Place and the Creative Class

Well, I'm in a coffee shop, so I guess I ought to write a blog post. It's been almost a month since the last one, so it's time. Have some work-related news, but that won't really be finalized for another couple weeks, so I'm going to hold off on that for now.

I've been reading some recent work by two authors recently that contradict in some interesting ways. One is Thomas Friedman (New York Times columnist and author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree and Hot, Flat, and Crowded [I skipped The World is Flat]), who argues that globalization is opening the world economy to lots of places that didn't previously have access and generally changing the importance of location in the direction of less. The other is Richard Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class and Who's Your City? (among others), who agrees that globalization is opening a lot of opportunities, but that it's also making location matter more.

It's an interesting dichotomy. Since I'm still in the middle of both (actually, I haven't read Hot, Flat, and Crowded yet, but I have some idea where it goes from Friedman's other work and recent writings in the NYT), and work is involved, I don't really have an opinion of which I agree on more, but it does lead me to an interesting train of thought which I haven't really developed into a coherent concept yet, but basically centers on an application of network analysis to stuff like The Tipping Point and using that to explain some of the stuff that both Friedman and Florida talk about. Problem is, when I try to distill it down to a few sentences, I keep coming up with additional layers to explore that seem essential to fully explaining my point. Like, for example, hierarchies of authority (which is, really, what The Tipping Point is mostly about) and channels of communication for those hierarchies (basically, that different modes of communication are good for different types of argument).


In the end, though, it's all about people. People talking to other people and interacting with each other in the pursuit of their continued survival.


Which, surprisingly, brings me to the other book I've been reading: Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis Slattery. Go find a copy of this book and read it. Now. It's fantastic.

Imagine the flat-out worst possible outcome of last year's economic troubles, culminating in the total collapse of the government, the dollar, and pretty much everything else. That's one of the precipitating events of Liberation. Riots destroy large parts of major cities. Mexico declares war on Texas. People take to selling themselves into slavery because it's better than starving. Bands of freewheeling hippies crisscross the country in a caravan of diesel-and-solar powered busses. Trains have machine gun nests and howitzers for self defense.

And into all this come the Slick Six, a gang of unstoppable international criminal, one of whom, Marco, has been in prison the last few years, since before the collapse. Marco has returned to reunite the Six and try to do some good in this new world.

Several of the interesting places in this world are where people have settled into a New Normal, where things are not so bad, or perhaps even better than Before. They grow their own food, barter for what they can't make, and generally get by. Maybe utopian, maybe not. The point is, despite a fantastic disaster, they're still alive. 

It's something that was on my mind a lot while Lehman was failing and they were debating the bailout. A lot of people were (and still are) losing their shirts, and were certainly looking at a more difficult future, but they weren't dying. That's my new yardstick for bad news: Did/will anyone die from it? If not, no problem. We'll get through it.