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All that is solid melts into air...
...and the clouds sublimate into stone.
Jason journeyed down into town once again.
This time he had to hurry. He felt mildly miffed at that. His boss just had to wait until the last minute to get in the proposal. They missed the 1 PM mail cutoff for another round of fairly pointless formatting tweaks. Then 2 PM had come and gone. Now he was racing down to the unthinking depths as fast as a data monkey could sky summersault through the slow zone.
Over the last few weekends, Jason’s gaming group had introduced him to the beyond, an entire new zone of thought where data flowed effortlessly between open ledgers. His buddies had convinced him to go in on building a rig together. All that shiny stuff was pointless down here, little more use than the scrap plastic littering the embankment beside the concrete channel.
Few walked over that dirt. Less thought penetrated those depths, just a regular water timer decades old. Those drops and the desperate. Instead most everyone flowed over concrete, steady and certain, an ending sea of metal rolling slowly, all equally capped by the same physics and the machine in front.
He split the flow. Here less was more. Zipping through the sea of metal on two wheels rather than four, he fought the urge to consult the watch on his wrist. Just two more markers. He steadied his breath and accelerated out of the channel into town. Racing into the central hall, he sprinted up to the clerk and watched… the data sheet marked 3:02 PM. Late!
The firm would be displeased. His time cost the firm money. Not just the travel but the data manipulations held no value now, lost to the darkness of the depths. Jason snapped his fingers in frustration and whispered into the watch on his left hand. “Tock, what’s next on my agenda?”
“Sir you have no open tasks or meetings for the day. Your boss’s boss sent an email inquiring about the data deposit. Shall I respond?”
“Sigh yes please send a picture of the clerk’s stamp and say I’m happy to discuss tomorrow.”
“Of cou—”
Jason snapped his head up as he heard shouting in the chambers beyond. Curious he walked to the door. A crowd in purple shirts surged past him chanting. He didn’t understand but followed, slipping into a corner by the door.
Several slow zoners sat above looking down at the growing crowd. One barked and hit a hammer. Jason scanned the room for signals to decipher what was going on. He asked Tock. No use down here. Data flowed differently. He saw an old man poring through an item taped to the wall and maneuvered himself quietly to see.
The old one smiled and whispered. “See item 7c. It’s a budget day. Pensions.” Ah. The connection with the data sheets became clear. Public moneys needed its data monkeys to model the flows. He couldn’t help wondering though why his beautiful graphs weren’t on display. Instead a confusing ball of words bandied back and forth in this strange chamber.
After a moment he whispered back. “What brings you hear today?
The old mans eyes narrowed. “My yard.” Waiting a beat, Jason whispered again more curious “what about it?”
“The movie folks walked on it.”
The purple shirts rippled out.
“My cue.”
Another ball of words. This time a beyonder brought a large picture which they propped up. Soon anyone from the transcend to almost the least thoughtful depths would be able to see those images. Then the words ended and the slow zoners up high signaled for those below to speak, if they so chose. The old man rose slowly.
“My name is Mr. Smith. I live on 42 Roosevelt parkway. For the last four weeks, that production company has parked it’s generators on the street median in front of my house. I understand that these suits have made a lot of promises. Here is mine. This paper includes the signatures of everyone on our block bar none. If you don’t do something to fix this, we will.”
The slow zoners up on the circle seemed rattled, more so than by the crowd of purple shirts. Jason thought back to the clerk’s desk. A plan began to form.
He stepped out of the chamber shadows and whispered to Tock:
“Draft a public-records query. I want every film permit issued within town limits for the last ten years. Cross-reference with resident complaints, parking tickets, generator decibel readings, and any code-enforcement actions. I need it ready before I get back to the ridge.”
Tock chirped:
“Query scoped. Estimated retrieval: 4 h 17 min. Shall I also pull the open-data parcel layer so we can overlay shoot locations later?”
Jason smiled despite the sour taste of 3:02 PM still on his tongue. “Yeah. If that proposal is out the door, I’ll model something people actually care about.”
He slipped out a side door, boots crunching on gravel between the civic plaza and the river walk. The purple shirts were already a distant ripple, but another flyer, still damp from someone’s coffee cup, was taped to a lamppost:
Alazon “Just Walk Out” Grocery
Coming to the old rail-yard parcel?
Scoping Session: 6 PM, Community Room B
Bring your questions, bring your barcodes
Jason peeled it off, folded it into the same pocket that held the clerk’s stamped rejection. Two projects now, twin edges of the same data knife: one looking backward at Hollywood’s footprints, one looking forward at a store that would never need a clerk at all. He pinged Tock again.
“Add a second line to the query. Pull any economic-impact statements, conditional-use permits, or traffic studies that mention ‘automated retail’ or ‘micro-fulfillment’ in the last five years. I want to see how the town models the shift to ceiling cameras and weight sensors.”
“Appended. Warning: most documents will likely be marked draft or require staff processing time. They will likely request filing fees.”
“Sigh, of course.” At least his blog would have new fodder. He had a quixotic curiosity for little esoterica from down in the depths. He liked to surface and polish them for the beyonders like trophies in a case.
Evening dropped like an overpass, sky swapping blues for oranges, then blacks. Jason climbed the switch-back streets until the sodium lights thinned and the hum of the valley flattened into wind, a single plain that belied colliding zones of thought.
He could battle starships across the beyond with his gaming rig, duel friends in worlds of pure code. But here, in his own city, in a matter of concrete and permits and real ground, he needed to descend into the depths of far more arcane magic than any fantasy wizard could conjure up.
Jason could see games running on a decentralized world computer operating on networks his little data monkey mind barely understood; this town’s plans for the future… faded into the ether. Winds gushed as the hot Santa Anas collided with the cool coastal air.
The mountains rose in the fading light, their ridgelines dark against the western sky. Jason pocketed the watch he called Tock, a childhood throwback. Enough for today. Tomorrow he would descend again into the data mines. Tonight, he rode the hills through the fading light.
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge utilizes the concept of zones of thought, distinct areas that shape the flows of computation and technology completely. That story felt like a fertile metaphor for today’s technological reality where vastly different modes of implicit digital operations coexist in the same physical environments. I thought it’d be fun to tell a story of a young data analyst headed to a city hall for work and use that framing as a conceit to illustrate the bizarreness and weirdness in an anytown city hall. Sometimes we forget how much we take as a given and looking at the everyday from the vantage point of the far future, like Vernor Vinge’s spacefaring human civilizations and worlds beyond with advanced AIs, provides a lens through which we might see what is going on with clear eyes.
Much of how cities operate in the US isn’t written in some constitution like document. Norms evolved in one information landscape have ossified into habits that harden into rules that really don’t make any sense. That’s easy to say and harder to have the imagination and more so the courage to implement new protocols that shift the basic systems that determine how our cities operate. Responding to a request for professional services. Permitting a movie production or a home addition. Publicizing an agenda. Sharing what a proposed building looks like. How the data embodied in each of those actions flows from profoundly analogue era. The procedures, habits, professional practices and really everything about how city hall’s operate was designed without the existence of the web let alone AI and today’s decentralized protocols.
My goal with this silly little story is to encourage folks to see the “water” all of us who live in cities take for granted. Regardless if we go to meetings we are affected by traffic, new developments, or their absence! The protocols that guide operations deep in the city O/S are not immutable walls blocking innovation and change… in fact from another angle they can even serve as wind.
Last week I learned about an alien life form. Cyclothones float in the mid to deep waters of the ocean. These fragile small fish make up 100 billion to 1 trillion kg by biomass, approximately 10-100x the mass of all mammals, and play a critical role in the vertical transfer of nutrients in the ocean, making a home 200-1000 meters deep where the light of our modest star struggles and then finally fails to penetrate.
In the late 1960s Stewart Brand campaigned to have NASA release a photograph of the whole earth seen from space. He believed that a single image of the planet entire would shift human perspective. When the Apollo 17 crew finally captured the Blue Marble, that vision crystallized. It was not just a photograph.
All that is solid melts into air...
...and the clouds sublimate into stone.
Jason journeyed down into town once again.
This time he had to hurry. He felt mildly miffed at that. His boss just had to wait until the last minute to get in the proposal. They missed the 1 PM mail cutoff for another round of fairly pointless formatting tweaks. Then 2 PM had come and gone. Now he was racing down to the unthinking depths as fast as a data monkey could sky summersault through the slow zone.
Over the last few weekends, Jason’s gaming group had introduced him to the beyond, an entire new zone of thought where data flowed effortlessly between open ledgers. His buddies had convinced him to go in on building a rig together. All that shiny stuff was pointless down here, little more use than the scrap plastic littering the embankment beside the concrete channel.
Few walked over that dirt. Less thought penetrated those depths, just a regular water timer decades old. Those drops and the desperate. Instead most everyone flowed over concrete, steady and certain, an ending sea of metal rolling slowly, all equally capped by the same physics and the machine in front.
He split the flow. Here less was more. Zipping through the sea of metal on two wheels rather than four, he fought the urge to consult the watch on his wrist. Just two more markers. He steadied his breath and accelerated out of the channel into town. Racing into the central hall, he sprinted up to the clerk and watched… the data sheet marked 3:02 PM. Late!
The firm would be displeased. His time cost the firm money. Not just the travel but the data manipulations held no value now, lost to the darkness of the depths. Jason snapped his fingers in frustration and whispered into the watch on his left hand. “Tock, what’s next on my agenda?”
“Sir you have no open tasks or meetings for the day. Your boss’s boss sent an email inquiring about the data deposit. Shall I respond?”
“Sigh yes please send a picture of the clerk’s stamp and say I’m happy to discuss tomorrow.”
“Of cou—”
Jason snapped his head up as he heard shouting in the chambers beyond. Curious he walked to the door. A crowd in purple shirts surged past him chanting. He didn’t understand but followed, slipping into a corner by the door.
Several slow zoners sat above looking down at the growing crowd. One barked and hit a hammer. Jason scanned the room for signals to decipher what was going on. He asked Tock. No use down here. Data flowed differently. He saw an old man poring through an item taped to the wall and maneuvered himself quietly to see.
The old one smiled and whispered. “See item 7c. It’s a budget day. Pensions.” Ah. The connection with the data sheets became clear. Public moneys needed its data monkeys to model the flows. He couldn’t help wondering though why his beautiful graphs weren’t on display. Instead a confusing ball of words bandied back and forth in this strange chamber.
After a moment he whispered back. “What brings you hear today?
The old mans eyes narrowed. “My yard.” Waiting a beat, Jason whispered again more curious “what about it?”
“The movie folks walked on it.”
The purple shirts rippled out.
“My cue.”
Another ball of words. This time a beyonder brought a large picture which they propped up. Soon anyone from the transcend to almost the least thoughtful depths would be able to see those images. Then the words ended and the slow zoners up high signaled for those below to speak, if they so chose. The old man rose slowly.
“My name is Mr. Smith. I live on 42 Roosevelt parkway. For the last four weeks, that production company has parked it’s generators on the street median in front of my house. I understand that these suits have made a lot of promises. Here is mine. This paper includes the signatures of everyone on our block bar none. If you don’t do something to fix this, we will.”
The slow zoners up on the circle seemed rattled, more so than by the crowd of purple shirts. Jason thought back to the clerk’s desk. A plan began to form.
He stepped out of the chamber shadows and whispered to Tock:
“Draft a public-records query. I want every film permit issued within town limits for the last ten years. Cross-reference with resident complaints, parking tickets, generator decibel readings, and any code-enforcement actions. I need it ready before I get back to the ridge.”
Tock chirped:
“Query scoped. Estimated retrieval: 4 h 17 min. Shall I also pull the open-data parcel layer so we can overlay shoot locations later?”
Jason smiled despite the sour taste of 3:02 PM still on his tongue. “Yeah. If that proposal is out the door, I’ll model something people actually care about.”
He slipped out a side door, boots crunching on gravel between the civic plaza and the river walk. The purple shirts were already a distant ripple, but another flyer, still damp from someone’s coffee cup, was taped to a lamppost:
Alazon “Just Walk Out” Grocery
Coming to the old rail-yard parcel?
Scoping Session: 6 PM, Community Room B
Bring your questions, bring your barcodes
Jason peeled it off, folded it into the same pocket that held the clerk’s stamped rejection. Two projects now, twin edges of the same data knife: one looking backward at Hollywood’s footprints, one looking forward at a store that would never need a clerk at all. He pinged Tock again.
“Add a second line to the query. Pull any economic-impact statements, conditional-use permits, or traffic studies that mention ‘automated retail’ or ‘micro-fulfillment’ in the last five years. I want to see how the town models the shift to ceiling cameras and weight sensors.”
“Appended. Warning: most documents will likely be marked draft or require staff processing time. They will likely request filing fees.”
“Sigh, of course.” At least his blog would have new fodder. He had a quixotic curiosity for little esoterica from down in the depths. He liked to surface and polish them for the beyonders like trophies in a case.
Evening dropped like an overpass, sky swapping blues for oranges, then blacks. Jason climbed the switch-back streets until the sodium lights thinned and the hum of the valley flattened into wind, a single plain that belied colliding zones of thought.
He could battle starships across the beyond with his gaming rig, duel friends in worlds of pure code. But here, in his own city, in a matter of concrete and permits and real ground, he needed to descend into the depths of far more arcane magic than any fantasy wizard could conjure up.
Jason could see games running on a decentralized world computer operating on networks his little data monkey mind barely understood; this town’s plans for the future… faded into the ether. Winds gushed as the hot Santa Anas collided with the cool coastal air.
The mountains rose in the fading light, their ridgelines dark against the western sky. Jason pocketed the watch he called Tock, a childhood throwback. Enough for today. Tomorrow he would descend again into the data mines. Tonight, he rode the hills through the fading light.
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge utilizes the concept of zones of thought, distinct areas that shape the flows of computation and technology completely. That story felt like a fertile metaphor for today’s technological reality where vastly different modes of implicit digital operations coexist in the same physical environments. I thought it’d be fun to tell a story of a young data analyst headed to a city hall for work and use that framing as a conceit to illustrate the bizarreness and weirdness in an anytown city hall. Sometimes we forget how much we take as a given and looking at the everyday from the vantage point of the far future, like Vernor Vinge’s spacefaring human civilizations and worlds beyond with advanced AIs, provides a lens through which we might see what is going on with clear eyes.
Much of how cities operate in the US isn’t written in some constitution like document. Norms evolved in one information landscape have ossified into habits that harden into rules that really don’t make any sense. That’s easy to say and harder to have the imagination and more so the courage to implement new protocols that shift the basic systems that determine how our cities operate. Responding to a request for professional services. Permitting a movie production or a home addition. Publicizing an agenda. Sharing what a proposed building looks like. How the data embodied in each of those actions flows from profoundly analogue era. The procedures, habits, professional practices and really everything about how city hall’s operate was designed without the existence of the web let alone AI and today’s decentralized protocols.
My goal with this silly little story is to encourage folks to see the “water” all of us who live in cities take for granted. Regardless if we go to meetings we are affected by traffic, new developments, or their absence! The protocols that guide operations deep in the city O/S are not immutable walls blocking innovation and change… in fact from another angle they can even serve as wind.
Last week I learned about an alien life form. Cyclothones float in the mid to deep waters of the ocean. These fragile small fish make up 100 billion to 1 trillion kg by biomass, approximately 10-100x the mass of all mammals, and play a critical role in the vertical transfer of nutrients in the ocean, making a home 200-1000 meters deep where the light of our modest star struggles and then finally fails to penetrate.
In the late 1960s Stewart Brand campaigned to have NASA release a photograph of the whole earth seen from space. He believed that a single image of the planet entire would shift human perspective. When the Apollo 17 crew finally captured the Blue Marble, that vision crystallized. It was not just a photograph.
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