> we unlock whole new ways of living
Please speculate on what some of these ‘whole new ways of living’ might be. I’m struggling to picture it.
Please speculate on what some of these ‘whole new ways of living’ might be. I’m struggling to picture it.
We have divided ourselves into neat little nuclear family boxes and thrown ourselves together with a bunch of other randos in neat little boxes, with the unstated assumption that the family unit is the end all be all of human lived experience.
This has separated us from our physical (atom-based) communities, to many ill effects including our friends and extended family being further away. This makes having and raising families more difficult than it should be, as we work rando jobs in order to hire rando nannies to do the job that a community otherwise would.
A lot of this comes down to proximity, and available space for people to group up in spaces larger than apartments or single family homes. We've simply lost a part of our daily lived connection to our close community, and being connected to them via only bits is a poor substitute.
When atoms and bits are easy to move around, we have the best of both worlds, pushing the frontier out for having a community experience and having the positive aspects of what we have today.
Even in high density car-less environments with great transport, you've still got all the attention and friction entailed with being on public transport and last mile issues walking to/from it (effectively traveling through 'far community' to get to 'close community'). This means more need to be co-located to avoid these through 'far community' journeys, which limits ones options for finding their best life.
Meanwhile radically different automated transport infra could mean things like 'you walk into the elevator-like transport connected to your house and 5 minutes later you're at your friends house'. No crazy subway, no need for attention, just hop in the pod and do what you'd already be doing at home like reading or work.
This means you could go from ~20,000 people within 10 mins of you to ~100,000 (or insert your number). And ultimately this means more ways that we could optionally have larger social units, because there would be more 'space' for them to live within 10 mins of you.
E.g. if my friends wanted to all live right next to each other they'd need to find enough land that it'd be like 3 hours away and a huge inconvenience for anyone living in a city. So the only people who would do that are crazy committed to the commune life, and thus quite distant culturally too. If it was 30 mins away instead due to better transport, culturally we'd see a lot more mixing of different types of lifestyles.
I think all this represents a new way of living. It's not near future stuff I admit, but driverless tech is the next on the 'move atoms' tech tree that brings us toward these opportunities.
You need to explain why all the other times and ways we have tried what you propose did not work, and what will be different this time.
Start, perhaps, with "The Tyranny of Structurelessness".
Among other things, a means of allowing proximity to be less of a factor allows us to explore different sized dwellings due to a greater area of possible land within proximity to us, which allow for a broader range of different sized social units, which allows for some relief of those issues as people can choose to live in more ways according to their preference (e.g. community/kibbutz, loose structure of friends nearby, big family nearby, nuclear family, anonymous in city).
You can literally break it down to a tradeoff of cubic meters of space for a social unit vs time/effort it takes to get to things you want. If you want a commune of X families and a convenience store within Y mins, more efficient transport makes those numbers, on average, work better for people. Maybe it's 60 minutes out of town for 5 families to get together, but only 15 minutes for 3 families, based on ease of getting shared property at a reasonable cost. Do you see where I'm going with this?
If you wanted to go further you could say ease of moving atoms lets you even rethink aspects of dwellings (why we cache food in a fridge, instead of having what we need dropped off to us in a few minutes) and notions of community property (a 'tool/whatever share' program among an opt-in group), and ultimately how we pick what infrastructure serves whom. Lots and lots of implications to unpack when we move atoms around more cheaply, and many of these ideas unlock with small changes. See apps/services that only work economically in cities but not suburbs for a modern example.
Not sure how this relates to The Tyranny of Structurelessness, maybe you're assuming I meant something that I didn't?
The Tyranny of Structurelessness is directly relevant to communities of interest. Hippy communes. Co-housing projects. Cults both secular and religious. Idealistic people who don't understand what is actually necessary. We've been here before, many times. Read up on the 1960s and 70s. We don't live very differently now to then, and self-driving cars won't change that for at least a hundred years.
The argument I am making is that there is benefit to having social units of >1 families be easier to form in modern society, and better transport helps that by relaxing space constraints. In fact, better transport allows us to explore the frontier of connection to close community and the connection to the amenities and cultural richness of modern living. It's an unlock of scale from what was possible before, which means it is at least partly uncharted territory.
I never said 'and these social units should ignore governance', or define exactly how these social units should operate or how close their ties should be. Obviously they should be mindful of power and define explicit ways to work together, and arguing that this is simply an interest vs kinship category thing is limiting to the point of not saying much. And of course it doesn't happen tomorrow; my argument is this is the way it happens and thus it's worth going down this tech tree.
One thing to consider is that scale has a profound impact on possibility, both in cultural normalization and discovering the appropriate models of governance for a given situation, which are much more likely to emerge when operating at a larger scale. So in turn we a) don't get enough examples to have replicable models emerge, and b) we only get groups that are pretty out there that want to do the thing, and these people tend not to be great models of generalizability because they're culturally far different from the norm. The examples you give are the extreme cultural outliers, not regular people. A weird hippie commune isn't for me, but a place where my four best friends and I can raise kids with some shared outdoor space and nannies and kitchen all within 20 mins of the city? Sign me up yesterday - that's resource pooling at its best, and a way to live more efficiently and sustainably as a species.
A recent analog is the increased sophistication of funding structures for early stage startups, from clunky & predatory term sheets to convertible notes and SAFEs. This happened as a result of the normalization and scale of the early stage ecosystem. Before then early startups were weird and only attracted the types that were ok pushing against the grain or were too rich to feel the pain. Now it's been around long enough and at enough scale to be normal enough to provide an easy on-ramp for good people and good ideas to make waves in the world, not just a place for the elite and the weirdos.
Zach Klein's thread here is a good read on the on-the-ground constraints of proximity and amenities for larger social units: https://twitter.com/zachklein/status/1422293114480250880
And we can point to societies that were following a similar path, like the Netherlands, and then decided to stop and focus on a less car dependant society. It appears to be working over there.
I meant this to be sarcastic because we already have this with campers and RV's - but it does sound kind of cool on second thought. Pointless, but cool.
Lovely turn of phrase to describe a whole swath of "why shouldn't this make money" startup ideas. If your goal is revenue, maybe don't base your entire marketing strategy on people with disposable income and decent financial literacy, because once an economic lull hits you're going to be stranded with a whole lot of responsibilities and a huge drop in income.
I keep thinking back to Jupe[1], and how YC actually put their money behind it, as a synecdoche of the absurd and surreal decade we've had with all that money flying around. Some people got very rich on a wish and a promise -- maybe some think that's laudable, I think it's sociopathic.
Like it's not any one thing, but a self driving car really changes a lot of things about how cities and transport are designed. Interesting thing is that it's harder to have a self driving car now than it would be in 20 years, because as they get closer and closer, the roads are going to adapt to them.