Glitch Jam

According to NPR, and re-reported by mammoth, a computer glitch “accidentally summoned 1,200 people to jury duty on the same morning,” causing a very physical traffic jam in an unfortunate California town. Kind of a real-world DDoS attack on our highway system.

Here Is Everywhere

I’m writing this as I ride to the airport in the back of a Lincoln Town Car. This is one of New York’s idiosyncrasies—despite a serviceable public transportation system, it is far easier to get to the airport by car. We enter the Long Island Expressway near the waterfront, just past the mouth of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. The roadway lifts up, and we are level with the upper stories of warehouses on our left. Brooklyn is below us and to the right, just beyond Newtown Creek. It’s an unexpectedly expansive view for New York. New Yorkers don’t sentimentalize, though. They simply note the sight with appropriately jaded detachment.

Further out in Queens, the highway drops down to street level and my attention is drawn to the houses along Borden Avenue, the access road on either side of the expressway. The brick homes stand shoulder-to-shoulder, forming a neat row facing the road; they are a breakwater against the river of vehicles, preventing them from eroding the neighborhood behind them. The opposing scales offer a sharp contrast: the oversized presence and wide sight lines of the expressway end abruptly against the modest houses. The structures, more appropriate for a dozy residential district, look cramped and worn, exhausted from facing the tireless tide of traffic on the L.I.E.

The small homes fall away again; the highway is now above their roofs. Only an occasional chimney pokes out above the concrete guardrail. Just ahead are sprawling complexes of brick apartment blocks, ranging from simple rectangular boxes to arrays of cruciform towers. We’re driving through a Corbusian wet dream, but I can’t help seeing it for what it is. It’s an endless plain of dying grass and crumbling brick.

These are exactly the urban landscapes Edward Platt describes in Leadville, his biography of London’s Western Avenue, but these days no one is at all surprised by the banal universality of automobile-forged urbanism. In fact, one the very roads I’m traveling along was a project conceived by New York’s master builder, Robert Moses, whose parkways became the very models of modern road building imitated across the globe. Reactions against the cloddish foot of modern civil projects have, of course, been written before; the most notable of which is Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities. To Leadville’s credit, Platt is not primarily concerned with the architectural or social theory of mid-century urbanism; these topics are better explained by architects and urban planners. Instead, Platt focuses on the human toll of road construction.

He surveyed residents whose life-long homes were slated for demolition, ambivalent business owners who welcomed growth yet questioned the wanton destruction, and the few transient squatters who were brave enough to sit for an interview. He captures the despair, hopelessness, and distrust that pervades a world being actively unravelled by distant government interests. The tension builds while bulldozers work their way from lot to lot, but he ends by interviewing a former Western Avenue resident who had been relocated to a modernist apartment block. Turns out she decided to make the best of it.

She braved a new life in an apartment block that could be any apartment block next to any highway on any continent. What does it mean to travel the world when the apartment buildings, the highways, the airports, the monuments and offices are all interchangeable? It’s exasperating to see that unchecked builderism has been such a successful U.S. export, and it’s sobering to realize the same stories Platt chronicled happened here first. Thank heavens for Jane Jacobs.

At last the driver pulls up to the unloading zone. Age has not been kind to Terminal 3 at JFK, but then again, the brutalist concrete drum was never much to look at in the first place. The approach takes you through the underbelly of the saucer-shaped gatehouse and up to a nondescript curb. The check-in hall is cramped and the circular departure lounge is ugly and cluttered. As I wait for my flight, I get lost in the psychogeography. I wonder about the emotional impact of our crumbling infrastructure. I wonder what it means to visit new places when global modernism has put the same hotels and coffee shops in every city. Yet here I am, about to cross the country to see all the same structures again.

The Fall

There’s a feeling you can’t shake at three A.M. when you hear the heater rattle in the other room through the cardboard walls and you feel as if everything is made of paper, fragile and delicate. You wake up on the twenty-forth floor suddenly aware of the ground below you, as if you could see through all those paper floors and you wonder how you haven’t fallen. Everything seems to be balanced precariously, a house of cards. Another breath and it will all collapse around you like the stock market, or the American dream we’ve all been sold on credit. It will all collapse around you so you hold your breath but it collapses anyway and you look down and see the bare earth and immediately feel the gut-wrenching weightlessness that used to be so exhilarating when the roller-coaster took its first plunge, but now is just nauseating. But you don’t fall to the ground. You don’t reach terminal velocity or accelerate at that magic number, nine point eight meters per second squared. You don’t stop to wonder how seconds are even able to form squares. No, you just hang, in midair, with 250 feet between you and the cold, distant earth, and that butterfly feeling of free-fall.

How often do people claim to be living through a revolution? How often are we presented with a precariousness that actually teeters at the ledge, a precariousness that we watch in free-fall and then grasp for, too late, as it shatters into a million tiny shards? How often do we see the whole scene play out in our mind, a premonition in which we are unable to move, paralyzed by the knowledge that at that fast-approaching moment when our life makes contact we will have crossed an event horizon? Maybe we just let it happen—we see it coming but hold back and watch because we don’t want to interfere with the beautiful destruction brought about by the inevitability of gravity, that eternal downward force.

More Problems

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think,

“I know, I’ll use Regular Expressions.” Now they have two problems.
“I know, I’ll use Java.” Now they have a ProblemFactory.
Now they have “I know, I’ll use Threads.” interleaved problems.
“I know, I’ll use LISP.” Now their problem is recursive.
“I know, I’ll write my own LISP.” Now they are Paul Graham.
“I know, I’ll use Haskell.” Now their problem is entirely academic.
“I know, I’ll use Erlang.” Now their problems are distributed.
“I know, I’ll use Scala.” Now they have problem traits.
“I know, I’ll use Python.” Now they import solution and have a beer.
“I know, I’ll use MySQL.” Now their problem is a single point of failure.
“I know, I’ll use MongoDB.” Now their problems are Web Scale.
“I know, I’ll use Crowdsourcing.” Now it’s your problem.