# Wielding civilization

(cross-posted from my blog, [Sunday Stopwatch](https://sundaystopwatch.eu/wielding-civilization/))

The other day, I was walking home on an empty road and a bus drew past me. It got me thinking about the differences in our speeds. I could never compete with the bus on speed. Not only because the bus has a big engine, but also because of the context it's embedded in. The bus lives in a world where the roads are made for it, and where fuel is available to it. Each of those two things - roads and fuel - both have their own highly complex supply networks. Roads require asphalt concrete, asphalt concrete requires giant plants for extracting rock and producing bitumen glue, both of these involve giant, planet-spanning networks of people who talk to each other, coordinate on amounts, routes, deadlines, shipments, issues with shipments, quality, quantity, and everything in between. And that's just for road material! We haven't even started to talk about the fuel part, nor how the buses themselves are produced! And the most incredible thing is how these networks - these complex, inert behemoths - they actually work, and work pretty well. If you [taboo](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBdvyyHLdxZSAMmoz/taboo-your-words) your understanding of what a road is, and instead see this enormous, civilization-spanning spell that has "road" as a byproduct, you really start to get incredulous that the whole thing works at all.

All this from the fact that the bus goes much faster than I walk. I guess I had a spiritual experience: a deep insight and appreciation of the sheer *size* of the entire thing. And that got me thinking - why have I been ignoring civilization?

Not in the sense of [industrial illiteracy](https://rootsofprogress.org/industrial-literacy) even though I could certainly be more industrially literate, but specifically in the sense of making a categorical distinction between being focused on *things* and being focused on *people*. These feel like they are different: people focused on things use tools, optimize systems, measure and analyze, think in terms of inputs and outputs, and so on. On the other hand, people focused on people use language, talk to others, understand their motivations, help or prevent them from achieving their goals, and so on. 

And they are different, they're two different clusters of personalities and preferences, but I guess I see the *thing* side of civilization now. I feel like I missed the forest for the trees with civilization. Civilization is also a tool to be wielded, same as any computer program, angle grinder, surgical knife, or 3D printer. It's just *huge*.

All this maybe sounds trivial. More than anything, this is an appreciation post. Recognizing the tool-nature of civilization was similar to learning about [x86 assembly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_assembly_language): you know that the computer works *somehow*, you just don't know how. But then you learn about assembly and you get a lot of appreciation for this entire *level* of nature. So, same for civilization. Thank you bus!

Oh, and there actually is one practical conclusion. If civilization is a thing to be wielded, a great, slow, powerful spell that binds an entire planet... you should maybe wield it! What I'm saying is that you should do politics. 

From [Steven Buss](https://www.sbuss.dev/post/software-was-eating-the-world-now-landlords-are-eating-everything/), speaking about local politics:

> Many of us feel that local politics is too small or too inconsequential to be worth thinking about. But the reality is that local politics impacts your day more than anything else. The high cost of housing, the dirty sidewalks, the broken roads, the unsafe bike lanes, the crippling traffic and pitiful transit system are all due to bad local politics.