Big Buildings, Big Ideas

A plea to dream more

Photo by Kit Suman on Unsplash

Typically, like most writers, I start these newsletters off with a couple of introductory paragraphs designed to convince you to read the rest. Perhaps some little story or a hook about the topic. This week, I’m just going to start with the following video. This is the promotional video by Saudi Arabia for their experimental city. If you are not one of the 10 million people to already watch this, take a look:

Wow. That is absolutely nuts. It’s also awesome and brilliant. It’s also never going to happen.¹ And in the incredibly unlikely chance that it did, I’m not even sure if it would be any good. And to top it all off, I’m jealous that America doesn’t have one of these ideas every week.

I assure you that is not a contradiction. Partially, I assume it’s because “there are no bad ideas in brainstorming” has been drilled into me so much I subconsciously carry it over to everything. It’s also in part out of intellectual humility. In a world where information is limitless, I find reminding myself that I’ll probably be wrong most of the time is the best way to survive. Sure, the history of big ideas is replete with failure, and I don’t even need to pick on the Segway this time. Why don’t we all live in geodesic domes? What if we just made alcohol illegal? What could go wrong with hydrogen airships?²

But the history if big ideas is also replete with failures that only failed because they were ahead of their time. Like what if movies had sound? What if you had a personal digital assistant? What if you could poop indoors? Sometimes an idea that sounds ridiculous is merely before its time.

Even worse, there’s been a lot of big ideas that were laughed out of the room but turned out to be a damned good idea. What if doctors washed their hands? What if we had bulbs that could illuminate things? What if we could send a rocket to the moon? All these core parts of our daily world were once laughable ideas. Sure, there’s been some truly awful big ideas, but the benefits of the good ones are civilization defining. So long as we avoid big ideas like “let’s kill all the Slavs to have more space for Germans” we should probably be pursuing big ideas. So, this ridiculous Saudi city may seem like a huge debacle waiting to happen, but, what if it’s not?

Big ideas are core to America. Or at least they once were.³ We Americans used to dream big. Many of our greatest things were once big crazy dreams. Everything from the space program to Disneyland to Las Vegas was once a big idea. Vision and guts are part of the American DNA. But that way of thinking has gone out of style. I hate to ever give credence to the irony-poisoned, algorithmically enhanced vitriol of Twitter, but the reaction to this plan to physically expand New York – not even that ambitious a plan – is a good example of the general reaction to big ideas. Short of a billionaire proposing we colonize Mars, big plans in America are typically met with a mixture of apathy and sneering derision. Why?

We’ve spent this month talking about the dead hand of history. Part of it is just status quo bias, the belief that things as they are now is how they always will be. This is funny because things as they are now always came about due to change. Part of it though is that as we create things we also create entrenched interests that then fight against change. At a certain point, the purpose of every institution is to perpetuate itself. There’s nothing inherently wrong about being against change. New is not always better. As anyone who is old enough to remember real McDonald’s fries can attest, not all change is good.⁴ But change is often inevitable. And if we aren’t willing to face that change head on what we get is a cacophony of nonsense.

We know that America will change, and that the way the country looked when you were first old enough to be cognizant of your surroundings will be very different from how it will look when you last are cognizant of your surroundings. Because I live in Austin, where this occurs at breakneck speed, I’m reminded of this daily. But even in my sleepy once rural now suburban part of Pennsylvania the difference is vast. Upon my last visit home, I was left to ponder whether, like the Ship of Theseus, this is even still the same place I grew up. If you look around where you are⁵ you’ll notice the same. Change is inevitable. So, if it’s going to happen, we need to stop pretending otherwise and start asking, what do we want it to look like?

In a very American way, we often pretend we’re letting the free market decide this. But we’re not doing that. I’m not taking sides in these debates, but NIMBYism and zoning are clearly as anti-free market as, say, price controls. What we’ve ended up with is a mismatched quilt of some cities that won’t build causing sky-high rents both there and in the cities that can’t build fast enough, other cities that have been dying for various parts of a century, and sprawl, sprawl, sprawl. Our population has added roughly 200 million people since World War II. That’s almost the population of Brazil. Theoretically we would’ve created a city or two in there. Instead, we have urban sprawl, with all its problems. NOEM is a bizarre idea. But “let’s expand suburbs in Dallas” is a pretty bizarre idea too. It’s just the one we’re used to.

Meanwhile, it’s countries like Saudi Arabia, China, Nigeria, India, and the United Arab Emirates carrying out big projects – again, to varying degrees of success and wisdom. We have The Villages. There’s lots of reasons it is more difficult to build in America now. But at the end of the day, they all come down to some entrenched interest. There’s a lot of theories as to how this country became so rich – and frankly a lot of them are probably true simultaneously – and one of them is the lack of entrenched interests. America was, in many ways, an economic tabula rasa at the perfect moment to be one. We are now a very filled in slate.

This isn’t limited to building things. We do this with everything. We hold on to public policies long after the public turns on them and reverse ourselves in nonsensical ways. We manage to somehow either intervene too much⁶ or too little⁷ – sometimes, somehow, both⁸ – into established corporate interests to stifle the creative destruction that is the engine of capitalist progress. We pretend we still want new Marvel content when everything they've churned out since 2019 has been so disappointing. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

And, perhaps more confoundingly, some of the big ideas we work on are not as crazy as they first seem. Change is far closer at hand than we may imagine. And this isn’t the “let’s look back with ample hindsight” examples I used earlier, redux. Almost a year ago when I wrote about engineering our way out of climate change I repeatedly fell over myself to emphasize how speculative some of these technologies are. But from electric vehicles to electric airplanes to green hydrogen to the Holy Grail of nuclear fusion, all have advanced quicker in the last year than my allegedly optimistic article would’ve led you to predict. That still doesn’t mean it’s time to hang the mission accomplished banner, but it’s a reminder that the great thing about discovery is everything seems implausible until it’s not. So why do we dismiss big ideas out of hand?

Status quo bias – and I’m aware of the irony of saying this – will always be with us. Entrenched interests are not going to go away. Unless we adopt my big idea, which is that everything has to sunset at 50 years. But this Logan’s Run of institutions is both not going to happen and also probably a terrible idea. So, we’re left with the dead hand of history. The only antidote to it is to think big. It’s to encourage the moon shots. It’s to not instantly scoff at every crazy idea you hear. And you should because it is 100% guaranteed that change will occur and that the future will be different from the present. The world of tomorrow is decided by the choices we make today. And if we choose not to decide we still have made a choice.⁹ Now, maybe that future isn’t a version of Games of Thrones’ The Wall as if designed by Sharper Image. But, then again, who’s to say it’s not? Us, it’s not going to be that. But expanding Manhattan? Why not?

This month at Technopoptimism we’ve looked at how the past controls the present. In the next month, we’re going to do the opposite. I hope to see you in October as we start looking at the big ideas that could be the next Hindenburg or the next Apollo 11.

1. If anyone at the Saudi Public Investment Fund reading this would like me to edit out all the negative parts, the “NEOM: City of Tomorrow” version of this article is available for the right price. I have very reasonable rates for selling out.

2. I understand that there are still people who believe hydrogen airships were a good idea and should be resurrected. I’ve yet to be convinced but I’m willing to hear the argument.

3. This is too important for a footnote but would’ve destroyed the flow of text. I certainly am not stating that no one in America is working on big ideas or crazy dreams. There’s lots of this occurring, much of it in the digital sector. It’s more that the days of “eh, let’s build our capital on a swamp” or “eh, let’s let a couple judges build a canal to Lake Erie” to “eh, let’s come up with a form of government based on something from 18 centuries ago” are long gone. I’m sure there’s some meaningless stat that disproves this based on equating “marginally better cell phone” with “land a man on the moon” but it’s a vibes thing. The people coming up with the big dreams are out there, they’re just not capturing the public imagination they once did. And this newsletter is all about public imagination.

4. I was torn here because I also wanted to use “as anyone who can remember the original Ewok song at the end of Return of the Jedi.” In the end, I felt the McDonald’s point was much stronger, as that was change that was forced from outside instead of the whims of a mercurial visionary. But I’m still linking to the video for the enjoyment of everyone born before 1992.

5. Apologies to non-American readers. Feel free to yell at me in the comments if your hamlet in Lincolnshire looks identical to the day Queen Victoria died. I’m sorry, Go Mariners (or The Iron).

6. See, for example, the impact of subsidies propping up legacy industries creating a cost advantage against competitors.

7. See, for example, the impact of not using antitrust power in industries with high barriers to entry, artificially propping up poorly run legacy business.

8. See, for example, the airlines.

9. Me paraphrasing Rush lyrics should be considered an apology for all my poking fun at both libertarians and Canadians.