Metaphors We (Might) Live By

Going to any political event in an election year is always about the old model—the model that still doesn’t get the values of Millennials. They don’t want the miserable Boomer life; they want to retire immediately.

After a short speech by J.B. Pritzker at my local library, I perused the book, “How to be Alive” by Colin Beavan. Those Millennials that have gotten the kind of jobs that are in the tech world, which Pritzker was stumping about, ultimately gravitate towards the world in Beavan’s book. After the stress rewires your brain, you want the rejuvenation from nature. In some ways, this could be the vanguard of a rewilding of modernity, not a continuation of it through new suburbias of 3-D printed houses, replete with all the new AI and IoT gadgetry.

We won't know suburbs as the G.I. Generation did in the early 1950s with cookie-cutter Levittowns. They will be known as "zones", or "cities in a box", built out for a specific purpose, a kind of provisional "cybernetic infrastructure" set up for some big project, which then is replaced with something else. It will follow the smartphone model: Instead of replacing your smartphone, you'd re-place your life as a part of a continuous manufacturing process--a "multiplier" as was set forth in Keller Easterling's interesting book Extrastatecraft.

But ironically, the new Zones won't be gardens in a city, a la Olmsted, but perhaps shipped in on prefab slabs, replete with all the landscaping.