Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Lately, Chuck has been in a whirlwind of events—largely thanks to the Confessions Book Tour. However, he was also recently a keynote speaker at the Main Street ND Summit, where he talked about how local leaders of all types can change the negative trajectory in their towns and help them to become more resilient. You can check out a recording of the webcast above, and head over to our Events page to see where Chuck will be speaking next!
In other news, this week we were very excited about the release of our latest series, Unleash the Swarm: Reviving Small-Scale Development in America’s Cities, by Senior Editor Daniel Herriges. It's all about the people who are doing small-scale, incremental development, and how their success can be replicated elsewhere. You can read the first part in this five-part series here, and sign up here to get the e-book when it becomes available!
Comment of the Week:
This comment came from the article “Paths of Greater Resistance.” Check it out here to join in on the discussion!
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
The apartment where Rachel’s great-grandmother grew up in Berlin.
Rachel: I had the privilege of traveling to Berlin last week to visit my brother and it was a glorious visit, especially after two years apart. There’s far too much to tell from my trip, but I’ll share just one anecdote: Berlin, like many cities in Germany and now across Europe, is dotted with small stones embedded into its sidewalks. These plaques include the names, birthdates, and death or deportation dates of people murdered in the Holocaust, and they are located in the ground outside of the former homes of these residents. They’re called Stolpersteine or “stumbling stones” and they’re meant to be a lasting and constant reminder of those who were lost, present today amidst the life of the city. My brother and I visited the former home of our great-grandmother who herself fled Germany to escape persecution as a Jew during the 1930s, and there in front of her apartment, we found these stolpersteine, with the names of people who might have been her neighbors. As we’ve been in a national conversation about monuments in the U.S. over the last few years, I find this very different approach to monument and remembrance significant.
Image via Indiana MPO.
Michelle: The Indiana Metropolitan Planning Organization annual conference is this Thursday, October 28, and our very own Daniel Herriges will be presenting a Curbside Chat there. It’s always exciting when we are able to get the Strong Towns message to an entire state! Registration is still open, so please consider checking it out.
A comparison of skull features of early human species. (Image via WikiCommons.)
Daniel: This is an adapted excerpt from the new book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, which I’m definitely going to need to read. The book synthesizes many recent anthropological findings to paint a much more diverse picture of the development of complex societies, with a wide variety of social organizational strategies, during the Ice Age and before. The deeper overarching observation is one about the power of narrative to shape what we think we know and blind us to what we don’t. The received wisdom in our culture is that human history has been a linear progression from uncivilized to increasingly civilized peoples. Although scholars have long since begun to know better, that mental model of history-as-linear-progress is still ingrained in most of us on an unconscious level, and influences how we interpret all sorts of things about society, politics, and what kinds of change are or are not possible.
Image via Unsplash.
John: I had a fascinating conversation with a colleague last week about crypto technologies, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and crypto governments. I use the term “conversation” loosely because I didn’t contribute much of substance. Cryptocurrency always struck me as a fad, and (for me) not a terribly interesting one, so I’d never been motivated to investigate. Listening to my brilliant colleague, though, I realized that crypto extends far beyond what I’d been dismissing as a Bitcoin-bubble. I resolved to learn more. Luckily, a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show was on just this topic.
Klein, a terrific interviewer and self-proclaimed “crypto skeptic,” talked with Katie Haun, a former federal prosecutor who now leads one of the largest crypto venture funds. The podcast was a great first step in my learning journey, and I no longer think crypto is uninteresting or unimportant. Instead, I have serious concerns. My biggest apprehension isn’t about the monetary value of cryptocurrencies—Nassim Taleb recently put Bitcoin’s worth at zero—or even, frankly, the high environmental costs of some NFTs. Rather, it is how crypto will scaffold the so-called “metaverse.” Haun says younger people are comfortable spending more of their time and money in virtual worlds; the economic possibilities of NFTs will be realized, she says, “when the metaverse is fully here and people are living more in the metaverse.” Haun’s rosy projections sound more like dystopia to me. Contrast that with the Kentucky writer and farmer Wendell Berry, who said, “What I stand for is what I stand on.” I’ve pledged my fidelity to the soil, the people, and the non-human creatures here in my little corner of the Willamette Valley. More time spent in virtual worlds means less time in—and less care for—the actual world. There’s more I need to learn, but if Haun’s description of crypto and the metaverse is the way of the future, I’m happy to be out-of-step.
Lauren: John and I have been talking about crypto-technology this past week, and though he flatters me in his Friday Fave, I must admit that I struggle to understand the mechanisms by which crypto currencies and other projects work. I learned most of what I do know over the course of many years through osmosis—being around people who actually are brilliant in this arena—so the discussion with John challenged me to shore up on the basics. This video is a good introductory explainer about how cryptocurrencies actually work, in clear, easy-to-understand terms so that people who aren’t computer wizzes (‘cause I am so not) can follow. I got a lot from it, and I hope you will, too.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Scott Balog, Daniel Baucke, Thomas Dolan, Cameron Gallant, Diana Giraldo, Michael Hamilton, David Hammond, Mark Haubner, Joshua Kilroy, Matthew Lyle, Gregory Mannie, Nathan Neuman, Jacqueline Porter, Donnie Ross, Daniel Rothblatt, John Safford, Anastasiya Smith, Nick Stefanik, Barbara Stovall, and Jeffrey Vermeire.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!