Remembering the Buffalo

How can we have technological progress without all the bad stuff?

A collection of trash littering the city.

When I decided to take a sadnap after watching Liverpool choke away the league on the opening matchday, I did not expect that I would miss some very nice person at Substack – presumably against a tough deadline and just going to their most recent browser tab – selecting my Netflix piece for the Substack Reads feature. Which means that today is my first – and potentially only – opportunity to write a piece with a large number of subscribers. Which means I need to pick the topic I care about most in the world: how much I hate those damned scooters.

If you don’t live in an area where this invasive species has taken over, you can see in the picture above what I’m talking about.¹ These things are the worst piece of technology ever created. Leaving aside that they anecdotally seem like death traps, they are the bane of my life as a pedestrian with a dog. Constantly zipping around at speeds that easily put me – and much more importantly, my dog – at risk. Almost equally upsetting is how much they have left the cityscape littered with junk. For some reason, the idea of “throw a large piece of metal anywhere you want” is considered acceptable. These were a product pushed out into the world that seemingly does very little to make the world better while doing quite a bit to make it a dangerous, trash filled hellhole. I hate them and would like them to disappear.

Typically, the remit of this newsletter is about how we can bridge technology and society to build a better world. Sometimes that means taking an aim at technology that makes the world worse. It’s just as bad living in a technodystopia as it is leaving in a Luddite one. Trust me, I suffered through playing Cyberpunk 2077, I don’t need to live it, I wouldn’t survive all the glitching. And most technologies have some bad side effects – or, to use the fancier term, negative externalities. As previously discussed, fear of those negative externalities has driven backlash against things such as self-driving cars and nuclear power. Substack has been abuzz this week with discussion of this regarding artificial intelligence. But I want to take a minute and go a little bit more old school than that.

If you were to ask me what animal I most associate with America it would not be the bald eagle. It’s the buffalo.² More properly known as the American bison, this country once was home to over 60 million of them. I’ve always found something beautiful about these magnificent creatures. Unfortunately, at one point in the 19th century we were down to 541 of them. Even today we’re in the low tens of thousands.

A lot has been written about why the bison were hunted to extinction, and if you’re both unfamiliar with that and interested, I would recommend a Google search. Like most things, it has a lot of causes. Perhaps the most important is that bison are just really easy to kill. They’re the anti-Steven Seagal.

Because this isn’t a Bison History newsletter, we’ll jump past a lot of important things – the motives behind this, the need for buffalo parts industrially, the military involvement – and get straight to the part that has stuck with me since I was a kid: the train hunts. Here’s a brief description from Harper’s Weekly in 1867:

Nearly every railroad train which leaves or arrives at Fort Hays on the Kansas Pacific Railroad has its race with these herds of buffalo; and a most interesting and exciting scene is the result. The train is "slowed" to a rate of speed about equal to that of the herd; the passengers get out fire-arms which are provided for the defense of the train against the Indians, and open from the windows and platforms of the cars a fire that resembles a brisk skirmish. Frequently a young bull will turn at bay for a moment. His exhibition of courage is generally his death-warrant, for the whole fire of the train is turned upon him, either killing him or some member of the herd in his immediate vicinity.

They never stood a chance. I’m not saying that trains led directly to the near-extermination of the buffalo, but it’s hard to look at the 19th Century and not think those noble creatures would’ve been better off if we never figured out steam power. But, would we have been better off? My gut says no, but then again, who knows? It’s impossible to read the history of World War I without realizing it was mainly dictated by railroads. It’s also impossible to imagine a world without Willie’s version of City of New Orleans.

This analysis can be done with almost every technology we’ve ever come up with. I love automobiles. I also know that they yearly kill more Americans than the Viet Cong ever did, pollute the environment, and devastated our urban areas. But they also gave us Knight Rider, Ferrari, and 83.7% of all Bruce Springsteen songs. The same internet that lets me talk to you – and you hit that like button, subscribe, comment, and share – also facilitates people becoming radicalized and committing acts of terrorism. Even our fundamental technology – fire – managed to give us cooked foods while also being the most horrifying way to die that I can imagine.³ Until they finally invent a pizza that makes you lose weight, there’s no such thing as a technology without negative externalities.

We just completed a series about some “disruptive” technologies, and many of them weren’t quite as disruptive as we think – or would like. But most of them do have some very disruptive effects. Some may argue that Netflix does and I’d be open to that, but I’ll be long in the cold, cold ground before I say a bad word about television or movies. Uber and Lyft though? I don’t agree with everything in this list, nor its overall thrust,⁴ but there’s ample evidence that these services make traffic worse, not better like they were sold as doing.

Airbnb theoretically allows people to rent out a spare room and make some extra money. But we know that’s not actually true. It’s impossible to get an exact figure on what percentage are actually owner occupied, but it doesn’t take being Sherlock Holmes to deduce that most listings you see can’t be owner occupied. Leaving aside the bad effects on neighborhoods by having so many transients, there’s the much bigger problem of its effect on housing. If I could snap my fingers and do anything it would be to have Philadelphia sports teams win all championships forever.⁵ If I could do it a second time it would be to do something less impossible than ending Philadelphia pain but far more important: creating an abundance of housing in the places we most need it. Instead, we’re devoting housing stock in prime areas to makeshift hostels. That seems like a negative externality.

Amazon and Walmart are even more visible examples of this. I’d be genuinely lost without them. When I realize I need a new lasagna pan at 1:30 in the morning, these are my saviors. But I also don’t think it’s possible to walk through any devastated city scape and see things that were once stores and wish we still lived in that world. I may be able to pay less to get more products, but is that worth the price of the destruction of all those small retailers and their effect on the community? And that’s not a rhetorical question, I genuinely am unsure if those tradeoffs were worth it and, as much as this may pain the economists out there, I don’t believe there’s an answer.

I would never say that these technologies are bad. Anymore than I would say trains are bad. Or cars, or the internet, or fire. But they all have negative externalities. For a Substack devoted to the intersection of technology and society, it’s pretty darned important to tackle this question. The answer is obviously that we’re humans and we do shitty things. The problem isn’t the scooters, it’s the people riding them. So the question isn’t “could we have crisscrossed our country with trains and not nearly exterminated the buffalo?” because the answer to that is absolutely yes. The question is “what made us use trains to nearly exterminate an animal that essentially walks into the path of a bullet and what could we have done to avoid that?”

As a simple rule of thumb, I like to think of three types of solutions. There are technological solutions, when we create a new thing or way of doing things that allows us to solve a problem, for example, the wheel. There are legal solutions, where we use government to do the same thing, for example, making it illegal to murder someone. Then there are societal solutions, where through some vague process we all agree on some norm that allows us to solve a problem. For example, there’s no legal or technological reason I can’t just walk up to people on the street and tell them they look stupid. It would just make me an asshole because we have a societal norm not to do that. The problem is these are much more difficult, even if they’re much more powerful.

The other problem with societal norms is they’re always changing and they seem unfathomable except for the moment you’re in them. One of the great difficulties of studying history is the near inexplicability of past societal norms. Whether you’re trying to wrap your mind around the actions of politicians during the early Republic, soldiers going over the top to face certain death on the Western Front, or literally anything that occurred in ancient history, it’s impossible without understanding societal norms. Except we really can’t because we don’t live with them. But they’re real, and they change all the time. Perhaps the most obvious example is slavery. Yes, there were technological reasons – the move to a machine world – that made slavery less desirable. And there were legal restrictions that grew up against it. But we’re among the first generations in human history to believe that owning another human is wrong and something that shouldn’t be done. It’s not just illegal – plenty of things are illegal, and you probably do a lot of them. It’s that it’s wrong, which is much more powerful.

The buffalo could’ve been saved by a law – much as it is now illegal to kill certain animals – but that never would’ve occurred because no one thought it was wrong. Instead we would’ve needed a 19th Century American society that cared more about preserving what we had – and, critically, not pushing Native Americans onto reservations – to save the buffalo. Trains and guns didn’t kill the buffalo. We did.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to ask some of these questions. Is the world ready for the Tinderization of dating? How do we have civil society in a world where drones make assassinations easy? Is the gig economy a good thing? And how do we avoid the negative externalities of these technologies? We don’t have to wipe out the buffalo, but it’s only possible if we choose not to do it.

1. I took all of those pictures last night on one brief walk. My favorite is that the two blocking the sidewalk weren’t there when I left. Stay classy, scooter riders. I considered taking a picture of the two people riding a scooter behind people on the sidewalk – even though a separated bike lane was inches away – but it felt like an invasion of privacy. Even though they deserved it. I should note that although I always rewrite my pieces to be less, let’s say spicy, this is the most I’ve ever had to rewrite something to avoid coming off as unhinged. I hate these things.

2. I almost drive hours to take a picture of the Texas State Bison Herd for the main picture, but I’ve been sick the last few days. I will try and find a way to shoehorn buffalo in again in the future.

3. I’m aware that we didn’t “invent” fire but, without doing the due diligence here, I think it’s a safe bet that most people who die in fires don’t die in ones created by lightning. I assume it’s arson, smoking, and gender reveal parties. Correct me if I’m wrong.

4. A lot of this list is complaining about rideshare versus transit. Who’s fault is that? It is a core belief of mine that people will go with the better thing. I’m a transit supporter – I used it constantly when I was a Philadelphian – but it’s usually terrible. The solution is make transit better – which is difficult because of mountains of political nonsense – not make Uber worse.

5. I want it known this would be me taking a hit for the city that I love. It would completely ruin the NFL for me if I knew the Eagles were winning the Super Bowl every year. But I’ll take that hit when I finally collect all the infinity stones or find a genie.