks like a space of freedom and democracy, but of oppression and persecution—whether by fascist troll armies or blue-haired moderators.

These strains of dystopianism tend to fall back to the terrors of the twentieth century, with MAGA digital fascism and woke digital communism figuring as twin menaces. Another strand of analysis reaches farther into the past to make sense of our tech impasses—surprisingly enough, back to the European Middle Ages, that era of relative technological stasis. I refer to the “technofeudalism thesis,” which as Malcolm Harris 

, “holds that 21st-century capitalism has been superseded by a new economic system overseen by Big Tech.” This new order is “feudal,” according to this view, because it elevates a handful of grandees (Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al) to ownership status while consigning the rest of us to digital serfdom. Like peasants who toiled on the land only to be forced to contribute much of the harvest to the great lords to whom it belonged, we reap only intangible rewards from the digital platforms on which we spend so much of our lives, while actual wealth accrues only to the platform’s owners.

The technofeudalism thesis has adherents across the political spectrum, as Evgeny Morozov notes in his 

 of the relevant literature. The basic question at stake in debates around technofeudalism, per Morozov, is: “Are Google and Amazon capitalists? [Or] are they rentiers?” In other words, does Big Tech’s burgeoning wealth come from continuously expanding production to generate value, or does it come from monopolizing certain assets and thereby deriving passive income streams? To put it another way, is the position of a tech oligarch more analogous to that of a factory owner who must constantly reinvest profits to remain competitive, or a large landowner, who by virtue of his position can simply wait around for a new round of checks to arrive?

Subscribers to the techofeudalism thesis hold that the latter is a more illuminating analogy, even if they concede it doesn’t capture all the complexities of the digital business model. As Morozov observes, one can even find support for this view in the statements of some of the tech oligarchs themselves: Peter Thiel infamously argues on behalf of anti-competitive monopolies; moreover, Thiel’s associates include figures like Curtis Yarvin, who openly advocates for a variety of hi-tech feudalism.

But this new aristocracy is not the only crucial element in the technofeudalist class configuration. The geographer Joel Kotkin has argued that alongside the increasing monopolization of assets and income streams by a new aristocracy, there has also emerged what he calls a new “clerisy”: his term for the “journalists, entertainers, credentialed professionals, and teachers [who] provide the images, narratives, arguments, and artworks that reinforce the binding outlook, and they police dissenters as vigilantly as did the Inquisitors of old (though fortunately, so far, less ­lethally).” The recent rigidification of ideological orthodoxy, policing of dissent, and escalation of censorship, in Kotkin’s account, all function as an ideological legitimation layer for the monopolization of assets by the few. In this sense, he attempts to show, it is technofeudal material conditions that have given rise to a new digital authoritarianism.

Was all of this inevitable? Or could some halcyon era of the freewheeling internet have been preserved were it not subverted by a combination of state and corporate interference? Barlow has plenty of intellectual heirs today who share his premises when it comes to the original internet, but these suffer from factual and categorical errors.

One of these is a failure to recognize the role of the American state in building the infrastructural foundations of the internet. Speaking from “cyberspace,” presented as a “home of Mind,” Barlow told governments: “Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.” This is a remarkable claim. After all, ARPANET—without which the internet could not have come to exist in its current form —was, in effect, a “public construction project.” The implications of this fact deal a further blow to narratives of a fall from grace. As Yasha Levine argues in 

, state surveillance was not an imposition on the internet from the outside: it was central to the military intelligence aims that informed the original development of ARPANET. The internet is a panopticon today at least in part because it was designed to be one.

Another error common to Barlow and his intellectual successors is perhaps more fatal. This is the mind-matter dichotomy implicit in assertions such as: “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.” This view takes the historical denial of cyberspace’s origins in a “public construction project” and expands it into a philosophical credo in which the internet is seen to exist outside of all economic and political reality—a framework dubbed “digital dualism” by sociologist Nathan Jurgenson, which inflects common usage in such idioms as “IRL” and “meatspace.” No less than the transportation and communications networks that preceded it and to which it is often analogized, the cluster of technologies that generate cyberspace were and are, at bottom, a material infrastructure. This infrastructure is inescapably caught up in the broader political economy that has given rise to it, and which it increasingly shapes.

Barlow’s exclusion of the question of property from cyberspace turned out to be particularly fateful: it legitimated the emergence of a digital landscape in which users have no ownership stake in the technologies they use. Barlow’s countercultural formation no doubt informed his guiding assumption that, in John Lennon’s terms, to “imagine no possessions” was the aspiration of all utopians. Looking back from an era in which assets continue to be concentrated in the hands of the few, and the World Economic Forum, a clearinghouse for the schemes of oligarchic monopolists, cheerily assures us we will “own nothing, and be happy,” Lennon’s injunction is easier to obey—and the result seems patently dystopian to most of us.

Digital communism now looks like an ideological smokescreen for digital serfdom. One of the first observers to recognize this was the virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, who in 

 (2014) argued that the “free” availability of the services of monopoly platforms was a disempowering illusion for the average user. By offering “free” access, these “siren servers” induce us to surrender our data to them, and thereby derive profits. As an alternative, Lanier proposes a conceptually provocative if impractical-seeing system in which we receive “micropayments” for contributions that contribute to the profitability of digital enterprises. In the end, this amounts not to a radical overthrow of the current system but a trickle-down-style reform of it.

Barlow’s Jeffersonian framing of cyberspace independence, evident in his title and certain passages of his manifesto, hints unintentionally at a more radical alternative. Thomas Jefferson’s influential vision of American democracy was not at all one where citizens were to be liberated from the “legal concepts” Barlow dismisses as obsolete and oppressive. On the contrary, Jefferson’s idealized political subject was the “yeoman”—the smallholding farmer whose liberty and autonomy was made possible by his ownership of a parcel of land. Although the yeoman is often associated with an ethos of rugged individualism and hostility to government, the US government played an interventionist role in making yeoman status possible, from Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase to the Homestead Act, which opened up vast new territories to smallholders.

The American state’s role in the development of the internet has more closely resembled its earlier role in the development of the railroads. Having made a massive public investment in the development of the railroad network in the form of land grants, it enabled the emergence of powerful monopolies that, in turn, were able to use their concentrated wealth and power to influence politics. Something analogous occurred when a communications network constructed by the state was turned over to private entities that quickly gained monopoly positions and became some of the most politically influential entities in the nation—as well as willing partners to state surveillance. Obscuring the question of property by presenting the new digital realm as a space of “mind” where immaterial rewards accrued was a useful smokescreen for this process.

On this basis, Morozov’s skepticism toward the technofeudalism thesis seems warranted, even if its descriptions of the present political order as a reversion to medieval hierarchies are appealing. “Capitalism,” Morozov writes, “is moving in the same direction it always has been, leveraging whatever resources it can mobilize—the cheaper, the better.” This was true of the monopoly system that, in the era of the railroads, forged the Gilded Age in the late 19th century, and it is true today.

Part of what ultimately curtailed the power of the Gilded Age oligarchy was the emergence of popular mass movements that challenged monopoly power. The rise of the labor movement was one well-known instance, but the more relevant precedent today is agrarian populism, which was essentially an alliance of the Jeffersonian yeomanry against large corporate interests. Contrary to the Jeffersonian vision of smallholding, however, a vast number were sharecroppers or tenant farmers who owned little and were massively indebted to landowners and merchants. The parallels with the present are not exact, but they may have more relevance than the feudal era for making sense of the class configuration of hi-tech monopoly capitalism. For Joel Kotkin, it is precisely the “yeomen”—small property-holders—who have faced declining prospects and rising debt in the dispensation he calls technofeudalist.

Others have made related arguments. In his recent book 

, the sociologist Dan Evans argues that the crucial class formation for understanding the present is not a so-called digital serf or peasant class or a “precariat,” but what Marx called the petty bourgeoisie. This intermediary class, contrary to Marx’s prediction that its members would ultimately end up proletarianized wage laborers, has continued to grow over the past century and a half. Digital technologies have accelerated that process. For instance, the gig economy has converted various subsets of what once was or might have been wage labor into new forms of “self-employment.”

The rideshare driver, in theory, is a small proprietor, but not unlike the 19th-century tenant farmer, he may in fact own very little given his dependence on and indebtedness to far more powerful entities. One response to this situation has been to demand gig economy workers’ recategorization as wage laborers rather than independent contractors, which might in turn enable them to organize unions. Another agenda, more difficult to formulate, might seek to make the aspirations to small proprietorship of those who toil in the gig economy real rather than illusory. This is the type of project that the American state has, at certain points in its history, and however imperfectly, taken on.

There have been hints of the emergence of a class-conscious digital petty bourgeoisie. Whatever the disappointments of the blockchain, the appeal of crypto to those disillusioned with the legacy banking system is clearly linked to the promise of a new tech landscape in which asset ownership is more widely distributed. A project like Urbit articulates a similar aspiration, as I have argued 

. We might even view the GameStop phenomenon as a glimpse of digital yeomanry’s inchoate class-consciousness. But history suggest that mere “exit” from existing systems and institutions, as many in the spheres just alluded to tend to advocate for, is not enough: the channeling of these discontents into an effective political project also requires a political “voice” that may demand state intervention on behalf of the neo-yeomanry.

If the last few years have made anything clear, it is that the formal rights we took for granted amount to little if not grounded in ownership—a point the Jeffersonians of old insisted on. Anytime tech platforms censor, de-platform, and banish users, we are reminded that the First Amendment is of little help: the corporate owners of the enclosed town squares of our age, have every right to dispose of our property as they wish, and all we have are the Terms of Service we didn’t read when we signed up. Now, the same censorious regime of state and corporate power is threatening access to our other assets on similar grounds, as the 

 born free, and the technologies we now depend on will continue to make us less so, if not challenged. Perhaps we are finally waking up to that fact.

Digital man was not born free, and the technologies we now depend on will continue to make us less so, if not challenged.

The Digital Yeoman's Plight

The physical layout of the environment in which someone is raised impacts their cognitive abilities as an adult. 

 based on video game data from 397,162 people across 38 countries found that “people who grew up outside cities are better at navigation.” More specifically, “growing up in cities with low Street Network Entropy (e.g. Chicago) led to better results at video game levels with a regular layout, while growing up outside cities or in cities with higher Street Network Entropy (e.g. Prague) led to better results at more entropic video game levels.”

In plain English: if you grow up in a grid-like environment, you will be worse at navigating less grid-like environments.

Association between Environment and Video Game (Sea Hero Quest) Wayfinding Performance stratified by age, gender, and education. The SHQ Wayfinding Performance is computed from the trajectory length and has been averaged within 5-years windows.

Two examples of cities with low (Chicago) and high (Prague) SNE. Right: Distribution of the street bearings across 36 bins of 10 degrees.

This finding is perhaps not wholly surprising, and at first blush might not seem all that significant. The vast majority of us hardly ever need to truly wayfind IRL anymore. Technology has made our navigational skills all but obsolete. So what does it matter whether certain environments are better or worse at preserving them?

It matters a great deal. To understand why, we will first need to take a little detour.

, complexity scientist David Krakauer makes a distinction between complementary cognitive artifacts—technologies that make us more intelligent after using them—and competitive cognitive artifacts (if you can’t guess what these do then maybe you’ve been using them too much). The canonical example of a competitive artifact is a calculator: repeated usage leaves you worse at mental arithmetic than you were before. Contrast this with an abacus, which can have quite the opposite effect: expert users can eventually develop such a high-fidelity model in their mind that they no longer even need to use the physical abacus, and are able to maintain their enhanced arithmetic skills without it.

Typus arithmeticae tratta da Margarita Philosophica (1503)

The brain is a complex system, full of interconnected representational systems. This is why an abacus doesn't just help you with math—it helps you with everything. Dr. Krakuer explains, "[the mind] doesn’t have a firewall around it such that the abacus’ functional advantages are confined to arithmetic…it actually has really interesting indirect effects on linguistic competence and geometric reasoning.” Positive global effects, that reach beyond the intended use, are a characteristic of all complementary cognitive artifacts.

 cognitive artifacts are also not limited to one domain or skill. Dr. Krakauer goes on to discuss how replacing primitive wayfinding technologies like maps, astrolabes, and sextants with automated wayfinding technologies has had exactly this effect:

“Your familiarity with mapmaking and topographical, topological, and geometric reasoning is generally valuable in your life, not just in navigating across the city. So taking away a map doesn’t just make you worse at getting from one door to another, it makes you worse in many ways… A good example of this, which both Einstein and Frank Lloyd Wright depended upon, was wooden cubes. Early in their youth, they both became very enamored of these cubes and would construct worlds out of cubes, like Minecraft. And both of them claimed—Frank Lloyd Wright in the case of architecture, and Einstein in the case of the geometry of the universe—that the intuitions they built up playing with these cubes were instrumental in their later lives. I would claim the same is true for maps. If you know how to navigate through a true space, like a Euclidean space or a curved space on the surface of the earth, that allows you to think about different kinds of spaces, relationship spaces, idea spaces. The notion of a path from one idea to another, as a metaphor, actually has an immediate and natural implementation in terms of a path in real space.”

That our cognition (reasoning, memory, creativity, etc.) is akin to a kind of mental navigation is betrayed by our 

: “a field of knowledge,” a subject that is “unexplored,” “a train of thought,” “a trip down memory lane,” “jogging your memory,” “a flight of fancy.”

This is also why the ancient memory enhancement technique, the 

—also known as the memory palace technique—is still used by memory champions today. According to The Art of Memory, “The method of Loci involves memorizing information by placing a mnemonic image for each item to be remembered at a point along an imaginary journey. The information can then be recalled in a specific order by mentally walking the same route through the imaginary journey and converting the mnemonic images back into the facts that they represent.” The connection between

, is also of note here—it is as if movement through the physical landscape primes one for greater ease of movement in the more abstract landscapes of ideas (see the wider literature on

“The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making. And so one aspect of the history of walking is the history of thinking made concrete — for the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can.”

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

We also use spatial metaphors to talk about the socio-economic landscape, or life itself: “life’s journey,” “broadening your horizons,” “finding myself” or “soul-searching,” “career paths,” “walks of life,” and so on. This makes sense when we consider our deep evolutionary history: many of the most important things we had to know for survival were spatial in nature—the wildebeest migrate through this valley, we can gather berries in this patch of forest, someone was killed by a saber tooth tiger over there, etc. We sometimes even conceptualize knowledge with an arboreal metaphor (“branches of knowledge”)—a vestige, perhaps, of our ancestral tree-dwelling lifestyle.

Our lack of wayfinding ability is present also in our physical, cultural, and metaphysical landscape, which has also become regular and grid-like. The consequence, which I believe we are now witnessing, is a lack of resilience and resourcefulness, an unwillingness to “blaze trails”, an inability to produce “path-breaking” innovations, and numerous other deficiencies which are leaving us altogether worse off than we were when the world was a little more chaotic and idiosyncratic. The social and intellectual “technologies” (e.g. the educational system, norms around child-rearing) that we’ve put in place have increasingly become competitive cognitive artifacts rather than cooperative.

The excessive “gridification” of the world can be seen most clearly in the physical domain. For a variety of reasons (economic, environmental, changing aesthetic preferences), newer cities tend to have simpler layouts.

Two of the oldest American cities in the figure, Boston and Charlotte, are the most irregular. Source for both figures: 

The same is true of architecture. More ornate and culturally distinct forms have been replaced the world over by drab monoliths. The result is an oppressive standardization and homogenization, a loss of the quirks and eccentricities that give places their unique character.

The loss of irregularity and variation is one aspect of the physical gridification of the world, but there is also the sheer number of roads and tracks crisscrossing the globe. It has become nearly impossible to “get off the grid.” Virtually nothing and nowhere escapes the techno-social net which we have cast over the planet. Uncharted territory has become a thing of the past.

“And even if you wanted to drop out nowadays, could you? You are identified, tracked, networked, and classified everywhere you go, at every moment of your day. Never in history has it been harder to find a fresh start, a clean slate, or a place to march to the beat of your own drummer. There are no Walden Ponds or hermitage retreats anymore—even the off-the-grid spots are now on the grid.”

A giant sea-serpent attacks a ship off the coast of Norway on Olaus Magnus’s Carta marina of 1539, this image from the 1572 edition.

“If you grew up in the 18th century, there were still new places to go. After hearing tales of foreign adventure, you could become an explorer yourself. This was probably true up through the 19th and early 20th centuries; after that point photography from National Geographic showed every Westerner what even the most exotic, underexplored places on earth look like. Today, explorers are found mostly in history books and children’s tales. Parents don’t expect their kids to become explorers any more than they expect them to become pirates or sultans. Perhaps there are a few dozen uncontacted tribes somewhere deep in the Amazon, and we know there remains one last earthly frontier in the depths of the oceans. But the unknown seems less accessible than ever.”

Peter Thiel has argued that the innovative spirit has degenerated because we no longer believe in secrets; and we no longer believe in secrets because there is no longer any accessible frontier. This is an unprecedented state of affairs for humanity. For eons, our minds and cultures have evolved in delicate symbiosis with the Unknown, that place on the map labeled “Here Be Dragons.” Without this Unknown, that place where there may be cities of gold or fountains of youth, the heroes (but not just the heroes, all of us) have nowhere to journey, and all of the things which can make us into heroes—bravery, fortitude, ingenuity, daring, and the like—begin to atrophy. Without this Unknown, we begin to feel confined, trapped, like a beautiful and dangerous animal in a small cage: we develop a claustrophobia; imagination and inspiration wither. We aren’t as hopeful as we used to be, but we don’t know why.

That kid’s face says it all; the abacuses are sideways jail cell bars

Life on the Grid begins at a young age, when you are given a job at the factory of tears and tedium that is the modern education system, where you will sit at square desks in square rooms in square buildings reading from square books and writing on square pieces of paper for countless hours of your childhood (in most cases I guess they will be rectangles, but you get the point). You will level up from one grade to the next by demonstrating that you can follow arbitrary rules and regurgitate knowledge that is spoon-fed to you in clearly-defined subjects, units, and chapters. If you are even remotely good at this game, they will insist that you do it for the first 22 years of your life, but even that’s not 

At some point, god willing, you will enter “the real world,” that mystical realm your parents and teachers always spoke of. However, you will quickly come to find that “the real world” is another vast bureaucratic system which isn’t really all that different from “the fake world” of school. Sure, you have a little more freedom and some things are slightly different (bosses instead of teachers, cubicles instead of desks), but the basics are the same: just stay on the straight and narrow, keep your head down, and keep leveling up.

As for our post-education lives (what little remains of them), many enter Corporate America or become Public Servants. Some of us become artists or entrepreneurs, but even that is no escape: these career paths have also been engulfed by the Grid. 

 of how there is one indisputable difference between contemporary writers and the writers of even the recent past (early 2000s): 

“But a majority of people under the age of 50 successful in publishing today literally got A+s. They all raised their hands at the right time, did everything they needed to get into Harvard or Amherst or Williams or wherever, then jumped through all the necessary hoops to make it to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop or Columbia University, etc.”

“Faulkner didn’t finish high school, recent research shows Woolf took some classes in the classics and literature but was mostly homeschooled, Dostoevsky had a degree in engineering…Not one of these great writers would now be accepted to any MFA in the country. The result of the academic pipeline is that contemporary writers, despite a surface-level diversity of race and gender that is welcomingly different than previous ages, are incredibly similar in their beliefs and styles, moreso than writers in the past.”

As for entrepreneurs, it’s more of the same. Gone are the days of Gates and Zuckerberg, when advanced degrees were optional and the digital frontier was wide open. Now, everyone reads the

8 Steps to Becoming a Tech Entrepreneur When You Know Nothing About Technology

”), and applies to the same programs, incubators and

Here was Tyler Cowen writing in 2007 (“

The Loose Reins on U.S. Teenagers Can Produce Trouble or Entrepreneurs

“The new ideas and business principles behind the Web have carved out the ideal territory for the young. A neophyte is more likely to see that music can come from computers rather than just from stores or radios, or that it is best to book a flight without using a travel agent. Clay Shirky, an associate teacher at New York University, notes that many young people are blessed by an absence of preconceptions about Internet businesses. Years of experience are critical to refining and improving a long-familiar product, like bread. But completely new, outside-the-box ideas — which typically come from the young — are more important for founding Napster or YouTube.”

Sixteen years later and literally all of this is false now. The young 

To review: growing up in simplistic spatial environments and using GPS has given you brain damage and life has become a soul-crushing video game utterly devoid of mystery or adventure. We are trapped in the Grid like an insect in the spider’s web; vigorous struggle will only serve to entangle us further. To extricate ourselves, we must, as individuals, gently subvert the very foundations of the Grid, which is nothing external, but a facet of human nature: the impulse towards control, the systematizing instinct, the part of us that abhors anomaly and ambiguity and seeks to eradicate them. What begins as an earnest attempt to break free can so easily slip back into a self-imposed system of rules and practices with standards to be met and schedules to be followed. But there are things which can be done. Part two of this series will focus on that. For now, there is perhaps only one thing that can be said: if you want to get off the grid, then get lost.

If you grow up in a grid-like environment, you will be worse at navigating less grid-like environments.

Life on the Grid (Part 1)

We are pleased to announce that former Chief Executive Officer of the Howard Hughes Corporation, David Weinreb, will join Praxis as Vice Chairman. David is spearheading our search for a founding site on the Mediterranean.

Howard Hughes is a pioneer developer of planned cities, such as The Woodlands, Texas; Columbia, Maryland; and Summerlin, Nevada — each with over 100,000 residents.

Other projects David oversaw include the transformation of Lower Manhattan’s South Street Seaport from a tattered tourist district into a prime destination for New York residents. This project included the Rooftop at Pier 17, which was named the Best New Concert Venue in 2019 by Pollstar. Under his leadership of the Howard Hughes Corporation (NYSE: HHC), the company’s share price rose by over 300%.

On Praxis, David says: “I have spent my career bringing people together to make urban spaces thrive. Praxis offers an incredible opportunity to do that work with a blank canvas, on a grand scale, and for a cause I believe in: revitalizing city life.”

Our vision is big: we want to build the next great city, an engine for technological progress, a dynamic culture, and a better way to live. We recognize that reality is in the details, and many crucial details can only be anticipated by a city developer with David’s experience, which is extremely rare. We’re excited to work with David to find the right site to pull the city of the future into the present through physical construction.

David has built three cities with over 100k residents

David Weinreb Joins Praxis as Vice Chairman to Spearhead Search for Site

My friend grew up in 1980’s Shanghai, before air conditioning. The summers were sweltering, but the concrete apartment block had a central courtyard. So at night, everyone would go down and hang out there. The courtyard made it so that the tenants could come together in their shared need to escape the heat. As a result, everyone knew each other, friendships thrived, a community was formed. But then air conditioning arrived.

At first, not everyone could afford air conditioning, so people crowded into the one apartment that could afford it. It was fun, for a time. Then air conditioning became cheaper and more accessible, so everyone got it. People would just stay in. This didn’t happen all at once, but each time one person decided not to go out, it reduced the value of going out for everyone else. Over time, the courtyard grew empty.

This describes the problem our cities and neighborhoods are currently facing at scale.

Historically, major cities were created either as trade cities, resource cities, or intentional government projects.

Trade cities were located where goods could flow in and out. Chicago is a perfect example: there’s a canal that leads out to the Atlantic and rail connections to the rest of the country. These trade cities became more settled over time; as more people moved there, the trade became more valuable, because the city turned into even more of a central “hub” of economic activity. This breeds a longer term mindset towards settling there.

The second kind of city is a resource city—a “mining town”—in which there is a resource that can be extracted, and which initially brings people to it. Literal mining towns are one example, but Las Vegas is another. In Las Vegas, the resource was regulatory arbitrage on running gambling, so the city focused on extracting that value. These cities emerged more recently in history, because they rely on more rails, shipping, and so on. You need to get food and supplies into the desert.

Cities like St. Petersburg or Dubai, on the other hand, are essentially government projects, created in order to become the “special city” of the country. These are rare, and often fail.

These cities were originally very distinct from each other, but over time, as they became more settled, they also became increasingly alike. But remnants of their initial purpose are still present in their character. San Francisco, for example, began as a mining town. People moved there for the Gold Rush. They came with dreams of getting rich, of primarily 

—and it’s still largely that way now. A telltale sign of a resource city is that there are more men than women, as men are more likely to venture into the unknown in an attempt to get rich. People often talk about this as if it’s a good thing, but in reality it makes men 

 rational, because the reward is great on the high end, but in the middle and low end most people don’t make it. Resource cities attract stupid and ambitious men like moths to the flame. This is why San Francisco is still full of them.

Transit is also important for the creation of cities. People think that transit is built to serve already existing communities, but in reality the transit system gets built first—and then the communities spring up around it. You build the city where the river is, you don’t bring the river to the city. When the Long Island railroad was built, people made fun of it, because there was nothing else around it. Now, it’s totally surrounded with stuff. Transit must come first, because no one will build in a place that people can’t get to. You build houses where the subways are, you don't move the subway to the houses.

A new city should invest in transit early, and be intentional about it. Transit infrastructure determines the pattern of development. If you invest in interstate systems like Houston, you’ll get a pattern of development like Houston. If you invest in subway systems, you can get something like Hong Kong—which has a brilliant self-funding transit system through the property value increase that it creates. In Hong Kong, they put the station in, then bought up all the land around it. There is a massive value unlock when you build a transit system, but it’s almost never captured by the transit system itself. So there is a lot of room for creativity there.

This is how cities were built in the past—out of necessity, whether that was work or transportation. A city was, and in most cases still is, a labor market.

But what about now, when remote work has freed so many from the need to move to cities for jobs?

First of all, we’re a long way away from a completely remote economy. While remote work has freed some of us to choose where we live, it’s unclear what that means for the future of cities. If remote work destroys the need for a local labor market, this might actually 

 cities. If you can work from home, why live in a city? You get all the downsides—piled on top of your neighbors, more expensive, smaller living space—with little of the upside.

There are, however, still good reasons to live in a city. In San Francisco, I can walk to my friends’ houses, and give my kid a more varied experience of life; my kid can meet all different kinds of people. Some cities, like NYC, still have a superior dating market. These are all fundamentally people-centered, as opposed to labor-centered. One possibility is that, freed from the strictures of the labor market, the city of the future might re-emerge as a place which exists to serve the relational needs of people who live there, and is less about their work.

While a new city might start off with remote workers, it must eventually become a breeding ground for local businesses and startups. As more people work from home, fostering a sense of vibrant, local community will become increasingly important. Like air conditioning, or anything else which makes it hard to leave our homes, remote work will have an atomizing effect on the neighborhood. I live in Pacific Heights, where a lot of people work remotely, and people don’t have any reason to leave their homes. Any new city must be designed in such a way that it encourages people to gather.

The problem with modern living is the same thing that makes it great: it’s too comfortable. I’m not volunteering to give up my A/C. Any attempt to foster real community will, in some basic sense, require sacrifice on the part of those in the community. Anyone trying to do this will have to figure out how they’ll get people to sacrifice for the greater good, and get them to stay involved in the community. Church, for example, does this by saying, “Okay, we’re going to meet every Sunday.” Another example is the overlook in the Berkeley Rose Garden, which people visit to watch the sunset together. Designing and creating opportunities for people to come together can be done architecturally, as with the overlook, or on the level of value systems, as with church, but either way there needs to be a physical space where people gather, and there needs to be a 

 to gather, even if it’s just something like watching the sunset.

Bondi Beach in Sydney is another great example. It is only open to the public on Sundays. If you want to apply to be a part of the community, you have to go there every Sunday for a year, and you’re only allowed to miss like two Sundays. Not only are they fostering community by having a place where people gather, but community membership is discerned by who will actually be there. Infrequent weekenders are takers. They have no incentive to make the beach a better place. When you’re building a new community, you want people in the community who have skin in the game.

Skin in the game creates community. Every community can only afford some percentage of tourists and takers. This is why there are such expensive hotel taxes in cities. Tourists are extractive: they’re there to use all the nice things, not to create them. Cities must find a way to reward people who are there long term. There should be rewards for those who participate in civic life and make the city better. In the ideal city, the shape of the tax burden would eventually go negative as you contribute more and more. Imagine a new city where people who contribute more to the community are rewarded.

Another way of thinking about this is to ask: 

What does it mean to be an owner of the city?

 With home-ownership, for example, the home-owner has the sense that if the city does well, he does well too. Having some material equity in the city is important. But what’s more important is how much people care about their specific neighborhoods. The question becomes something like: 

Do people care about where they actually live? Do they benefit when they take prosocial actions that make the neighborhood a nicer place?

Incentive structures should reward good behavior. These can be financial, or social. It’s easier for financial incentives to break behavior than to make behavior. The goal with financial incentives should basically be to not make things worse. They should not be set up so that people root against new development in their neighborhoods, or any other common good. With things like Prop 13 in California, residents share in 100% of the downside but none of the upside. One should want more jobs and people in their city, because, though it can be destabilizing in some respects, it’s generally beneficial for the whole city. This isn’t always the case with intentional communities—where one should be rigorously selective about the people who can be a part of it—but it’s true as a general rule.

Social incentives can be even more powerful. At the high school I went to, all of us shared in the maintenance work, and this totally changed the feeling of our shared space. If one of us littered, we knew that one of our peers would have to clean it up, and there would be a social cost to that. If you made a mess, you heard about it. Often, in cities today, there isn’t even this basic sense of social unity. The incentives work 

 the community, and this is totally untenable.

Ultimately, there is only so much top down engineering one can do. I support federalism at the city level. People want different things, and they should be able to organically congregate around them. It’s better to have different things existing alongside each other than to make everyone compromise all the time. This also creates a kind of dynamic friction, which can help give a city life, and give each neighborhood its own character.

Today, our cities still operate like labor markets. But increasingly, due to remote work, they will no longer serve this function. This creates an opportunity: to design the city of the future, focused on solving for the things I’ve just described. Historically, intentional communities have had a terrible track record. The idea sounds good—“I’m going to live around people who share my values”—but in practice it doesn’t work, unless you’re a religious community, like the Amish. And even if it does work, it only works for one generation, because the kids don’t want to live there. Intentional communities have historically cut you off from the flow of modernity. But I’m fundamentally a progressive—I believe in progress, and I believe that a better future is possible. There is an incredible city waiting to be built.

Visions of the City Interview Series: Emmett Shear

Just as the ant unconsciously creates the ant hill, each tending to his small piece, unaware of the larger picture - so too do humans create cities. It is the inevitable expression of humanity to create settlements, birth local economies, facilitate the interaction and growth of human life - each doing his part to create a dynamic and living whole. In the past, these emergent cities created suboptimal conditions for truly vigorous and healthy living; today, we have the chance to build a city with a more holistic vision.

Every city is a monument, an expression of the humans that created it. Should it not be our primary mission to create something beautiful, something that magnifies our potential rather than stifling it; that multiplies our energy rather than sapping it?

Cities historically have been engines of economic growth. People moved to cities for work and focused on making money, at the expense of all else. In 1943 Los Angeles, the "eye-burning, lung-stinging, headache-inducing smog" was so thick that people thought Japan had launched some kind of poison gas attack on the city. In reality, it was just the lack of mindfulness about the health effects of industrial production. Many good things came out of this kind of productivity (a surplus of vital resources, more free time due to specialization of labor etc.), but it did however literally cement into our way of life certain negative externalities that were hitherto not considered.

Spend some time in these urban playgrounds and you’ll see for yourself. An underlying sense of biological unease plagues you as the invisible and visible fumes pass through your bodily system. You find it impossible to truly concentrate with the beeping of vehicles, the morning cacophony of leaf blowers. Our tap water? Oh, it's got a touch of poison for that extra zing - don't worry, it's just to keep those pearly whites cavity-free (complete nonsense by the way). Then there's our food, artfully laced with toxic chemicals, just so the lobby groups can spice up their margins. What about the friendly neighborhood cell towers? They may be carcinogenic, but who wouldn't trade that for unnoticeably faster WiFi?

Having personally spent time in one of the world’s largest metropolises, New York City, I am well aware of the feeling of living in such an environment. Even as someone who understands the health issues and does their best to mitigate them - in a city like New York it inevitably saps at your vital power. Friends I know consider it a cost and sacrifice they are willing to make temporarily in order to further their economic chances of success.

All of this, of course, is for the noble cause of economic progress, a cause so noble that it's willing to sacrifice our health at its altar. Do these cities even spare a thought for the common citizen? Nay - we're just expected to strap in and enjoy the bumpy ride towards this so-called "progress," even if it means trading our lungs for a wifi booster.

The infrastructure is built and the incentives are entrenched. We face great hurdles to completely refurbish these cities to become truly healthy. We must recognize that vital societies require overarching health principles. We must build anew.

I understand that the culture of the times naturally created these things and most people don’t have the time to consider the second order effects of their particular industry. But we do have the time, knowledge, capacity and opportunity now to create the metropolis we deserve.

“The confined air of a metropolis is hurtful to the minds and bodies of those who have never lived out of it. It is impure, stagnant—without breathing-space to allow a larger view of ourselves or others—and gives birth to a puny, sickly, unwholesome, and degenerate race of beings.”

Healthy living is relatively simple. Fresh air, quality water, sunshine, natural organic foods, exercise and a tight knit community will get you the vast majority of the way. All we have to do is remove the constrictions of modern city life while keeping what makes cities great.

Anyone building a new city (or leading a current one) should incentivize the good things, and disincentivize the bad. A healthier population is one that can grow and flourish, one that will have more energy and resiliency to contribute to the city on a higher level. This is an immensely valuable and noble goal - realizing it could mean the difference between man ascending to the heavens, or spiraling down into hell.

Healthy living has a spiritual aspect as well. A spiritually devoid populace cannot be healthy no matter what. If your idols are demonic, then the society will become despondent. People need figures to look up to, to be inspired by, to seek truth from.

What I recommend here are principles and ideals to consider. If your immediate reaction to these are “THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE” or “WOW YOU’RE SCARED OF EVERYTHING”, think about why your mental limits have been so tightly constrained. We have done it before, we can do it again. There need not be any judgment, nor frustration about the past. Look and think FORWARDLY!

Here is what should be done. It isn’t exhaustive, but it’s a start.

: Fix air quality, minimize particulate emissions, cease bioengineering in the form of chemtrails, curtail public smoking around others. I do not believe in the ‘all carbon emissions bad’ idea, but reducing smog and other particulates in the air is absolutely something that should be considered. Another option is to have sophisticated air filters in large public buildings.

: Lighting affects health on a cellular level. Think about how you feel being in the sun for a few hours compared to being under fluorescent office lights and PC/Phone for a few hours. That’s all the ‘evidence’ you need. Our natural circadian rhythm is shot to pieces which is upstream of a myriad of health issues. It is my belief that if people rose with the sun and ceased computer work when the sun sets we would have a blossoming of health. Additionally, there is a major difference between energy-efficient LED bulbs and the warm glow of incandescent bulbs that littered the streets of our youth. Light pollution has negative effects on wildlife as well, impacting migratory patterns and sleep cycles just as it does with humans. Consider lighting public spaces with lanterns and great fires (natural infrared light therapy).

: When we live outside of nature’s laws we produce waste that isn’t easily broken down by natural forces. Avoiding materials that don’t biodegrade easily is the first step, then those who litter should be dealt with strictly. I am not totally against the chopping off of hands - find a bin, it’s not hard.

 What the city is made of has a permanent effect on the energy of the people. Think about how you feel visiting older structures made entirely of great stone, marble columns. It is an entirely different energetic imprint compared to the ‘efficient’ plastic box skyscrapers we build today. Avoid asbestos-like scenarios. Use wood, stone, metals. Zero synthetic plastic-based materials. Doing so imbues the entire city with vitality and you need not worry about potential toxic impacts in the future. They also last longer so from a functional viewpoint it’s a no brainer.

 “Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.” - Frank Lloyd Wright. Limiting high rise buildings means that natural light flows through society more and minimizes the claustrophobic effect of big cities. Utilizing sunlight at every opportunity, skylights to reduce the need for artificial light. High ceilings raise the spirits of the human.

Speaking to the necessity of inspiring the populace, we should have inspirational, historical and mythological physical reminders. If you have ever spent time in a city such as Florence, it is impossible not to feel the beauty and magnitude of the human spirit with the ornate structures and statues that are throughout the city.

Walking is an essential human activity; it allows social human contact through movement and contributes to the health and the overall flow of the city. Cities are great because everything you might need is within walking distance. With everyone commuting to work in separate boxes of plastic (cars), you remove a ‘town square’ feeling that is powerful to both vitality and industry.

 These insidious and invisible electric radiation sources affect our cells in perceptible and imperceptible ways. Minimize 4g towers. Utilize anti-emf material for buildings. Ethernet over wi-fi. I acquiesce that some electronic connection is necessary but it can be done in a more conscious way than ‘beaming more and more radiation through everyone’. Part of the reason you feel so much better in nature is because there is much less electromagnetic radiation. Something to consider; when was the last time you didn’t have cell service outdoors?

 The archaic water systems of our cities deliver what is essentially poison to the citizens. In the mountains of northern Italy natural spring water flows through the municipal tap system, and fluoridation is banned. Spring water is ideal. No chlorination, no fluoridation. Ideally you do not poison your water supply to begin with, but having filtering systems that can actually remove such impurities is essential. Basing the water architecture off the natural shape of rivers can deliver a ‘living’ water which is much more healing.

The standard should be food as it was created by nature; organic. People are eating foods that are soaked in chemicals such as RoundUp, now known to cause cancer. Encourage biodynamic farming, and put in place incentives for citizens to grow their own food. Utilize our animal friends and gift chickens to every citizen that wants them - they devour your organic food scraps and produce beautiful eggs for you to consume in return. If you remove the opportunity for toxic ‘food products’ in your stores, the people will be healthier.

 One of the jewels of Californian life is the open air, free-to-use Muscle Beach developments. These are important to encourage physical activity of the citizen, provide a community meeting point and contribute to the health of the city.

As man is part of nature, we are healthiest when living amongst it. Bringing plant life indoors and also outdoors as much as possible has many physical and spiritual benefits. The best cities have the most nature blended within it; and completely pristine parks even in the heart of the city.

 The giver of all life, sunlight is essential to physical, mental and spiritual health. Implement mandated outdoor sunlight breaks, quartz glass windows that allow the full spectrum of sunlight through, prioritize ‘open-air’ capabilities of buildings.

In order to build a more vital environment, we must simplify, purify, and beautify. The cumulative effect of these changes will make a world of difference—both individually and socially. Until then, we can serve as examples. We can be the pillars of health that will one day hold up the eternal city—a city like soil, in which we will all grow.

Residents of Praxis will play a role in the city’s design and creation. Visions of Praxis is a series of essays from our future residents in which they share their perspectives on how the city should be designed.

Visions of Praxis: Building the Vital City

The castle holds a secret promise. Its walls enclose a towering fortress of last refuge. Yet its power rests not in its walls alone. Rather, the castle is a symbol of hidden authority. In surveying its surroundings, it announces its mastery of the world. And, in upholding this sovereign perspective, it reciprocally shapes the symbolic grammar of cities.

Castles were first constructed as permanent fortresses to defend and police a territory. From the earliest settlements, fortified enclosures were constructed in and beyond the walls of the city.[1] These fortresses later developed from a simple motte and bailey structure to become the administrative and ceremonial centres of Paris, London, and New York. With the emergence of centralized bureaucracies and large professional armies, such older castles gradually fell into disuse, until even the greatest came at last to be rendered obsolete by new weapons, including gunpowder artillery, mechanized warfare, and aerial bombardment. Most historic castles have since been demolished. Yet even amidst their ruins, the image of the castle has remained a potent symbol of a wondrous life in and beyond the world.

The new Romantic or Neo-Medieval castle is radically distinguished from the older Medieval castles by precisely this elevation of symbolic power. It serves no defensive function. It can neither be used to quarter a garrison, nor to project violence, nor to defend a country. Rather, its paramount function is the power of the symbol. It shapes the surrounding countryside with its symbolic grammar. Its walls expressly demarcate the object outside from the subject inside. Yet its towers also draw the object of the outside within the gaze of the subject inside. In gathering the object within the subject, it attributes the object to the subject. And, in attributing all such objects to the subject, it erects a totemic pole for successive regimes of symbolic grammar: first, in Feudalism, as all land outside is attributed as the property of the king; second, in the Revolution, as this singular dominion is dispersed to be attributed to the people; and third, in the Restoration, as this political cycle from the one to the many is collected under the free and sovereign figure of a reconciling genius, in whom – for a fleeting moment – the free and general will of an entire people appears to be objectively personified. Once abandoned, the ruins of old medieval castles could be reimagined as concrete symbols of aesthetic flight and spiritual emancipation.

In the castle, the spirit of art now shines through the political. It crowns the heights of the earth with reminders of a younger age when mountains could be moved by a hope as bold as the break of dawn. As a symbol, the castle remains more potent than any physical barrier. For it is not, as it initially appears, simply an island fortress held apart in lonesome particularity beyond the walls of both the city and the wilderness. Rather, it is the radial axis of creative labour, extending in a chain of spiritual action beyond the horizon of terrestrial domination, and glowing like a candle from within the hidden strength of a single place. It can, in this concentration of symbolic power, reproduce the universal as singular, even as its universal significance erupts like a flash of lightning in ever new symbolic media. The spectacle of the sacred liturgy could thus, for a moment, pass from the cathedral to the castle, such that, as in the Château de Versailles, the power of the king could appear divine through the total-artwork (

) of a house that assumes the shape of the world.

In his essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, Martin Heidegger describes how a bridge “does not just connect banks [of the river] that are already there.”[2] Rather, “The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream.”[3] It is the bridge that establishes a relation, whereas before there was no middle between the extremes. Rather than the castle or the cathedral, he renders the ‘last bridge’ as the place in which dwelling is elementarily open to the “letting-be” of being.[4] Yet, as Heidegger’s allusion to the “saint of the bridge” also suggests, a castle, like a cathedral, is not only a destination, but a ‘building-as-dwelling’, in which, the horizon of death hangs upon its walls, and the bridge of all bridges to every places opens from its gates.[5] A castle can, accordingly, be acknowledged as the concrete symbolic form of the highest middle, from which this transit of bridges radiates in every direction. In a castle, all the elements of urban habitation are seminally preserved and projected outwards. It draws to it the whole attention of the country over which it looks as a radiant oculus – one that is seen by all, and one from which all else can be seen. It lingers over the hills as a totemic power of unseen depths that shines across the countryside. All of its age-worn stones are saturated with symbolic meaning, as much today as ever before.

The spiritual renovation of the world could thus be carried out under an entirely new design. Musical drama became, in Richard Wagner, for the first time since Attic tragedy, a medium for drawing this chorus of the city to the stage, and shaping the city in an echo of its song. He writes of how the Greeks came to see in Aeschylus’ 

 “the image of themselves, to read the riddle of their own actions, [and] to fuse their own being and their own communion with that of their god.”[6] King Ludwig II similarly conceived of a series of castles, including the swan castle Neuschwanstein, and the grail castle Falkenstein, in which this passing spectacle of musical drama could be performed again upon the political stage.[7] In a 13th May 1868 letter, he wrote to Wagner: “I propose to rebuild the ancient castle ruins of [Vorder]hohenschwangau near the Pöllat Falls, in the genuine style of the old German knights’ castles.”[8] The Neo-Medieval castle was envisioned as a theatre of new art and new politics that would light the hills of Bavaria with monuments to living music. Yet for his quixotic programme, King Ludwig II was deposed, and likely murdered, in a death that to this day remains a mystery.[9] The designs of his unfinished castles rested on the drawing-board until the moment when news arrived of the King’s death.[10] With his passing, the political importance of art in Europe was ceded to the bourgeoisie: first to the Socialists, and later to the Fascists. The building of castles has since come to appear as not only a political, but an aesthetic embarrassment – an intolerably kitsch swansong to the politics of the past.

However, in demolishing one castle of stone, we have lately succeeded in erecting a far more malevolent castle of symbols. Beginning in his studio, Walt Disney gathered the wealth of premodern myths in modern animated films. As the world’s largest media conglomerate, the Walt Disney Company brokers a mercantile emporium of global myths. It is, as Theodor Adorno described, the monopoly producer of the ‘culture industry’, in which the raw materials of human talent are harvested, stories are assembled, and the deep culture of a nation is commercially transacted.[11] No less than the great factories of the gilded age, Disney today industrially produces all the spectacles of song, television, and film that circulate through the vital sinews of our media culture. The operatic castle of Wagner’s 

 has been substituted for the animated castle of Disney’s 

As a utopian city-state, Disney World is the focal theatre for the manufacture of the American dream. EPCOT had, as Steven Mannheim illustrates, originally been designed by Walt Disney to feature “a radial/organic plan; a 50-acre town centre megastructure enclosed by a dome; a regional mall-sized internationally themed shopping area; a hotel and convention complex of thirty or more stories; office space; a greenbelt; high-density apartments; single-family houses; neighbourhood centers; a satellite community; monorail and PeopleMover systems; and underground automobile and truck tunnels” in a continuous transmutation of material into symbolic production.[12] Like the Vatican, Disney World holds the 100 square-kilometre Reedy Creek Improvement special governing district, with virtual representations among all nations. At its heart, Cinderella’s Castle rises as an international stage designed for pilgrims to capture an immortal image of their lives as witnesses to myths made real. Its magic is thus all the more powerful, as the concentrated stage of the simulated production, consumption, and performance of new myths already packaged for sale.

The Magic Kingdom is, as Jean Baudrillard observes, a utopian “digest of the American way of life, [a] panegyric of American values” and the “perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra.”[13] In its childlike “play of illusions and phantasms”; “its tenderness and warmth of the crowd”; and the “excessive number of gadgets necessary to create [its] multitudinous effects,” it appears as a phantasmagoria of perfect ideology.[14] It is 'no longer anything but an immense scenario' that is simulated in this reality of 'faked phantasms' under the omnipotence of the symbol.[15] It is no longer 'real', but rather, for Baudrillard, 'hyper-real' – more real precisely because as a symbol it is representative of all that can be real. The naïve meaning of reality has thus been elevated to the occult shapes of symbolic forms that shine from behind the surface of things. Yet this drama of illusions only further conceals the fact that Disney World is the real America.[16] If its walls appear nowhere, it is because the castle of our culture is now everywhere.

In this monopoly fortress of the culture industry, we observe the supreme concentration of symbolic production and consumption. The creation of art has come increasingly to be captured by a myriad of conflicting interests beyond the designs of the artist, of shareholder profits, and of an inhuman cybernetic system that would cannibalistically simulate only to consume its own suffocating exhalations. No sovereign artist now directs its grand designs. No singular mind now animates its torturous labours, or longs in the travails of passion to express in visible crafts the hidden springs of its heart. Roland Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ has instead been recapitulated at a higher level in the indistinguishable revivification of long-dead artists.[17] And, in recycling once animated films in live-action remakes, it has unfolded the second into the third dimension of computer-generated imagery, even as it has captured this geometrical transformation under a frame that collapses the depth of the not so distant past for the reproduction of old in new stories.

 (1994) opens and closes with a repetition of the same royal baptism. All of the animals have assembled in a circle of life at the castle of the animal kingdom to celebrate the birth of the new prince Simba. The central dramatic conflict then results from a palace 

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