In New York, everyone comes in contact with the train system, unless you're rich enough to have a driver (but even then you're encountering traffic, maintenance crews, highway traffic).
Modernity is basically a system based on trust, a word for this layer cake of systems that all require an implicit trust because people have been disembedded from what would have been a native or indigenous way of life and forced into this meta system-of-systems.
It's all so complex, so interconnected. Modernity is a feeling of fragility: the planes could drop out of the sky, the cars could crash, the bridges could crumble, the internet could be shut down.
It requires the upkeep of all kinds of engineers, smart, highly educated people. There's all kinds of knowledge that is not generalized, not in textbooks, that isn’t necessary passed on. Corporations have internal software or algorithms built by one or two employees who are the only ones who still know how to use it and are employed just to field questions about how it works or how to fix it when it breaks.
We, the average person, discount all of this. We are aware of it, but we can't think about it, it would be too much to think about. It hurts to think about, it's frightening to think about.
A New Yorker like me is probably a little bit more aware of it because we're in this super dense urban system. If I were living in a rural area, I'd rightfully have a little less reason to think about it.
We think of politics in terms of progressive versus conservative, East Coast elites versus flyover America, but it might be helpful to think about it in terms of system dependence versus independence. The degree to which you're on the grid might be predictive of your politics, or at least your tribal affiliations and your incentive structure.
A New Yorker, no matter how literally conservative their politics are, or how liberal, is going to be conditioned by the visible evidence of tight interdependence around them. You can be a liberal homesteader, as many I'm sure are, but still be more resistant to authority, to rule following and coercion, than an urban liberal.
Independence versus dependence might be the invisible skeleton key to understanding many of our values and preferences. It might be a good way of predicting our choices and our sense of ourselves.
I took a night off from theater tonight, Saturday. On the edge of burnout. I think I'm really reaching the limit of the number of people I can host in a given week a month—the number of people I can meet for coffee, integrate into the network of my theater company.
I want to—I want to be accommodating. But it's easily taken advantage of. I'm just easily pushed beyond my natural means and limits.
From the chatter I'm hearing, the burgeoning Brooklyn/downtown theater scene partly defines itself reacting to the specter of “Gasda plays”— either copying me or repudiating my influence it; and I find this surreal (the way everything kind of collapses into this brand antagonism, Coke versus Pepsi, Nike versus Adidas).