Cities are attractors because of superlinear real-productivity scaling. Now that we can do collaboration with anyone in the world, we can have a single global virtual city. Then way less need to pack tightly! = summary of @jgreenhall's Civium concept 🧵👇 youtube.com/watch?v=yXBAtd…
Civium: superlinear city scaling and the single global virtual city
16 tweets · August 2021 · 158 likes · 12 retweets · read on Twitter
The premise is based on Geoffrey West's book Scale, about scaling laws & network effects. Dissipative systems (as in QT below) often have sublinear scaling effects: animal twice as big has +85% metabolic rate, ie it's slower.
Corporations also scale sublinearly, in terms of productivity & revenue per capita. It asymptotes as you add more people. However! In cities, there's just a superlinear scaling function—more people means not just more income total but more income *per capita*.
This explains why cities keep growing. "In some very strong sense, cities are to people as stars are to atoms. If you increase the population, you increase wealth & population." But outward pressure of physical limitations on how close you can pack'em (& still feed 'em etc)
These two pressures generate huge creative pressure to use the city's wealth & innovation to solve these problems, whether by building aquaducts, elevators, or hyperloops. Then you can add more people—until you have more problems that require more solutions!
That's the first half of the vid—Jordan summarizing this bit from Geoffrey West's book Scale (which I recently bought because I'm trying to do things on a bunch of fractal scales at once. The index already has me drooling!)
JH then goes a few step further. His first extension is that effectively the entire population of a region is composed of a city and its support infrastructure. But there's a logistic fragility to that, since everything is operating at critical limits.
The key insight here though is that the reason the city is so productive is not about packing bodies tightly together, but minds, in relationship 🤯 "It's because minds are embodied, that we have cities." Relationships are subject to the limits of travel & telecommunications.
But now we're at/near the tipping-point, with zoom, VR, etc (@visakanv & I would add twitter!) where the geographic limits to collaboration & innovation fall away. Thus! the Civium concept says: we can have a single virtual city, where everyone can communicate with everyone.
The superlinear scaling laws then imply that the shift from our current largest cities to a 7,885,232,461-person city produces a 3-5× increase in wealth. (I think this referring to real wealth, not just money)
*Meanwhile*, if we can do a lot of our creative collaboration virtually, with people all around the 🌎, then we no longer still need to cram all the bodies in one place. There can be lots more smaller, more walkable communities, where people know each other and can be in nature.
"And, I suspect that this is not just *awesome*... I suspect it's actually going to be obligate, to enable the virtual to be as powerful as it's going to be!" "Most people are now [mid-2020] experiencing that interactions via zoom conference are more draining than in-person"
"Now imagine if, when you finish that zoom conference, instead of dropping into your body in the context you're in now, you dropped into a context that's extremely nurturing to human beings."
Anyway, fwiw, I'm in the early stages of plotting such a context on Vancouver Island. Get in touch if you are someone (or know someone) who might want to be involved on whatever level.
The particular element I'm working on is what @jgreenhall calls the "meta-protocol". (The thing I've been calling the "Non-Naive Trust Dance" is my framework for talking about the meta-protocol) This is a great short vid on why we need such a thing: youtube.com/watch?v=Y8obOM…
oh btw, I think I summarized the first video so thoroughly that instead of suggesting you watch it I'd now suggest checking out this other, newer, same-length video that's also introducing the project (haven't watched it) & tell me what else it's got youtube.com/watch?v=tuHhvM…