#91: Music for Airports
The coastline paradox, a popular illustration of fractal geometry, posits that a coastline’s length is impossible to definitively measure because each scale of measurement gives a different result. The edges that appear as straight lines on a map are just simplified representations of the jagged outcroppings that you’d observe if you explored the same coastal area on foot, and if the contours of each rock were measured and added up, the “length” of said coast would obviously be much higher than the lengths of the simplified straight lines. No individual measurement of the coastline is correct; getting an authoritative answer requires an agreed-upon scale of measurement and a consensus about which details are too small to matter. One quirk about fractal phenomena is that increasingly advanced measurement tools can reveal additional levels of detail, thereby decreasing certainty about the answer to the original question. As that’s frequently inconvenient, we often just stick with the old answer.
Plenty of phenomena are fractal and similarly hard to measure. I've often thought our ideas of residence and domicile are probably due for an update along these lines. The home serves an obvious functional purpose, but it also serves an entirely separate—and increasingly archaic—informational role, forming the basis for census data collection, voting, legal status, and countless other administrative processes that require a mailing address. Like the elusive coastline of England, “where we live” could be understood as a simplification based on the shared agreement that additional detail is unknowable or impractical and thus irrelevant. In reality, for many, homes are merely the receiving point for a dwindling stream of snail mail and a growing onslaught of Amazon packages (that can reach us elsewhere if necessary). Many people do still spend most of their time at a single primary residence. But how many more people don’t truly live anywhere at all, or split their time between multiple cities, or travel for work five days a week, or are couchsurfing with friends in a new city, or are on a year-long vacation. Even during the course of a day, we frequently only come home to sleep. For some of us, the office would be a more appropriate domicile than the place where we keep our stuff. In the past decade, I’ve had ten mailing addresses but the same single email address—contrast this with the pre-voicemail era, when phone communication required both parties to occupy fixed locations at once. Now, we can admit, at sufficiently high resolution we’re all effectively homeless a lot of the time.
One obstacle to measuring the increasingly nomadic, probabilistic, and free-flowing state of physical existence, of course, is the unpalatable digital surveillance it would invite, but we should at least admit that institutions like the US Census are increasingly decoupled from the hypermobile reality of the world. Last week, I attended Ribbonfarm’s annual meetup in Los Angeles (which was fantastic). In Venkatesh Rao’s closing remarks, he observed that the audience wasn’t so much a community as an airport: a bunch of people on individual trajectories sharing the same physical space momentarily before dispersing again. I thought that was an elegant acknowledgment of how we actually live now, as opposed to how we think we live. The word “community” may imply a shared physical stability, but even if not, we are certainly overeager to call things communities that aren’t so stable, and this makes it more stressful when they dissipate. If we can instead learn to design parts of the world for airport-like assemblages and the fractal nature of physical existence—the world we currently inhabit—we might actually find that we get more of what we’re seeking from communities.
Reads:
Big Mood Machine, another great installment in Liz Pelly's Spotify coverage. How users reveal their moods and emotions by what they listen to on Spotify, and why that data is especially useful for advertisers.
Millions of business listings on Google Maps are fake, and this is "profitable for nearly everyone involved."
Is "rural decline" just a statistical artifact? "Any rural area eventually gets reclassified as urban if it’s successful and growing."