Seeing Like a State Machine

currently percolating some half-formed takes about the notion of "abundance" as another rendition of warmed-over high modernism

depends on what you're talking about I guess? If it's all-out techno-optimist type stuff I can see it, but if we're talking about strict urbanist stuff then I would argue that trying to sculpt the built form of the entire city from the top is more High Modernist than not doing that

Read Theory:

tbh it's not *not* about the vibes - how 'abundance' is partly a reaction to activists against midcentury high modernist urban renewal, who advocated for the procedures/reviews that gum up big projects today (even if a tram line is quite different from a highway) - also re: bsky.app/profile/noah...

I think I understand what you mean, it's mainly that my inclination is to be more favourable to this kind of thing when it comes to housing and most kinds of infrastructure than in trying to discern what the most optimally popular policy would be? It can take more state power to block sometimes

Lots I could say about general midcentury nostalgia though, which seems to be overwhelmingly common

it feels like everyone has something to latch onto from midcentury - unions! but also very anticommunist - but the USSR at its height! autopia ascendant, but trains are still a thing - the suburbs are growing, but the cities haven't hollowed out quite yet - plus the designs from then just look cool

agreed that even abundant 5-1 apts. on arterial roads w/ windowless bedrooms is not nearly as bad as the biggest midcentury bungles - but in the extent to which some try to latch onto "abundance" for more oil drilling or sprawl ... ofc it involves a matty take www.slowboring.com/p/big-ass-tr...

there's always a Matt Y take lol Think the big question is that a bunch of the stuff that holds back good things also holds back bad things, and the tricky part is going to be making it work the way it's supposed to. Think also maybe my brain has been cooked by too much time in Vancouver

ah yes, vancouver, land of 'playing children are a land use nuisance' vancouver tho thankfully lacks the inner-city freeways that are a constant reminder in US cities of why NIMBYism is good, *sometimes*

yeah there's some important correlation between having an aesthetic appreciation of the discreteness, determinism, strictness, and "purity" of computers and wanting the rest of the world to be like that. it sucks because the former is Good, Actually.

i have the same impulse and just sublimate it into metaphysics rather than politics. probably healthier. probably.

even leftist ones have this issue

Er, how about legacy engineer who switched to do software engineering (the pay's better)? Asking for a friend...

Good news: the next generation of software devs who rely heavily on LLMs will have demon-summoner witch-doctor pre modern animism as their Brain

this explains a lot (see also, many yuppie "urbanist"-types) --

This is a screenshot of an actual "there is no bread" github issue on the leading central planner's (Cockshotts) dusty Java repo. c4ss.org/wp-content/u...

From c4ss.org/content/53166