A Forest of Boxes

A Forest of Boxes

0:00

/112.128

1×

New York is just nodes and conduits.

That's what industrial society is.

Endless iterations

of input and output zones and routes to connect them.

Highways, train tracks, and fiberoptic cables linking miners and manufacturers and consumers, and back again.

Factories, distribution centers, and retail shops.

Shipping lanes and ports.

Flows of wealth controlled by the implicit threat of the barrel of a gun.

What is a gun? A jumble of nodes and conduits, built in a factory made of nodes and conduits, run by computers that are just nodes and conduits.

What else could a thing be? Even our bodies are nodes and conduits.

Where I grew up, in Alaska, the nodes of human improvement are relatively sparse. In New York City, where I live now, the nodes and conduits are dense.

The city is a forest of boxes, connected by tubes and transitions, with travel time between them often insignificant.

Each room is a box - most of them perfectly so - and each has its own micro-reality where people are working, cooperating, competing, and living their lives, with the lingering ectoplasm of all who've occupied those rooms before.

Every box grows it's own culture, and packed together so tightly, each exerts a tiny little invisible influence on all the others, like the gravities of distant suns.

No one can hope to visit every room in the city - not even a fraction - but it is a rich life wandering amongst this forest of boxes, where heaven and hell sometimes share a wall. And you never quite know which you might stumble into next.