My Theory of Everything
Part of the oddity of this moment is that, not for the first time, some aspects of life are racing ahead while others are lagging behind. It’s not a clear division at all — in fact, part of the oddity is the way the cracks spread, as with thin ice. In the past few months, we’ve seen Boeing 737s, workhorses of the sky, fall out of it because their digital equipment flummoxed their human pilots. At the same moment Toronto embraces Google’s vision of the next city, the Chinese version is here, visibly dystopic, a digital block warden worthy of Orwell.
The Internet is being broken up. Across the planet, strong men want the media to bend to them. Armed with AI, the dissent that rose like waves on countless phones is now methodically suppressed. You can die for a tweet in some countries. A new generation of progressives is here on schedule, but the old generation of regressives is digging in. That end game is horribly slow.
In 2005, U.C. Berkeley Professor Randy Hester told a conference, “The Future Metropolitan Landscape,” that only regions and neighborhoods mattered in terms of governing. The comment sticks with me. They’re “workable scales” that map meaningfully to actual places. Regions can be defined in terms of their watersheds, which is highly relevant given water’s growing scarcity. They set up an immediate dialogue about the ways we use land, how goods and people flow, and if a region’s economy sustains or undermines it.
We live and work in neighborhoods that are our reference points for change. A few days ago, I walked east on Folsom Street to San Francisco’s “temporary” bus terminal and saw firsthand how the expanse from Second to Main Streets has been transformed by a different order of highrise redevelopment. This happened in about a year. The result is a more “urban” neighborhood, an improvement on earlier redevelopment in that the streetfront is much livelier. Something was learned from the errors of the past, although Spear and other north-south streets through Rincon are still there, devoid of life. On Folsom, there’s an actual neighborhood emerging. Further east, there’s hardly any.
The north-south streets like First and Spear are regularly frozen into gridlock by rush-hour car traffic trying to get on the Bay Bridge. In baseball season, the limits of the trams that run along the Embarcadero are evident — local transit is inadequate. Lyft and Uber get caught up in this chaos, which is why e-bikes and scooters are thriving: they get through when even pedestrians struggle.
E-bikes connect an early 20th-century industrial product with today’s battery and digital, app-based tech. They’re put on the streets by companies that see them as replaceable commodities, unlike bikes you own and maintain. I point to e-bikes because they speak to where we are: with one foot here and another way back there. And at rush hour, we can’t get across town without them.
E-bikes are a workaround. Someone jammed three technologies together and got them on the streets. My theory of everything is that this is how it will go: we could leverage AI to use and provide housing much more efficiently, but we’ll only do so for short stays and vacations, leaving housing to muddle along as an amalgam of old and current tech, hemmed in by vested interests. There will be exceptions — serviced apartment variants, for example — and a steady push to strip the stupidity out of local process. Developments elsewhere, like Singapore’s success building and operating public mass housing, will be noted. Stated differently, my theory is that progress is about finding a new normal — a slow process that overshoots much more than it hits the target.
