Prompt: So as those techniques get diffused across the industry as a whole, they start to be less of a differentiator. How does this impact employment? How do you see these technologies affecting either how many people the financial industry employs, or the level of skill required in different roles? Back before the financial crisis, there was a theoretical basis for the rise of the mortgage-backed security industry. If you can diversify the risk to the investor by bundling a bunch of mortgages together, then the investor should be willing to accept a lower return, which in turn should reduce the cost to homebuyers of taking out a mortgage. That’s the theory: when financial markets work well, the benefits should percolate throughout the economy. Obviously, in 2008, that theory broke down.

Response: In the field of quantitative investing, the same theory plays out. Let’s say people are saving money for retirement by investing in a mix of stocks and bonds. Those assets are a little cheaper for them to buy because there are all kinds of participants in the market who are fighting over making the market a little more efficient because there’s a financial incentive for them to do so.


Prompt: The flip side is that the entire financial industry also has an incentive to encourage people who don’t know as much as them to give them money to do all the things that ordinary investors don’t know about. “Give me money to use a machine learning technique to manage your money, even if the machine learning technique doesn’t work, because it’s very profitable for me to take 2 percent of your fund every year.” So the incentive to make the market more efficient is balanced against the excessive proliferation of financial services that don’t add value.

Response: What is the mechanism that’s going to eliminate that? Well, it’s the recognition that the industry as a whole may be getting paid far in excess of the value it’s providing. How does that recognition actually begin to remake the industry, and what role will new technologies play in that process? The short answer is that tons of jobs are on the verge of getting wiped out because technology can do those jobs. And there are benefits to scale, so you may not need many firms to replace those that don’t survive.


Prompt: Take the mutual fund industry. It has more than a hundred thousand employees in the US. And every one of those jobs is at risk from the realization that the economic value of those funds is replicable with the right computer systems. For the moment, those jobs are sustained by inertia, or they are sustained by a story about why a certain manager is going to make you more money than an index fund. But that’s changing. That change will play out over the next couple of years.

Response: Take the big money managers in Boston like Fidelity and Putnam. Those are old, large institutions. Effectively all of those jobs are at risk unless they evolve fast. And even if they do, automation will cut deep. Hedge funds, same thing. Some of them will be able to eke out value from the development of new techniques, but everyone else will be replaced by computers.


Prompt: You’re already seeing big changes at investment banks. Even though investment banks continue to be very large in terms of their physical footprint, number of employees, and impact on the economy, the actual participants inside banks have changed a fair bit. It’s far more automated. Many of the actual operations inside an investment bank are done by computers. It’s not humans deciding to buy Apple stock; it’s computers deciding to buy Apple stock. So that job shift is already happening.  Financial firms are increasingly becoming tech firms. JP Morgan Chase employs 50,000 technologists, two-thirds of which are software engineers. That’s more engineers than many big tech firms: Facebook, for example, employs about 30,000 people total.  You've been in the financial industry for a little while so you’ve seen this transformation firsthand. How has the influx of technologists changed the industry? The very clubby nature of traditional financial firms like investment banks has been diluted. You’ve got a lot more geeks and nerds. You don’t see certain jokes being made. Football conversations have been replaced by conversations about restaurants or other staples of yuppie culture.

Response: The culture has mellowed quite a bit. It’s less driven by adrenaline. It’s less loud. The value is provided not by the person yelling into the phone but by the person who’s sitting at their computer, writing the right algorithm, who needs a little bit of thoughtfulness to do that work. The old model was about driving transactional flow through sheer energy. The new model is about driving transactional flow through computers.


Prompt: So less Wolf of Wall Street and more The Social Network. Totally. But that tension is still playing out. For instance, there’s still a big disconnect between the way that HR divisions recruit, especially at large firms, and the kind of candidates that are actually needed. So you’re seeing the development of completely alternative hiring tracks within large firms. The traditional hiring track just doesn’t give you enough good quantitative candidates.  Returning to the question of employment: you said you expected that one of the biggest consequences of these technologies will be a reduction in the number of people the financial industry employs. Does that also affect the overall size of the industry? On the one hand, it seems like many jobs could be eliminated or deskilled. On the other hand, it also seems possible that the very large size of the financial sector relative to the rest of the economy could be reinforced and even intensified by these technologies.

Response: I think you’re right. There’s a contradiction built into managing money using quantitative techniques. Let’s say you’re a hedge fund and you get paid a lot for an advanced technique. In order to demonstrate to your customer that your technique really does make money and does so in a replicable and sustainable fashion, you need to be a bit open-kimono in talking about why the technique works. You probably have to talk about the actual algorithm itself. But of course once you’ve described the algorithm, well, why does the investor need to pay a manager to do it? It’s just lines of code. Once you’ve developed it, you can run it for the marginal cost of next to zero.  Some of the managers who have been successful at raising money for their quantitative funds may have done the work of educating investors on why people shouldn’t be paying that much money to invest using these techniques. The result is that fees are dropping fast.


Prompt: Currently, the largest growth in investment industry funds is happening in entities like BlackRock or Vanguard. These firms are launching a number of funds that use algorithms to invest but charge very low fees. So they are competing with hedge funds, who are having to lower their own fees in response. But BlackRock and Vanguard are also competing with themselves, because they are educating the market on why their own previous products were too highly priced.  If you measure their scale by the number of assets under management, these entities have grown at an explosive rate. BlackRock manages trillions of dollars at this point. But the actual revenue it ekes out from its assets isn’t growing nearly as fast. So you see both forces at play: the expansion of funds being managed along quantitative lines, but also the difficulty in sustaining profitability on those assets as more customers become aware of the actual cost and value of managing those assets using quantitative techniques. Even though the footprint might expand, the profitability will probably start to retreat towards levels that reflect the underlying value created.

Response: Does that create a tendency towards greater consolidation? As the revenue that firms are able to wring out of the assets they manage goes down due to the impact of quantitative techniques, there’s presumably an incentive to manage more and more assets.  That’s certainly what we’ve seen. In the new world there are many benefits to scale. BlackRock can charge .01 percent to manage a fund because it’s got $6 trillion behind it. A smaller firm can’t compete at .01 percent. Fidelity now offers a fund that doesn’t even charge a fee. And the reason they can do that is because they have incredible scale across the rest of the platform, and if you’re a customer you might buy something somewhere else on the platform.


Prompt: So consolidation is a solution to the low marginal cost of these products. Once the algorithm is known, it’s a race to see how low you can go. And how low you can go is a function of how much you manage.  Irrational Cyborg Exuberance What new kind of vulnerabilities are introduced into the financial system through these techniques? What role will they play in the next financial crisis? The way that mortgage-backed securities precipitated the financial crisis is very much applicable here. One of the fallacies behind that phenomenon was the assumption that the world would behave in the future the way it had in the past. For instance, housing prices would go ever upwards.  That fallacy is intensified in the case of quantitative investing, because all quantitative models use historical data to train themselves. As these techniques become more widespread, the assumption that the world will behave in the future the way it has in the past is being hard-wired into the entire financial system.

Response: Another fallacy in the lead-up to the financial crisis was the assumption that financial markets were so efficient that participants didn’t need to do the underlying work to figure out what the securities were actually worth. Because you could rely on the market to efficiently incorporate all available information about the bond. All you need to think about is the price that someone else is willing to buy it from you at or sell it to you at.  Of course, if all participants believe that, then the price starts to become arbitrary. It starts to become detached from any analysis of what that bond represents. If new forms of quantitative trading rely on assumptions of market efficiency—if they assume that the price of an instrument already reflects all of the information and analysis that you could possibly do—then they are vulnerable to that assumption being false.  Is Uber worth $60 billion? Well, Uber is worth $60 billion because we believe someone is willing to pay $60 billion for it. But maybe Uber is worth zero. Maybe that’s the actual value of the revenues that Uber will make in the future. In the current environment, we rely on liquidity to sustain prices for financial assets. When liquidity dries out and you’re forced to rely on the things that those financial assets actually represent, however, you could see painful shocks if there’s a big disconnect between price and reality—the kind of shocks you saw during the financial crisis.


Prompt: If people didn’t want to do the analysis before, they’re probably even less inclined to do it now. They figure the machine learning models are taking care of it.  Right. The machines are taking care of it. Or other market participants are taking care of it.  I might think that the share of a particular company is worth 20 dollars. But its price can go up to 100 dollars well before it drops down to 20, in which case I can’t sustain my measure of its actual value. So if all of the computers are pushing the price to 100 dollars, I might as well not do the work of figuring out what the company is actually worth because it’s somewhat irrelevant to the price that it trades at. Paraphrasing Keynes, “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”  It sounds like algorithms have the potential to make that irrationality worse.

Response: If the underlying computer models are less sensitive to measures of fundamental worth, they can create very large distortions in the prices of financial assets. You don’t need computers to do that, of course. You can have the Fed making a lot of cash available to everyone, cash that needs to go somewhere, and assets appreciate in response. Computers can do something similar. They can assume that prices will behave the way that their models tell them they’ll behave, and therefore drive prices to a point that is extremely disconnected from the things those prices are supposed to represent.


Prompt: On February 5, 2018, the stock market fell off a cliff. The Dow industrials dropped nearly 1600 points, its worst intraday point drop in history. In the aftermath, there was a lot of discussion about the role of computerized trading in triggering the crash. Is this a preview of the world to come? Should we expect more of that in the future? There are certainly forms of instability that have been introduced by algorithmic trading that will increase as we put more and more faith in these algorithms. The February 2018 flash crash was instructive. The culprit was a slightly esoteric exchange-traded product that has a rebalancing mechanism inside of it. And that rebalancing mechanism ended up destroying the product on one specific day when the market moved a little bit more than the product was designed to handle. The product was required to trade a lot of instruments in response to that move. But then those trades exaggerated a small move and it became a big move, which required more rebalancing—and everything spiraled out of control.  What about the impact of a more algorithmic financial system on retail investors? We’ve mostly been talking about big institutional investors, which makes sense because that’s where the money is. But how do these types of tools filter down to the ordinary investor who’s maybe got a small retirement fund?  You’ve already got robo-advisors, which use algorithms to manage assets for retail investors. We’re also probably only a few years away from you being able to log into a brokerage account and run a sophisticated institutional-grade algorithm yourself.  People tend to assume that the diffusion of these technologies is a good thing. I’m more ambivalent. I think it could be a big mistake to have the population at large play around with algorithms. Some people who are very good at it might benefit from having access to this broadened toolset. But most people will just end up paying too much or make bad decisions because they’re being given access to a technology that they aren’t equipped to do anything useful with. They can lose money with it, however.

Response: Looking ahead, what else do you see on the horizon as finance becomes more algorithmic? We’ve talked about the extent to which large financial firms are becoming tech firms. But I expect that it’ll start accelerating in the other direction: big tech firms will become financial firms. If you’re a tech firm, why would you assume that a traditional financial firm is better at tech than a tech firm? If we’re talking about using big data and machine learning, well, tech firms have been doing that for a while. They’re better at data structure and organization and processing than anybody. They’re also newer, so they probably started off with better architecture internally.  In China, this is already happening. Large Chinese tech firms like Alibaba are much further along in their integration into the financial industry than their equivalents in the US. They’re doing payments and deposits and loans. The regulatory structure is more permissive. Given the expected growth of financial services there, it’s likely also a more attractive investment than for large tech companies in the US. Entrenched incumbents may be harder to dislodge here.


Prompt: What financial firms have is a large customer base, which can be sticky. They also have a lot of unique knowledge—customer, economic, regulatory—from their position in the economy. But Google and Facebook have a ton of information they can employ for the same purposes—I mean, it’s hard to compete with the sheer quantity of data that tech firms have, or the scale of their integration into people’s lives. Retail investors have to put their money somewhere. They’re currently putting it into traditional financial firms. But there’s no reason that Google and Facebook shouldn’t be accepting deposits, facilitating payments, making loans, managing assets, running quantitative investment funds.

Response: Everything I’ve described to you in the field of quantitative investing, I would imagine those companies could do very quickly. The data, the analysis, the algorithms, the infrastructure. The only question is why they haven’t yet. Diogenes the Cynic lived naked on the beach, his only shelter a tub. His minimalist life only added to his reputation for wisdom, and many sought him out. One day Alexander the Great came to pay him homage. Standing over him, the world-conqueror asked if there was anything he could do for him. Diogenes replied: Yes there is. Stop blocking the sun.   This was the first of many times Diogenes egged Alexander on. Diogenes would goad and diss him, playing him like an instrument, pushing him until he was on the verge of flipping out, but then walk him back. Diogenes and Alexander were playing “chicken” to see who would lose their cool first, and Diogenes never lost.  Diogenes put himself in harm’s way to expose the violence of power and teach the powerful a lesson, and Alexander kept coming back for more. He knew he was within his rights to kill Diogenes for his lèse-majesté, but Diogenes would remind him that no one else would tell him the truth, and Alexander would back off.  Though in ordinary speech “cynicism” has come to mean disillusionment with lofty ideals, the original Cynical tradition was anything but nihilistic. In his lectures on the ancient Greek notion of parrhesia—free or fearless speech—at Berkeley in 1983, Michel Foucault treated Diogenes as a source of the critical tradition of speaking truth to power. By putting himself at risk of wrath and injury, Diogenes exposed the abusiveness and insincerity of the rulers. Socrates tried to get people to see that they were ignorant of their own ignorance, but Diogenes went for the jugular: pride. The Socratic dialogue showed people they were dumb; the Cynical dialogue showed them they were blind.   Foucault called these games “provocative dialogues.” The gamble was that wit and courage could defeat arms and rage.


Prompt: Diogenes made a nice role model for Foucault and others. He was cool, aloof, and self-contained. He did what he wanted and didn’t owe anybody anything. He broke all the rules in public and lived a life of social transgression calculated to shame the powerful. He met his needs simply. When he wasn’t stark naked, you could imagine him looking good in a turtleneck, shades, and a shaved head.   Alexander, the king of the world, admired Diogenes for his freedom. Alexander was free to do what he wanted within the limits of other people’s gold and cooperation—meaning that Alexander was profoundly dependent on cajoling, flattery and coercion. In other words, not very free.  Embarrassing the Strong The kinds of provocations that Diogenes engaged in have long played a role in struggles of the weak against the strong. Jesus of Nazareth refused to answer his accusers and engaged in enough provocative public behavior, sarcastic metaphors, and contempt of ruling authority to invite some scholars to see him as a kind of Cynic. (His enduring image as a man with long hair, a beard, and flowing robes has the look of a Cynic.) Francis of Assisi once crashed his own birthday party disguised as a beggar to see how his professedly Christian friends would treat a stranger in need.  The “Yankee Diogenes” Henry David Thoreau made a show of going to jail to protest US imperialism in Mexico and was annoyed when a well-meaning person paid the poll-tax to bail him out. Gandhi led his followers into confrontations where he knew they would be beaten up, and he made sure reporters were on hand to witness and publicize the abuse.  Unions have practiced work-to-rule tactics to make corporate regulations look ridiculous by doing nothing not specified in the books. At Selma and elsewhere, African-Americans and their allies marched into the dogs, guns, and firehoses of Southern law. They provoked white supremacy to show its ugly face. When Martin Luther King Jr, who learned a lot about provocative dialogues from Thoreau and Gandhi, was jailed in Birmingham, the first thing he wanted to know was whether the protests had been covered in the national news.

Response: In this light, the Cynical tradition looks like a formidable tool against injustice. The core Cynical tactic is the delegitimization of power through public embarrassment. If the powerful show themselves incapable of embarrassment, that has usually only served as further proof of their moral failing. But Cynical provocation, I fear, has been hijacked. Today, the tactics that Diogenes, Gandhi, and King used have been taken over by trolls.   Triggering the Libtards The alt-right has stolen a page from Diogenes’ book. The Essential TRS Troll Guide is written in a bro-ish slang that treats driving “senile old liberal cat ladies into apoplexy” as a kind of massive multiplayer video game; it directs the would-be provocateur not to show emotion, not to rise to the bait. The aim is to goad someone else into getting upset, an act known as “triggering.” In a comic-vulgar kind of sociology of the internet, the guide anatomizes different types of targets and notes the forums that offer a “target-rich environment” of “libtards.” The troll, like a drone operator, does his damage behind the safety of the screen. They get hot, but he stays cool.   The first and most obvious context for the hijacking is technological. It is so much easier to see and share the comic and exasperated results of goading when everyone is armed with a video camera. Gandhi and King relied on sympathetic reporters and editors who worked at trusted news agencies; trolls rely on viral video to stir outrage and lulz and have little interest in context, explanation, or getting their story into establishment media. The Cynical dialogue of provocation is in shambles today in part because it has become so promiscuous in its creation, editing, and dissemination.   But the proliferation of digital outlets does not explain the whole story. Alt-right cynicism is unhinged from an interactive relationship with the target. Diogenes, Gandhi, and King put their bodies on the line: they interacted with their adversaries in the dangerous meatspace of physical presence where face, name, person, and even address are mutually known. You don’t need to doxx someone you are talking to in the flesh.


Prompt: Sure, most Cynics couldn’t resist a bit of teasing, but the best practitioners used it as a means to midwife the truth, not as an end in itself. Diogenes’ goading of Alexander was not simply hostile; it aimed to help him find a truth that he couldn’t on his own. The lulz-boys have little interest in such mutual discovery.  Trolling tactics lack the dialogical bond of questioner and answerer that goes back to Socrates. King, as a hard-headed activist, wanted Bull Connor to stop the violence, but as a Christian, he would have welcomed a penitent Connor into the fold as a brother. A troll, in contrast, relates to his victim as a Pac-Man to a Power Pellet or a windshield to a bug splat.   The Shameless Sovereign Many would-be Diogenes today do not seek to embarrass those who command armies or police forces but rather those in institutions of higher learning. The alt-right likes nothing better than a sputtering professor. Look online: never before have you been able to watch so many people losing their cool. There are compilations of all kinds of people losing their “sh*t” as YouTube decorously calls it. There is plenty of provocation; not a lot of walking back or revelation of truth.   By standing for reasonable debate, academics are painted as hypocrites who refuse “free speech” if they do not accept the forum-upstaging antics of their foes. The alt-right, who believes in no such thing, can make the liberal call for civil discussion look like the rankest hypocrisy. Cynics might strategically conceal what they believe for temporary effect, but trolls seem to believe in nothing but lulz. They recast what reason does—winnowing wheat from chaff—as an act of censorship. If the act of judgment, the very basis of rationality, is said to be oppression, no wonder liberals keep losing it!   To be a game, the participants have to agree on the frame that “this is play.” The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once made this point brilliantly. Hazing rituals, he said, were governed by the frame “is this play?” Trolls like to claim the prerogative to define an interaction as play when their conduct makes that frame completely unclear. Bateson called situations where the frame and the content clash “double binds.” Though nobody today thinks that they cause schizophrenia (Bateson did), they are still maddening in the deepest way.

Response: Double binds are a recipe for paralysis. When a troll bites, he always claims it is a play bite, even if the victim bleeds. But trolls rarely get bitten themselves. It would be nice to see one put his body on the line for once. My imagination is battening on the schadenfreude of seeing a little scuffing up, but that is not very nice: to be true to the Cynical tradition, I should step back and see my urge to violence as itself the problem. In the economy of the troll world, however, such lofty refusal to fight back just offers another opportunity for attack. A double bind indeed! Today we have a troll-in-chief, a provocateur without a dialogical relationship to hold him in check, a master of the immobilizing double bind. Mr. Trump, prone to rage in the West Wing like a mad Renaissance king and breaking all the china in international relations, has no capacity for shame and no ability to contain his wrath. A showboat without a cause, he would have fired Diogenes.   Trump’s shamelessness, as many have pointed out, is part of his magical power.  Mere mortals are felled right and left for lesser transgressions than the ones he commits daily. In a society of shame, sovereign is he who defies that logic. The sovereign names the exception. Trump and his trolls name what they do as play but they are always changing the framing. Is that lean-in handshake affectionate or hostile? Is the next tweet going to be redescribed in a subsequent tweet as a joke? Should we be scared spitless or is old Donald just being an idiot again? He is an absolute master at metacommunicative messing.


Prompt: The Cynics sought to expose the power of the sovereign. They took on empires—of Alexander, the Brits, whiteness. They risked everything in a game that could turn lethal at any moment. Today’s trolls hijack the posture and the provocation of the Cynic to reinforce power—their own.  Cynicism, the unique property of the outsider, turns rank once it enters the gates of power. Instead of stunning power into self-reflection, today’s cynicism shields power. Instead of the truth-seeking stuntsmanship of the self-risking Cynic, we have the collapse of the Cynical tradition into paralysis on the one hand and sovereign self-satisfaction on the other. I’d love to see Diogenes take on Trump and show him who’s boss. He’d find a way.

Response: “A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them… such is my idea of happiness.” — Leo Tolstoy Several years ago, I bought a used copy of Rune Factory 3 on the way to an international flight.


Prompt: The Rune Factory games are a fantasy-themed spin-off of Harvest Moon, the classic farming and village-life simulation series. Rune Factory takes the Harvest Moon model—rotate your fields, get to know your neighbors, grow crops, watch the seasons pass—and adds monsters, fighting, and an intensely anime aesthetic.  Rune Factory 3 isn’t a good game, but I wouldn’t call it bad, either. Rather, it is so deeply entrenched in genre cliche that the rules of “good writing” or “nuanced character development” don’t really apply. I picked it more or less at random, to keep me company over the turbulence.

Response: One begins Rune Factory 3 by falling from the sky into a small village, where you wake up with amnesia in the arms of the mayor's daughter, Shara. Allowed to stay—in a giant treehouse, of course—your character is given basic tools like an axe and a water pot, and instructed to try farming some derelict land.


Prompt: Farming is repetitive and tiring, both as a character and as a player. Each square of land must first be tilled, then planted and watered. Storms bring down debris from overhead, weeds populate empty squares, and large rocks must be moved or broken. It is difficult work and I barely manage to keep a quarter of my fields in production before my energy is depleted and I crawl back into bed each day.

Response: Some days, I ignore my farming duties and walk to town. I slowly meet the villagers, a small community of shop-keeps, each with a one-dimensional character trait that defines them. Raven, the quiet one; Collette, the one who loves eating; Sophia, the rich one who talks in opposites; Daria, the artist. They joke with me and tell me about their lives here, and explain why they decided to be a cook or a blacksmith or a tailor.


Prompt: As we get to know each other, they ask me to run them errands. I do my best, on the days that I have energy left over from farming. These tasks are often difficult—some of the villagers want things like silver rings, which I could never afford, or rare foods that I have never seen. More commonly, they ask me to fetch something from the wilds around town, fierce regions populated by dangerous monsters. If I run full-tilt through these spaces I can sometimes make it away with a particular herb, fruit, or stone before the monsters spot me.

Response: Unsurprisingly, I fail to meet the desires of my new friends more often than not. But they always forgive me. They seem to know that what they want is near impossible. Struggle and Repetition As time goes on, our conversations become more personal. They tell me stories about their pasts and confide their fears and dreams. Hazel, the general store manager, is worried about her daughter Karina, who seems to show no interest in inheriting the store. A young and overeager witch named Marian is determined to make better medicine and be just like her grandmother Marjorie, the town matriarch. Pia, a mermaid who was adopted into the family that runs the hot springs, wonders what her biological family was like. A single dad named Blaise hopes he is doing alright at raising his two children alone. I feel like I have found real stories, hidden under the absurd premise of this place.  Years pass in the timeline of my village. I’ve finished my twelve-hour flight and well into my vacation, and I'm still playing. I've become friends with everyone.


Prompt: I’ve never played a game that feels quite like this. Rune Factory 3 is actually engaged with the realities of daily subsistence in a small place. It doesn’t pull punches about the struggle and repetition of a hard life with the land. My tools are all rusty and my weapons don’t properly protect me. But this hardship is rewarded by moments of natural beauty as the seasons pass, and real intimacy with my friends.

Response: We are all stuck here for different reasons—our children, our shops, our crops—but we have one another. Even though we might want valuables that our town cannot provide, we ask for them anyway and laugh, pretending—just for a bit—that they might be on their way. Although we struggle with legitimate difficulties in our private lives that may never change, there are the comforts of conversation and community. And despite the fact that the work is hard—and we all work so hard—we take time for festivals and birthdays. When I get sick or hurt, someone comes over with homemade medicine. They jokingly threaten to charge me next time, but they never do.


Prompt: It is so rare to find a role-playing game like this. There is no plot, no mystery, no dragons, no romance, no treasure. I still don’t know who I am or where I came from: my amnesia is never resolved. But I know why I am here, and that is enough.  Finally, around hour thirty of playtime, the dialogue starts to repeat: my villager-friends have run out of things to say. I feel that I have spent as much of my vacation harvesting bell-peppers as I’d like.

Response: An Orb in the Woods It’s around this time that everything collapses. I’m walking in the woods south of my village when I stumble across something atypical—a mysterious floating orb in a section of the woods I’d never seen. The screen goes white and I'm in a prerecorded cutscene where my amnesiac character regains a fraction of their memory.


Prompt: “That’s right!” My character exclaims. “I’m half human and half monster!” And then I transform into a yellow sheep. Now, I don’t tend to use walkthroughs. I prefer to experience the story of a game without spoilers, and I generally won’t pull up internet guides unless I’m feeling bored or stuck. But immediately after the sheep-transformation, you can bet I would have been digging desperately for my phone, ready to use all of my international cell data to figure out what was happening. However, I had just boarded the Trans-Siberian Railroad in rural Mongolia. I wouldn’t have cell service or Wi-Fi for another week. So I keep playing.

Response: After the flashback, my character is human again. Back in town, I decide I’d best make the rounds, visiting my friends to chat just like every other time I’d had a problem. They’d know what to do. After all, we’d already been through so much together. However, these interactions are decidedly strange. I run into Rusk, the only other boy my age in the village, who introduces himself like we’d never met. Next, his dad Blaise reminds me that he “runs the restaurant” and tells me to “come by for a hot meal every once in a while.”  I’m spooked. I know they know me—we’ve talked hundreds of times. I check my save file, thinking that perhaps, somehow, I’d started a new game. But everything else is in place. My fields, my house, my name—everything is as I left it.


Prompt: Of course, I can’t help but wonder: Was the game written this way? Is Rune Factory 3 about finding a community, and then losing it? Is it about aging? About forgetting, and being forgotten?  It’s then that I speak with Collette, who blushes, asks if I’d like to join her on a walk, and then brings up the idea of marriage. I panic, politely excuse myself by again transforming into a sheep, and then repeat this interaction with every young woman in the village within twenty minutes.

Response: No, I decide, it wasn’t written this way. Something is profoundly, wildly, off.  I remember that there is a menu that lists the villagers and our level of friendship on a zero to ten scale, which I’d long since maxed out for everyone. I pull it up to find that I am at a one with Rusk and Blaise (who just reintroduced themselves), a ten with every eligible bachelorette, and a zero with everyone else. Those zeros had forgotten me. But even those who remember me seem to remember me differently. Our relationships have changed overnight.


Prompt: I go home to find an extra room in my house. Shara drops by and launches into tutorial mode, explaining that all of this extra space would be a perfect place for a workshop. I could make new tools and farming equipment! Expand my kitchen! Learn to sew! Suddenly, it all makes sense. The impossible requests, the wildly difficult farming, the over-leveled monsters, the rusty tools, the non-upgradeable weapons, the dangerous wilderness, the villagers who claim they’ll charge me “next time,” the friendships that never became romantic, the lack of plot: I had been playing inside of an introduction sequence. I had built my whole life inside of the tutorial, and when I finally moved on, it triggered a waterfall of unstable behavior and glitches.

Response: Slow Crawl Deciding to see it through, I play the rest of the game. I explore the various regions, even meeting new monster-people that live in a town to the west. I upgrade all of my weapons and get my neighbors the rare and expensive treasures they had wanted. I tame some monsters to work my field for me. I rush through the rest of the storyline, uncovering my backstory and uniting the town of monsters with my village of humans. Eventually, I marry (Raven, the quiet one). We have a child. It is utterly unfulfilling.  In truth, I am homesick.  What made the tutorial space remarkable was everything it excluded: fighting, dating, taming monsters, crafting better weapons, the actual story. I loved the punishment of working the land with the minimum viable tools, the slow crawl of the seasons, and the attempt at surviving on so little. I loved slowly getting to know my neighbors without aim or goal, doing my best to help them while knowing that I mostly could not. I loved my tiny world.  The work was hard and tedious. But my friends, programmed for endless kindness as I oriented myself in this new place, were soft and generous and forgiving. They truly didn’t want anything from me but to see me succeed. We were all in it together.


Prompt: I choose to remember them like this, from before we had an economy, romance, and answers. I remember them as they were: goofy, one-dimensional, and poorly written, but profoundly good. Nobody can agree on what the first open-world video game was. Nobody, for that matter, can agree on what an open-world game is. There are some criteria that have to be met: a free-roaming environment you can wander at will, the ability to pick and choose your objectives. However, open worlds tend to defy the simple definitions of other game genres. In a platformer, you jump. In a shooter, you shoot. But what makes an open-world game is the promise of freedom.

Response: It's a promise that can never be truly kept. Even with the ever-expanding potential of modern processing power, the digital world always has its limitations. We are offered the chance to explore to our heart's content, but invisible walls always lie somewhere to hem us in, and waypoints hurry us on to the next mission. Stray too far from the developers' vision and the illusion of an open world will collapse.  Players don't seem to mind, though. In an industry forever chasing the hot new trend, the open-world game has survived and thrived for decades, and is only getting more popular. The genre can lay claim to a long list of gaming’s most successful franchises: Final Fantasy, Minecraft, The Legend of Zelda, Grand Theft Auto. Even artificial freedom is enough to grab audiences.


Prompt: Perhaps that’s because we're increasingly being denied the freedom to explore in the physical world. Open-world games sell the fantasy of sweeping landscapes and endless choice. Even if the games can’t ever fulfill that fantasy, they are enticing in an era when our physical movements have become increasingly restricted. In fact, the same decade that first embraced the open-world game saw the beginning of a decline in real-world freedom that continues to the present day.

Response: The Destruction of Public Space Whether you trace the genre’s origins back to flight simulators or early role-playing games, open-world games had truly arrived by the mid-1980s. The decade’s booming economy sustained a burgeoning home console market in both Japan and the West. Customers and developers alike were eager to test the limits of their new machines and games like Ultima (1986), Elite (1984), and The Legend of Zelda (1986) demonstrated what was possible. The ability to roam a sprawling world at will was, and remains, the appeal.


Prompt: While players were seeing their digital horizons expand, however, their physical space was contracting. Urban populations continued to grow throughout the 1980s, and the cities that housed an increasing proportion of the world's population were rapidly changing. In Japan and the West, the 1980s were the heyday of mall culture, which shifted the center of communities away from the publicly owned main street and into privately controlled shopping centers. There, behavior could be tightly monitored under the all-seeing eye of CCTV cameras, and transgressors forcibly removed by security.  By the end of the decade, the private security industry was generating $5 billion of business a year in the US. alone. Almost thirty years later we're accustomed to, and even enthusiastic about, being watched over—almost 60 percent of Britons now support implementing video surveillance in all public space in the UK. Cameras constantly loom behind us, as if we're each the protagonist of our own video game.

Response: This reshaping of the urban environment over the 1980s was not confined to its public space. The decade saw a great surge in gentrification under the free-market capitalism espoused by figures like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Ironically, the deregulation of businesses and property developers that fueled the boom resulted in more regulation for the citizens of the communities they transformed. As Sarah Schulman wrote in The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to Lost Imagination, her memoir about the gentrification of New York during the 1980s AIDS crisis: Just as gentrification literally replaces mix with homogeneity, it enforces itself through the repression of diverse expression. This is why we see so much quashing of public life as neighborhoods gentrify. Permits are suddenly required for performing, for demonstrating, for dancing in bars, for playing musical instruments on the street, for selling food, for painting murals, selling art, drinking beer on the stoop, or smoking pot or cigarettes…[t]he relaxed nature of neighborhood living becomes threatening, something to be eradicated and controlled.


Prompt: The 1980s also saw the expansion of privately owned public space, or POPS. First developed in New York in the 1960s, POPS are open-air spaces—parks, plazas and thoroughfares—that are open to the public, but privately owned and controlled. This leaves them under the authority of the landowner, who is free to set and enforce restrictions on “acceptable behavior” as they wish. The few responsibilities required of the owners of POPS in return for this power are frequently ignored—the city of New York's forty-year ordeal to get Donald Trump to abide by his 1979 agreement to maintain public amenities in the POPS in Trump Tower being the most famous example.

Response: In 2000, Jerold S. Kayden, a professor of urban planning at Harvard, found that more than a third of POPS in New York were of "marginal quality" and half of the city's POPS had been illegally privatized by their owners. Landowners had locked gates and hired staff to declare their buildings off-limits. As a result, a significant number of POPS weren't public spaces at all. Still, the allure of outsourcing the cost of maintaining true public spaces has proven impossible for local authorities to resist, and POPS have spread to cities around the world. In London, where POPS began to be built during the 1980s building boom, many of the city’s busiest and most iconic public spaces are privately owned.  Google’s UK headquarters are currently being built within one of them: the Kings Cross Estate. The estate's four acres—the largest POPS in Europe—is under the control of King's Cross Central Limited Partnership, which maintains a secretive list of regulations governing behavior on their site and team of private security guards to enforce them. One homeless man in the area told The Guardian in 2017, "I’m allowed to lie down on the grass, but not to close my eyes... I tried to take a nap the other morning, just for an hour or two, and every time my eyes began to shut I was woken up by security guards." Marginalized groups have always bore the brunt of efforts to control public life. They are priced out of homes and communities, arrested for “driving while black” or “walking while trans,” forced away by inaccessible design, and encouraged to stay inside “for their own safety.” While the “right kind of people” are largely free to roam at their leisure, the rest of society is kept under strict supervision.  Breath of the Wild Every year, surveillance is getting more sophisticated, police more militarized and public space more privatized. However, this growing lockdown on our physical space has happened side by side with an incredible growth of our virtual space. In 1986’s The Legend of Zelda, the playable world of Hyrule was around 0.058 km2 large; in 2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it was 121 km2.


Prompt: These open-world playgrounds extend the opportunity to act in ways often denied to us in the physical world. The criminality of games like Grand Theft Auto and its imitators may grab headlines, but often it’s the far more innocuous moments that feel the most freeing. Spotting something interesting in the distance and running over to investigate it. Driving around the city with the radio on full blast. Finding a scenic spot and just enjoying the view. All three are simple things we take for granted in open-world games, but are more than enough to arouse suspicion in the physical world if seen by someone who doesn’t like the look of you.  Simply being able to leave your character idling is a freeing act when, in the real world, loitering can result in your arrest—especially for people of color. (In a particularly egregious example from April 2018, Philadelphia police arrested two black men just for sitting in a Starbucks without ordering anything.) With our actions constantly monitored and our freedom to explore eroded, it's no wonder that more and more of us are choosing to spend our time in virtual worlds instead.

Response: The year-on-year growth in computing power means that our open-worlds are growing richer and more immersive all the time. Today, video games can sometimes feel more fulfilling than the real world. The Legend of Zelda was inspired by creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s childhood exploration of the forests and caves around his home in Sonobe, Kyoto Prefecture. Sonobe is no more, having been merged into the city of Nantan in 2006. However, millions of people play in the “miniature garden” that Miyamoto tells interviewers he sets out to create in each game, a fantastical recreation of a countryside that no longer exists.  Can our miniature gardens really replace the real thing? Could they one day?  No Exit The idea of humanity abandoning the physical world for the freedom of a virtual life has long been explored in science fiction, but the concept hit the biggest mainstream stage possible in the Steven Spielberg-directed blockbuster Ready Player One that came out in March 2018. In the movie (as well as the book it’s based on), much of humanity finds an escape from their desolate Earth in a virtual-reality universe called the OASIS. The OASIS takes open-world gaming’s promise of freedom and makes it a reality: inside, you really can be or do almost anything.  It’s an idea as unrealistic as any of the technology that appears in the film. The appeal is obvious when you live in a world of countless restrictions. In the end, though, our games are still the product of that world, with the same issues we play to escape.  A woman playing Grand Theft Auto may be free to explore Los Santos or Liberty City in a way that she could never explore her own city, but she has to do it in the body of a man, in a world filled with sexism. The female player of Grand Theft Auto is encouraged to murder sex workers. The queer player of The Witcher has to role-play heterosexual romance. The player of color who picks up most of the games in the Far Cry series is going to find themselves in a stereotypically “exotic” land, shooting its stereotypically “exotic” inhabitants. Even within the seemingly infinite possibilities of the digital world, the marginalized will still find themselves at the margins.


Prompt: Any player who looks too close, though, will start to lose faith in the open-world game’s promise of freedom. Compromises will always have to be made. Maps have to end, the plot has to be followed, and dialogue trees can only grow so far. Our virtual worlds aren't as free as we would like to think.  Neither, though, are our real worlds. Our gentrified neighborhoods and surveilled public spaces are just as limited and artificial as the cities and villages in our open-world games. They're the manufactured creation of developers, whether they're building software or property. In the physical and digital world alike, freedom is, in the end, a facade.

Response: The term “DIY” is contested within music communities. But “DIY space” generally refers to a self-organized venue run by artists, often on a formal or informal collective basis, to house non-commercial music, art, and community organizing projects.  These spaces typically aspire towards ideals of accessibility and inclusivity, and are open to all ages. They have low ticket prices, and give most of the money made at the door to the artists. They are places where new bands can play their first shows, and where people can learn how to book and run events collaboratively. Above all, they foster participation. In an increasingly isolated culture, music remains a medium that can still get people into a room together. DIY venues offer real social spaces in an era when the concept of being “social” has been hollowed out by Silicon Valley.


Prompt: In 2014, I moved into the Silent Barn, a three-story DIY space in Bushwick, Brooklyn. There were art galleries, a recording studio, a barber shop, murals on every surface, and shows every night. On one of my first nights living there, I came home to a kitchen filled with dozens of collective members, sitting on chairs and the floor, holding a meeting. It reminded me of an Occupy general assembly, but with the purpose of running an all-ages music and art venue. For four years, I stayed involved as a resident, collective member, and co-facilitator of programming.  These days, however, DIY spaces like the Silent Barn are under threat. The Silent Barn shut its doors in May 2018, about one year after the shuttering of another local, long-running DIY venue, Shea Stadium. Beloved Brooklyn spaces like Death by Audio and Palisades have also shuttered in recent years.  The closing of DIY spaces is nothing new. Their reliance on volunteer labor makes them vulnerable to collective burnout, while their shoestring finances make them vulnerable to bankruptcy. Moreover, one of their defining characteristics is often their semi-legal status, which exposes them to pressure from the authorities. For these reasons, the announcement of another closure never comes as too much of a surprise. Still, it seems that DIY venues in big cities face more challenges than in previous generations: namely the rising price of urban real estate, and the complex relationship that exists between art spaces and gentrification.

Response: But there’s another factor fueling the crisis of DIY: Facebook. To be involved in a local music community today means maintaining an inextricable reliance on Facebook events, and Facebook-owned Instagram, for promotion. Further, some DIY spaces have become dependent on Facebook groups for everything from connecting with the public to hosting internal organizing conversations. Across the music world, digital platforms are reshaping the ways that community forms around music—and, in the case of Facebook, exacerbating the significant obstacles that DIY spaces already face. A platform that claims to bring people closer together is helping derail and destroy some of the few remaining places that actually do.


Prompt: Communications Theater The original Silent Barn organizers were wary of underground arts organizing leaning too hard on “gigantic, panoptic” digital platforms, as one of the Barn’s cofounders G. Lucas Crane puts it. But eventually they came to rely on digital tools. As a non-funded arts organization perennially strapped for time and money, Crane explains, digital tools like Facebook offered the perception of convenience, but ultimately proved to be just that: a perception. Starting to use a Facebook group for internal organizing “ate away at the togetherness,” Crane says. “It just kind of makes you lazy. You get subsumed in the thing that Facebook wants you to do, which is to argue a lot with no actual outcome.”  “You think you’re getting something done. You think you’re communicating,” Crane says. “But you’re actually just performing communication. It’s communications theater. It doesn’t actually provide consensus.” Further, he noticed the nature of conversations on Facebook seeping their way into in-person meetings, “rotting away the ancient strategy” of getting people into a room to work things out because everyone had preconceived notions of one another from social media.

Response: In Arcata, California, an all-ages, collective-run DIY venue called Outer Space balances similar concerns about online versus in-person decision making. They rely on a Google Group for communication, but also hold a weekly, recurring meeting. “Sometimes we have long, hard conversations where we don't always agree about how to move forward,” says Alex Norquidst, a member of the core collective that works with a larger volunteer base. “These kinds of conversations are really hard to have via text or email threads because people’s tone, body language, and the ability to take time out and check in with everyone goes away.” DIY Space for London (DSFL), a venue that opened in 2015, does not use Facebook for internal discussions. “People often need to take a break from social media, or aren’t on it altogether, so if we were to use Facebook to organize, we’d be excluding a lot of people,” explains collective member Amy. Another member, Ben, adds that many members of the space do not use Facebook or Google “due to their power/practices.” Instead, their primary all-collective organizing tool is Loomio, a free app specifically designed for collaboration, which they supplement with a WhatsApp group for emergency communications. DSFL members note Loomio’s usefulness for fair discussions, time polls, and decision-making. Its notifications system also seems to be built to prevent burnout—something Facebook seems to make worse.


Prompt: On Facebook, there’s a feeling that the platform is actually creating more organizing labor rather than less. During my time at Silent Barn, being part of the booking team involved responding to daily emails and DMs regarding date requests, lineups, follow-ups, announcements, promotion, production needs, and liaising with staff. Other digital labor included making Facebook events, writing promo copy, sourcing artwork, adding listings to our site, and trying to spread the word online without getting algorithmically buried. As a Barn booker, I found promotion on Facebook, something that was supposed to make our jobs easier, actually just created more work—it made our jobs harder.

Response: Digital Monocultures The rampant reliance on Facebook also complicates the long-held anti-commercial politics of DIY, which exists in opposition to the mainstream music industry. DIY spaces are in theory built on an ethos of valuing art over profit—sliding scale, suggested donation, and “NOTAFLOF” (or “no-one-turned-away-for-lack-of-funds”) shows are common. The use of Facebook weaves corporate infrastructure into the fabric of ethos-driven spaces.


Prompt: It is a given today that engaging with corporate digital structures is a necessary compromise required to connect to communities. Facebook is a particularly murky environment: it positions itself as a social network, but is actually an advertising platform. Thus the interactions of socially motivated DIY organizers on Facebook are shaped by its advertising mechanisms. Facebook will naturally promote whatever has been paid for, or whatever will generate the most clicks in the attention economy.  This means that the kinds of small shows being pushed by DIY promoters are likely to get algorithmically buried, especially if they don’t pay for sponsored posts. Meanwhile, DIY venues and independent bookers are expected to use the same tactics as more established commercial venues that partner with corporate ticketing platforms like Eventbrite and Ticketfly, which in turn have deals to integrate more seamlessly with Facebook.  It’s hard to publicize unpopular artists on platforms that prioritize what’s popular. Indeed, the reliance on Facebook means DIY culture is becoming more closely aligned with the platform’s digital monoculture. The logic of social media platforms, of instant gratification and optimized “content,” requires pages (and spaces) to absorb streamlined “brand identities”—a logic that cultivates a more passive, consumerist approach to music that is inimical to scrappy, under-resourced DIY spaces.  While different DIY spaces have different approaches to navigating Facebook, generally the lack of resources means that DIY venues have difficulty maintaining a constant social media presence due to a shortage of volunteers. This in turn makes Facebook less likely to surface their content—for instance, by promoting their events with automated notifications that say, “We found concerts and other music events happening near you.” The first time I received such a notification, I couldn’t help but think that “music events” sounded like something an undercover cop might say. Relatedly, there is a history of undercover police using Facebook to snoop on DIY shows. In 2013, when Boston police officers busted up popular DIY show spaces, they bragged about the fake Facebook accounts they used to find addresses for gigs. Here is another ongoing complication of social media and DIY: the way it makes spaces vulnerable to surveillance from authorities that see these spaces as nuisances and shut them down.

Response: Social Webs Digital tools haven’t always played such a destructive role for DIY. In fact, the early social web facilitated interactions that hugely benefited self-organized music culture. Think message boards, the sprawling landscape of independently run MP3 blogs, and even Tumblr communities where weird micro-genres and home-recorders could thrive. The MySpace era in particular is widely seen as a golden age for DIY: much has been written about how MySpace offered the ideal music site, perhaps for the simplicity of its interface or the highly customizable quality of its pages.  By contrast, the consolidated social web embodied by Facebook is damaging DIY by providing an illusion of convenience that reshapes communities in the image of Facebook’s preferred norms. Criticism of platforms is essential as they continue to take a stronger hold on the ways that we form community. There is still much to be thought through by DIY organizers when it comes to examining how platforms play into building DIY spaces.  We need to fight against the trappings of convenience, and make sure that it’s us using the digital tools and not the digital tools using us. Perhaps there is something to be gleaned from what DIY spaces are already learning about Facebook: as an advertising platform, it may have some utility, but as a tool for building community, it’s probably best to go somewhere else.


Prompt: In 1984, the developer Will Wright had just finished work on his first video game, a shoot-em-up called Raid on Bungeling Bay. In it, the player controls a helicopter dropping bombs on enemy targets on a series of islands. Wright was happy with the game, which was a commercial and critical success, but even after it was released, he continued tinkering with the terrain editor he had used to design Raid’s levels. “I found out,” Wright later told the Onion AV Club, “that I was having a lot more fun doing that part than just playing the game and going around bombing stuff.” Enthralled by the islands he was making, Wright kept adding features to his level editor, adding complex elements like cars, people, and houses. He became fascinated with the idea of making these islands behave more like cities, and kept tinkering with ways to make the world “come alive and be more dynamic.”  Looking to understand how real cities worked, Wright came across a 1969 book by Jay Forrester called Urban Dynamics. Forrester was an electrical engineer who had launched a second career as an expert on computer simulation; Urban Dynamics deployed his simulation methodology to offer a controversial theory of how cities grew and declined. Wright used Forrester’s theories to transform the cities he was designing in his level editor from static maps of buildings and roads into vibrant models of a growing metropolis. Eventually, Wright became convinced that his “guinea-pig city” was an entertaining, open-ended video game. Released in 1989, the game became wildly popular, selling millions of copies, winning dozens of awards, and spawning an entire franchise of successors and dozens of imitators. It was called SimCity.

Response: Almost as soon as SimCity came out, journalists, academics, and other critics began to speculate on the effects that the game might have on real-world planning and politics. Within a few years of its release, instructors at universities across the country began to integrate SimCity into their urban planning and political science curriculums. Commentators like the sociologist Paul Starr worried that the game’s underlying code was an “unreachable black box” which could “seduce” players into accepting its assumptions, like the fact that low taxes promoted growth in this virtual world. “I became a total Republican playing this game,” one SimCity fan told the Los Angeles Times in 1992. “All I wanted was for my city to grow, grow, grow.”  Despite all this attention, few writers looked closely at the work which sparked Wright’s interest in urban simulation in the first place. Largely forgotten now, Jay Forrester’s Urban Dynamics put forth the controversial claim that the overwhelming majority of American urban policy was not only misguided but that these policies aggravated the very problems that they were intended to solve. In place of Great Society-style welfare programs, Forrester argued that cities should take a less interventionist approach to the problems of urban poverty and blight, and instead encourage revitalization indirectly through incentives for businesses and for the professional class. Forrester’s message proved popular among conservative and libertarian writers, Nixon Administration officials, and other critics of the Great Society for its hands-off approach to urban policy. This outlook, supposedly backed up by computer models, remains highly influential among establishment pundits and policymakers today.


Prompt: 150 Equations, 200 Parameters Jay Wright Forrester was one of the most important figures in the history of computing, but he is also one of the least understood. He trained at Gordon Brown’s Servomechanisms Laboratory at MIT, spending World War II designing automatic stabilizers for the U.S. Navy’s radars. After the war, he led the development of the Whirlwind computer, arguably the most important computer project of the early postwar period. This machine, after humble beginnings as a flight simulator, morphed into a general-purpose computer which stood at the heart of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), a multibillion-dollar network of computers and radars that promised to computerize the U.S. Air Force’s response to a Soviet nuclear attack by streamlining the detection of incoming bombers and automatically deploying fighters to intercept them.

Response: In 1956, with the SAGE system not yet finished, Forrester abruptly changed careers, shifting his gaze from electronic systems to human ones. From the unlikely setting of the MIT Sloan School of Management, he founded a discipline called “industrial dynamics” (later rechristened “system dynamics”). At first, this field focused on creating computer simulations of production and distribution problems in industrial firms. But Forrester and his cadre of graduate students later expanded it into a general methodology for understanding social, economic, and environmental systems. The most famous example of this group’s work was the “doomsday” World 3 model that stood at the center of the landmark environmental text The Limits to Growth, a book that warned of a potential collapse of industrial civilization by 2050.


Prompt: Urban Dynamics was Forrester’s first attempt to apply his methodology outside of the corporate boardroom. He came up with the idea of tackling the problems of cities after meeting John F. Collins, a conservative Democratic politician and the outgoing mayor of Boston, who had recently taken a position at MIT. Listening to Collins’s stories about his time as mayor in the 1960s, Forrester became convinced industrial dynamics could be used to study the poverty and capital flight associated with the US’s ongoing “urban crisis.” Even though Forrester had no expertise in urban affairs—or in social science more generally—Collins agreed that a collaboration could prove fruitful.

Response: Over the course of 1968, Forrester devoted about twenty-five hours a week to his project with Collins. During that time, he met with the former mayor and his team of advisors and constructed a sprawling flowchart representing the relationships between different aspects of the city’s structure. Forrester translated this flowchart into the group’s house simulation language, DYNAMO. After a staff secretary or a graduate student punched the DYNAMO equations onto cards, it could be loaded on a machine. From there, the computer would generate a running version of the model, and output line-plots and tabular data representing the decade-by-decade evolution of the simulated city.  Forrester spent months tinkering with this model, tested and corrected it for errors, and ran a “hundred or more system experiments to explore the effects of various policies on the revival of a city that has aged into economic decline.” Six months after beginning the project, and over 2000 pages of teletype printouts later, Forrester declared that he had reduced the problems of the city to a series of 150 equations and 200 parameters.


Prompt: Death Spirals At the start of a standard 250-year run in Forrester’s model, the simulated city is empty. No land is occupied, there is no economic activity, and there is little incentive for construction. As the city gradually develops, increases in housing, population, and industry all serve to reinforce one another, and the city enters a period of sustained economic and population growth. During this period, people are attracted to the city, and new housing and businesses are constructed at a brisk pace.

Response: But as the city ages and its land area reaches full occupancy, growth slows. Areas which were considered “attractive and useful” have already been occupied. New construction takes place on more marginal land, and because this land is less attractive, the pace of construction slows. When no greenfield parcels of land are left for development, new construction becomes impossible, and new housing and firms can only be built when old ones are demolished. New migrants, once a boon to the city’s industry, continue to flow into the metropolis, causing overcrowding and underemployment, dampening economic vitality, and sending the city into a death spiral of blight and decay.


Prompt: The arc of this story reflected the simplified, and sometimes entirely fictional, assumptions of Forrester’s model. On its most basic level, Urban Dynamics modeled the relationship between population, housing stock, and industrial buildings against a background of government policies. The city inside Forrester’s model was a highly abstracted one. There were no neighborhoods, no parks, no roads, no suburbs, and no racial or ethnic conflicts. (In fact, the people inside the model didn’t belong to racial,ethnic, or gender categories at all.) Economic and political life in the outside world had no effect on the simulated city. To the extent that the world outside the model existed, it served only as a source for migrants into the city, and a place for them to flee to if the city became inhospitable.

Response: The residents of Forrester’s simulated city belonged to one of three class categories, “managerial-professional,” “worker,” and “underemployed.” As one moved down the class ladder in the urban dynamics model, classist assumptions about the urban poor piled up: birth rates were higher, tax contributions were lower, and the use of public expenditures increased. This meant that the urban poor served as a massive drag on the health of the simulated city: they did not add to its economic life, they had large families which strained public services, and they contributed only paltry amounts to the city’s coffers.


Prompt: Forrester was cagey about how much this mapped onto real life. He cautioned that his model was a “method of analysis” and that it was unwise to take its conclusions as applicable without first ensuring that the model's assumptions fit a specific city’s situation. At the same time, Forrester used the simulation as a stand-in for cities in general, making sweeping claims about the failure of what he regarded as “counterproductive” urban policies.

Response: To Forrester, low-income housing was an especially egregious example of a “counterproductive” urban program. According to the model, these programs increased the local tax burden, attracted underemployed people into the city, and occupied land which might otherwise have been put to more economically healthy uses. Housing programs aimed at improving the condition of the underemployed, Forrester warned, “increased unemployment and reduced upward economic mobility” and would condemn the underemployed to lifelong poverty. This idea wouldn’t have seemed new to anyone steeped in the conservative or libertarian tradition, but Forrester’s technical approach helped update it for the digital age.


Prompt: The Perversity Thesis When we consider the social effects of computers in political and social life, we usually think in terms of expanded power and new possibilities. This perspective on computation permeates even our critical visions of technology. But we should also be attentive to the power that computers and the accompanying language of “systems” and “complexity” have to narrow our conception of the politically possible.

Response: Forrester thought that the basic problem of urban planning—and making social policy in general—was that “the human mind is not adapted to interpreting how social systems behave.” In a paper serialized in two early issues of Reason, the libertarian magazine founded in 1968, Forrester argued that for most of human history, people have only needed to understand basic cause-and-effect relationships, but that our social systems are governed by complex processes that unfold over long periods of time. He claimed that our “mental models,” the cognitive maps we have of the world, are ill-suited to help us navigate the web of  interrelationships that make up the structure of our society.  For him, this complexity meant that policy interventions could, and usually would, have very different social effects than those imagined by policymakers. This led him to make the stark assertion that “the intuitive solutions to the problems of complex social systems” are “wrong most of the time.” In essence, anything we do to try to improve society will backfire and make things even worse.


Prompt: In this respect, Forrester’s approach to the problems of American cities mirrored the “benign neglect” outlook of influential Nixon adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the rest of the administration. Indeed, Moynihan was an enthusiastic proponent of Forrester’s work and recommended Urban Dynamics to his fellow White House officials. Forrester’s arguments enabled the Nixon Administration to claim that its plans to slash programs created to help the urban poor and people of color would actually, counterintuitively, help these people.

Response: Forrester’s central claim about complexity wasn’t a new one; it has a long history on the political right. In a 1991 book, Rhetoric of Reaction, the development economist and economic historian Albert O. Hirschman identified this style of argument as an example of what he called the “perversity thesis.” This kind of attack, which Hirschman traced back to Edmund Burke’s writings on the French Revolution, amounts to a kind of concern trolling. Using this rhetorical tactic, the conservative speaker can claim that they share your social goal, but simultaneously argue that the means you are using to achieve it will only make matters worse. When commentators claim “no-platforming will only make more Nazis,” that welfare programs lock recipients into a “cycle of dependency,” or that economic planning will lead a society down a “road to serfdom,” they’re making this kind of perversity argument.


Prompt: What Forrester did was give the perversity thesis a patina of scientific and computational respectability. Hirschman himself makes specific reference to Urban Dynamics and argues that the “special, sophisticated attire” of Forrester’s models helped reintroduce this kind of argument “into polite company.” In the nearly fifty years since it has come out, Forrester’s “counterintuitive” style of thinking has become the default way of analyzing policy for mainstream wonks. For many, “counterintuitivity” is the new intuition.

Response: Expert knowledge, of course, has an important place in democratic deliberation, but it can also cut people out of the policy process, dampen the urgency of moral claims, and program a sense of powerlessness into our public discourse. Appeals to a social system’s “complexity” and the potential for “perverse outcomes” can be enough to sink transformative social programs that are still on the drawing board. This might not matter in the context of a virtual environment like that of  Urban Dynamics or SimCity, but we have decades of real-world evidence that demonstrates the disastrous costs of the “counterintuitive” anti-welfare agenda. Straightforward solutions to poverty and economic misery—redistribution and  the provision of public services—have both empirical backing and moral force. Maybe it’s time we start listening to our intuition again.


Prompt: They say you can’t go back, but I have backups of every computer that I’ve owned since I was thirteen years old. That was the year I built my first gaming desktop. Each folder is both a time capsule and a path not taken. A folder of images 500 pixels wide and 100 pixels tall recalls the time I taught myself Adobe Photoshop in middle school because I wanted to make cool banner images for my signature on Pokémon forums. A few more clicks and I am staring at a mound of receipts for computer hardware purchases, emulated versions of games that came out years before I could even type, and gigabytes of video game soundtracks.

Response: Then there is the graveyard of compressed video recordings from when I used to play competitive Super Smash Bros. Most are of me and my friends (local or online). Others capture legendary fights from national tournaments like Major League Gaming (MLG), Apex, or Evo, or from local tournaments in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, near where I lived.  Getting paid to play video games? It was the coolest job in the world and I wanted in.


Prompt: From Pac-Man to eSports My gaming genealogy isn’t so unusual. In countless family photos, I am holding a Game Boy. My cartridges of Pokemon, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, Sonic, and Kirby were constant childhood companions. I was nine when I swore to never return to Europe after losing my Game Boy and a bunch of games on a tour bus in Paris.

Response: Aside from occasional multiplayer rounds on GoldenEye 007 with my brother, being a “gamer” (as I understood it then) was a solitary activity. This changed around the time I wrote my parents a two-page single-spaced letter on why they should pay $5 a month to let me have a premium RuneScape account. We had just moved (again) and my new friends in fifth grade all played together every day after school. Playing games was something I had always loved, but the stakes were higher now that I had a new social scene to fit into.  Many game scholars would argue that competitive video gaming—or “eSports,” as it’s often called today—has been around since the beginning of video games. In the 1980s, players used to jockey for the highest score on arcade games like Pac-Man. In the 1990s, local tournaments were organized for sports, racing, and fighting games. By the end of the decade, these had become big events, often backed by corporate sponsors.  The 2000s brought the growing popularity of eSports to new heights with major annual tournaments like MLG. And eSports became a global phenomenon, with many competitive communities throughout Europe and Asia. South Korea in particular emerged as an epicenter: in 2000, the South Korean government created the Korean e-Sports Association to regulate and encourage the industry.


Prompt: The most popular genres for eSports are first-person shooters, real-time strategy, fighting games, and online multiplayer battle-arena games. Each genre has its own social rules and competitive culture, and most importantly, its own fan community. In fact, professional gaming is as much about the community as it is about the matches themselves. Every tournament is discussed, every replay is dissected, and every top player has a loyal following.  Game development companies largely see these communities as a lucrative target audience, and have invested heavily in eSports in order to market their titles. Elite players today can walk away with hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) from competitions, not to mention thousands of dollars in secondary streams of revenue from product sponsorships and live-streaming. The big money flowing in from game companies has further accelerated the growth of eSports: as of 2018, ESPN counts about fifty varsity collegiate eSports programs in North America, not to mention the many more teams associated with student clubs and independent college tournaments.  (Almost) Going Pro Super Smash Bros. is a series of fighting games that feature characters from throughout the Nintendo universe. The first title, Super Smash Bros.,  was released in 1999 for the Nintendo 64. While the original game didn’t have much of a professional scene in North America, its Nintendo GameCube successor Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001) quickly became a premier title in the competitive gaming circuit.  Subsequent titles in the series include Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008) for the Nintendo Wii, Super Smash Bros. 4 (2014) for the Wii U and 3DS, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch (2018). The exact mechanics differ, but the goal is to damage your opponent enough to knock them off the stage into the blast zones at the edges of the map. Some competitive players find Melee to be most “serious” option due to its fast-paced gameplay and complex on-hit interactions. Over the years, the game’s developers—under the direction of series creator Masahiro Sakurai—have gone back and forth on mechanics that lend themselves well to competitive play.

Response: I never actually owned a GameCube, but I racked up hours and hours at friends’ homes playing Super Smash Bros. Melee in my pre-teen years. A fighting game that pitted all of my favorite Nintendo characters against one another had an appeal like no other. From 2004 to 2008, the golden age of the Super Smash Bros. Melee competitive scene was well underway. Players a decade or so older than me were competing at world-class tournaments, and finding fame and fortune with professional sponsorships.  I followed all of this closely through message boards, YouTube videos, and word of mouth from friends who were equally invested in what I saw as the holy grail of nerd culture. The allure was powerful: imagine being talked about by teens that lived on the other side of the country!  With the release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl in 2008, I decided to jump headfirst into world of competitive gaming. I joined AllisBrawl.com (AiB), a message board that served as a hub for competitive Super Smash Bros. Brawl players. The site encouraged players not only to socialize but to host tournaments using an application called Tio Tournament Organizer, designed by AiB founder “Nealdt.” The appeal was simple: if you used Tio, the results of your tournament would be uploaded to AiB for everyone to see.  The AiB leaderboards were a way to keep track of the top players in the competitive scene. At the height of the site’s popularity, from 2008 to 2012, it was the place to be if you were a serious Super Smash Bros. Brawl player. I joined AiB as someone who was initially too young to make the short journey to the regional tournaments in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I figured that I would learn as much about the scene as I could through the online community, at least until I was a little older.


Prompt: But as I entered high school and started to attend a few local events, I realized that the amount of effort required to be an elite competitor was far more than I was willing to expend. I had made a very small amount of money, but I knew I was going to be on the upper end of average for a competitive player going forward.  To reach the top of even the regional leaderboards would have taken hundreds of hours of practice with no guarantee that any money invested would be fully recouped. Yet as I grew more ambivalent about eSports success, AiB and the competitive community around Super Smash Bros. was becoming more popular than ever. Looking for a way to stay involved, I became a moderator of AiB, as well as a writer for the site’s eSports journalism arm. Almost overnight, I belonged to a small team overseeing a monthly active user base that, at its peak, hit just under 100,000 people.   Choose Your Character Being an aspiring teenage professional gamer meant many hours after school and on weekends practicing technique, losing repeatedly to better players, and spending as much time as possible keeping up with the “metagame”—popular competitive strategies that dictate gameplay. Being a community moderator meant managing users’ expectations, developing complex procedures for dispute resolution, and coordinating content with other staffers on a weekly or sometimes daily basis. I may have been a mediocre competitive gamer, but I was an excellent moderator.  In the years that followed, I wrote dozens of articles about tournaments, interviewed rising stars, and led coverage of the often-overlooked women and LGBTQ players. It was my first experience occupying a position of power in an online community. It was also my first experience being out as a queer person online, and I did my best to promote others who gamed from the margins.  Being a community moderator for a deeply engaged fandom is hard work. No one teaches you how to advocate for yourself while you’re trying to resolve yet another complicated interpersonal dispute. If you ban someone, will they harass you in other online spaces? Was it worth pointing out that casual homophobia or misogyny wasn’t “funny” to everyone else? It should come as no surprise that these problems are exacerbated when you are both a volunteer and a teenager.

Response: The most difficult parts of community moderation often came from small groups of toxic users and burdensome administrative obligations. After just a few years, I learned how responsibility can eat away at pleasure. While I loved the community that had seen me grow up, I started to distance myself from the site as I neared the end of high school.  These days AiB is no longer accessible and it’s unclear if anyone aside from the co-founders has a complete copy of the website’s archive. While I have some screenshots, draft articles, and chat room logs, a major part of my teen years is nothing more than a pixelated ghost.  I remain an eSports fan, and have been pleased to see increasing mainstream attention for the scene. At the same time, I find myself thinking about how young people today are dealing with the issues that I did. Would you drop out of school to play competitively? What does life look like after you retire from competitive gaming? How do you deal with harassment and abuse in your community? What are you willing to give up? What happens when play becomes work and work feels like play? 1.


Prompt: The Chinese internet is coming for you. Or so we often hear. “China’s internal internet repression is world-famous,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced in 2018, condemning China’s “Orwellian nonsense” and “efforts to export its censorship and political correctness to Americans and the rest of the free world.” “A cold war is being waged across the world’s most advanced industries,” the New York Times declared the same year. Headline writers can rarely resist a martial metaphor. The battle for digital supremacy. The coming tech war. The AI arms race. When China rules the web.  Of course, there’s some truth to these stories. The internet has created menacing new opportunities for the Chinese surveillance state. Some Chinese tech firms have become hugely successful. The Chinese government is investing heavily in AI research. Americans should be thinking about and responding to these changes.

Response: Yet the us versus them, winner takes all rhetoric raises as many questions as it answers. “We” who? And “all” of what, exactly? These claims of a zero-sum “cold war” share a common problem: they start from the American perspective. They may reflect some Chinese realities but they are also, in many ways, projections of American desires and American fears.  As a result, they provide only partial views of Chinese tech. Indeed, much of the American media coverage perpetuates centuries-old stereotypes even as they update them for a new era.  Twenty-first-century Orientalism reduces China—home to one in five humans on the planet—to a dreamscape of digital opium dens, where all-powerful despots demand tribute from foreigners as the price of trade, and new Shangri-las hoard the secrets of AI supremacy. Like all projections, these stories ultimately reveal less about their purported subject than about the people who tell them. How many hot takes on Chinese techno-dystopia have surveyed surveillance technology and unaccountable data collection as if the United States did not also need to grapple with these phenomena? This issue aims to push back against these prevailing clichés by centering on Chinese perspectives. Rather than Will China Beat Us at AI—whatever any word in that sentence besides “will” means—we set out to ask more fundamental questions. How have digital technologies developed in China since the 1980s? Who are the winners and losers? What are some likely futures? There are still, remarkably, few widely agreed-upon answers.


Prompt: Leave the New Cold War framework to politicos and CEOs looking to score points in Washington. We set ourselves the task of taking Chinese tech on its own terms. In order to do so, we sought out voices, both within and beyond Chinese borders, who are committed to pushing aside the commonplaces that clutter the headlines. The picture they paint isn’t simple. It’s full of tensions, complexities, and contradictions. Indeed, it suggests that these may be the very source of the dynamism that has driven the most important geopolitical shifts of the twenty-first century.

Response: 2. Once upon a time, the Chinese Communist Party needed to play catch up. The isolation of the country under Mao Zedong had left it far behind. Deng Xiaoping, the preeminent leader who oversaw pro-market reforms after 1978, put technology at the heart of his vision for modernizing China. (Deng called it, in Marxist parlance, “a primary productive force.”) Throughout the 1980s, as they watched the emergence of new information technologies around the world, Chinese politicians called on the people to race ahead to match the West—stressing the importance of scientists and business leaders in particular. The original Apple Macintosh was released in January 1984; in November of that year, an engineer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences named Liu Chuanzhi founded the company that would become known as Lenovo. Lenovo would grow into one of the world’s biggest makers of personal computers, acquiring IBM’s personal computer business in 2005.


Prompt: The sense of urgency that Party leadership expressed in the 1980s laid the foundations for the rise of the internet in the 1990s. In 1995, China had 40,000 internet users; by 2000, there were 22.5 million. In 1999, Alibaba was founded, and the Chinese internet’s first blockbuster app—the hugely popular QQ—appeared.  American elites viewed these developments as waystations on the inevitable path of post-Cold War liberalization. Many of them believed that the Chinese Communist Party, by embracing the internet, would inadvertently set in motion a process of political opening. Signing a bill into law that permanently normalized trade relations with China in 2000, Bill Clinton predicted that “in the new century, liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem.” Liberty would be lucrative too: American tech companies expected to make a fortune by dominating the Chinese market.

Response: Both programs stalled, however: ERROR_ PATH_ NOT_ FOUND. Liberalization by modem didn’t materialize. Instead, the Chinese government developed a sophisticated system for controlling and censoring the country’s digital sphere. And while some American tech companies did make plenty of money in the Chinese market, they hardly dominated it. Instead, many of them ended up like eBay, which was outmatched by Chinese rival Taobao and left grumbling about the challenges of business inside the “Great Firewall.” Or Uber, which sold its remaining China business to competitor Didi Chuxing before abandoning the Chinese market in 2016.  Today, travelers from China to the United States often report feeling as if they have gone backwards in time. Yet what this sensation may really mean is that the developmental metaphor—history as staggered race on a single course—was wrong to begin with. For years, Americans disparaged Chinese tech, like Chinese goods, as knock-offs, shanzhai. But the Chinese internet is not a copy of the American internet. It’s a whole new world.


Prompt: 3. WeChat is a messaging and social media app. You can send direct messages to another user, or share photos and GIFs with groups of thousands—all of which is subject to state censorship. It’s also an e-commerce app. You can order anything from a new computer to an antique vase to your office, factory, farm, or home, and when it arrives you can pay by scanning a QR code. Your purchase can be as small as a dumpling or as large as your monthly rent. Passengers traveling over two hundred miles per hour on the gaotie, or high-speed train, can use DianPing (the “Chinese Yelp”) to find the best-rated Sichuanese restaurant in an upcoming city, then place an order on Meituan, the food delivery service—all without leaving WeChat. At the train’s next stop, a deliveryman in a yellow shirt will come to their seat bearing Chongqing chicken.

Response: For many users, WeChat is the Chinese internet. By 2018, WeChat had nearly one billion monthly active users. But there isn’t one single story of the Chinese internet—or one “Chinese internet,” even if the phrase can be a useful shorthand.  Today, to the visitor arriving in a major city like Shanghai or Shenzhen, it’s clear that digital technologies are central to everyday life. The urbanized coast is where investment and infrastructure have been densest, and over the past thirty years, they have fostered high rates of technological adaptation and entrepreneurial activity. Yet the cities aren’t the whole story. Indeed, many of the most vibrant areas of online activity today are in less privileged communities that made the leap directly from offline to mobile.  When Ren Qingsheng first started selling homemade costumes on Taobao in 2010, he kept his computer in the family kitchen of his small home in the Shandong countryside. He used his daughter’s pinyin textbook to translate characters into letters he could type on the keyboard. A few years later, his small business grew large enough to hire several workers, and he was sending bulk orders of costumes to buyers from Taiwan to Thailand. By 2017, his revenues exceeded 10 million yuan, or nearly $1.5 million per year. But even this impressive level of success only put him in the top ten of the most successful entrepreneurs in his village.  Rural e-commerce gurus like Ren aren’t the only “winners” of the Chinese internet, of course. It has democratized certain kinds of cultural and economic participation across the country. Consider the rural grannies who produce riotous dance videos that go viral on TikTok: video platforms help bridge the digital divide by reducing the literacy barrier that might formerly have excluded such users.  But the biggest winners are the people at the top of the tech boom. The decisions of government officials crafting industrial policy or venture capitalists pouring millions of renminbi into risky startups have produced a handful of immensely wealth tech titans in an already unequal society. Yet these decisions haven’t pulled apart China’s so-called “socialist market economy,” as the national constitution officially calls it. Rather, they have helped entrench that mixed system.


Prompt: Prominent tech investors like Eric X. Li have long doubled as defenders of the Communist Party. Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s Party membership came to widespread attention when he was honored by the Chinese government as a “reform pioneer” in 2018. The figures who preside over China’s tech boom aren’t all Party members. But they have all found a way to coexist with the Party-state—even if only uneasily, and perhaps temporarily.  This proximity has strongly shaped how Chinese tech has developed. The app economy is built around real-name registration, proof of residence, and so on—requirements that enable state agencies to keep a close eye on users. The most-downloaded app of early 2019 is an ideology instruction program called “Study Xi, Strong Nation,” which Party members and civil servants are required to use to ensure their engagement with Xi Jinping’s thoughts and teachings. If the Chinese internet has enabled new forms of participation, it has also facilitated the detection and elimination of other forms of participation that the Party deems intolerable.  The Party-state has decimated the nascent feminist movement and undercut the work of criminal defense lawyers, journalists, and HIV/AIDS activists. The big, nationwide movements get the most attention, but crackdowns extend to localities far from Beijing. In January 2019, the Guangdong provincial public security bureau fined a thirty-year-old man 1000 renminbi for downloading and installing a proxy server on his phone.  The site of the most brutal and heartbreaking application of digital surveillance technologies within China’s borders is farthest from the capital, in the western region of Xinjiang. Digitally enhanced monitoring and gulag-style reeducation camps housing as many as one million detainees have devastated Uyghur communities. And there are indications that the technologies and techniques perfected in Xinjiang are designed for export—not only to other parts of China, but also to other countries around the world. In this way, the geography of Chinese technology can move swiftly from the local to the global and back again. These oscillations are one more reason why it is imperative for everyone, not just China experts, to pay attention.

Response: 4. As Chinese-built telecommunications infrastructure breaks ground around the world, as Chinese companies buy American apps like Grindr and offer cloud-computing services from Indonesia to Canada, and as WePay and Alipay become accepted everywhere from duty-free shops in European airports to New York City taxi cabs, it has become more difficult to say where the “Chinese internet” begins and ends. The writers in this issue travel across national borders, socioeconomic divides, and possible futures, pursuing glimpses not only of what the Chinese internet is but where it is—and where it may go from here.