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Hello Interactors, I’ve long been a fan of “regreening” cities, imagining replacing bits of asphalt and concrete with trees, plants, mini-parks, and green roofs to cool them down. In many cases these are indeed good interventions. But even these celebrated nature-based solutions to the “urban heat island” effect require closer inspection. It turns out any land cover change alters energy, water, and momentum exchanges between the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere. Which are the right ones and where? To understand why cookie cutter greening plans can fail and how planners and policy makers can build cities that can handle climate change, we need to understand how land and the air interact. Environments vary from place to place, and this puts limits on what we can do to land to create urban climates that are both beautiful and healthy. To get a handle on what the research says, I found a literature review from 2025 that synthesized findings from 84 peer-reviewed studies. In was published in the journal Climate Risk Management. Let’s see what they, and others, found. BEATING HEAT WITH BIOPHYSICAL FEATS What better place to start than science. Let’s just delve right into how urban green spaces affect temperature. It starts with determining the energy balance at the surface of the earth. This comes from a budget equation found in physical geography. When sunlight hits the Earth’s surface, it breaks down into three main fluxes, or ways heat moves around * Sensible heat flux: the heat that directly warms the surrounding air, which we measure as temperature. * Latent heat flux: the heat that’s used to turn water from a liquid to a gas, like when we sweat or plants release water vapor (transpiration). * Ground heat flux: the heat stored in building materials, asphalt, and soil. In conventional urban environments dominated by concrete and asphalt, latent heat flux is minimal because we’ve built cities in ways that rapidly drain water away as ‘waste’. As a result, incoming solar energy is funneled into sensible heat. This raises daytime air temperatures that gets stored as ground heat, which is slowly radiated back into the city at night. Urban greening can reshuffle this thermodynamic budget through three interconnected physical mechanisms: shading, evapotranspiration, and albedo modification. Mechanism 1. Shading: Intercepting Solar Radiation Shading — the most immediate and reliable cooling mechanism provided by vegetation — requires precise microclimatic quantification. Vegetative canopies act as physical shields, intercepting incoming shortwave solar radiation before it strikes impervious surfaces like concrete or asphalt. By preventing these dense materials from absorbing heat and emitting sensible heat flux back into the boundary layer, shading dramatically lowers surface temperatures and reduces the baseline thermal energy transferred to the surrounding air. (Bowler, D. E., et al. 2010) The cooling benefit of urban trees is non-linear, accelerating significantly once neighborhood canopy cover crosses a critical threshold of around 40%. Measuring daytime air temperatures across urban gradients, they found that canopy cover above this 40% mark can lower local air temperatures by up to 1.5 to 2.0 degrees Celsius, effectively offsetting the thermal burden created by surrounding roads and impervious surfaces. (Ziter, C. D., et al. 2019) Mechanism 2. Evapotranspiration: Trading Sensible Heat for Latent Heat While shading blocks heat absorption, evapotranspiration actively removes heat from the air. Plants absorb soil moisture through their root systems and release it as water vapor through tiny microscopic pores in their leaves called stomata. This process requires thermal energy that turns phase-changing liquid water into gas. This energy transfer absorbs sensible heat and converts it into latent heat. Evapotranspiration from well-watered urban green spaces can lower local air temperatures by 2-4 degrees celsius. (Coutts, et al., 2013) However, physical geographers emphasize a crucial physical prerequisite that is easy to overlook: evapotranspiration is entirely dependent on available water. When the soil is dry or the air is super dry, plants close their stomata to save water. When stomata close, evapotranspiration shuts down. This leaves shading as the sole remaining cooling mechanism. Mechanism 3. Albedo Dynamics: The Surface Reflectivity Paradox Albedo measures the reflectivity of a surface on a scale from 0.0 (total absorption) to 1.0 (total reflection). Urban asphalt has a low albedo (0.05 to 0.10), absorbing up to 95% of incoming solar energy. Vegetation’s albedo can range from 0.11 to 0.25. In temperate climates, replacing low-albedo asphalt with greenery or reflective surfaces increases surface reflectivity, sending more solar radiation back into space before it can be absorbed as sensible heat. One study documented that increasing urban surface albedo typically lowers peak ambient air temperatures by 0.3 degres Celsius to 1.0 degree Celsius — alongside much larger drops in surface pavement temperatures. While a temperature change under one degree Celsius may sound modest at first glance, a baseline shift of this magnitude across a neighborhood is enough to redefine a local microclimate. (Santamouris, 2014) But swapping out light urban surfaces for dark vegetation can also have a negative effect. Paradoxically, when researchers in 2023 replaced dry, light-colored desert soil with darker vegetation in hot, arid regions it reduced overall surface reflectivity. The drop in albedo caused an increase in daytime surface warming. (Schlaerth, et al., 2023) Furthermore, dense tree canopies inside narrow urban street canyons can act as thermal blankets at night. While trees provide valuable shade during the day, their foliage reduces the sky view factor at street level, trapping outgoing longwave thermal radiation emitted by surrounding building facades and asphalt. When combined with reduced wind permeability, this canopy barrier restricts nocturnal radiative cooling and holds warm air near ground level (Lee et al., 2016). These are the physical realities that can demonstrate how urban greening is not a consistently inherent cooling practice. It is a complex thermodynamic intervention whose success relies entirely on local environmental conditions. PLACEMENT, PATCHES, AND PARK PATTERNS Because thermodynamic processes happen across physical spaces, cooling urban green space can be uneven. The literature review reveals that a green space’s cooling capacity depends on four spatial and biological variables: vegetation density, species selection, spatial configuration, and urban morphology. Let’s break them down individually. Cooling Factor 1. Vegetation Density and Species Traits Not all greenery cools equally. One way to measure this is through a Leaf Area Index (LAI). This is the total leaf area per unit of ground area and is a primary predictor of thermal performance. As you might imagine, dense foliage absorbs more from the sun and then produces higher cumulative transpiration (so long as there’s adequate water). Botanical traits also play a big role. Broadleaf deciduous species (like oaks or maples) feature large surface areas that maximize summer transpiration, but that goes away when they drop their leaves in winter. Evergreen coniferous trees, however, maintain continuous canopy coverage through every season. In temperate rainforest environments like Seattle or Vancouver, researchers found that conifers cooled urban surroundings up to 1.7 degrees celsius more effectively than broadleaf trees. Dense needle canopies continuously block incoming solar radiation due to higher LAI and the fact that clusters of spiny needles better trap a stable buffer of calm air which moderates heat exchange with the surrounding urban environment. (Eyster & Beckage, 2022, 2023) Cooling factor 2. Spatial Configuration: Landscape Ecology Principles Ecologists and geographers commonly evaluate green spaces through two main attributes: composition (how much green space exists) and configuration (how those green patches are arranged across the landscape). Over 58% of the mechanism-focused studies in the literature review analyzed spatial pattern metrics. The consensus is the spatial layout of green space is just as important as its total area! Other empirical studies consistently demonstrate that cooling effects decay the further you get from green spaces. Research done in 2016 and 2023 shows how urban parks can produce a primary “cooling footprint” that extends typically 100 to 300 meters from the park boundaries. If you’re lucky enough to live within this buffer, temperatures drop between 1.9 and 3.1 degrees celsius, but beyond 300 meters, the cooling influence quickly falls off. (Bao, et al. 2016, Shi et al. 2023) This spatial limit leads to a couple spatial layout choices. A few big parks or connected networks of smaller green spaces. Large, consolidated parks (>2 hectares) generate intense, stable “cool islands” at their core, but their benefits remain localized. For example, a study in Xalapa, Mexico, revealed that parks larger than 2.8 hectares with over 21% tree cover provided reliable local cooling of around 2 degrees celsius . (Lemoine-Rodriguez et al., 2022) Connected networks of smaller green spaces distributed across a city create a more equitable cooling effect. Three studies in 2019 and 2021 show that fragmented, isolated green patches — like big parks — perform poorly compared to continuous, linear green corridors. Linear “green belts” or street-tree networks (in the right environment) can act as ventilation channels, allowing cool air generated by vegetation to flow into adjacent built-up neighborhoods. (Masoudi et al., 2019, 2021; Pramanik, 2019) Cooling factor 3. Urban Morphology: The Built Environment Matrix Obviously, green spaces don’t exist in isolation.

Hello Interactors, As Canadian and Alaskan wildfire smoke drifts across North American borders, it’s easy to resort to feelings and language of crisis in the demand for urgent, immediate control. But fires are not new to these landscapes, and this “crisis” sits alongside others that are also on fire. Climate crises events bring into focus which histories we forget, whose knowledge we ignore, and which relationships we disrupt. Turns out it’s happening at a cellular level too. The real danger is a world and ecology changing so quickly, and understood so narrowly, that it erases the very temporal patterns, memories, and ecological relationships that make adaptation possible. FIRE’S FRACTURED FREQUENCY The climate crisis is often communicated through rising averages. We read of climbing global temperatures, sea levels, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, and acres burned. These measurements are indispensable, but averages can make crisis feel distant and abstract. In a forest, climate change is also experienced as an altered interval — as too little time between one disturbance and the next. A forest is not a passive surface. It actively shapes its own microclimate, stores carbon, and retains moisture until fire temporarily disrupts these relationships…and in doing so creates new ones. To understand what shorter fire intervals are doing to Alaska’s boreal forests, ecologist Xanthe Walker and an interdisciplinary team of researchers examined carbon storage and forest recovery across 555 plots associated with thirty-one fires. They compared stands with different fire histories, including sites that had burned repeatedly before black spruce forests could fully recover. The absolute amount of carbon released by individual fires was broadly similar across fire-return intervals, but recently burned landscapes began with smaller remaining carbon pools and therefore lost a greater proportion of what remained. Repeated burning also consumed more legacy carbon — the carbon inherited from earlier vegetation and accumulated soils — and reduced the likelihood that some sites would regenerate as black spruce forest. Fire was doing more than releasing carbon in the present. By interrupting regeneration, it was weakening the landscape’s capacity to store carbon in the future (Walker et al., 2025). Black spruce forests are not merely tolerant of fire but have evolved with stand-replacing fire as a recurring part of their life cycle. Their cones evolved to be little seed bombs that stay in the trees and release their seeds when they burn. This helps new trees grow on the ground where they’re not protected by the canopy. That strategy works when fires recur at intervals long enough for stands to mature, rebuild their seed stocks, and accumulate biomass. Historically, boreal fire-return intervals commonly ranged from about seventy to 130 years. Black spruce may require roughly fifty years to produce enough seed for self-replacement. Yet intervals of less than thirty years are becoming more common in some areas, allowing another fire to arrive before recovery is complete (Walker et al., 2025). Under those conditions, fire can push regeneration away from black spruce toward deciduous vegetation or more open landscapes. Such places may remain biologically productive, but they are no longer the same forests. They store carbon, retain moisture, shelter organisms, but also carry subsequent fires differently. The landscape may not simply return to its former state after disturbance; it may cross into another ecological regime, organized by different species, intervals, and feedback loops. MEMORY, MEANING, AND MALLEABILITY It is tempting to call such transformations unprecedented. In some measurable respects, they are. We know Industrial greenhouse-gas emissions are rapidly altering atmospheric and ecological systems on a planetary scale, and the effects are not confined to normal oscillations around once-familiar conditions. The rate, direction, and geographic concentration of change effects forests adapted to fire and may be unable to adjust when fire’s frequency exceeds the time needed for reproduction and recovery. The fact that Earth has always changed does not make the present disruption ordinary. But neither does the climate crisis mark the first time people have faced the collapse of an expected environmental order. Many humans didn’t survive the Little Ice Age, but many did. For many Indigenous peoples, colonization produced generations of forced displacement, altered fire and water regimes, destroyed food systems, suppressed governance, and separated communities from ancestral lands. What dominant institutions now describe as an unprecedented disruption may appear within Indigenous histories as another transformation imposed by powers that have long treated land, water, plants, animals, and people as resources to be reorganized. The word crisis can therefore describe an observable material condition while concealing a historical one. The flames are real, but so are the questions of who altered the landscape, whose losses are treated as new, who is expected to adapt, and who gets to define recovery. Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte challenges this framing, arguing that a dominant “epistemology of crisis” treats environmental disruptions as radically new, imminent threats (Whyte, 2021). This framing isolates the crisis from historical contexts of colonialism, allowing institutions to justify urgent, top-down actions that bypass local consent and justice under the guise of emergency. That framing carries two recurring assumptions. The first is unprecedentedness — the belief that the past contains few usable precedents or lessons for present conditions. The second is urgency — the belief that immediate action may justify setting aside ordinary concerns about consent, justice, and responsibility. Whyte’s intervention exposes how crisis language can obscure Indigenous histories of displacement and adaptation while allowing new forms of dispossession to proceed in the name of emergency responses (Whyte, 2021). Whyte is not arguing that climate change is unreal or that rapid action is unnecessary. He is asking what calls for urgency and emergency action leads people to overlook or forget. When the present is imagined as unprecedented, earlier crises become difficult to see. Climate-related relocation may be narrated as a novel problem even though Indigenous nations have extensive experience with forced removal, shrinking territories, flooding, and government-directed resettlement. Declaring the current moment historically unique can erase not only previous violence but also knowledge formed through surviving it. Whyte contrasts crisis epistemology with an “epistemology of coordination.” Coordination begins not with novelty but with constant change. It asks whether the relationships needed to respond remain intact. Those relationships take the form of kinship and mutual responsibilities, including care, consent, and reciprocity. They generate what Whyte calls the “responsible capacity to respond to constant change” (2021, p. 52). This is a big geophilosophical change in how we think about the world. Adaptation isn’t just about an organism or group of organisms changing to fit their environment, it’s also about how things are connected, like people, places, history, and processes (the primary focus of Interplace). Fire isn’t just about heat progressively burning through plants. It depends on things like how old the trees are, how much moisture there is in the soil, how many seeds are available, if there have been any fires before, what the weather is like, and the rules and laws that people have made about how to handle fire. What the forest looks like after a fire depends on which relationships are still around. The same is true of human communities. Memory is not merely a record of what happened. It is part of the infrastructure of adaptation. It carries knowledge of earlier disturbances, durable practices, failed interventions, and obligations extending beyond the present generation. A society that repeatedly labels each disruption unprecedented may collect and reason over immense quantities of data while remaining unable — or unwilling — to learn from other histories. CELLS, CUES, AND CONTINGENCY The adaptive value of memory may reach far deeper into life than culture or nervous systems. Evolutionary biologists Maor Knafo, Elena Casacuberta, and Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo begin a recent study with the observation that “one of life’s most remarkable features is its persistent and adaptive resilience in the face of constant environmental fluctuations” (2026, p. 1). They investigated whether a single-celled organism could use an environmental cue to anticipate future stress rather than responding only after that stress arrived. Cells exposed to a predictable light and vibration cue before heat stress experienced a 12 percent mortality rate, compared to a 27 percent mortality rate for cells subjected to unpredictable, random cues. The cells didn’t just adapt to the heat; they learned to anticipate it, demonstrating that even single-celled life relies on temporal regularities to survive. The authors paired this experiment with a computational model. A nonlearning “blind” agent could adapt only through genetic mutation and selection across generations. A learning agent could also revise its phenotypic strategy within its lifetime, exploring alternatives when earlier responses performed poorly. In predictable environments, learning agents achieved higher fitness because they could use environmental cues to prepare for approaching conditions. The study does not demonstrate that cells reason as humans do. Nor does a cellular experiment prove a general philosophy of life. It does, however, offer evidence that even single cells can exploit temporal regularities in their surroundin

Hello Interactors, Welcome to summer where Interplace turns its attention to physical geography and the environment. It’s already a crazy El Niño — thanks in large part to global warming — and the United States is having a big birthday. How might these be related and what to do about it? What follows is not a celebration or a condemnation, but more of a reckoning. I look at what was built, what was deliberately forgotten, and what is now continually arriving, season by season, in forms of weather the founders could not have imagined. Although Alexander Humboldt — one of the world’s most famous scientists at the time — did warn Jefferson of the effects of human-induced climate change in 1804. He based his prediction on changes he observed in forests and water systems as a result of mono-crops and industrial “steam and gas”. Jefferson ignored him. BUILDING, BURNING, BILLOWING BACK On this momentous 250th Fourth of July, when the world is experiencing record level extreme weather events, let’s reflect on how over the last 250 years the United States helped build, extract, and then burn the material and political conditions that made climate change possible. From the beginning, it tied itself to land, extraction, mobility, and expansion. Over time those commitments became an energy system built on coal, oil, gas, highways, suburbs, industrial agriculture, and a development model that treated nature as an inexhaustible storehouse. That legacy is now legible in the atmosphere itself. Let’s light a Roman Candle in celebration! Even before the 4th of July fireworks celebrations create another nationwide 42% average increase in fine particulate matter (Seidel, et al., 2015), the United States bears the single largest share of cumulative historical CO₂ emissions of any nation . We represent roughly 20 percent of the global total since 1850 contributing approximately 0.2°C of warming to date (Carbon Brief, 2021; UNEP, 2023). To represent four percent of the world’s current population and be responsible for nearly a fifth of its cumulative warming is not a coincidence of geography or fake news. It is the outcome of deliberate choices about how a republic would be organized, energized, and expanded across two and a half centuries. The United States has long imagined freedom in spatial terms: movement, property, settlement, mastery, frontier, and circulation. Those abstract ideals were made real through land theft and remade landscapes, as well as through infrastructure built in significant part by African and African American enslaved labor. Each step along the way depended on ever-greater throughput of energy, labor, and material. In that sense, the country’s history is also a history of how thought became organized around extraction and exploitation, until those thoughts and actions themselves became a kind of common sense. But by the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries increased industrialization meant emissions grew. They surged during the postwar era and peaked in the early 2000s — a trajectory that maps almost exactly onto the spatial project of suburban expansion, highway construction, and fossil-fuel-dependent agriculture (Climate Change Tracker, 2024). Two-thirds of the country’s cumulative warming impact derives from fossil CO₂ alone. The built environment of American freedom is as inseparable from the chemical footprint it left behind as a firecracker’s scattered debris and carbon residue. This leaves us with a climate crisis that is not just the result of a few bad policy choices in the late twentieth century. We exist in a cumulative outcome of a long national project that normalized combustion as prosperity and treated atmospheric consequence as some distant abstraction. Kind of like turning up the radio to drowned out the sound of your car making a funny noise. The federal state government played a central role in this process. Not only through direct policy and subsidies, but through the development of roads, ports, power systems, agricultural regimes, and military logistics that expanded the scale of fossil dependence at every scale of national life. The fossil fuel industry understood this trajectory earlier than the public was permitted to know. A systematic analysis published in Science found that ExxonMobil’s own scientists accurately projected and skillfully modeled global warming due to fossil fuel burning from as early as 1977. These projections are consistent with subsequent observations. And yet, for decades, the company publicly pushed doubt and denial (Supran, Rahmstorf, & Oreskes, 2023). Consequently, what America projects as “economic growth”, fueled enormously by the fossil fuel industry, is embedded not only in a collective national memory but in the scientific record. The irony is that America’s confidence in its own permanence rested on a false sense of geography. The landscape seemed stable because the costs were displaced in the form of upstream mining, downstream pollution, hidden emissions, imported and exported harm, and deferred climate effects. The effects on the atmosphere made that displacement impossible to sustain. The ‘progress’ that had been scattered across space and time returns as heat, drought, fire, flood, and increasingly volatile weather. We built a world in which the rewards of extraction were immediate while the penalties were delayed. Call it what you will — the climate crisis is just the debt of delay, dressed as disaster. KNOWING, NEGLECTING, NEUTERING KNOWLEDGE The USA did not simply keep burning and expanding on autopilot. By the late twentieth century, it had also begun to lose the institutional capacity to understand what its own trajectory meant. The problem was no longer that the 1970’s scientific picture Exxon had already portrayed was absent. The evidence was clear. By the early 1990s the United States had ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and formally accepted the goal of returning greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by the end of the decade. The barrier to progress was not ignorance, but a degraded relationship between knowledge and power. This was engineered in part by more fossil fuel industry campaigns to sow doubt about science it privately accepted. Historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented how a loose-knit network of industry-connected scientists ran effective campaigns to mislead the public on issues from tobacco to climate change. They exploited the media’s tendency toward false balance and keeping controversy alive long after scientific consensus had been reached (Oreskes & Conway, 2010). The strategy was to make certainty seem uncertain, and it worked. For decades, political inaction persisted through every window of action that may have helped. By the mid-1990s, climate change had become legible enough for federal institutions to name, study, and plan around, but the machinery of governance was being bent in the opposite direction. Newt Gingrich and the Republicans who rose with him may not have invented anti-government politics, but they weaponized it. Curiously, through pro-governmental politics. While their rhetoric promised efficiency and modernization, in practice it often meant cutting staffs, weakening committees, abolishing subcommittees, and treating the legislature less as a site of deliberation than as a theater of permanent combat. After all, their own staffers affectionately referred to Gingrich and his wrecking crew as ‘jihadists’ — even as those same politicians promulgated and attached that term as a slur toward Muslims. One of the most consequential acts of this period was the 1995 defunding of the Office of Technology Assessment. This was a bipartisan, independent body that had produced over 750 reports on complex scientific and technical questions since 1974, including major studies on energy policy, environmental risk, and the long-range consequences of atmospheric change. Gingrich had vowed to kill the OTA during his 1994 election campaign. He kept his promise, and with it eliminated one of Congress’s primary mechanisms for converting scientific knowledge into durable legislative capacity (Wikipedia, Office of Technology Assessment; AAAS Science, 2019). A legislature cannot respond intelligently to a long-range atmospheric crisis if it has stripped away the very mechanisms designed to synthesize evidence, test assumptions, and tackle complex questions over time. What replaced deliberations mediated by experts was a vacuum quickly filled by industry lobbyists — the same industry that, amongst themselves, knew exactly what Gingrich was doing. Research on institutional dynamics in climate governance consistently finds that fragmented policy, weak intergovernmental coordination, and the erosion of technical capacity are among the most significant barriers to effective long-range climate action (Jaisridhar et al., 2025; Birchall, Bonnett, & Kehler, 2023). The thinning of Congress’s own cognitive infrastructure in 1995 was a bureaucratic adjustment that disabled the country’s capacity to govern on topics beyond the timescales and dimensions of a single administration. The political system was becoming less capable of converting recognition into sustained action precisely as the need for that conversion became most urgent. The United States not only helped create the conditions for warming but undermined its own capacity to govern the effects warming created. The atmosphere was warming and so was the willful weakening of the world's most powerful potential partner in planetary protection. CASCADES, CRISES, AND COMING TO TERMS What follows is not simply a warmer world, but a less legible and actionable one. Once a political system weakens its own capacity to think long-term, it becomes ill-equipped to face a future that arrives not as a single rupture but as a cascade of self

Hello Interactors, A couple weeks ago, I found myself in Tulsa for the first time. I left pleasantly surprised. There’s a lot of private money flowing into this town, but the city is filled with sorted stories about land, who holds it, who loses it, and how that loss and potential return is engineered. On Juneteenth, the city’s history feels especially close so I thought I’d unpack the layers of displacement, violence, and reinvention that lurk beneath a city still struggling to face them. CONCRETE, COALS, AND A CITY THAT CONCEALS Raise your hand if you like Brutalist architecture (I’m raising mine.) I just didn’t expect to find it in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I was visiting for my niece’s wedding. The Brut Hotel is a converted Brutalist tower a few blocks from the Arkansas River and it’s all raw concrete. Even the floors and counters. Most people see Brutalism as cold — which is nice on a hot Tulsa day — but I read it as honest and direct. A bit like a Midwestern prairie settler stereotype. After all, the style did emerge in postwar Europe from an egalitarian impulse. It was meant to be democratic architecture stripped of ornamental excesses of fancy city folks. It arrived in America just in time to become the aesthetic of urban renewal. We mostly got housing projects and highway interchanges built on top of what had been Black and working-class neighborhoods, often by eminent domain and without meaningful consent. Concrete can be made to beautiful, but it’s definitely also the material of displacement. Tulsa is no exception. On my first muggy Tulsa morning, I ran from The Brut toward the river. A block or two along, tucked between midtown houses on Cheyenne Avenue, I passed a small park I had read about but didn’t know was so close. The bronze sculpture of a flame was the give away. This is Creek Nation Council Oak Park, and it is, in the most literal sense, where Tulsa began. In 1836, the Lochapoka clan of the Creek Nation arrived at this hill above the river after two years on the Trail of Tears. They had carried live coals from their last ceremonial fires in Alabama the entire way — embers kept alive through hundreds of miles of forced march. Under this oak, they set those coals down and kindled a new flame. They named the settlement Talasi, meaning “old town.” White settlers mispronounced it into Tulsa. The term “Trail of Tears” perhaps softens this forced displacement too much. Of the 630 Lochapoka who began the journey, 161 did not survive it. The oak did and it still holds its annual ceremonies. In November 2024, the site was formally returned to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. As I kept running south along the river, a second gathering place was harder to miss. It has a giant sign that reads, The Gathering Place. The Gathering Place is a privately built public-ish park that stretches along the Arkansas River’s eastern bank and inland a bit. It’s one hundred acres of fountains, climbing structures, event lawns, and restored prairie plantings. It is, by nearly any measure, a stunningly beautiful park. It is also unmistakably the product of a single man’s fortune. George Kaiser, the Tulsa-born oil billionaire and philanthropist, has poured more than $350 million into transforming this stretch of riverfront. It’s honestly something you’d expect to see in a Northern European city. The park opened in 2018 to national acclaim. The New York Times called it “the most ambitious new park in a generation.” I can see why. But head north from the riverfront, past the gleaming BOK Center arena (“B. OK.” is a financial services company dating back to 1910 oil money and is half owned by Kaiser) and the reclaimed warehouse districts, (including the Bob Dylan Center — Kaiser bought Bob Dylan’s archive collection in 2016) and within minutes you are in a different city. North Tulsa — and specifically the Greenwood District — reveals modest homes and stretches of underdevelopment. This is an area that feels like it’s being watched and commemorated but it’s not entirely clear it is being heard. The Greenwood Rising history center, also primarily bankrolled by Kaiser, opened in 2021 exactly one hundred years after the neighborhood was destroyed in the Tulsa Massacre. This building is also very nice and tells the area’s story well. Whether it changes the story is another matter. Cities can act as maps of their own history, so that’s how I try to read them. I take note of the distances between prosperity and poverty, commemoration and investment…even a museum and a neighborhood. These are not determinant accidents of the market, but accumulated residue of specific decisions made by specific people over a very long time. To understand Tulsa’s geography today, you have to go back not just to 1921, but further — to the rivers and grasslands of Indian Territory the Lochapoka people encountered. It’s here you’ll find federal ledgers leveraged as weapons, their lines and lists legalizing the largest land liquidation in American history. PROMISES, PARCELS, AND THE POLITICS OF POSSESSION The Lochapoka were not the only ones force-marched into Indian Territory. All five of the so-called Civilized Tribes — the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations — were relocated from their homelands in the American Southeast across the 1830s. Each tribe were given the same federal promise that the territory would remain theirs permanently. The maps and the Federal treaties said so, but neither turned out to mean much. What the maps did not show, and what the official history long preferred to omit, is that the Five Tribes brought enslaved Black people with them into Indian Territory. As the historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Rose Stremlau have noted in the context of the 1619 Project, the story of this dispossession cannot be told without acknowledging that intersection: the Trail of Tears was also, for some, a forced march into continued bondage (Gordon-Reed et al., 2022). That fact would shape the politics of Oklahoma for generations — and it is the thread that connects the founding fire under the Council Oak to the rise of Greenwood eighty years later. After the Civil War, the federal government’s promises to the Five Tribes began to erode almost immediately. The Freedmen — formerly enslaved people who had been held by tribal members — were formally granted citizenship in the tribes by treaty, though the tribes’ willingness to honor that citizenship varied considerably. Many Freedmen, seeking mutual protection and economic self-sufficiency, began establishing their own communities. This impulse gave rise to what became known as the Black Towns Movement. Between the 1870s and the 1920s, more than fifty all-Black towns were founded in Oklahoma and Kansas, created by people who had learned, with good reason, not to rely on the goodwill of white-majority governments (Martin, 2025; Gordon-Reed et al., 2022). The legal and cartographic instrument that made the Black Towns possible — and that would ultimately help destroy them — was the allotment system. The Dawes Act of 1887 broke up communally held tribal land into individual parcels, assigning plots to enrolled tribal members and opening the remainder to white settlement. It was framed as a civilizing measure. It was in practice a mechanism for transferring Indigenous land to white hands on an enormous scale. Each parcel was drawn on a map, recorded in a ledger, and assigned a legal description. This act appeared to secure property rights while in fact it made land far easier to steal through legal machinery than it had ever been to simply seize. The discovery of oil made the theft more systematic and more lethal. When crude was found beneath allotments assigned to Native people — particularly in the Osage Nation, the Creek Nation, and elsewhere — a federal guardianship system allowed courts to appoint white guardians for Native landowners deemed “incompetent” to manage their own affairs. The definition of incompetence was flexible and self-serving. Native heirs to oil-bearing land died under suspicious circumstances with startling frequency. Deeds were forged. Guardians enriched themselves and left their wards landless. The historian David Grann has documented this in devastating detail for the Osage Nation specifically, but the pattern was region-wide. Modern GIS analysis of original allotment records against subsequent deed transfers reveals what contemporaries knew but rarely said aloud: the disappearance of Native landowners from oil country was not a coincidence, but a covert policy. For Black Oklahomans, the allotment system created a narrow window of possibility. Freedmen who appeared on the Dawes Rolls received allotments of their own. Some of this land was in proximity to other Black allottees, and the Black Towns Movement capitalized on that geography, incorporating towns, establishing churches and schools, and building the civic infrastructure that Black communities had been denied elsewhere. As scholar JT Martin has argued, the philanthropic traditions within these communities — the mutual aid societies, the church networks, the communal investment in education — were not secondary features of the Black Towns Movement but its essential architecture (Martin, 2025). People who had nothing built institutions that served everyone. Greenwood, established in the early 1900s on the northern edge of Tulsa, was the apex of that project. By 1921, it contained over thirty-five blocks of Black-owned businesses, a hospital, law offices, two newspapers, a library, schools, and churches. Booker T. Washington reportedly called it “the Negro Wall Street,” a phrase that has since become shorthand for what the neighborhood achieved. Although that shorthand flattens what was, more precisely, a masterwork of community-building under conditions designed to make community impossible.

Hello Interactors, We like to think we choose our own paths, but our cities have already decided for us. New York and Los Angeles function as the extended phenotype of our species — a living circulatory system that subtly channels our collective behavior. This week, we explore the multi-generational biology of transit to see how modern infrastructure effectively dissolves what we perceive as individual autonomy. MANHATTAN MOBILITY AND THE MASSED MILIEU I recently flew from New York visiting my daughter, where large vessels moved massive numbers of people around, to Los Angeles visiting my son, where small vessels moved small numbers of people around. The transition was jarring. I went from being physically enmeshed in a dense social milieu to being systematically protected from it — from walking over 10,000 steps a day to barely 1,000. My daily cadence shifted from bobbing and weaving around persons I could see, hear, and smell, to maneuvering around what sociologist Mike Michael termed ‘carsons’ — persons fused with a car. This deep-seated desire for individual control over our own mobility is not unique to the modern driver. The instinct to leverage an external entity to conquer long distances is as old as the domestication of the horse in the third millennium BCE. Every stage of human life presents a shifting horizon of mobile autonomy: from crawling to walking, to the childhood triumph of mastering a bicycle or a local bus network, to the initial rush of freedom that comes with a first car. All before the natural declines of aging ultimately diminish our autonomy once more. Yet, suggesting mass transit to many Americans accustomed to the perceived agency of the car feels like a threat to their very freedom. Because transit routes are fixed and schedules are unyielding, collective travel is often mischaracterized as an artificial restriction on liberty. History shows that long before the locomotive, scheduled, multi-passenger transit enabled human freedom and societal cohesion where individual movement was risky or impossible. Across Eastern Polynesia, the Caribbean, and northern Eurasia, multi-passenger canoes were the lifeblood of trade and travel. In southern California, the Chumash and Tongva communities developed advanced sewn-plank canoes called tomols and ti’ats, which facilitated complex political economies between the Channel Islands and the mainland. This reliance on collective vehicles extended beyond coastal waterways. Human networks also depended on highly organized, shared transport to conquer distance across vast terrestrial and inland landscapes. Centuries before Western cities built public transit, imperial China constructed the Grand Canal, a two-thousand-kilometer artificial waterway that operated as a continental transit artery during the Sui Dynasty. This facilitated the regular movement of millions of passengers and state resources between agricultural basins and northern metropolises. On land, Tokugawa-era Japan structured its empire around the Tōkaidō, a highly regulated highway system where travelers moved rhythmically between post stations using a coordinated network of horse relays and official permits. Eastern aquatic and terrestrial networks achieved continental scale, replicated on Europe’s rugged overland trails. Public multi-passenger carriage service began in Paris in 1662 with the world's first urban transit system. In colonial America, occasional stagecoaches linked Boston and New York starting around 1735, with regular schedules emerging in the 1740s. By the late 1820s, fixed-route horse-buses (omnibuses) appeared in Paris (1828) and New York City (1827). When urban populations exploded in mid 1800s, these street-level collective networks buckled under their own weight. It triggered unprecedented structural crises. By the late 19th century, New York City was drowning in a public health emergency born of its own transit power. Imagine over 150,000 working horses blanketing the streets. Now imagine thousands of tons of manure and urine daily. When a horse influenza epidemic paralyzed the city overnight in 1872, New Yorkers realized they could no longer rely on street-level animal power. The city initially looked upward and built coal-fired elevated railroads — the “Els” — on massive iron trestles. While these steam engines bypassed street traffic and allowed Manhattan to expand northward, they rained hot ash onto pedestrians, blocked natural light, and shattered the urban peace with deafening noise. True structural relief required going underground. Early pneumatic experiments, like Alfred Ely Beach's secret, air-driven tunnel in 1870, remained short-lived novelties due to political opposition and mechanical limitations (only 300 feet long, single-car shuttle). The project closed in 1873. The breakthrough for electric rail came in 1890 with the City & South London Railway in London, the first railway to use third rail electrification. The third rail — an additional, continuous steel rail running alongside the tracks that carries electricity to train cars — became the standard for underground and metro systems from around 1900. October 27, 1904, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company opened its first official subway line from City Hall to Harlem. This permanently compressed densely housed humanity into a swift, subterranean network, channeling the city’s chaos beneath the cobblestones. COASTAL CARRIAGES AND THE CYCLEWAY While New York dug into the earth to consolidate its density, a parallel but radically different evolution was unfolding across the wide horizon of the Los Angeles basin. Between the 1820s and 1904, Los Angeles transformed from an isolated Mexican pueblo (population ~650) into a sprawling metropolis (population 100,000+). Here surface transit was not just responding to growth, but was actively engineering it. After bridging the distance to its seaport via the San Pedro Railroad in 1869 and connecting to the transcontinental rail network via Southern Pacific in 1876, the city experienced the Southern California real estate boom of the 1880s (1884-1887), which required vast spatial integration. The 1885 completion of the Santa Fe Railroad's direct line to Chicago triggered a development boom that dwarfed the earlier one, transforming the region. Rather than stacking millions of people into a vertical core, transit magnates like Moses Sherman and Henry Huntington realized that electric surface rail could be weaponized as a tool for land speculation. They built lines out into empty fields, bought up the surrounding acreage, and subdivided it into suburban tracts for commuting workers. A similar strategy played out in Chicago. Founded in 1901, Huntington's Pacific Electric 'Red Cars' rapidly expanded, opening its first interurban line to Long Beach on July 4, 1902. At its peak in the 1920s, the Pacific Electric system became the largest electric railway system in the world, with over 1,000 miles of track connecting dozens of isolated towns across Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties, stitching together hundreds of square miles. By scattering its population across a massive geographic basin, this surface network wrote the genetic code for LA’s modern identity. This decentralized layout was perfectly primed to swap the shared space of the streetcar for the individualized isolation of the highway just a generation later. Yet, beneath both the subway tunnels of Manhattan and the streetcar tracks of Los Angeles lies a forgotten foundation engineered by an entirely different mode of transit. As Carlton Reid uncovers in Roads Were Not Built for Cars, our modern road networks were not designed for the automobile but were hard-won by late-nineteenth-century cyclists. For the moneyed elite who could afford the “safety bicycle” — the high-tech, liberating consumer gadget of the 1880s and 1890s — the machine offered an unprecedented leap in individual autonomy. Disgusted by muddy, horse-fouled, and rutted roads, these cyclists organized under the League of American Wheelmen, launching a powerful “Good Roads” movement that pioneered the smooth, paved macadam surfaces that motorists would later inherit and monopolize. While New York carved out its first dedicated bike path in 1894, when civic pressure led to the opening of the nation's first separated bike path along Brooklyn's Ocean Parkway, wealthy urbanites could now cycle down to Coney Island detached from chaotic street traffic. The parkway became NYC's first dedicated bicycle path and the first in the United States, described as the oldest bike path in the world by Guinness World Records. Simultaneously, the early elite of Pasadena and LA used the bicycle to weave together their sprawling territory. This culminated in 1900 with the opening of the California Cycleway — a spectacular, approximately 1.3-mile elevated timber bicycle toll-way running through the Arroyo Seco. Lit by incandescent bulbs and built from over 1.25 million board feet of pine, this highway offered a vision of uninterrupted, rapid commuter flow through open terrain. Though the full nine-mile route was never completed by the rapid rise of electric streetcars, its right-of-way established a profound precedent. Decades later, that exact path found a permanent place as the Arroyo Seco Parkway, LA’s first freeway, formally opening on December 30, 1940. SUBTERRANEAN SABOTAGE AND THE SOCIALIZATION SYSTEM The triumph of the automobile in Los Angeles was not an inevitability, nor was the city entirely devoid of subterranean ambition. In December 1925, Pacific Electric opened the Hollywood Subway. Boring a mile-long concrete tunnel beneath the Victorian mansions of Bunker Hill, they were able to bypass downtown LA’s already paralyzing surface congestion. Emerging from the Beaux-Arts style Subway Terminal Building on Hill Street, this route allowed Red Cars to escape street traffic en

Hello Interactors, Neuroscience research on narrative shows that stories sharpen attention, improve recall, and recruit shared brain networks that help us organize events into a coherent arc. The trouble, for anyone who works with spatial data, is that the reality on the ground refuses to cooperate with clean narratives despite this inherent bias. Today I look at how the popular telling of how Homo sapiens came to contemplate such things — to become ‘modern’ — is not the story the evidence keeps telling. THE LURE OF THE LEAP We like our origin stories well defined. The popular telling — the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens is the bestselling version — locates a moment when archaic humans crossed a threshold and became modern, transformed by some neurological windfall in Africa. But a recent paper by anthropologist Huw Groucutt on Homo sapiens dispersal argues this says more about Homo sapiens’ neurological bias toward clean narratives than about the evidence we have. This ‘revolution into modern’ frame has traceable historical roots. In the 1960s and 70s, the only deeply excavated record was in a western sliver of the Eurasian landmass called Europe. There, the transition from Neanderthal to Homo sapiens congregations did look abrupt. It was reasonable, given what was known at the time, to read this regional shift as a species-wide threshold — a sudden flowering of cognition and culture. But that reading was a misinterpretation. What Europe records is not a transformation but a replacement where one population arrived as another receded. The arc of change was migration, not metamorphosis. That correction took hold, but the ‘revolution’ story, like the species, simply relocated. There would be a coastal revolution in southern Africa, a cognitive revolution in the Rift Valley, a technological revolution in the Levant. The plot survived even as the setting changed. The deeper trouble lies with the word “modern” itself. It is a relic of mid-twentieth-century thinking that anchors humanity to an imagined ethnographic checklist: symbolic art, refined toolkits, complex burials, linguistic competence. These traits are taken to constitute a package, and the package is taken to arrive together. But the evidence keeps refusing this neatness. The traits show up in pulses across regions and disappear again. They appear in populations we have been trained to call “archaic.” They fail to coordinate the way the model demands, and as Groucutt says, provide just “another way of separating ‘us’ and ‘them’.” For example at Panga ya Saidi in coastal Kenya, excavators recovered the burial of a child known as Mtoto dated to around 78,000 years ago. It is among the oldest deliberate burials known from Africa, and the kind of behavior usually slotted under “modernity.” Yet there is no continent-wide adoption of similar mortuary practice that follows from it. Burial complexity at Panga ya Saidi appears, then thins, then reappears elsewhere on different terms. It looks less like the leading edge of a wave and more like a local response to local conditions. A second example pulls in the opposite direction. The Iho Eleru skull, recovered in 1965 from a rock shelter in Nigeria, is roughly 13,000 years old — geologically yesterday — yet preserves features that morphologists have long called “archaic.” It refuses to sit in the bin its date implies. The bone is doing something the category cannot absorb. The cost of the revolution model, then, is not that it tells a tidy story. It is that the tidiness encourages researchers to treat their categories as facts of nature rather than instruments of description. Evidence that does not fit the frame gets explained away or quietly set aside. When you stop asking when our ancestors became human and start asking how, across thousands of generations and a shifting climate, particular behaviors were assembled and reassembled in particular places, the data reads very differently. This point is not new. In 2000, Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks published a paper titled “The revolution that wasn’t,” arguing that the complex behaviors taken to define modernity in Europe had appeared in Africa tens of thousands of years earlier, and gradually rather than in a single burst. That correction is over twenty-five years old. The fact that revolution thinking has persisted despite it — and persisted most loudly in popular accounts that sell in the tens of millions — is itself worth taking seriously. Models, like fossils, accumulate where the conditions are right for preservation. The trait-list at the heart of “modernity” is a fragile instrument in its own right. Many of the behaviors taken to mark our species are anchored to ethnographic data on recent hunter-gatherer societies, assumed to provide a baseline for what fully human cultural life looks like. Those datasets have well-known problems; when the archaeologist Robert Kelly examined a portion of Lewis Binford’s widely used hunter-gatherer compilation in 2021, he was able to confirm the accuracy of only one percent of the entries. The benchmark we have been measuring the deep past against is, in places, made of sand. PATHS, NOT PIVOTS For anyone who works with spatial data, the revolution model has a second problem. It ignores the terrain. A revolution, mapped, would look like an expanding circle radiating from a source — like a wildfire expanding from a single ignition point. Human dispersal looks nothing like that. It moves along corridors, hesitates at barriers, doubles back, fragments around resources. It is shaped by climate cycles that open and close routes on millennial timescales. The footprint is irregular because the ground is irregular. Groucutt’s argument benefits from a concept that geographers and geomorphologists know well: equifinality. The same observed outcome can result from different processes. A bowl-shaped depression on a hillside can be carved by a glacier, scooped by a landslide, or eroded by a spring undercutting from below. The shape alone does not tell you which. Read the depression as a single signature of a single cause, and you will misjudge its history. The same caution applies to the deep human past. A scatter of similar tool types across regions does not necessarily document a single dispersing population with a shared cognitive package. It may document several populations independently arriving at similar solutions to similar pressures. A flicker of symbolic behavior in two distant places does not imply continuous transmission between them. The archaeological record is dense with cases where the simplest explanation — one cause, one origin — turns out to be the wrong one. A telling example of how revolution thinking distorts spatial evidence comes from a long-running argument about the Levantine sites occupied by Homo sapiens between roughly 130,000 and 75,000 years ago — Skhul, Qafzeh, and others. Did these represent a genuine out-of-Africa dispersal, or were they merely an extension of African ecology into Southwest Asia? In the latter view, our species was so tightly coupled to its native biome that early presence beyond Africa was a kind of optical illusion. One prominent researcher has argued that Israel is outside Africa “only by modern political convention.” But the Levantine mammal fauna of this period is dominated by Palearctic species — deer, gazelle, boar — and has been since at least the Middle Pleistocene. The supposed African flourish at Qafzeh shrinks under examination to a few rare elements, some of them present in the region long before Homo sapiens arrived. “Africa grew” is what the revolution model looks like when biogeography becomes inconvenient. Rather than accept that early Homo sapiens dispersed beyond the continent before achieving full “modernity,” the frame extends the boundary of “Africa” to wherever the species happens to be. The terrain bends to match the model. This is where genomic evidence becomes interesting and dangerous in roughly equal measure. Ancient DNA has transformed what can be reconstructed about population structure, and the resolution is genuinely impressive. But the analytic culture around that data has often defaulted to event-style narratives: a bottleneck here, a split there, a discrete mixture of pulses at a specific date. These tidy events, plotted on a tree, recover the satisfactions of the revolution at a different scale. They imply that the past has crisp joints, making “claims for events which never actually occurred.” The caution Groucutt raises is that population structure across the deep African past was probably continuous, regionally varied, and persistently interconnected — closer to a braided river than a branching tree. Apparent “events” in the genetic record may be artifacts of how the analysis is framed rather than discrete moments in time. Treating them as facts encourages claims of historical specificity the underlying signal cannot bear. Equifinality applies to genomes too. Different histories of structure and gene flow can produce overlapping statistical signatures. What follows, methodologically, is a shift in what models are expected to do. Instead of identifying the moment, the route, or the founding population, the task becomes mapping a field of overlapping processes whose visibility varies by region, by preservation, and by the history of where archaeologists have chosen to dig. That is a less satisfying answer than a date and a place, but it’s closer to what the evidence supports. MANY CLOCKS, MANY PASTS, MANY THREADS The physicist Carlo Rovelli, in The Order of Time, makes an observation that time is not a universal river running at one rate everywhere. It is local and relational. This is not intuitive but matches reality. Atomic clocks at different elevations tick at measurably different rates because gravity dilates

Hello Interactors, It’s been a while. Traveling for family, and a bit flooded by the relentless sneaker waves of unsavory world events — the kind that usually inspire me to write but lately threaten to pull me under. Spring in the northern hemisphere means Interplace turns to geographic information science and spatial analysis. How might we look at the complex unfolding of world events through this lens — and what happens when we push it further than emergence alone can carry it? That’s what I attempt to explore here. PATTERNS PRECEDING PHYSICAL PLACES Geographic information science is a relatively recent field. It emerged from mid-20th-century cartography and land-use planning. Computer cartography and quantitative geography of the 1960s is often considered the first true digital Geographic Information Systems (GIS). It became a science (GIScience or GISc) in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Michael Goodchild questioned if there was a genuine scientific discipline lurking within the software. His answer was yes. He built an institutional home for that argument at the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, my alma mater. Goodchild was my senior advisor in 1989 as UCSB was becoming a generative intellectual hub in the field. UCSB’s geography department continues to push the question of what space means analytically, not just how to map it. I’m personally invested in better understanding how GISc may be a natural partner for complexity science, a field I’ve been attracted to since I started researching and writing. This partnership isn’t new. GISc provides a powerful framework for dissecting the spatial dimensions of complexity, where systems defy reductionist analysis and emerge through nonlinear interactions. In the early 2000s, geographer David O’Sullivan, and others, articulated this as the study of “the behaviour of macroscopic collections of many basic but interacting units endowed with the potential to evolve in time” emphasizing these characteristic elements of complexity science: self-organization, path dependence, and the irreducibility of wholes to their parts. Around the same time, sociologist John Urry (and others) extended this to global scales, portraying globalization as co-evolving systems marked by unpredictability, irreversibility, and positive feedback loops that amplify disorder within pockets of order. These parings are a good start, but computational biologist Michael Levin offers what can be seen as a genuinely unsettling upgrade. His recent work on the origin of cognitive and morphological patterns suggests the dominant appeal to emergence as an explanatory endpoint may itself be, in his words, a “mysterian” position — one that “does not facilitate further advances.” When a surprising pattern appears in a complex system, the emergentist says “that’s just what happens” and catalogs it. But Levin proposes these patterns are not random facts to be noted and admired. They are part of an ordered, non-physical space that physical systems, when configured the right way, ingress into. Ingression is a term Levin borrows from mathematician Alfred North Whitehead as a potential that timeless abstract objects possess to become actual concrete experiences. “Red” only becomes red when its potential is realized. These ‘ordered spaces’ of potential are portals into what Levin calls a Platonic Space. Plato argued that the objects we encounter in the world are imperfect instances of perfect, eternal Forms that exist independently of any physical thing. The most primitive form being the triangle. Levin’s argument is the triangle participates in a kind of Triangleness; it realizes it’s potential to exist. Nature keeps arriving at triangles independently, across wildly different substrates, as if drawn by the same attractor. The triangle is the only polygon that is inherently rigid: push on any corner and the shape holds, which is why trusses, bridges, and bones all rely on triangular geometry for structural strength. Radiolarians, single-celled ocean organisms with no brain and no blueprint, construct intricate skeletal lattices of triangulated geometry at microscopic scales. In Levin’s terms, nature is ingressing Triangleness — repeatedly, across billions of years and countless lineages — because the Form has properties that reward any physical system stable enough to express it. The truth that a triangle’s angles sum to exactly 180 degrees owed nothing to the first organism that built one. Physical systems are, in this sense, less like containers and more like pointers — a term borrowed from computer science. Pointers are variables that hold the addresses that reference more information. Levin’s framework requires a specific kind of pointer: not a pointer to stored data, which retrieves a static value, but a pointer to a subroutine that calls up a routine that executes complex actions and outputs beyond the pointer itself. The pointer is small, while the executed routine may be vast and behave unpredictably. Think of a street address. The address itself contains nothing — it is a short string of numbers and words that fits on an envelope — but hand it to the right system and it retrieves a house, a history, a neighborhood, everything that has ever happened inside those walls. This is Levin’s claim about physical structures. A genome, a city, an institution doesn’t contain its pattern so much as it points at one — and when the pointer is well-formed, you get considerably more out than you put in. What does this mean for GISc? It means that spatial configurations — cities, borders, trade corridors, migration routes — are not merely sites where local interactions produce global outcomes. They are interfaces into a latent pattern space. When a hub city emerges, when a colonial border persists for centuries past the empire that drew it, when a pandemic spreads exactly along the topology of air travel, we are not only witnessing the consequential mechanical emergence of patterns derived from local rules. We are watching physical structures act as pointers that summon — ingress — specific patterns of collective behavior, whose full complexity exceeds what was put in. Levin’s core observation about biological morphogenesis translates here with uncomfortable precision. Consider one of his more unsettling tadpole experiments. The creation of its normal bulging eyes are suppressed (by microscopically manipulating cellular ‘software’) and a replacement eye is instead induced — ingressed — on the tail. The optic nerve growing from that tail-eye doesn’t connect to the brain — it terminates somewhere around the spinal cord. By any conventional account, the animal should be blind. It isn’t. The tadpoles can still see and perform well in visual tasks. Somehow, the system routes around its own abnormal wiring to recover function. The pattern being pointed to — sight — was never housed in the eye itself, or in the specific neural pathway, or in any single component. The eye on the tail is a wildly improbable pointer, and yet it retrieves something far richer than its own structure contains. You get considerably more out than you put in. Some GISc tools — like agent-based models or network analysis — already detect this excess in a geography context. A single infected traveler tips a system toward chaos not because of arithmetic addition of local interactions described in the GISc analysis, but because that traveler’s position in a network acts as an interface to a pattern of contagion whose scope was latent in the structure all along. The “geographic advantage” O’Sullivan, and crew, describes — GISc’s relationship to multi-scalar processes and human-environment couplings — is, in Levin’s vocabulary, a sensitivity to how physical arrangements act as pointers into a rich space of possible collective behaviors. This reframes world events not as linear narratives but as navigations of morphospace — the full landscape of forms a system could take, where some configurations are reachable and others are not, and where attractors pull trajectories toward specific patterns regardless of starting conditions. What pattern are current geopolitical configurations pointing toward? What is being ingressed by the particular architecture of today’s global institutions, communication networks, and urban densities? While GIScience sharpens our sight on outcomes, it leaves uncharted the deeper question of what is the shape of the latent space these material forms slip into. BORDERS STORE WHAT BODIES KNOW Levin’s work suggests at every scale of organization, we are dealing not with mechanical aggregation but with collective intelligence. To understand what he means by that, it helps to borrow an image from Einstein. Because nothing travels faster than light, any event you could possibly influence — or that could possibly influence you — is bounded by how far light could travel in the available time. Draw that boundary in spacetime and it forms a cone. Everything inside it is causally reachable, everything outside it is not. Levin borrows this image to describe the reach of any cognitive agent. A single cell’s light cone is tiny — it can only sense and respond within its immediate chemical neighborhood, over milliseconds. A brain’s light cone is vastly larger — it can model consequences years out and coordinate behavior across great distances. The cone is simply a measure of how far an agent’s agency actually extends. And just as the body is a nested hierarchy of such agents — molecular networks, cells, tissues, organs — each operating within its own cone, pursuing goals whose scale its parts cannot perceive, so too is human society. A city is not simply a dense clustering of individuals whose local interactions produce urban dyna

Hello Interactors, This one attempts to balance the privilege of cold analytical escapism with the gruesome rehumanization of past, present, and future atrocities. I end up trying to make sense of the political psychology that leads to such jubilant violence. While it can be understood, its the very intelligibility that makes it so intolerable. PRESSURE, POWER, IMPUNITY In 1965, as my umbilical cord was being severed in Iowa, U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were cutting the ears off innocent dead Vietnamese children. And their parents. The shriveling cartilage served as “proof” they were killed. They’d string them into necklaces or hoard them in “ear bags” as trophies. Their commanders demanded a tally. This morbid ritual, born from the military’s obsession with numeric “success” metrics amid “search and destroy” orders, exposed not just individual moral depravity but a systemic disregard for human life. Such barbarity serves as just another example of America’s enduring pattern of defying Geneva Conventions on civilian protections, proportionality, and prohibited weapons. These atrocities are wrapped in bureaucratic euphemisms like “collateral damage”; all to evade accountability and perpetuate unchecked imperial violence. When barbarity returned like a boomerang to hit the Twin Towers on 9/11, the term “collateral damage” was absent. But “search and destroy” came back. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force authorizes the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” These expanded interpretations of and the idea of a “continuing, imminent threat” led to doctrines that allowed drones and bombs to be used as sanctioned forms of force across borders. Targeted killings are domestic justifications that override attempts at global legal constraints. As my own kids were being born in 2004, U.S. drones were flying across the skies over Afghanistan, Yemen, and beyond, vaporizing wedding parties, schools, and outdoor markets, shredding innocent men, women, and children into mangled flesh mixed with bone fragments. These ‘Hellfire missiles’ were sold to the public as possessing surgical precision. These “precision” killings, justified as “targeted” under the euphemism of “signature strikes,” leave behind charred craters, orphaned survivors screaming amid the rubble, and “double taps” that slaughter first responders rushing to the scene. And here again the body-count calculus of modern warfare dehumanizes the dead as mere “collateral” in an endless cycle of remote-control atrocity. However, unlike in Vietnam, groups controlling casualty numbers and combatant definitions created incentives to undercount civilian deaths to bolster the claims of legal precision. Because such reasoning was long classified, external scrutiny relied on leaks and sporadic court‑ordered disclosures. Obama deployed 10 times more drones than Bush. They all occurred in legal grey zones. They were justified through broad claims of self‑defense against “imminent threats” from non‑state actors operating in countries not formally at war with the United States. Legal assessments have found that many attacks did not meet the threshold of an “armed conflict” — meaning strikes there should have been constrained by international human‑rights law — thus violating requirements of necessity, last resort, and proportionality. Recent incidents, like the Iranian Khamenei killing, further expose gaps between law and practice. In the case of the 2020 killing of Iranian General Soleimani, scholars argue that the official rationale failed to meet the UN Charter’s Article 51 requirement of an actual armed attack. Since then, the U.S. and its allies have instead advanced an even more squishy view of “imminence” to justify anticipatory defense against imagined potential threats. Critics say these interpretations transform what was intended to be a narrow exception into a license for routine, preemptive killing. The U.S. government is seemingly unequaled in its interpretive flexibility of law. Rather than submitting to adjudication, they practice “norm‑shaping” noncompliance. This involves acting first, then using rhetoric and diplomatic influence to normalize or justify those actions. Research on the UN Security Council demonstrates how veto rights, opaque bargaining, and diluted resolutions enable permanent members to escape condemnation while weaker states are disciplined. In effect, international law becomes a language powerful states can manage, not a rulebook to obey. U.S. operations in Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and elsewhere are often positioned as short-term “strikes” meant to sustain “rules-based order.” But the U.S. doesn’t have to behave orderly. Moreover, these actions show a longstanding system where the law on force sustains hegemony. Though the justifications shift — from humanitarian intervention in Kosovo and WMD prevention in Iraq to “responsibility to protect” in Libya or preemption against terrorists or nuclear programs in Iran — the underlying logic is the same. You can see why the U.S. systemically refuses to ratify the 1998 Rome Statute. This treaty established the International Criminal Court (ICC) and grants it jurisdiction over the most serious international crimes — genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression — committed by nationals of states parties or on their territory. It was created after ad hoc tribunals like as those in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda to ensure accountability. But by remaining outside the Rome Statute (while accepting some of its principles in domestic law), the United States — along with Israel, Russia, and Sudan — avoids the ICC’s adjudicative authority over its own personnel and operations. The U.S. (and three other states) has essentially insulated its use of force from external legal accountability. This suggests a deeper political culture where U.S. force is assumed to be protective and exceptional. When national security conflicts with legal limits, they are negotiable, and most Americans accept this as normal. The stability of these justifications over time suggests a shared worldview and America’s place in it. It’s a settler-imperial, racialized imagination of place that makes some regions dangerous and disorderly, while viewing U.S. power as the necessary instrument for security and progress. STRUCTURES OF SPATIAL SUPPRESSION To get a better grasp of how legal gray areas become permanent features of the geopolitical landscape, we need to look beyond the law and explore the spatial imaginaries that come before it. The “lawless power” I describe is not merely a failure of international oversight; it is the modern expression of a settler-imperial logic that has long used the map as a weapon. This logic functions through what historian Patrick Wolfe termed a “logic of elimination”: a systemic drive to clear space for a dominant order by rendering the original inhabitants of that space invisible, irrelevant, or “out of place”. The bridge between the “body-count calculus” of Vietnam and the “Hellfire missiles” of today lies in the historical practice of declaring territory terra nullius — land belonging to no one. By portraying Indigenous lands as “empty” or “underused,” settler-colonial legal fictions justified removal and massacre as “regrettable but necessary” steps toward progress. This spatial erasure serves as the architectural blueprint for modern drone warfare. Just as 19th-century maps rendered Native peoples “spatially absent” to normalize dominion, modern military doctrines use “bureaucratic euphemisms” to turn vibrant communities into “trouble spots” and “problem-spaces” for management. When a “signature strike” occurs, the target is not a legal subject but a “pattern of life”. This is the ultimate form of algorithmic governance, where the individual is erased by the data-point before the missile is even fired. By defining specific regions as inherently “disorderly,” the U.S. creates domestic justifications that override attempts at global legal constraints. In this framework, regions treated as a modern “frontier” — a zone where ordinary rules of necessity and proportionality are “negotiable”. This “geometry of dominion” is not exclusive to foreign policy; it is mirrored in the way U.S. power organizes its own domestic heartland. George Lipsitz’s concept of the “white spatial imaginary” explains how space is arranged to prioritize the exclusion and property rights of the affluent while subjecting communities of color to displacement and surveillance. We see this in the physical “concrete” of urban planning: * Highway Infrastructure: Interstate routes were systematically redirected to demolish poor white, Black, and brown communities, ensuring affluent white residents could “get home faster”. * Nuisance Abatement: In cities like Los Angeles, nuisance laws are used to “preemptively reclaim” areas through speculative policing and banishment, enacting a fantasy of dominion over racialized bodies. * Racialized Sorting: The world is sorted into “secure cores” and “unruly peripheries,” a dynamic that scales from the “redlined” neighborhood to the “sanctioned zone” or “reservation”. In both the urban grid and the global borderland, the goal is this: to produce order for some while underwriting “legally malleable violence” on “others”. The “collateral damage” of an Afghan, Palestinian, or Iranian village is the international equivalent of the “nuisance” of a demolished neighbor

Hello Interactors, Watching all the transnational love at the Olympics has been inspiring. We’re all forced to think about nationalities, borders, ethnicities, and all the flavors of behavioral geography it entails. After all, these athletes are all there representing their so-called “homeland.” And in the case of Alysa Liu, her father’s escape from his. Between the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the fall of the Berlin wall, “homeland” took on new meaning for many immigrants. This all took me back to that time and the start of my own journey at Microsoft at the dawn of a new global reality. HOMELAND HATCHED HERE With all the focus on Olympics and immigration recently, I’ve found myself reflecting on my days at Microsoft in the 90s. As the company was growing (really fast), teams were filling up with people recruited from around the world. There were new accents in meetings, new holidays to celebrate, and yummy new foods and funny new words being introduced. This thickening of transnational ties made Redmond feel as connected the rest of the world as the globalized software we were building. By 2000 users around the world could switch between over 60 languages in Windows and Office. In behavioral geography terms, working on the product and using the product made “here” feel more connected to “elsewhere.” This influx of new talent was all enabled by the Immigration Act of 1990. Signed by George H. W. Bush, it increased and stabilized legal pathways for highly skilled immigrants. This continued with Clinton era decisions to expand H-1B visa allocations that fed the tech hiring boom. I took full advantage of this allotment recruiting and hiring interaction designers and user researchers from around the world. In the same decade the federal government expanded access to the United States, it also tightened security. Terrorism threats, especially after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, spooked everyone. Despite this threat, there was more domestic initiated terrorism than outside foreign attacks. The decade saw deadly incidents like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 by radicalized by white supremacist anti-government terrorists, which killed 168 and injured hundreds, making it the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history before 9/11. A year later, the Atlanta Olympic bombing and related bombings by anti-government Christian extremists caused multiple deaths and injuries. Clinic bombings and shootings by anti-abortion extremists began in 1994 with the Brookline clinic shootings and continued through the 1998 Birmingham clinic bombing. These inspired more arsons, bombings, and shootings tied to white supremacist, anti-abortion, and other extreme ideologies. Still, haven been shocked by Islamist extremists in 1993 (and growing Islamic jihadist plots outside the U.S.) the federal government adopted new security language centered on protecting the “homeland” from outside incursions. In 1998, Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 62, titled “Protection Against Unconventional Threats to the Homeland and Americans Overseas,” a serious counterterrorism document whose title quietly normalized the term homeland inside executive governance. But there was at least one critical voice. Steven Simon, Clinton’s senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, didn’t think “Defense of the Homeland” belonged in a presidential directive. Simon’s retrospective argument is that “homeland” did more than name a policy, it brought a territorial logic of legitimacy that the American constitution had historically resisted. He recalls the phrase “Defense of the Homeland” felt “faintly illiberal, even un-American.” The United States historically grounded constitutional legitimacy in civic and legal abstractions (people, union, republic, human rights) rather than blood rights or rights to soil. Membership was to be mediated by institutions, employment, and law rather than ancestry. “Homeland” serves as a powerful cue that suggests a mental model of ‘home’ and expands it to encompass a nation. This model is accompanied by a set of spatial inferences that evoke familiarity, appeal, and even an intuitive sense. However, it also creates a sense of a confined interior that can be breached by someone from outside. This is rooted in place attachment that can be defined as an affective bond between people and places — an emotional tie that can anchor identity and responsibility. But attachment is not the same thing as ownership. Research on collective psychological ownership shows how groups can come to experience a territory as “ours.” This creates a sense of ownership that can be linked to a perceived determination right. Here, the ingroup is entitled to decide what happens in that place while sometimes feeding a desire to exclude outsiders. When the word “homeland” was placed at the center of statecraft it primed public reasoning from attachment of place through care, stewardship, and shared fate toward property ownership through control, gatekeeping, and exclusion. It turns belonging into something closer to a property claim. What makes the 1990s especially instructive from a geography perspective is that “access” itself was being administered through institutions that are intensely spatial: consulates, ports of entry, employer locations, housing markets, and the micro-geographies of office life. The H-1B expansions was not simply generosity, but a form of managed throughput in a system designed to meet labor demand. And it was paired with political assurances about enforcement and domestic worker protections. Mid-decade legal reforms strengthened enforcement by authorities in significant ways. Mechanisms for faster removals and stricter interior enforcement reinforced the idea that the state could act more decisively within the national space. The federal government found ways to expand legal channels that served economic objectives while also building a governance style increasingly comfortable with interior control. “Homeland” helped supply the conceptual bridge that made that socioeconomic coexistence feel coherent. It continues to encourage a politics of boundary maintenance that determines who counts as inside, what kinds of movement are legible as normal, and which bodies are perpetually “out of place.” If the defended object is a republic, the default language justification is legal and civic. If the defended object is a homeland, the language jurisdiction becomes territorial and affective. That shift changes what restrictions, surveillance practices, and membership tests become thinkable and tolerable over time. HOMELAND’S HOHFELDIAN HARNESS If “homeland” structures a place of belonging, then “rights” are the legal grammar that tells us what may be done in that place. The trouble is that “rights” are often treated as moral abstract objects floating above context. Legally, they are structured relations among people, institutions, and things. But “rights” can take on a variety of meanings. Wesley Hohfeld, the Yale law professor who pioneered analytical jurisprudence in the early 20th century, argued that many legal disputes persist because the word “right” is used ambiguously. He distinguished four basic “incidents” for rights: claim, privilege (liberty), power, and immunity. Each is paired with a position correlating to another party: duty, no-claim (no-right), liability, and disability. When the police pull you over for speeding you hold a privilege to drive at or below the speed limit (say, 40 mph). The state has no-right to demand you stop for going exactly 40 mph. But if you’re clocked at 50 mph, the officer enforces your no-right to exceed the limit which correlates to the state’s claim-right. You have a duty to comply by pulling over. If the officer then has power to issue a ticket, you face a liability to have your driving privilege altered (e.g., fined). But you also enjoy an immunity from arbitrary arrest without probable cause. Let’s apply that to “homeland” security. If a politician says we must “defend the homeland,” it can mean at least four different things legally: * Claim-Rights: Citizens can demand that the government protect them (e.g., from attacks). Officials have the duty to act — think TSA screening or border patrol.​ * Privileges: Federal Agents get freedoms to act without legal blocks, such as stopping and questioning people in so-called high-risk zones, while bystanders have no-right to interfere.​ * Powers: Federal Agencies hold authority to change your legal status. For example, they can label you a watchlist risk (e.g., you become a liability). This can then lead to loss of liberties like travel bans, detentions, or asset freezes.​ * Immunities: Federal Officials or programs shield themselves from lawsuits (via qualified immunity or classified data rules), effectively blocking citizens’ ability to sue. Forget whether these are legitimate or illegitimate, Hohfeld’s point is they are different forms of rights — and each has distinct costs. Once “homeland” is the object, the system tends to grow powers and privileges (capacity for overt or covert operations), and to seek immunities (resistance to challenge), often at the expense of others’ claim-rights and liberties. Rights are not only relational, but they are also often spatially conditional. The same person can move through zones of legality experiencing different practical rights. Consider border checkpoints, airports, perimeters of government buildings, protest cites, or regions declared “emergency” zones. Government institutions operationalize these spaces as “behavioral geographies” which determines who gets stopped, where scrutiny concentrates, and which movements count as suspicious. The state looks past the abstract bearer of unalienable liberties and due process

Hello Interactors, Minnesota has seen federal incursion and overreach before. And not just in 2020. These removal tests we’re witnessing are rooted in the premise of US ‘manifest destiny’ and how quickly the notion of ‘home’ can be made fungible by a violent state. But likeminded bodies always resist being bullied. SCAFFOLD, SOVEREIGNTY, AND SEIZURE On December 26, 1862, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln authorized the hanging of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota. The execution, staged as public theater, was not a solemn judicial act. A special scaffold was built, martial law was declared, and an estimated 4,000 spectators witnessed the largest mass execution in U.S. history. The spectacle mattered because it carried meaning beyond Mankato. The hanging marked the end of the six-week U.S.–Dakota War of 1862. This brutal conflict devastated the Minnesota River Valley and left deep trauma in Dakota communities. It also conveyed that the state could swiftly and effectively attempt control of contested land by violent force. Mankato was the visible climax, but Fort Snelling was the quieter cruelty that continued. After the war, Dakota families — women, children, elders — were confined in harsh conditions near the fort during the winter of 1862–63. Disease and exposure killed between 130 and 300 Dakota people. Execution and exile worked together. One provided public power, the other attempted to ensure territorial outcomes. Here’s what Dakota Chief Wabasha’s son-in-law, Hdainyanka, wrote to him shortly before his execution: “You have deceived me. You told me that if we followed the advice of General Sibley, and gave ourselves up to the whites, all would be well; no innocent man would be injured. I have not killed, wounded or injured a white man, or any white persons. I have not participated in the plunder of their property; and yet to-day I am set apart for execution, and must die in a few days, while men who are guilty will remain in prison. My wife is your daughter, my children are your grandchildren. I leave them all in your care and under your protection. Do not let them suffer; and when my children are grown up, let them know that their father died because he followed the advice of his chief, and without having the blood of a white man to answer for to the Great Spirit.” This moral failing was part of a larger burgeoning political economy. In 1862, the Twin Cities were still emerging, with mills, river commerce, and infrastructure. Yet the region’s future as an urban, financial, and political center depended on converting Dakota and Ojibwe homelands into transferable property. The spring prior to the massacre, in May 1862, Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, handing out 160-acre chunks of stolen land labeled now as “public.” Colonizers and immigrants could occupy this land, and be defended by the US government, if they showed they could “improve” it through five years of occupation. This act negated all Dakota treaties, seized 24 million acres of Minnesota lands, and mandated removal of what were now called Dakota “outlaws.” This converted communal Indigenous homelands into surveyed “public domain” eligible for homesteading, auctions, and rail grants, directly feeding wheat production for Minneapolis mills. Speculators and railroads exploited the act via proxy filings, reselling “cleared” parcels at profit to European immigrants. By 1870, non-Native population surged from 172,000 to over 439,000. The “clearing” of land was not metaphorical. It was the prerequisite for surveying, fencing, settlement, rail corridors, and the wider commodity circuits that would bind the Upper Midwest to national and global markets. That is what Harvard historian Sven Beckert calls war capitalism. He argues that global capitalism’s ascent was not a clean evolution toward free exchange. It relied on coercion, conquest, and violence. As his book on the history of Capitalism lays out, state funded war capitalism fundamentally relied on slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed commerce, and the imposition of sovereignty over both people and territory. In this framing, the Dakota and Ojibwe were obstacles to industrialization and commodification. The frontier needed to be safe for settlement and investment of Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians, as well as railroads and industry. This included these two flour mills, the world’s largest by 1880: General Mills and Pillsbury. The gallows in Mankato were the blunt instrument that made the state-capital alliance credible. The point was not only to punish alleged crimes, but to demonstrate a capacity and will to kill. The American state needed to show it could override Indigenous sovereignty and reorder space. The subsequent removals and confinement at Fort Snelling completed the transformation. “Home” was recoded from relationship into asset. This land was no longer lived geography but extractable territory, from stewarding real soil to the selling of real estate. TOPHOPHILIA, TIES, AND TENSIONS War capitalism is not merely to punish resistance, but to convert a lived place into a fungible asset. But violence plays a deeper role than just legal rearrangement. It has to break this constant of human life: our attachment to place. Behavioral geographer Yi-Fu Tuan borrowed the term topophilia to describe this attachment — the “affective bond between people and place or setting.” The phrase can sound soft and sentimental but it can also cause friction in projects of political economy. The state may be able to abolish or rewrite a treaty, redraw a border, rename a river, and issue new deeds, but it still confronts bodies that have been oriented by firm ground. It’s on these grounds that paths are walked, food gathered, relatives buried, stories anchored to landmarks, and seasonal rhythms internalized as a habit of life. The obstacle is embedded and embodied in the physiology, including cognitive, and grounds to location. Modern neuroscience gives a concrete account of how place becomes part of a person. The hippocampus plays a central role in spatial memory and navigation, and research on place cells shows that hippocampal neurons fire in relation to specific locations in an environment. Familiar surroundings are not only around us they are within us. The brain builds spatial scaffolding that links location to memory, routine, prediction, and emotional regulation. When cognition is tied to the specificity of place, it becomes hard for a parcel to be made equivalent to another. Commodification demands interchangeability. A home cannot easily be made equivalent to another home when it’s part of the nervous system — not quickly, not cleanly, and often not at all. When the state-capital alliance imagines territory as a grid of extractable value, it is implicitly trying to override how humans experience territory. That is why “simple” displacement so often produces disproportionate harm. Psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove coined the term root shock to describe the traumatic stress that follows the destruction of one’s “emotional ecosystem.” Root shock is not only grief or nostalgia. It is a stress response to the sudden loss of the social and spatial cues that stabilize daily life. The shredding of a mesh of relationships, routines, and meanings embedded in a neighborhood or homeland. The root shock of the state violence of 1862 was not just incidental to the project of transformation. It was structurally necessary. If topophilia is a biological and psychological anchor, then a purely legal or economic strategy (bureaucratic coercion) will often be insufficient because the anchor of topophilia holds. To clear land at speed and scale, the state reaches for tools that can sever attachment abruptly. Public executions, mass incarceration, forced marches, and exile doesn’t just relocate people. They’re violent attempts to scramble the conditions under which people can remain attached at all. It transforms topophilia into vulnerability. Work on social exclusion and “social pain” helps explain why. In a widely cited fMRI study, Naomi Eisenberger and colleagues found increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex during experiences of exclusion. This parallels patterns seen in physical pain studies where distress is tracked with painful activities. The point is not that social threat is “just like” physical injury, but that the brain treats social severing as a serious alarm condition. It’s something that demands attention, vigilance, and behavioral change to overcome. ROOTS, RESISTANCE, AND REPAIR Topophilia doesn’t end with the so-called frontier or attempts at ‘removing’ its inhabitants. It reappears wherever people form durable bonds. That includes the streets and schools, churches and parks, language, kin, and the local economies and cultures war capitalism eventually built. The Dakota and Ojibwe were never “removed” in any final sense. Many live and organize in and around the Twin Cities today. In South Minneapolis, the Indigenous Protector Movement, a biproduct of the American Indian Movement, works out of the American Indian Cultural Corridor along Franklin Avenue — an immediate target for ICE. The protectors made their presence known as a form of ongoing place-based care and defense. It is a living archive of tactics for defending attachment under pressure through direct action, community building, patrols, and the mundane discipline of showing up. What it offers is not merely a critique of state violence, but vigilance without spectacle, care without permission, and solidarity as a daily habit rather than a momentary sentiment. Other areas of Minneapolis show how when federal enforcement turns public space into a zone of uncertainty, topophilic neighbors often respond by adopting exactly those same “weapons” of persistence — care, doc

Hello Interactors, It’s winter. So, as the sun tilts toward the sun (up north) my writing tilts toward the brain. It’s when I put on my behavioral geography glasses and try to see the world as a set of loops between bodies and places, perception and movement, constraint and choice. It’s hard to do that right now without running into AI. And one thing that keeps nagging at me is how AI is usually described as this super-brain perched in the cloud, or in a machine nearby, thinking on our behalf. That framing inherits an old habit of mind. Since Descartes, we’ve been tempted by the idea that the “real” mind sits apart from the messy body, steering it from some inner control room. Computer metaphors reinforced the same split by calling the CPU the “brain” of the machine. And now we’re extending the metaphor again with AI as the brain of the internet, hovering overhead, crunching data, issuing guidance. An intelligence box directing action at a distance is a tidy picture but it risks making us miss what’s actually doing the work. Let’s dig into how the brain leverages the loops of people, places, and interfaces we all move through to extend it’s richness and reach. GRADIENTS GUIDE WHILE BODIES BALANCE Have you ever hiked or skied in snow or fog and seen the middle distance just in front of you disappear? It takes the world you thought you knew, like ridge lines, tree lines, and the comforting predictable geometry of “just ahead” and reduces it to panic stricken near-field fragments. I’ve sensed once familiar ski runs become suddenly unfamiliar not because it changed, but because it was no longer accessible to my brain. In these moments, we’re all forced to reckon, recalibrate, and (usually) slow down as our senses sharpen. We take note of the slope under our feet and the way the ground shifts. We listen for clues our eyes can’t see and notice which direction the wind is blowing, how the light is changing, and how our own heartbeat and breath changes with each calculated risk. We know where we are, but the picture is fuzzy. Our memory only gets us so far. Everything around us becomes this multi-faceted relationship between our body making sense of it all while our brain updates its status moment by moment. The last thing a brain wants is to have its co-dependent limbs fail and risk falling. That experience demonstrates how the world is coupled with us. In world-involving coupling a living system survives through ongoing coordination with the affordances and constraints of its surroundings. In behavioral geography this frames spatial behavior as dynamic, reciprocal coordination between individuals and their environments, rather than just isolated internal cognition. Places actively shape decisions through the physics of the world and all its constraints. Actions, in turn, then reshape those surroundings in ongoing loops. This approach to cognition shifts focus from isolated mental maps to lived, constitutive engagements. It treats the world as a partner in our own competence. Before brains, gradients existed. Living systems navigated heat, cold, salt, sugar, thirst, dark, and light to persist. The first cognitive problems were biophysical. Surviving in a world that constantly disrupted viability relied on basic mechanisms like membrane flows, chemical reactions, and feedback. These primordial loops coupled an organism to a given environment directly. There were not yet any neural intermediaries. These were protozoa drifting toward nutrients or recoiling from toxins. It is in this raw attunement that world-involving coupling emerges. In 1932, physiologist Walter Cannon coined the term “homeostasis” to describe the body’s active pursuit of stability amidst environmental pressures. Living systems, whether single-celled or more complex, maintain survival variables within narrow bands. Cells detect changes in these variables, which affect molecular states. Temperature, acidity, pressure, osmosis, and metabolic concentrations all influence reaction rates. Feedback loops alter cell-environment interactions through heat transfer, ion flux, water movement, and gas exchange, ultimately restoring the system to a viable band. Organisms are not passive vessels but actively engage with these detection loops, triggering adjustments like a wilting plant drawing water. Sensing and action are fused operations for persistence. About 600 million years ago, cells in an ancient sea sensed electrical fields or chemical plumes on microbial mats. These pioneering cells formed diffuse nerve nets, evolving into jellyfish and anemones. Simple meshes firing to contract thin membranes in bell-shaped forms, they lacked a brain but coordinated propulsive pulses to keep the organism in bounds or sting prey. Within 10s of millions of years, bilateral animals evolved. Flatworms like planaria emerged with nerve cords laddered along their undersides, thickening toward their tips. These proto-brains sped signal spread across their elongated forms. As vertebrates appear, control becomes more layered. Circuits in the brainstem evolve to coordinate breathing, heart rate, posture, and basic orienting reflexes. The cerebellum emerges to sharpen timing and coordination. Competing actions, drives, and habits become sorted with the help of the basal ganglia. With mammals — and especially primates — the cortex expands. Perception and action become more flexible across situational contexts and with it comes longer-horizon learning, social inference, and planning. But at every milestone, bodies are still constrained and governed by gradients and fields related to gravity, friction, heat, oxygen, hydration, predators, prey, and terrain. The cortex sits on top of these older loops, stretching them in time and recombining them in new ways. Even the most “abstract” human cognition still rides on the same foundation of reflexes and sensorimotor sampling. This is what keeps an organism in operable biochemical ranges while it propels itself through an environment that perpetually pushes and pulls. BOXED BRAINS BEGET BIG BELIEFS The field of physiology deepened this bio-chemical inquiry through the early 20th century. Physiologist and neurologist Ivan Pavlov revealed how sensory cues could chain to responses through neural rerouting creating conditioned ‘Pavlovian’ reflexes. Neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington coined the term “synapse” as he dissected and described them as switches in these loops coupled to the world. Through this inquiry, the autonomic nervous system emerged as a kind of homeostatic controller. Sympathetic surges in the system were found to create fight or flight reactions as our parasympathetic system kicks in to dial us back. This can be seen as a more complex version of the same push-pull of Cannon’s original homeostasis. By the mid-20th century, mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener, working closely with physiologists and engineers, compared the nervous system to a servomechanism — a self-correcting governor found in engines. He coined the term cybernetics in his 1948 book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine where he treated animals and machines as systems that regulate themselves through feedback. He and his collaborators argued this was a form of “purposeful behavior” or goal-directed action — a kind of negative feedback loop that reduces the difference between a current state and a target state. These ideas hardened in engineering fields during wartime as they were used in weapon systems for prediction and control of trajectories by compensating for delay and uncertainty. Cybernetics helped make the physiological regulation of Cannon’s biological homeostasis structurally analogous to engineering. This mechanical metaphor sparked a long-standing debate, dating back to Descartes’ 17th-century mind-body split. Dualism posited an immaterial mind as a rule-following pilot controlling mechanical flesh. Alan Turing’s 1936 paper had already formalized this possibility, presenting a “machine” capable of computing any algorithm. Two decades later, the Dartmouth summer workshop coined “artificial intelligence” and encouraged the idea of engineering minds as programs. Around the same time, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell built early “logic theorist” programs that proved theorems, making intelligence seem like a boxed process involving symbols and reasoning. That lineage hasn’t disappeared. This is largely the default engineering posture of AI. Even when the machinery shifts from hand-coded rules to learned statistical patterns, we still talk as if intelligence lives inside a system. AI models claim to “form representations,” “build a world model,” “store knowledge,” “plan,” and “reason.” Contemporary training methods reward this language because they really do produce rich internal states that can be probed, steered, and reused across tasks. Less discussed is the metaphysical shift from “the system has internal structure supporting performance” to “the system contains an inner arena where meaning emerges and is inspected before action.” Daniel Dennett, a philosopher who dismantled this intuition in theories of mind and consciousness, called this picture the “Cartesian theater.” He noticed that scientific explanations often subtly reintroduce the central place where “it all comes together” for an internal witness. Dennett believes this inner stage is a comforting fiction derived from Descartes’ split between observer and world. Brain imaging reveals coordinated network activity, but not a literal inner ‘screen’ presenting a unified world-model. Many neuroscientists describe cognition as emerging from distributed, parallel, and recurrent processes, sometimes with large-scale integration. Dennett’s point is not that internal processing is unreal, but that our language tempts us towar

Hello Interactors, Spain’s high-speed trains feels like a totally different trajectory of modernity. America prides itself on being the tech innovator, but nowhere can we blast 180 MPH between city centers with seamless transfers to metros and buses…and no TSA drudgery. But look closer and the familiar comes into view — rising car ownership, rush-hour congestion (except in Valencia!), and growth patterns that echo America. I wanted to follow these parallel tracks back to the nineteenth-century U.S. rail boom and forward to Spain’s high-spe ed era. Turns out it’s not just about who gets faster rail or faster freeways, but what kind of growth they lock in once they arrive. TRAINS, CITIES, AND CONTRADICTIONS My wife and I took high-speed rail (HSR) on our recent trip to Spain. My first thought was, “Why can’t we have nice things?” They’re everywhere. Madrid to Barcelona in two and a half hours. Barcelona to Valencia, Valencia back to Madrid. Later, Porto to Lisbon. Even Portugal is in on it. We glided out of city-center stations, slipped past housing blocks and industrial belts, then settled into the familiar grain of Mediterranean countryside at 300 kilometers an hour. The Wi-Fi (mostly) worked. The seats were comfortable. No annoying TSA. Where HSR did not exist or didn’t quite fit our schedule, we filled gaps with EasyJet flights. We did rent a car to seek the 100-foot waves at Nazaré, Portugal, only to be punished by the crawl of Porto’s rush-hour traffic in a downpour. Within cities, we took metros, commuter trains, trams, buses, bike share, and walked…a lot. From the perspective of a sustainable transportation advocate, we were treated to the complete “nice things” package: fast trains between cities, frequent rail and bus service inside them, and streets catering to human bodies more than SUVs. What surprised me, though, was the way these nice things coexist with growth patterns that look — in structural terms — uncomfortably familiar. In this video 👆 from our high-speed rail into Madrid, you see familiar freeway traffic but also a local rail running alongside. This site may be more common in NYC, DC, Boston, and even Chicago but less so in the Western US. Spain now operates one of the world’s largest high-speed networks. Spaniards reside inside a country roughly the size of Texas and enjoy about 4,000 kilometers of dedicated lines. This is Europe’s largest HSR system and one of only a handful of “comprehensive national networks” worldwide (Campos & de Rus, 2009; Perl & Goetz, 2015; UIC, 2024). Yet, like most of Europe, it has also seen a steady rise in car ownership. Across the EU, the average number of passenger cars per capita increased from 0.53 to 0.57 between 2011 and 2021, with Spain tracking that upward trend (Eurostat, 2023). Inland passenger-kilometers remain dominated by private cars, with rail — high-speed and conventional combined — taking a modest minority share (European Commission, 2021). Spain, in other words, has both extensive HSR and rising car ownership. The tension between the pleasant micro-geographies of rail stations, sidewalks, and metro lines and the macro-geography of an ever-familiar car-dependent growth regime makes it interesting from an economic geography standpoint. HSR in Spain is not so much an alternative to growth but a particular way of organizing it. America was once organized around rail. But our own car-dependent growth regime pushed it away. In the late nineteenth century, the United States was the HSR superpower of its time. From the 1830s through the early twentieth century, a dense mesh of rail lines shortened distances across the continent. By 1916, the U.S. rail network peaked at roughly 254,000 route miles — enough track to circle the globe multiple times. It then went into steep decline under competition from cars and trucks (Stover, 1997; The RAND Corporation, 2008). Rail was not merely a mode of transport. It was the primary infrastructure for integrating an entire continent’s economy. Chicago was the canonical beneficiary. William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis makes the case that rail-driven “time–space compression” did as much as natural endowments to elevate Chicago from muddy frontier town to the pivot of a continental system of grain, lumber, and meat (Cronon, 1991). Rail lines did not simply connect places that already mattered; they reorganized what mattered by funneling resources, capital, and people through specific nodes. Economic geography here is not just about location, but about which locations are made central by network design. This “time–space compression” traces back to Karl Marx’s 1857–58 Grundrisse, where he described the “annihilation of space by time” as capitalism’s drive to overcome spatial barriers through faster transport like railroads to enable quicker turnover of capital. Geographer David Harvey formalized the term “time–space compression” in his 1989 The Condition of Postmodernity, building on Marx to analyze how nineteenth-century rail networks (alongside telegraphs) shrank perceived distances during the first major wave of compression from the mid-1800s to World War I. At the metropolitan scale, those same rail technologies produced an earlier generation of “nice things” that sustainable transportation advocates now associate with Europe. Horsecar, cable car, and later electric streetcar networks radiated from downtowns into the countryside, creating early “rail suburbs” connected by frequent service and walkable main streets (Jackson, 1985; Fishman, 1987). Streetcar suburbs offered middle-class households a promise of a commuter train to a walkable compact neighborhood with quiet residential streets, relatively clean air, and quick access back to the city. But these “nice things” were never neutral amenities. Rail suburbs became instruments of class and, in the U.S. context, racial segregation. (Jackson, 1985; Fishman, 1987) Access to frequent rail service and detached houses on leafy streets was tightly bound to property ownership and exclusionary practices. Chicago’s rail-driven boom reshaped hinterlands into “commodity frontiers.” It, like many other cities later, externalized environmental costs onto landscapes far from the city’s sidewalks, station concourses, and less than desirable living conditions. RAILS, ROADS, AND REGIMES The core paradox of economic growth is already visible here. Rail dramatically reduced transport costs and enabled agglomeration economies — thick labor markets, specialized firms, information spillovers — that enriched certain cities and classes. At the same time, those very efficiencies intensified resource extraction, spatial inequality, and political conflicts. Capital and power decided who could benefit and who would be pushed to the margins. America once ran on rails — dense, local, and linked — its own version of the “nice things” seen in Spain. But they carried with them the costs of congestion and expansion, sending us on a different path for mobility. The transition from rail to road in the twentieth-century United States is not just a story of transportation technology. It’s a story of how a country decided to scale itself. As motor vehicles diffused in the early 1900s, they interacted with existing urban and regional patterns largely established by rail networks. Postwar sprawl is largely a confluence of car-based living. Rising incomes, coupled with finance institutions rewarding new developments and cheaply manufactured cars, led households and corporate firms to trade close proximity for space (Glaeser & Kahn, 2004). Cars did not invent the desire for separation from industrial cities, but they multiplied the potential configurations. Federal policy amplified that shift. The 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act created a 41,000-mile limited-access network funded primarily by federal fuel taxes. This embedded a new high-speed system on top of the pre-existing rail grid (National Archives, 2022; Weingroff, 1996). While railroads remained vital for freight, the intercity passenger market was increasingly organized around airports and interstates. Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier documents how federal mortgage guarantees, tax incentives, and highway construction converged to make owner-occupied suburban homes the normative “good life” for white middle-class Americans (Jackson, 1985). Robert Fishman’s Bourgeois Utopias similarly traces how suburban landscapes became aspirational geographies of domestic desire separated from the din and drive of the urban mire, rising from London to Los Angeles (Fishman, 1987). From an economic geography perspective, the postwar highway and aviation regime did not end agglomeration; it reconfigured it. Metropolitan regions sprawled outward along radial freeways and beltways. Airports became new nodes of connectivity, often surrounded by logistics parks and office clusters. The benefits of scale — large labor markets, diversified industries, hordes of consumers — remained, but the physical form of cities stretched into low-density, car-centric webs of cul-de-sacs. This system has its own “nice things” that I enjoy every day: door-to-door convenience on your own schedule, cheap flights between distant cities, and a logistic network that will deliver almost anything in two days…or even the next hour. But it also hardened a built environment that is difficult to retrofit for different “nice things” like rail. The very success of car-based ascendence created a geography whose path dependence only leaves alternatives of prohibitive transcendence. HSR projects worldwide tend to cluster where dense city pairs sit 300–800 km apart, with strong pre-existing travel demand and robust local transit systems (Campos and de Rus, 2009). National HSR strategies lead to “exclusive corridors,” “hybrid

Hello Interactors, I’m back! After a bit of a hiatus traveling Southern Europe, where my wife had meetings in Northern Italy and I gave a talk in Lisbon. We visited a couple spots in Spain in between. Now it’s time to dive back into our exploration of economic geography. My time navigating those historic cities — while grappling with the apps on my phone — turned out to be the perfect, if slightly frustrating, introduction to the subject of the conference, Digital Geography. The presentation I prepared for the Lisbon conference, and which I hint at here, traces how the technical optimism of early desktop software evolved into the all-encompassing power of Platform Capital. We explore how digital systems like Airbnb and Google Maps have become more than just convenient tools. They are the primary architects of urban value. They don’t just reflect economic patterns. They mandate them. They reorganize rent extraction by dictating interactions with commerce and concentrating control. This is the new financialized city, and the uncomfortable question we must face is this: Are we leveraging these tools toward a new beneficial height, or are the tools exploiting us in ways that transcends oversight? CARTOGRAPHY’S COMPUTATIONAL CONVERGENCE I was sweating five minutes in when I realized we were headed to the wrong place. We picked up the pace, up steep grades, glissading down narrow sidewalks avoiding trolley cars and private cars inching pinched hairpins with seven point turns. I was looking at my phone with one eye and the cobbled streets with the other. Apple Maps had led us astray. But there we were, my wife and I, having emerged from the metro stop at Lisbon’s shoreline with a massive cruise ship looming over us like a misplaced high-rise. We needed to be somewhere up those notorious steep streets behind us in 10 minutes. So up we went, winding through narrow streets and passages. Lisbon is hilly. We past the clusters of tourists rolling luggage, around locals lugging groceries. I had come to present at the 4th Digital Geographies Conference, and the organizers had scheduled a walking tour of Lisbon. Yet here I was, performing the very platform-mediated tourism that the attendees came to interrogate. My own phone was likely using the same mapping API I used to book my AirBnB. These platforms were actively reshaping the Lisbon around us. The irony wasn’t lost on me. We had gathered to critically examine digital geography while simultaneously embodying its contradictions. That became even more apparent as we gathered for our walking tour. We met in a square these platform algorithms don’t push. It’s not “liked”, “starred”, nor “Instagrammed.” But it was populated nonetheless…with locals not tourists. Mostly immigrants. The virtual was met with reality. What exactly were we examining as we stood there, phones in hand, embodying the very contradictions we’d gathered to critique? Three decades ago, as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, I would have understood this moment differently. The UCSB geography department was riding the crest of the GIS revolution then. Apple and Google Maps didn’t exist, and we spent our days digitizing boundaries from paper maps, overlaying data layers, building spatial databases that would make geographic information searchable, analyzable, computable. We were told we were democratizing cartography, making it a technical craft anyone could master with the right tools. But the questions that haunt me now — who decides what gets mapped? whose reality does the map represent? what work does the map do in the world? — remained largely unasked in those heady days of digital optimism. Digital geography, or ‘computer cartography’ as we understood it then, was about bringing computational precision to spatial problems. We were building tools that would move maps from the drafting tables of trained cartographers to the screens of any researcher with data to visualize. Marveling at what technology might do for us has a way of stunting the urge to question what it might be doing to us. The field of digital geography has since undergone a transformation. It’s one that mirrors my own trajectory from building tools and platforms at Microsoft to interrogating their societal effects. Today’s digital geography emerges from the collision of two geography traditions: the quantitative, GIS-focused approach I learned at UCSB, and critical human geography’s interrogation of power, representation, and spatial justice. This convergence became necessary as digital technologies escaped the desktop and embedded themselves in everyday urban life. We no longer simply make digital maps of cities and countrysides. Digital platforms are actively remaking cities themselves…and those who live in them. Contemporary digital geography, as examined at this conference, looks at how computational systems reorganize spatial relations, urban governance, and the production of place itself. When Airbnb’s algorithm determines neighborhood property values, when Google Maps’ routing creates and destroys retail corridors, when Uber’s surge pricing redraws the geography of urban mobility — these platforms don’t describe cities so much as actively reconstruct them. The representation has become more influential or ‘real’ than the reality itself. This is much like the hyperreality famously described by the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard — a condition where the simulation or sign (like app interfaces) replaces and precedes reality. In this way, the digital map (visually and virtually) has overtaken the actual territory in importance and impact, actively shaping how we perceive and interact with the real world. As digital platforms become embedded in everyday life, we are increasingly living in a simulation. The more digital services infiltrate and reconstitute urban systems the more they evade traditional governance. Algorithmic mediation through code written to influence the rhythm of daily life and human behavior increasingly determines who we interact with and which spaces we see, access, and value. Some describe this as a form of data colonialism — extending the logic of resource extraction into everyday movements and behaviors. This turns citizens into data subjects. Our patterns feed predictive models that further shape people, place…and profits. These aren’t simple pipes piped in, or one-way street lights, but dynamic architectures that reorganize society’s rights. LISBON LURED, LOST, AND LIVED The scholars gathered in Lisbon trace precisely how digital platforms restructure housing markets, remake retail ecologies, and reformulate the rights of humans and non-humans. Their work, from analyzing platform control over cattle herds in Brazil to tracking urban displacement, exemplifies the conference’s focus: making visible the often-obscured mechanisms through which platforms reshape space. Two attendees I met included Jelke Bosma (University of Amsterdam), who researches Airbnb’s transformation of housing into asset classes, and Pedro Guimarães (University of Lisbon), who documents how platform-mediated tourism hollows out local retail. At the end of the tour, when a group of us were looking to chat over drinks, Pedro remarked, “If you want a recommendation for an authentic Lisbon bar experience, it no longer exists!” Yet, even as I navigated Lisbon using the very interfaces these scholars’ critique, I was reminded of this central truth: we study these systems from within them. There is no outside position from which to observe platform urbanism. We are all, to varying degrees, complicit subjects. This reflection has become central to digital geography’s method. It’s impossible to claim critical distance from systems that mediate our own spatial practices. So, instead, a kind of intrinsic critique is developed by understanding platform effects through our own entanglements. Lisbon has become an inadvertent laboratory for this critique. Jelke Bosma’s analysis of AirBnB reveals how the platform has facilitated a shift from informal “home sharing” to professionalized asset management, where multi-property hosts control an increasing share of urban housing stock. His research shows “professionally managed apartments do not only generate the largest individual revenues, they also account for a disproportionate segment of the total revenues accumulated on the platform”. This professionalization is driven by AirBnB’s business model and its investment in platform supporting “asset-based professionalization,” which primarily benefits multi-listing commercial hosts. He further explains that AirBnB’s algorithm “rewards properties with high availability rates,” creating what he calls “evolutionary pressures” on hosts to maximize their listings’ availability. This incentivizes them to become full-time tourist accommodations, reducing the competitiveness of long-term residential renting. The complexity of this ecosystem was also apparent during our Barcelona stop. What I booked as an “Airbnb” was a Sweett property — a competitor platform that operates through AirBnb’s APIs. This apartment featured Bluetooth-enabled locks and smart home controls inserted into an 1800s building. Sweett’s model demonstrates how platform infrastructure not only becomes an industry standard but is leveraged and replicated by competitors in a kind of coopetition based on the pricing algorithms AirBnB normalized. In Lisbon, my rental sat in a building where every door was marked with AL (Alojamento Local), the legal framework for short-term rentals. No permanent residents remained; the architecture itself had been reshaped to platform specifications: fire escape signage next to framed photos, fire extinguishers mounted to the wall, and minimized common spaces upon entry. It’s more like a hotel disaggregated into independent

Hello Interactors, Fall is in full swing here in the northern hemisphere, which means it’s time to turn our attention to economics and economic geography. Triggered by a recent podcast on the origins of capitalism, I thought I’d kick off by exploring this from a geography perspective. I trace how violence, dispossession, and racial hierarchy aren’t simple externalities or accidents. They emerge out of a system that organized itself and then spread. Capitalism grew out of dispossession of land and human autonomy and became a dominant social and economic structure. It’s rooted in violence that became virtuous and centuries later is locked-in. Or is it? EMERGING ENGLISH ENCLOSURES The dominant and particular brand of capitalism in force today originates in England. Before English landlords and the state violently seized common lands back in the 1300s, economic life was embedded in what historian E.P. Thompson called “moral economies”.(1) These were systems of survival where collective responsibility was managed through custom, obligation, and shared access to resources. Similar systems existed elsewhere. Long before Europeans arrived at the shores of what is now called North America, Haudenosaunee longhouse economies were sophisticatedly organized around economies of reciprocity. Further south, Andean ayllu communities negotiated labor obligations and access to land was shared. West African systems featured land that belonged to communities and ancestors, not individuals. Back in medieval English villages, commons weren’t charity, they were infrastructure. Anyone could graze animals or gather firewood. When harvests failed, there were fallbacks like hunting and gathering rights, seasonal labor sharing, and kin networks. As anthropologist Stephen Gudeman shows, these practices reflected cultures of mutual insurance aimed at collective resilience, not individual accumulation.(2) Then landlords, backed by state violence, destroyed this system to enrich themselves. From 1348-1349, the bubonic plague killed perhaps half of England’s population. This created a labor shortage that gave surviving so-called peasants leverage. For the first time they could demand higher wages, refuse exploitative landlords, or move to find better conditions. The elite mobilized state violence to reverse this. In 1351 the state passed The Statute of Labourers — an attempt to freeze wages and restrict worker movement. This serves as an early signal that reverberates today. When property and people come in conflict, the state sides with property. Over the next two centuries, landlords steadily enclosed common lands, claiming shared space as private property. Peasants who resisted were evicted, sometimes killed. Initial conditions mattered enormously. England had a relatively weak monarchy that couldn’t check landlord aggression like stronger European states did. It also had growing urban markets creating demand for food and wool and post-plague labor dynamics that made controlling land more profitable than extracting rents from secure peasants. As historian J.M. Neeson details, enclosure — fencing in private land — destroyed social infrastructure.(3) When access to common resources disappeared, so did the safety nets that enabled survival outside of market and labor competition. People simply lost the ability to graze a cow, gather fuel, glean grain, or even rely on neighbors’ obligation to help. This created a feedback loop: Each turn made the pattern stronger. Understanding how this happens requires grasping how these complex systems shaped the very people who reproduced them. The landlords driving enclosure weren’t simply greedy villains. Their sense of self, their understanding of what was right and proper, was constituted through relationships to other people like them, to their own opportunities, and to authorities who validated their actions. A landlord enclosing commons likely experienced this as “improvement”. They believed they were making the land productive while exercising newly issued property rights. Other landlords were doing it, parliament legalized it, and the economics of the time justified it. The very capacity to see alternatives was constrained by relational personal and social positions within an emerging capitalistic society. This doesn’t excuse the violence or diminish responsibility. But it does reveal how systems reproduce themselves. This happens not primarily through individual evil but through relationships and feedback loops that constitute people’s identities and sense of what’s possible. The moral judgment remains stark. These were choices that enriched someone by destroying someone else’s means of survival. But the choices were made by people whose very selfhood was being constructed by the system they were creating. Similarly, displaced peasants resisted in ways their social positions made possible. They rioted, appealed to historical customary rights, attempted to maintain the commons they relied on for centuries. Each turn of the spiral didn’t just move resources, it remade people. Peasants’ children, born into a world without commons, developed identities shaped by market dependence — renting their labor in exchange for money. What had been theft became, over generations, simply “how things are.” By the mid-16th century, England had something new. They’d created a system where most people owned no land, had no customary rights to subsistence, and had to compete in labor markets to survive. This was the essence of capitalism’s emergence. It wasn’t born out of markets (they existed everywhere for millennia) but as market dependence enforced through dispossession. Out of this emerged accumulated actions of actors whose awareness and available alternatives were themselves being shaped by the very system they were simultaneously shaping and sustaining. REPLICATING PATTERNS OF PLANTATIONS Once capitalism emerged in England through violent enclosure, its spread wasn’t automatic. Understanding how it became global requires distinguishing between wealth extraction (which existed under many systems) and capitalist social relations (which require specific conditions). Spain conquered vast American territories, devastating indigenous populations through disease, warfare, and forced labor. Spanish extraction from mines in the 16th century — like Potosí in today’s Bolivia — were worked by enslaved indigenous and African peoples under conditions that killed them in staggering numbers. Meanwhile, Portugal developed Atlantic island sugar plantations using enslaved African labor. This expansion of Portuguese agriculture on Atlantic islands like Madeira and São Tomé became a blueprint for plantation economies in the Americas, particularly Brazil. The brutally efficient system perfected there for sugar production — relying on the forced labor of enslaved Africans — was directly transplanted across the ocean, leading to a massive increase in the scale and violence of the transatlantic slave trade. Both empires generated massive wealth from these practices. If colonial plunder caused capitalism, Spain and Portugal should have industrialized first. Instead, they stagnated. The wealth flowed to feudal monarchies who spent it on palaces, armies, and wars, not productive reinvestment. Both societies remained fundamentally feudal. England, with virtually no empire during its initial capitalist transformation, developed differently because it had undergone a different structural violence — enclosure of common land that created landless workers, wage dependence, and market competition spiraling into self-reinforcing patterns. But once those capitalist social relations existed, they became patterns that spread through violent imposition. These patterns destroyed existing economic systems and murdered millions. English expansion first began close to home. Ireland and Scotland experienced forced enclosures as English landlords exported the template — seize land, displace people, create private regimes, and force the suffering to work for you. This internal colonialism served as testing ground for techniques later deployed around the world. When English capitalism encountered the Caribbean — lands where indigenous peoples had developed complex agricultural systems and trade networks — the Spanish conquest had already devastated these populations. English merchants and settlers completed the destruction, seizing lands indigenous peoples had managed for millennia while expanding the brutal, enslaved-based labor models pioneered by the Spanish and Portuguese for mining and sugar production. The plantations English capitalists built operated differently than earlier Portuguese and Spanish systems. English plantation owners were capitalists, not feudal lords. But this was also not simply individual choice or moral character. They were operating within and being shaped by an emerging system of capitalist social relations. Here too they faced competitive pressures to increase output, reduce costs, and compete with other plantation owners. The system’s logic — accumulate to accumulate more — emerged from relational dynamics between competing capitalists. The individual identities as successful plantation owners was constituted through their position within the competitive networks in which they coexisted. New location, same story. Even here this systemic shaping doesn’t absolve individual responsibility for the horrors they perpetrated. Enslaved people were still kidnapped, brutalized, and worked to death. Indigenous peoples were still murdered and their lands still stolen. But understanding how the system shaped what seemed necessary or moral to those positioned to benefit helps explain how such horror could be so widespread and normalized. This normalization created new spirals: This pattern then replicated across even more geographies — Jamaica, Bar

Hello Interactors, My wife and I recently started watching the mini-series 100 Foot Wave, which follows extreme surfer Garrett McNamara’s quest to ride the mythical 100-foot breaker. The show has put Nazaré, Portugal on the map — not just as a place, but as a symbol of human daring against forces far larger than ourselves. At the same time, I’ve been listening to physicist-philosopher Sean Carroll’s recent “solo” podcast on the emergence of complexity, tracing how the universe began in simplicity and blossomed into stars, life, and consciousness. These two threads — towering waves and cosmic arcs — collided in my mind, stirring something that has been swelling in me for years: how to reconcile wonder at life’s improbable flourishing with despair at its accelerated unraveling on Earth. Should despair be the only response? Or is it possible, like the surfers at Nazaré, to recognize the peril without surrendering to it — to ride, however briefly, the wave that could also destroy us? THE COSMIC WAVE Beneath the lighthouse bluff at Nazaré, Portugal opens a canyon 140 miles long and three miles deep — three times deeper than the Grand Canyon. Born of tectonic fractures and sculpted over millions of years, it is less a static feature than a force in its own right: a conduit that gathers the ocean’s momentum and hurls it shoreward. Swells that elsewhere would pass unnoticed are here magnified into walls of water, indifferent to whether they become playground or grave. Geography conspires — wind, current, and rock — but the canyon itself is an accomplice, a reminder that Earth is never merely stage but actor. For today’s surfers, this is possibility. For centuries of fishermen, it was peril. The waves have not changed, but the stance we take toward them has — and that, too, becomes part of the story the canyon tells. So it is with complexity. Every wave begins simple, a long low swell born of distant winds, that crescendos into chaos at the shoreline. It swirls and curls into turbulent foam piqued in curious but dangerous beauty, only to dissolve back into undertow, bubbles, and silence. Our own cosmos follows the same rhythm, driven by the logic of entropy — the tendency of energy to spread, of order to give way to disorder. In the beginning, we know the universe was astonishingly simple and ordered: a hot, uniform plasma, almost featureless in its smoothness. Imagine the origin of life sitting at origin of a graph. It exists orderly in low entropy and low complexity. But entropy is restless. As it advanced diagonally up and to the right disorder increases in a straight line. This opens space for complexity to emerge. Early on in the cosmos tiny quantum fluctuations stretched into patterns, atoms gathered into stars, stars fused new elements as galaxies spun, coalesced, and collided. Imagine this as the complexity line on our graph. It also grows with time but takes the shape of a parabolic wave climbing upward to a smooth crest as it increases in complexity. Meanwhile, entropy ticks steadily up and to the right as a straight arrow of time forever growing in disorder as our universe continues to increase in complexity. We are now somewhere on this complexity curve. And this is the paradox of our middle epoch. Entropy never reverses course — disorder always increases — yet along that trajectory the complexity within we live crests, like a wave gathering its final height. For a sliver of cosmic time, the universe has been rich, complex, and with structure. On at least one world in the cosmos, life emerges and even creates complex organisms like us. But if entropy pushes inexorably forward, complexity will not hold indefinitely. Stars will exhaust their fuel, galaxies will drift into darkness, and matter itself may decay. This diagram reminds us that complexity rises only to fall again, tracing an arc back toward simplicity even as entropy continues its steady climb. In this framing, the universe is not a march from order to chaos but a cycle of simple-to-complex-to-simple played out against entropy’s one-way slope. We live in a fleeting middle where complexity momentarily flourishes. Like the wave at Nazaré, born as a long low swell, steepening into a towering wall of water, then dissolving again into foam, undertow, and silence, our cosmos crests only once. The question is not whether entropy wins — it does — but how we dwell, and what we make of meaning, within the brief surge of complexity it permits. It took a lot to get us to this point. This complex space that entropy has carved within cosmic time leaves room for novelty. Complexity flourishes locally even as disorder deepens globally. Out of this novel initial imbalance, life emerged — fragile metabolisms harvesting energy from their surroundings, weaving temporary order against the grain of entropy. From single-celled organisms to multicellular bodies, from photosynthesis to predation, biology layered new strategies of survival atop older ones. Evolution diversified life into forests and reefs, wings and fins, neural nets and circulatory systems. These proliferations multiplied niches where order could briefly hold, even as the larger cosmos drifted toward disorder. Only much later did consciousness arise, one of evolution’s rarest experiments: a capacity not merely to metabolize energy but to reflect upon the arc of complexity itself. With awareness came memory, imagination, culture — tools for navigating the turbulence of entropy’s middle chapter. Entropy still holds the reins: the universe will drift back toward simplicity, whether into a thin uniform haze or some other quiet ending. Yet here, in the middle, entropy’s detour has produced extravagant complexity — including beings capable of gazing back at the wave that carries them and wondering what it means. THE INDIFFERENT EARTH This same gaze can also induce speculation. Like speculative realism. Emerging in the early 2000s as a reaction against a tendency to keep reality tethered to human thought and language, its central claim is stark: the world is indifferent to us. Planets orbit, tectonic plates shift, and waves break whether or not anyone is there to see them. From this view, complexity arises from imbalances in matter and energy, from unfinished processes that unfold far beyond human agency. The wave doesn’t care whether it is surfed or feared; it builds from wind, water, and terrain, cresting and dissolving with no meaning to maintain. Animated globe of tectonic plates shifting across hundreds of millions of years, reminding us that Earth’s movements unfold indifferent to human presence or perception. Source: Reddit. And below is where we go from here: This speculation hits another conscious reality — optimism. Human optimism is as hard to contain as its constant refrain. Born of the Enlightenment but rebirthed amid the industrial expansion, world wars, and scientific breakthroughs of the early 1900s, modernist optimism leaned confidently on reason and science — a conviction that human ingenuity could transcend natural limits and bend uncertainty toward progress. Time and again, human ingenuity has found ways to stretch the boundaries of what seemed natural limits. Agricultural revolutions multiplied food production beyond what Malthus thought possible. Industrialization transformed energy regimes, substituting fossil carbon for dwindling forests. Urban innovations — from sanitation to electrification — allowed cities to grow far past the thresholds that once doomed them to collapse. Each leap suggested that collapse was not destiny but averted through cleverness. This pattern sustains modernist faith: that humans can intervene wisely in the unfolding of complexity. Where speculative realism emphasizes the indifference of natural forces — entropy driving stars and systems toward disorder regardless of our designs — modernist thought wagers otherwise. It insists that ingenuity allows us not merely to endure the swell but to ride it, to carve temporary stability out of turbulence. In this view, the challenge of complexity is not simply to recognize its inevitabilities but to cultivate the foresight, restraint, and imagination that let human life persist in its fragile middle. That is if humans “don’t do dumb things.” In other words, humans can and should preserve the conditions that let life and intelligence persist locally, even as the universal drift of entropy continues. Armed with the mathematical models that fuel both scientific confidence and human hubris, the world can appear elegant — even in its ugliness. Amidst entropy following a relentless trajectory we see scaling laws enfold organisms, cities, and civilizations alike. The planet itself is rendered as a singular complex system drifting through cosmic time. The physicist’s gaze simplifies this by design — reducing frictions, stripping away differences, until only lawlike arcs remain. As the polymath Heinz von Foerster once put it, “Hard sciences are successful because they deal with the soft problems; soft sciences are struggling because they deal with the hard problems.” Geography, by contrast, cannot ignore what falls through those cracks. The sweep of cosmology may remind us that complexity is not uniquely human — stars ignite, galaxies cluster, black holes churn — but such vistas stretch horizons so far that human lifetimes blur into insignificance. Civilizations, like waves, crest and crash in an instant against the span of cosmic time. To move closer in, at a planetary scale, complexity narrows to the thin envelope where oceans, land, and atmosphere intertwine. It is within this fragile band that agriculture took root, cities rose, and civilizations flourished. Yet scientists, equipped with hard science, warn that this Holocene balance has already been breached. The “safe operating space” is no longer secure; the planetary is alre