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What are the parallels between faith and open source software? Join Henry Zhu for an off-the-cuff conversation between friends. Check out hopeinsource.com and nadiaeghbal.com/public-faith for the backstory!
Henry: Talking with Drew Austin.
We're doing this in person,
which is kind of new for me.
And maybe for you too.
Drew: In person podcasting is back!
Henry: Yeah, I hope so.
You've had a few newsletter posts
recently about New York as well.
Drew: I've lived in New York for 10 years.
My background is in urban planning, so
a lot of what I write about is how the
digital and physical worlds collide
and overlap and influence each other.
Watching how much cities have been changed
by all our digital technology, not just in
the last 10 years, but well before that.
It's such a fertile place to observe
different phenomena, and it's also very
unlike the rest of the United States.
So in a sense, you're not
always learning that much about
other places if you're here.
Henry: Everyone knows what's up in
New York, but then we might not know..
Drew: The internet is so like central
to that, but other media I guess also
broadcast the activities of New York to
the rest of the country and the world.
So everybody I joked, has to know
what the weather's like in New York,
if there's an extreme weather event,
my mom knows if it's snowing here.
And I've always thought that was
kind of silly, but that's also..
Whatever the New Yorker like identity is.
I feel like that's such a big part of it.
Like you have to hear what I'm doing,
but I don't care what you're doing.
That's the provincial New Yorker
looking out at the rest of the world.
But I mean, I don't like to think that
I've internalized that attitude, but
it is just being here I think gives you
a lot of food for thought if you care
about cities in the built environment.
I mean, I'm really happy to be here
and I think it gives me a lot of
ideas that I wouldn't necessarily
have if I lived somewhere else.
Henry: I've been here, I guess like six
years, so it's long enough I suppose.
Yeah.
I don't think I feel like a New
Yorker either, but there's a certain
ethos or culture to the city that
you can't get in a lot of places.
When I first moved, I didn't
want to be here, but then I
realized how much I hated driving.
Seems like the only city that you
can just take a subway, right?
In the US.
Drew: That's also really important to me.
I love not owning a car and I will try
to not have a car as long as possible.
I think I've written about this
a lot over the last year and a
half since the pandemic started.
The pandemic is obviously like
a very physical problem in many
ways, requiring us to isolate
social distance being transmitted
by people being close together.
And how it's kind of been both in
the middle of last year and now post
vaccine, it seems like New York's
like role in, I guess like having
a dense urban environment or just
being like the American dense city.
Everything that's happened
with the pandemic seems to be
this referendum on New York.
So last year everyone was very eager
to declare that like New York was dead
and now everyone kind of has like swung
completely to the opposite direction.
And everyone thinks New York is is
where you where you want to be right
now because you can do things again.
And it's funny how in both situations.
It somehow becomes more about New
York than you would expect and.
I mean this is also like a very,
again, like, yeah, New York centric
thing to say, to like assume that
everyone is thinking about New York.
But it does feel that way sometimes.
Henry: Maybe it's self-fulfilling
prophecy that maybe that's, I was
thinking just memes in general,
like the whole GameStop thing.
Drew: Yeah, and I mean that definitely
seems to be borne out by the fact
that I, I haven't checked lately, but
just I know that the GameStop stock
price is still like way, way above.
If you're talking about technology
and media, a city is a medium, but
like also the internet is a different
medium where it just happens to
be one of the primary theaters
where human nature plays out today.
Like we attribute a lot of things
to the internet that aren't
really because of the internet.
There's certain types of human
behavior that are going to
happen somewhere no matter what.
And like a city is one place
that they can be observed and
the internet is another place.
So like I think a lot of times
we think Facebook is causing
us to become bad people.
But really like that way of being bad was
something that we would've found a way
to do before, and maybe we just haven't
remembered what it used to be like.
Or we've idealized the past.
I mean, some people idealize the future.
That's what's kind of interesting
about technology, thinking of
it in terms of like the medium
as Marshall McLuhan used it.
It's just another place
where people do human things.
Henry: He was emphasizing the medium
isn't just the way, but the environment.
We are always thinking about how do
we create tools and affect the world
rather than the world affecting us.
Drew: Right?
That statement about every new
technology is an amputation of,
Henry: He's known for saying like
it's an extension of our body, but
then we forget the second part of it,
which is like, it can easily do the
opposite, which is remove our senses
or remove the need for our senses.
Drew: You can see things
like certain types of memory.
You can see it in our culture that other
ways of doing those things have atrophied.
Memory is sort of like a complicated
thing, but right now nobody feels like
they're not gonna have most of the
information they need at their fingertips.
So it becomes less urgent.
It almost feels pedantic to even..
I, I'm not complaining about that.
I feel like it can be kind of missing
the point if you complain about the
fact that nobody has to remember facts
anymore because they can look them up.
Right?
Like that's great.
I'm happy to not have my
head full of useless facts.
But there again, like you were kind of
alluding to earlier, there's so many like
knock on effects and a lot of them are.
Fairly unpredictable and we kind of
realized that there are problems once
something has already disappeared.
Henry: All of us can use like
GPS to like get anywhere we want.
This is great for all of us
individually, but then maybe before
you would've asked for directions
and that was like a small amount of
trust for a stranger that we lost.
Drew: I noticed that pretty quickly
when smartphones became pretty
widespread 10 years ago or however long.
One of the first apps I remember
seeing on the iPhone that I thought
was really amazing and kind of
like the perfect indication of what
the iPhone could do was Shazam.
I remember pretty quickly after
people started to use Shazam to
identify music, that it became less
acceptable to ask somebody what
was if you went to a restaurant.
And you liked the music that was playing.
First of all, it's like, why are you,
it would be, why are you asking me this?
You can just Shazam it.
But secondly, a lot of times people
wouldn't even know what was playing
because they were just playing like a
Pandora or like algorithmic playlist.
The person both doesn't need to talk to
you about what it is and doesn't know.
So they've been removed
from the whole process.
Henry: Yeah.
Impersonal.
I guess like they might even feel
offended that you're asking at all.
'cause like everyone knows at
this point you're supposed to just
search Shazam it maybe eventually.
Like there's no name to the music.
It's just like all Yeah, like real time
generated from like code or something.
Drew: Which I is in a way it
happening now because so much music
is made to like be lo-fi basically.
Yeah.
Lo-fi or like Monday moods or whatever.
Yeah.
And it's kind of not actually
even really meant to be thought
of as made by a, an artist.
It's just almost an engineered product.
But I think that's actually like,
I mean, directions is also like a
good, it's an opportunity to help
somebody directly, like on the street.
With music, it feels even more tragic to
me because asking somebody what music they
chose to play is such a great opportunity
to talk about something interesting
that you both are excited about.
And I mean, we can go do that on Twitter
or social media or whatever now, but
it's just one little thing that has
gone away, and I think it's kind of
not perceptible to a lot of people.
Henry: I think one of your posts
mentioned that too, like when
you're driving with someone?
Drew: The disappearance of physical media.
I wrote about that recently.
How by reorganizing our like media
archives in this completely digital
format, we don't have the same ways
to like show each other what we
like as you could, if you had all
your CDs on a shelf or all your
records on a shelf at your house.
Most people who like books still have
bookshelves, although that's also
kind of going in the same direction
with ebook and stuff like that.
Again, there's a way of talking about this
that can feel like it's kind of trivial.
How much do you really need?
And I actually am like, happy to have
more space in my apartment that's
not taken up by huge piles of CDs.
But it is like something that I don't
think that for my generation, there's
an adequate replacement for it.
And I mentioned in the post part of
it's just that I've gotten older,
so like music and showing off what
music you like as you as central to
my life as it would've been when I
was in my early twenties or teenager.
It's still like, you know, a way
to learn a lot about somebody.
Henry: Yeah, we're in my room.
It's like what's in here?
Yeah.
Maybe.
Well, I put the books in a box, but
otherwise what are we showing off anymore?
Yeah.
And maybe that if it's all
online, it's like, you could have
just looked it up or something.
Drew: Well, I think social media or
there's, there's an effort to kind of give
us artificial ways to recreate those types
of things in purely digital environments.
Like in theory, social media
should be a way to like.
Show everybody else what you are.
But the way that it's done in those
media are like, it kind of just
feels like everyone's shouting
at each other at the same time.
So you're thinking a lot more about
what you're putting out than what other
people are are showing or like, I mean,
I think actually an interesting example
of this is NFTs, the technologies
for displaying your NFTs, which
are still pretty rudimentary, but.
I think that's actually filling
the void of something like
having a record collection that
is a sign of like who you are.
I'm not that deep in NFTs.
I don't own any, so I can't imagine using
an NFT to like show anything about myself.
But I know that people seem to be
trying to do that and are probably
getting some value out of that.
And what, what's interesting to me about
that is at some point it feels like the
last era of the internet or of computers
was kind of eliminating all these things
from the physical world and putting
them in pure information formats online.
And now we've completely finished that
process and now we're trying to re
recreate these physical environments that
we've stripped of all of their purpose.
Henry: Right.
Maybe Zoom is like the
epitome of all this.
So there's all these like gather, like
these spatial apps where you can chat in
a video game or people are using video
games to have parties or birthdays.
Drew: Even clubhouse I
thought was pretty spatial.
I mean, I audio is inherently more
spatial than a lot of the visual
environments we have on the internet.
But the way that like you would
drift from room to room, it actually
did seem to kind of simulate.
Being at some social gathering or a
place in its own kind of simplified way.
A lot of what the physical world imposes
on us is these constraints which are
very fundamental to life in meet space.
Like I have to travel across
distance to get from my house to
your house to record this podcast.
And kind of the magic of technology is
that it eliminates those constraints.
So it's interesting that we
feel the need to reproduce them.
It may be suggests to me that we've
sort of given these digital technologies
too many chores to do or too many tasks
that maybe not all of them are best
done online or in purely digital forms.
If we find something lacking
when everything is online it
means that we've moved too many
things out of the physical world.
But that's a, I mean,
that's a huge, I don't know.
I feel like that's all.
You could write a whole book about it.
Henry: On a website, it's like
actually too fast on the server side.
So they purposely make it slower so that
it feels like something's being done,
but in reality it's actually an instant.
They need people to perceive that
like work is quote unquote being done.
Drew: Yeah that's a great example of that.
And like, it's disorienting
if that goes away.
Like your actual sensory
cues are like missing.
You need some of that.
Henry: I don't think you would
wanna have to walk to a Zoom room.
You still would just teleport.
We always recreate.
Yeah.
The same thing in the new medium
and we can't help but do that.
We don't really know how to
imagine something really different.
Drew: Yeah, assuming that Clubhouse is
not at all what it was six months ago.
I think that was one of its big downfalls
was that it took most of the social
media that we use is asynchronous
and it imposed a synchronous quality
on how we communicate digitally.
And it only worked because it was
this special moment in human history
when everybody was isolated and at
home and had a lot of free time.
So every evening when people
weren't working anymore, like
they would all be on Clubhouse.
But you, I think you could, and
you saw it kind of start to wane
once people started going back out
and getting vaccinated and stuff.
So I think it was an unnecessary
constraint that we've already
kind of figured out ways to
bypass using the internet.
Twitter is really interesting because it
feels like it's happening in real time.
But it's actually a bunch of people
who just posted and are probably
not even looking at their screen
right now at a very granular level.
Like most of the people that you
see in your Twitter feed aren't
actually on Twitter right now.
They're probably like
doing something else.
It's pretty clear if you have an
opportunity to find out how many
people are online at one time.
There are also a lot of eyeballs
on the screen at any given moment.
Henry: Yeah.
I found myself like not
using it much anymore.
Sacasas was saying how like
there's no way to be silent.
Mm-Hmm.
Online.
Drew: And there's no like
silence paired with presence.
It's like people would notice if you,
if you were silent and on Twitter, then
it would be perceived as an absence.
It would be like, where did Henry go?
But in the physical world, you can be
silent and present at the same time.
And you know, we could be
sitting in this room together,
not talking, and there would be.
Some benefit of shared human
contact there, even though there
was no quote unquote content.
Henry: So this reminds me
of a game that I play a lot.
It's called the Mind.
You're supposed to be silent
when you're playing it.
In short, it's the numbers
one through a hundred.
It's a card game.
And you need to play the
numbers in ascending order.
So like 1, 5, 23, and up.
And it's a cooperative game..
The trick is that you're not
allowed to communicate what
number you have or anything.
So you can only use like body language.
And so that's a great game to
show nonverbal communication.
Drew: Yeah, no, I love stuff like that.
And I think it becomes, I also think
it's sort of like almost a trapping of
knowing somebody better or being closer
to a friend or someone in your family
that you can feel comfortable sharing
silence with them while together?
I think that's something that
we don't really feel with
people we don't know as well.
You just have to keep filling the
silence, but as the relationship
deepens, it becomes more Okay.
Which I think is very telling
of the value of silence, that
we kind of get more comfortable
with it as we know people better.
Henry: Is that even something we want to.
Introduce into digital space,
or is it just like not a thing?
There's live streams and discords
where people join and they just
study together and nobody is talking.
Drew: I think in a way actually
that, um, the GM meme is kind of
that too, even though it is a thing.
But because it's just the same
thing being said over and over
again, it kind of loses its.
It's content and it just becomes
this statement between two
people without any real message.
Like a nod.
Henry: Yeah, that sounds like the YO app.
Drew: It's just that reappearing.
I mean, I've seen it in like discord
rooms where everyone's just saying
GM and that's the only message
that's being exchanged in the room.
And obviously the app
that was made recently.
But all that stuff, I
think it speaks to some.
I mean, that's also just kind of a joke.
I can't really like assess whether it
speaks to some deeper need, but it does
seem to be like kind of an example of
something that's not like content in
the way that we normally experience it.
Henry: Should we talk about
your post on Real Life?
The title is called Worn Out.
Drew: I wrote a piece for Real Life
a month or two ago, so I became
really interested in this idea of
fashion as something that has a
relationship to the public space
and there's this reputation of.
People in the Bay Area or Silicon Valley
or in tech not dressing well and obviously
in like New York would be the opposite
end of the spectrum to that which kind
of embodies everything that the Bay Area
is not Culturally, people in New York
are known for dressing well or trying to
dress well or caring about that aspect
of their self presentation, and I thought
it was really interesting to kind of
explore maybe the deeper reasons why.
People in tech don't seem to value that.
And my hunch or my hypothesis
that I explored and argued in this
piece is that fashion is something
with positive externalities
that enhances the public realm.
And if you don't care about that,
then you don't care about fashion.
Now, I think there's another way of
looking at fashion, and I mentioned
this in the piece, that it is a sort of
vain and self-aggrandizing practice so
that people will think I am great, but
I actually don't think of it that way.
This is kind of a great example of what
I was saying about living in New York.
I notice just being on the street
and how interestingly people dress is
something that we all benefit from.
If you dress interestingly, if you have
like a flashy style, then it kind of makes
the whole street scape feel more vital.
And when people like think that
New York is an interesting place
to visit, that's a huge part of it.
So the people watching, half of why it's
interesting is what people are wearing.
My argument in the piece was that
tech isn't interested in creating
those kinds of positive externalities,
and they're not really interested in
enhancing the physical public realm.
And a lot of the environments that we
spend all of our time in online seem
to be these digital simul acra of
public space that don't actually have
some of the necessary qualities of
public space, one of which would be.
Like the fact that there is a commons,
like a shared experience of things
that's not sort of monetized or turned
into data that somebody benefits from.
I'm curious what you thought
about that, or if you have any.
Henry: I was just thinking about myself.
I have to admit, I never
really cared about it.
And then moving here, it made me feel..
Well, I guess I still don't care about it.
It's funny and yeah, it's like
we're both just being to ourselves.
Maybe it's the same thought of
science is objective and then saying
that, oh, my non view of close is
objective, but that's also its own view.
There's no like, it's a statement.
Yeah.
There's no non view.
It's just the tech.
Attire or whatever is a thing, right?
Drew: Yeah.
And you are saying, I never
cared about what I wore, and
then in some ways still don't?
I probably dress nicer than I did
before I moved to New York, just
because the bar is higher for like,
what, I guess like what's acceptable.
But I think about it more now, and
I acknowledge that I gather a lot of
information about other people by what
they're wearing, not in a judgmental way.
Just there's a lot that you kind of
gather right off the bat if you see
somebody and see how they're dressed.
And I, I've come to like, not
only be aware of that, but
to actually appreciate it.
I think it's just really fascinating
to see what you get, what you
learned about somebody in that way.
And I don't think it's
about a competition.
I don't think people are trying, there
are situations where that's true, but
it's not like someone's trying to be
better than everybody else in the room.
I think there is just pure
self-expression happening in many cases.
Henry: Doesn't mean we should dismiss
thinking about the whole industry of
fashion, because you thought that some
people were trying to show off, right?
Drew: Right.
There's a consumerist element to it
that is unavoidable, but that I think
afflicts everything at this point.
Henry: Basically just being more aware of
things that you didn't care about before.
Drew: Maybe because I'm not an example
of a person that dresses in a flashy way.
I almost think it was like more
interesting for someone like me to
write it because if, if like you or
I are appreciating this behavior that
we don't fully take advantage of, I
think it attest to the power of it.
Like, I'm glad someone's doing that.
It's not necessarily me.
Yeah.
But like with any public benefit or
public good, everyone is glad to see.
Yeah.
That it exists, even if they're
not all, it's rare that people
are equally contributing to it,
but everybody benefits from it.
And I think that's important in
healthy societies to have that dynamic.
Henry: Yeah.
I guess going back to like Commons, Andy
Matus kind of post, and he mentioned
like video games being a public good,
but specifically the UI of a video game.
So I guess once a video game comes
out, everyone can just copy that ui.
Remember the game 2048?
That was like a copy of something else,
which is also a copy of something else.
Drew: All of culture I think could
be said to be a version of that.
Like music is often clearly, even
great music is clearly deriving
tons of its characteristics
from what's come before it.
Any art, I would say there's
a version of that happening.
It's very natural and it's what we
should want because once somebody
comes up with something that
works, everyone else can adopt it.
Henry: The style of it, it's
like UI is just fashion of
like software or something.
Maybe tech cares too much about function.
Drew: Yeah.
I think that's actually a
really good way of putting it.
This connects back to architecture because
in modernist architecture there was
this idea, of form following function.
The shape of something or the
form of something should be a
pure expression of its purpose.
There was an idea that if something
was perfectly engineered to fulfill
its function, then there was an
inevitable way they would have to look.
And modernism kind of contradicted itself
by not actually adhering to its own ideas.
Because a lot of modernist architecture
was just this like style that kind of got
applied to everything in a non-functional
way, but the idea was pretty compelling.
And I think I see a lot of that in, in
tech and how, how software is approached
that if, you know, if something's not
contributing to the functional purpose
of the software, then it's excess and
it doesn't really need to be there.
It's like a completely different
medium to think about that in,
because code is inherently functional
and it's not really visible.
So like aesthetics get layered on top.
And there might be a example
of that that I'm like missing.
But I think aesthetics always seem to
come like after the, the underlying code.
Again, with crypto, I think some of
that may have like converged again.
The actual act of doing certain things
in code is not necessarily functional
except to like express some point or idea.
Henry: Yeah.
My friend Angus, he has a book
called, like if Hemingway wrote
JavaScript, it's really cool.
He just implements algorithms
and then he'll write them in
different authors like Hemingway or
Shakespeare like, and he'll have like
different ways of writing comments.
So it's like showing you
how aesthetic coding can be.
It's also just writing.
One of the first things I worked
on was what's called a code linter.
And you know, like linting your
clothes, like get off like,
you know, hair or whatever.
And so we have that, which is
essentially just spell check for
coding, but it's only aesthetic.
So it's like you need a space here.
You, you need to change
your name and your variable.
It's really helpful on a team
where you have like a hundred
people, you wanna make sure that.
Everyone's on the same page.
So we have a standard.
But the problem with standards
is that it removes the ability
of people to express themselves.
And so some people might protest
against the use of a linter, at
least on your personal project.
Just let me do whatever I want.
Drew: Well, that's really interesting.
And I, as a non programmer, it's
interesting to me that there is, you
know, like that there would be like
a desire for expression just in the
way the code is written and like
how it raises the question of how
much flexibility should there be?
I was thinking as you were describing
that there, it's code is weird in that
you consume it two different ways.
You can actually read the code
as it's written or you encounter
it as a user who is experiencing
the, the results of the code.
And like the latter is obviously much
more common and something you don't really
need any literacy in engineering to do.
It's actually the purpose of it to be
something that people can engage with
without understanding the underlying code.
But I don't, I guess there's a
version of that with reading a book.
Like you could read the book or you
could experience the second order
effects of the book as it disseminates
through the world and affects culture.
But with code, I think
that loop is much tighter.
The relationship between what's
written and what the effect of
what was written is a very direct
and predictable relationship.
Henry: I also think about how people
create programming languages themselves.
Yeah.
And usually language design is top down.
That makes sense.
You have a group of experts that
kind of decide what goes in and
our tool in a way, democratizes.
That design because they
can make their own things.
Then maybe propose them to the committee
and then they'll eventually get included
in the standard, even though that might
take like three years or something.
That gets into this whole philosophy
around how do you design a language
and what's good for people?
Should there be one way of doing things or
should they be many ways of doing things?
And so there's this guy, Larry
Wall, and he's the creator of Pearl.
Okay.
And he gave this talk, like he
said, that Pearl is the first
postmodern programming language.
Wow.
Which I think is an interesting
concept from a functional
utilitarian point of view.
It's like, yeah, you should only
have one way of doing something
'cause you're gonna confuse people.
Drew: And there's also the
idea that the best way is the
way that you've arrived at.
Yeah.
And so why would you not, why
would you do something that's
not the best way of doing it?
Henry: Mm-Hmm.
Drew: But then there's hubris
in that because who can like.
Why would you assume that you
found the best way to do something?
I mean, I understand the desire to believe
that, but it's unlikely to be true,
Henry: Even from the creator themselves.
Like why do you think, just 'cause
you made it, that you're gonna also
be the best person to determine that?
Cause Illich, he talks a lot about how
standardizing, like I think it was a
Spanish or Chinese was like a way for the
government to like impose on their people.
Through programs, like,
okay, that's kind of true.
You are making them
think in a certain way.
It might not even be intentionally,
but it does that just by
limiting what they can express.
Drew: Yeah.
George Orwell has written about that too,
how it's kind of a totalitarian action.
I guess 1984 has that.
The double speak and all the
weird language in the book.
He's written essays about that too
and just how it shrinks the range of
thoughts that people can have if you
reduce the options in the language.
Henry: Yeah, and I think that
it speaks to the idea that
there's only one value in tech.
Which is like ability and efficiency.
But you're assuming that
there's no other metric.
Drew: Do you think that's
changing at all though?
I feel like I see more evidence now that.
There are those other value systems.
Maybe it's just because I'm more
plugged into the communities of
people that are working on things
than I was like 10 or 20 years ago.
Henry: People are more
wary of tech values.
It's a very broad statement.
I guess my concern, that's someone
that's sympathetic to it, bringing in old
values back into the new medium, right?
It's so easy to do that by accident.
The artifacts that we make, embody
our values whether we want to or not.
If you have a different mental model
of how the code works than them,
that's why you can't understand it,
because they are thinking from a
certain viewpoint, and it's like if
you can buy into that viewpoint, it'll
be easier to go through the, say the
tutorial or whatever on how it works.
Instead of just pretending that
like, code is code, you know, people
say it all the time, unless you
understand why they said something.
You're just doing what I, I
call like archeology, trying
to figure out like a mystery.
Like how do they do this?
Drew: That's actually..
As someone who, what you just described,
I would say I've dabbled in coding, but
I definitely am no expert and, certainly
don't do it professionally at all.
Actually, that's not even totally true.
But, the way you're describing it,
I feel like the farther you are from
it or the less you understand it,
the more you would not realize that.
If you don't have any understanding
of coding as I don't, relative to
someone like you, it seems from the
outside more like there's likely to
only be one way of doing things because
it's kind of perceived as this super
rational system for creating things
that do things in very predictable ways.
The more I've learned about how code
actually works, the more I've come to
understand what you just described.
And it's much more of an
art than I ever realized.
Henry: One way of thinking about it
is just trying to be aware of the fact
that like everything can have bugs.
My code can have bugs, like my
program, but then the browser that
I use can have bugs, which it does.
And then even the program language itself.
Yeah, that can have bugs.
And then the CPU that you use can
have bugs like all the way down.
So it's not that predictable.
So they have to have error correcting,
like built in to be resilient to like
these kinds of random fluctuations
of electricity or something.
Drew: I like that you said the word
resilient because I do feel like
resilient is another word for there
being multiple ways to do something.
And that's kind of necessary for something
to actually be resilient, whether
in a system like a city or in code.
I think it's a generalizable
quality of resilience.
I mean, modernism, again,
that was the problem with it.
It kind of connects back to that
idea of one way of doing things.
I feel like a lot of the things that get
grouped under the term modernism, a system
that's completely totalized, that has one
way of working and things that have more
flexibility and more resilience built
into them, have stood the test of time.
And I mean modernism as a
20th century phenomenon.
I think it kind of had its moment.
Henry: For maintenance and any
kind of infrastructure you're
gonna want that resilience,
that's literally the whole point.
Drew: Over and over again that,
that you want things to be resilient
and only in like temporary periods
of time where people forget about
what's gone wrong in the past.
Does it become possible to like
produce something that's not resilient?
I mean, honestly, we're probably
in another one of those periods.
I think we're always in a
period like that in some.
Aspect of life where like something's
being over-engineered to be kind of too
rigid or too narrow and we ultimately pay
the price and we learn too late that like
we should have made it more resilient.
And then we learn the lesson in
that space, but then we make the
same mistake in a different domain.
Yeah.
I also think one of the best and
like most time honored sources of
resilience in different areas of
society is just more people having
agency and more people being empowered.
And instead of having a more top-down
system, having a lot of that agency
sort of at the lower levels, what I
think you could see that in terms of
like communities, small businesses, the
more of those types of things you have,
the more resilient society usually is.
The more consolidation happens, the
more likely it is to be not resilient.
Henry: The commons.
Like, you know, this idea
that nobody can own it.
There's no rules that you can
even think of to impose on people.
Drew: Instead of rules that are
customs for engaging with it, but
everyone kind of just understands
what they, and everyone sort of sees.
The commons as, as something
to be protected and not to be..
Henry: Managed.
Drew: Captured for oneself or..
Managed is a good word.
Henry: Those rules are internalized in
some sense, like they're not written down.
Everyone understands them.
Drew: And it's kind of like the culture
is like an organism that regulates
itself in a constant process of sort of
subtly nudging behaviors towards where
they need to be rather than hard rules
that are enforced via punitive measures.
Especially Illich's writing on the
Commons is so valuable because when
I read it, I realize how few examples
there are of anything like a commons
in contemporary life, even things
that we think of as commons are not.
And like when I say public space,
yeah, that is not a commons.
It's just space that's been,
you know, marked off to be used
by groups of people at once.
But I think a, an actual commons in
which you can, like gather resources
or do more types of things is not even.
It's not, it's like a completely
different thing than public space.
And I think public space is maybe
a, a more restricted version.
It's
Henry: usually just like space that
the government allows people to use.
Why can't I buy a ping pong table and then
let everyone use it I can't even do that.
Drew: People's behavior changes
when they know that they're
not engaging with the commons.
What you described, if that was not
prohibited in the park, then it would
instantly be a problem because too many
people would try to do things like that.
Because everybody sees it as,
I'm gonna try to claim as much
of this as possible for myself,
either temporarily or spatially.
And in the commons, that wouldn't
happen because the whole society
that is the steward of the commons
would understand that that ruins it.
Henry: Understood that there's
some kind of way of managing,
Drew: there would be a protocol.
Yeah.
That was easy for everybody
to follow and understand.
Henry: And maybe that inherently means
that it has to be local and like Yeah.
Not really scalable.
It sounds like it relates to when you were
talking about like airport lounges, right.
Drew: I think it was last week,
the background of this post.
I went to the US Open, the tennis
tournament, which happens at
the end of August and beginning
of September in New York.
And the venue, which I'm sure, I think
this is like common at every stadium
or arena now, but, there were these
Amex lounges all over the grounds.
And there were like chase sapphire
lounges and it felt like an airport
or something from an airport that's
now been exported out of airports to
urban environments, or, I mean, that's
like a private space, a private event.
But actually since I wrote that
post, I was in Manhattan down
by the South Street Seaport.
And there was an Amex lounge.
Wow.
Just out on the street for people to use.
And they had like a little bar and
people could like charge their phones.
But you just got in, if you have the card.
And I was like, now this, this kind
of logic is sort of disseminating
throughout space where we have
these enclaves that are kind of
nested inside of other enclaves.
And you need special permission
or you need some special
status often as a consumer.
If you have the right consumer
status, you get access to this space
that everyone else can't get into.
And that's not new by any means.
But I mean, the airport's kind of
a place where you're familiar with
that and expect to encounter it.
Because even getting into an
airport, you have to clear the
hurdle of having booked a flight.
And then within the airport
there's more and more exclusive.
Spaces that you can all get into
if you have like that specific
boarding pass or this credit card
that gets you into this lounge or
some status on a certain airline.
And now it seems like that's leaking
out of airports and it's everywhere.
And I think that that's probably
been the case for a while.
And obviously there've been
different types of exclusive
environments throughout history.
But this feels maybe new because it
kind of coexists so easily, and I think
when everything is, is sort of digitally
tracked and monitored, you can have the
exclusive Amex lounge, like just right in
front of like, like rubbing elbows with,
with quote unquote public space around it.
In the past, you would've needed a
more heavy handed way to separate
those different spaces out.
But now they can all just
kind of intertwine each other.
Henry: Are they just on
the street or something?
Drew: Yeah, it was just like out in
the middle of the street with like
a little, like a rope around it.
It's kind of funny.
Henry: That kind of reminds
me of SoulCycle Peloton?
Yeah.
They have the outdoor
makeshift gym, I guess.
Drew: Yeah.
And then the space kind of becomes
an advertisement for itself.
Henry: Because it is open, right?
Yeah.
Everyone can see it.
Drew: People see it and they wonder
what they have to do to have access
to it, and it just kind of bolsters
the brand via that visibility.
Henry: Instead of like a gym where you..
I don't know if you can see through..
Drew: Yeah.
Well, a lot of gyms have big glass
floor to ceiling windows, so you can
see, I don't know, I don't know if
that makes them seem more enticing or
not, but I do feel like the Equinox
brand is pretty like powerful.
In different sectors like gyms or WeWorks,
there's all these different versions
of spaces where you're kind of buying
a membership to a desirable space and
then you have unlimited access to it.
And that's kind of the product, is
just being in the space and that's
what you're paying for, rather than
getting any specific good or service.
It's more about just
existing within the brand.
Henry: And making it more like
part of your day to day or just
make it feel like it's just normal.
Yeah, well, everyone goes to Starbucks,
so it's like you go there to work.
It's not even about coffee anymore.
I think did, did they change the
policy where like you could like
just sit there or something?
Drew: I think there's been some
different eras of that because
there was a whole thing with..
I remember it came up last
year during Black Lives Matter.
Somebody got kicked out of a Starbucks
and, um, they were forced to change
their policy and allow people to be in..
I think the question was whether or
not the person had bought coffee.
And I think now they've
pulled back on that.
You can be in there no matter what.
I've always assumed that that was the
case with any fast food type place.
I always kind of thought that you could
go in McDonald's and nobody would ever
question what you were doing there.
And actually McDonald's, I think
has become one of the main public
spaces that people use in different
types of urban environments.
Smaller towns that don't really
have other third places, mcDonald's
sort of fulfills that role, which
is kind of a, a sad statement.
And it's so like your presence in
a place like Starbucks is still so
compromised, but it feels public just
because it is more public than most of
the other environments we have access to.
And I mean, it's kind of this consistent
branded environment that appears around
the world now, and you can find it.
In any, like, pretty much any big city
in the world and know exactly where
you're getting what to expect inside.
And I think that consistency makes
it more desirable for people to
like, or in certain situations people
like welcome that familiarity, but
it's not, I feel like a very small
part of that is about the coffee.
Henry: It is interesting that
it's like, that's like where the
corporate side is becoming the commons
because the common is that knowing
that we've all been to Starbucks.
Drew: It's like discreet spaces
where you would just be in them to
make a transaction now evolve into
like relationships that are ongoing.
I feel that very strongly with the credit
card lounges because it's all about
forming a relationship with American
Express and then you are in this club that
gets different amenities and access to
certain spaces and events and products and
discounts and it's all about you feeling
warm towards American Express and almost
thinking of them as, some sort of people
that are gifting you all these benefits.
Henry: It's like a clan or a guild.
I also read something about
there's a dating ad Bumble.
They're trying to make a space
for people to have dates.
Drew: That's pretty interesting.
I think it's in New York.
I think it's gonna be a coffee
shop or cafe or something.
Anytime something I think of is an app
like suddenly has a physical presence
in the world, it always makes me laugh.
And I mean, there's more and
more of the Amazon Go stores.
It feels very weird and like
bizarre every time I see one.
Like I just walked past one
the other day in Midtown.
It's like sort of a AI generated like
approximation of like what a store is.
They are basically the product of,
Amazon's data, about what types of
things people want on a daily basis.
That could be in like
a bodega type setting.
They just reverse
engineered the corner store.
Henry: Yeah.
That reminds me of when.
People used to like ab
test, like buttons and Yeah.
The most trivial things.
Drew: Actually when I went, have you been
in one of the Amazon physical bookstores?
Yeah, I did.
Yeah.
I went in one of those a while back and
I remember just thinking the same thing.
It felt like the organization of the
store was completely chaotic and not
based on any traditional notion of
how you should organize a bookstore.
You know, like there's very,
like, familiar conventions.
If you go into a bookstore about.
You know, there'll be a fiction section.
There'll be, you know, poetry,
like then all the different
categories of nonfiction.
In the Amazon store, it just felt,
it actually felt like the physical
manifestation of like the Netflix home
screen where it's just rows of content
filed according to different categories.
Right.
But they're not mutually exclusive.
I can't even begin to like, yeah, yeah.
Henry: Well they're all like
the most popular things, right?
I wanna be able to feel like I can
create my own serendipity, but they
kind of force it on you and they're
kind of ruins the joy of just finding
something new 'cause of the algorithm.
Drew: And it also feels
like fake serendipity.
Because someone clearly thought very hard
about what you were going to encounter
as you move through this environment.
Yeah.
And tried to make it more likely, whereas
other, I think the serendipity as it
has been known traditionally is more
like there is no mastermind or like.
Maybe there's a well-designed
environment that makes it more
likely, but it's not trying to ensure
that you have a certain outcome.
It just enables that to happen.
Henry: The fact that it might not
happen is why it's serendipitous.
Not that it was made to happen or
it's a hundred percent gonna happen.
That's how New York is as the city itself.
Although I haven't had it happen
recently, but I used to meet
people I knew all the time, just
randomly walking or taking a subway.
Drew: That's like one
of my favorite things.
I think everyone feels that way.
It sort of releases this massive
amount of endorphins or something that
happens because it really does, like,
I think it's some deep human, thing
to value that or to appreciate it.
Henry: It's the opposite of let's schedule
a date to like meet up or whatever.
I just find myself
wanting to plan less and..
Drew: That would be the dream is
like just to live in a place..
I feel like the last time I really
had that, 'cause I've lived in pretty
big cities, but I think that's, it's
been said that like one of the reasons
people like college so much is because
it's the only one of the only times
in their life or maybe the last time
in their life that they live in like
a walkable place where everybody.
It kind of simulates like a
community in the traditional..
Everything good about a community
without a lot of the downsides.
You have those serendipitous encounters
constantly throughout the day.
You walk everywhere, which in turn
makes serendipity more likely.
Unlike the more restrictive forms of
community that have characterized like
most of human civilization, college is
not, it doesn't have like the confinement.
You ultimately leave.
And you are able to do whatever you
want in a way that hasn't always been
as easy in other types of communities.
I think there is a lot to that, that it
is like, you know, a place where like
there's huge amounts of serendipity, which
is just an indicator of a lot of other
positive social qualities that we want.
Henry: It's like a side
effect where you can't..
Can't make it happen, but if
you have those other things in
place, then it'll go through.
Drew: It's like an outcome of a very
intricately constructive environment that
can only really arise over time with the
ingredients being in place or the right
characteristics of the place allowing.
Things like serendipity to happen.
It just means that it's
a well-made environment.
Henry: Do you think that the
digital space can do that?
Drew: I think it can, but I think the
physical environments are so complicated
and the ones that we've like, like a
city for example, or a town, there's
just so much going on there it's
very difficult to build every quality
of that into a digital environment.
So I think you can definitely enhance
digital environments and give them
better qualities over time and fix
things and tweak things and make
them better and make them more human.
But I think that just because the nature
of digital space is so fundamentally
different from physical space, you're
gonna end up with a different outcome.
And anytime you try to simulate something
that is present in the physical world,
it's harder to faithfully reproduce it.
I think you look at, like, I've, I keep
referring to Twitter because that's
where I spend the most time online.
There's a whole different set of
norms that exists on non-spatial
digital environment like Twitter.
That is like, there are moments on
Twitter that feel like serendipity,
but it's a completely different
type of serendipity than the type
that you get in the physical world.
It's just a different type of environment.
And I think it's interesting when you
see the types of features that people
demand from a site like Twitter,
which kind of is notoriously not
added many new features or changed
the product much over the last decade.
But something like demanding the edit.
But yeah, I think is a
really good example actually.
in the camp of like, we
don't need an edit button.
And I don't really see the benefit
of it, but I think, I mean,
I know why people ask for it.
but just the way that we relate to
like the information in front of
our faces in an environment like
Twitter, I think is so different.
The idea of like a tweet being kind of
like fully flexible and being changeable
via the edit button, like the way that we.
Would engage with, with that type of
information is different than in the
physical world when there's more of
like, if something gets changed, there's
more evidence that it was changed.
All this like fake news stuff that keeps
coming up on Facebook or every, every
website or, or platform, like, I just
think a lot of it stems from the fact
that we don't have as much context.
On the internet and like we could,
a lot of like what people want
from environments that feel more
spatial is just more context.
And I think the physical world's very
good at providing context and it doesn't
come naturally to digital environments.
Henry: The history of
where something came from.
It's like I know that someone's
used this thing or like someone's
been here before, but like..
Drew: On a piece of paper, if something's
been rubbed out and rewritten,
there's more evidence of that.
That's like a narrow example,
but I think the physical world
tends to just leave more traces.
Henry: Traces, yeah.
Drew: Of everything.
Henry: And it's maybe that
goes all the way back to this
whole program language thing.
It's like that's not
something someone thought of.
They're not like, oh.
Let's make it easier to track like
what happened in the past or whatever.
Drew: Yeah.
And again, I mean that to, to bring
up, like NFTs again, that is like
a, that's the type of like feature
that I think is being sort of
copied from pre-digital, like modes
of existence and being replicated
or like artificially introduced.
The idea that like the providence
of an NFT can be or anything
on the blockchain, you know?
Yeah.
That actually leaves a.
Trail immutable, like trail like
I think that's the type of thing
where we're reacting to some of the
problems with earlier versions of,
of software or, or the digital world.
Henry: Is it good to create
that water cooler type place?
You coming here is like you had to.
Take time to go A to B, and then
everything online's instant.
So it's like, yeah, the waiting room,
whatever that means, so that people
have a space where they can stop.
Drew: The waiting room is an
interesting example, like a place
that you're in, but you're not really
there for any particular reason.
Mm-Hmm.
You're just there.
Yeah.
Like I think that everyone ends up with
some digital space that is like that.
The default website or app that
you go to if you're just mindlessly
on the internet and not really
thinking about what you're doing.
Like for me, that would
probably be Twitter.
For some people it's a discord server.
Henry: The feed is the waiting room.
Drew: It is kind of a waiting room.
Like you're just, a bunch of people are
just sort of there hanging around, like
figuring out what they're gonna do next.
Henry: That's funny because
the waiting room is literally
about time rather than space.
Because you could be anywhere, right.
And you know, you're in line
for something else, and then now
you're waiting by joining Twitter.
Drew: You're in the physical and
digital waiting room at the same time.
Henry: But you've like
outsourced the waiting room.
'cause you could be talking to the person
next to you in line, but obviously you're
not, you're not gonna talk to them.
Drew: I kind of said this a different
way earlier, but I do think Twitter
is interesting, and you could say the
same of Instagram or Facebook, but
it's this massive body of work that's
being completely produced by mostly
people that are in the middle of doing
something else or like waiting for
something real to happen, or like taking
a break from like talking to somebody.
I feel like all of my Twitter behavior
is just in these tiny little moments
between things that I would consider
like real activities, and now I've
tweeted like thousands of times and
it, it's just like all the product of
these weird fragments of time when I
was like distracted from something else.
Henry: Well, the way you use it
is definitely reflective of that
then, which I appreciate, but
I don't know what I would say.
Drew: There are a lot
of different approaches.
some people very much take it seriously
and think of it as a way to network
or build their personal brand or
promote something that they're doing.
And I use it to promote
things that I've done too.
But my primary usage of it is stray
thoughts that I'm firing off just
to kind of get them out of my head.