2007 – Jonathan Rowe

Hidden Aid

It is customary to describe human economies as “mechanisms,” but “plumbing” would be more apt. The economy, as economists define it, really is just the realm of money; so those who get to design the pipes and valves can determine in large measure where that money flows.

Establish a Federal Reserve to guide the creation of money through commercial banks, for example, and the rest is pretty much details. Arrange the international plumbing so that struggling nations have to go to an International Monetary Fund for financial relief, and you can bring those nations to heel without a rifle being raised.

They Want to Sell the Golden Gate Bridge

The history of transportation in the U.S. has been less about meeting needs than about creating them. From the “internal improvements” of the early republic, to the railroads, urban trolleys, and interstate highways that came later, development has been the object, more than serving the needs of people already in a place. Urban trolley systems were built out to farmland. The railroads recruited settlers from Germany and Scandinavia for the lands they opened up. (They described the Dakotas as a New Eden.)

The Golden Gate Bridge, which connects San Francisco to the Marin Headlands to the North, is a chapter in this same story. For all its iconic glory, the bridge actually was part of a development push to the North. The authority that governs it includes members from counties all the way to the Oregon border. One suspects that the main concern of those members is not the aesthetics of bridge design or the self-presentation of San Francisco.

Lakeman Talks on Intersections and Design

It could be the way cities are starting to feel like airports, with Starbucks and other chains taking over the downtowns. It could be the iPods and cell phones: even … More

How Credit Cards Cut the Invisible Thread

It is not common to associate commercial credit with such things as community and trust, but that is a symptom of how credit cards have sucked this function into the abstracted realm of corporate finance. The criticism of these cards usually goes another route – namely to the way they have lowered the resistance to buying and led to the massive build-up of shopper debt.

This is beyond question. When you have to take actual money out of your pocket you think twice about a purchase. Credit cards are like plastic alcohol. They loosen you up, make things seem almost free, especially (and perversely) when you are strapped for cash. But credit cards carry another malignancy that is noted less often. This is the way they sever an invisible thread that once helped hold communities together, and degrade mutual obligation in the financial realm.

Jobs’ IPhone: Vernacular Innovation vs. Terminator Tech

I don’t own a cell phone for pretty much the same reason I didn’t become a lawyer after I graduated from law school – namely, the brooding sense that one more would just make the problem worse. Besides, one thing I do not need these days is another thing to think I need. So when it comes to Steve Jobs and his vaunted iPhone, this is a hunt I have no dog in.

Still it’s hard not to follow the story, in particular the tragedy of Mr. Jobs himself. Decades ago, he and Steve Wozniak were making black boxes that enabled people to hack into the AT&T long distance network. Now he’s become the enforcer of the sanctity of that very network, at least as it connects to his iPhone. The guy who was the anti- Bill Gates has become a disciple of the Gates business model, which is to lock customers into a technological system as opposed to giving them tools to do what they want.

Clothesline Contention and the Tragedy of the Private

It is a weird alchemy of a commodity culture that it turns the normal and sensible into the eccentric and suspect. Natural food becomes a cultish attachment rather than a redundancy. Walking instead of driving becomes a sign of questionable political inclination. A desire to conserve rather than waste becomes “political correctness.” Then there’s clotheslines, which have emerged as sources of contention in suburbs throughout the nation.

Clotheslines are the best way to dry clothes, absolutely and without question. Clothes last longer and smell better; and the sun is clean and free. The consequences for the use of fossil fuels are larger than you might think. Some 5% to 10% of the residential energy use in the U.S. goes to washing and drying clothes, and most of that is in the drying. Wash with cold water and you save 85% on that side. Hang the clothes on the line and you cut 100% of the electricity or gas use on the other.

Debt Circus: The Coming Liquidation of the Commons Realm

When a debt circus starts to fold there is a desperate resort to hard assets. The banker seizes the real estate; investors head to precious metals. America’s biggest debtor is the federal government itself. As the hyper-leveraged economy contracts; and as China and other countries balk at financing the deficit that the Bush Administration deliberately has created; there will be demands to liquidate the common pool to keep the operation going. It won’t be entirely an accident.

We’ll be told we have to ease restrictions on poisons in the water and air, to get the “economy” going. We’ll be told the public domain has to go as well. Offshore oil? National forests? Resort developments in the national parks? There will be a replay of the contractor honey pot that the occupation of Iraq became, only this time on the privatizing front. There have been previews around the country. Local governments, starved of tax revenue, have had to sell access to a captive audience of school children to corporate advertisers, just to raise money. We’ve tossed the kids into the liquidation fire. Why not trees?

Craig and Me

Blood sport at home and away

Broken Social Feedback: The Wealth Gap is an Experience Gap

Money is a psychological phenomenon. It has no reality in and of itself. Take a dollar bill to the US Treasury and demand payment for the “debt” it represents. In effect they will hold a mirror to your face. You want payment from us? All that’s in that piece of paper is you – your faith, your trust, your desire to have more of those dollars, yours and everyone else’s. It is little wonder that money becomes a projection screen for so much that rattles around in our psyches; and nowhere more so than in politics.

Consider a picture that appeared in the Wall Street Journal last week. It shows Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, sitting together on an L-shaped couch. At their feet is a coffee table, leather top, strewn with snack plates, playing cards, a folded newspaper, and underneath, a laptop. (You can guess whose.) Persian rugs are on the floor, credenzas by the wall. The two are in shirtsleeves, Gates has one socked foot up on the table. Just two guys kicking back and enjoying the special kind of moment that only the world’s two richest people could understand.

Good Bye Night Sky

There was a time, a few days ago in human history, really, when people spent a lot of time looking at the sky at night. To read Greek mythology, and Shakespeare’s plays, one might guess that people were as familiar with the constellations, as they are with corporate brands today. Or close at least. Of course, it was possible back then to see the sky at night. As David Owen pointed out in a recent New Yorker piece (August 20th), in Galileo’s day – about 400 years ago –people thought the Milky Way was a continuous ooze, so densely packed were the heavens to the naked eye.

Today we can see only a fraction of what was easily visible back then. We are enclosed in a visual cocoon, and the cause is not just the smog and fumes that fill the sky. Even more it is the light. “Today a person standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on a cloudless night,” Owen writes, would see “less than one percent of what Galileo would have been able to see.” We emit so much illumination – if that’s the word – down here below, that we have lost the capacity to see above.