The Organs of Society: A Visceral Approach to Urban Organization
In the game of modern governance it is all about economies of scale. We build bureaucracies and technologies that are retrofitted and grafted onto any interaction. Anyone can devise a cute app to mishandle anything from getting a ride home to doing the laundry. Each of these formulae are assumed to carry in them an awareness of the best of human nature, reason, or whatever it is that motivates and drives us to act naturally . We find in our cities, our traffic patterns, our rent regulations, and rampant homelessness something true about us. In the same soft gesture whatever works for the pure individual must be able to scale up, and the modern city, the modern state is treated as Macron treats it, a thing that "thinks and moves like a startup."[1] The degradation of urban infrastructure, blight of gentrification, and neglect of all but the wealt...