[Flo Crivello, @Altimor] Americans severely underestimate how dirt poor most Europeans are. They go spend their American wages there and are amazed at the "quality of life," not realizing that they're taking the equivalent of a trip to Disneyland, and everyone around them is the staff.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome] Median size of a dwelling in every US state vs the same thing in Europe. [presumably a map or chart]

“As culture shaped us as a single species so too it shapes us as separate individuals. This … is what we have in common. Oddly enough, many of our subjects seem to realize this more clearly than we anthropologists ourselves. In Java, for example, the people quite flatly say, “To be human is to be Javanese.”

Don't necessarily disagree with this framing (would say it differently), but I believe a large percentage of Europeans would swap their tiny apartment three miles from downtown Brussels, or Marseille, their tiny car, for a ranch house in Jacksonville beach with three cars & a yard for the kids to play in. Not sure many Americans would take up the opposite offer, other than grad students wanting a quaint experience Maybe I'm wrong, but that's my sense.

Phoenix is a large grid, of mile-long four-lane sides, with shopping plazas at the corners, and an inside of twisting single-lane roads and simple ranch homes on half-acre plots. Those residential insides are the nice parts, and showing that they’re nice is partly why I’d come to Phoenix: to highlight a version of the American Dream, which, while I might not love and isn’t necessarily “walkable,” is still very appealing to lots of people. It’s what I wrote about last week, when I cautioned that walkability doesn’t necessarily translate into livibility. [https://walkingtheworld.substack.com/p/so-what-makes-a-city-more-walkable ]

Often, users introduce wider aspects of sociality and social practice into this world, and then the company realizes this is behavior that might be fashioned into something more delimited, organized, data-generating, and ultimately profitable: something that can generate a manageable order, fit for an algorithm to digest, analyze, and sell to advertisers.

[I]n some ways social life is anything but scarce and people are anything but reasonable. From this point of view, human societies are driven by reckless profligacy, impulse, and rivalry rather than prudent saving, coolheadedness, and self-interest.

[V]ery common design patterns — retweets, quote tweets, replies, mentions — are all behaviors that users originated, and which where then captured by Twitter. Fourcade and Healy, again: Often, users introduce wider aspects of sociality and social practice into this world, and then the company realizes this is behavior that might be fashioned into something more delimited, organized, data-generating, and ultimately profitable: something that can generate a manageable order, fit for an algorithm to digest, analyze, and sell to advertisers.

I’m not interested in paternalistic nudges or vapid prompts to think twice, but rather, something like the way a well-designed park creates space both to gather and to wander — quiet benches tucked under trees alongside open fields fit for games, pathways for walking in ones and twos, blooms and birdhouses that invite a moment of rest. What if our social spaces had more ways to get lost? More places to sit a spell? What if we brought more intention to the way we contribute to these patterns? To the way our own choices overflow the container, and push on what’s possible. What is it that we are making together?

What I can know is always conditioned on an unconditioned whole that I must presume to exist but that remains unknowable. Put another way, the minimum condition of any experience whatsoever is not being a god, whether a god of very small things or of very large ones.