E2: Statistically Significant Ant City; S14: Why not get smaller than right-sized? Life is fractal anyway.

<p>This episode begins with a very comforting question:</p><p>What is the worst that could happen?</p><p>I actually like that question.</p><p>I remember watching a video with Peter Zeihan and several younger people who seemed to have come up through his orbit, all trying to work out what a plausible version of deglobalization, demographic decline, supply-chain disruption, and general societal wobbling might look like.</p><p>Which I found reassuring.</p><p>Not because I want civilization to collapse.</p><p>I just like knowing where the floor might be. It is a strangely comforting way to plan a life.</p><p>That has often been how I make decisions. I don&#39;t need to know that something will work. I need to know what happens if it fails spectacularly—and whether I can live with that.</p><p>When my partner and I had been together for about two years, I quit my job, sold my condo, left my family and friends, applied to immigrate to Canada, and then moved with him to Indonesia while we waited.</p><p>Worst case?</p><p>We finally land in Canada, have a gigantic fight at the airport, break up, and there I am.</p><p>In Canada.</p><p>Fine.</p><p>People had been telling me, essentially, If you don&#39;t like it here, leave, for most of my life.</p><p>Okay.</p><p>Done.</p><p>I&#39;m very glad to be here.</p><p>Unfortunately, Canada lives upstairs from the United States, and when America sneezes, Canada gets a cold.</p><p>America is currently doing considerably more than sneezing.</p><p>So perhaps we&#39;re trying to get vaccinated through Europe and Asia.</p><p>We&#39;ll see.</p><p>This episode is another attempt to finish thinking about The Big Big City, which apparently required The Big Big City, The Bigger Big City, and now whatever this is.</p><p>Because the thing that kept scratching wasn&#39;t really cities.</p><p>It was scale.</p><p>How large can a human system become before the human beings inside it become abstractions to one another?</p><p>In a small school, the quarterback may also have to build the stage, help with the prom, and move some chairs because otherwise the chairs do not get moved.</p><p>In a huge institution, every desirable role can have fifty applicants.</p><p>In a village, you know the person selling you bread.</p><p>In a metropolis, if you emotionally registered every human being you passed on the sidewalk as a complete person with grief, desires, hemorrhoids, childhood memories and plans for Thursday, you&#39;d probably make it half a block.</p><p>So we get efficient.</p><p>We get specialized.</p><p>We get competitive.</p><p>We become statistically significant.</p><p>And I know something about wanting to be significant.</p><p>Art school. Plays. Reviews. Grants. Programs. Songs. Standing-room-only audiences. Being wanted in the room.</p><p>Not necessarily fame.</p><p>More like: Tell me I matter enough to have been invited.</p><p>And then, once invited, I often wandered off and made something smaller.</p><p>Which raises another possibility.</p><p>Maybe right-sized is still too big.</p><p>Why not get smaller than right-sized?</p><p>Life is fractal anyway.</p><p>An ant does not need to understand globalization.</p><p>An ant gets up.</p><p>An ant encounters whatever the enormous incomprehensible forces of the universe have put in front of it.</p><p>Sugar.</p><p>Rain.</p><p>A shoe.</p><p>And it does whatever an ant can do.</p><p>That&#39;s where the coda ends up after briefly considering reincarnation, alien intelligence, God with stranger furniture, the blue genie from Aladdin, solipsism, world events, and several other little conceptual devices I have apparently used over the years to keep existence from becoming completely unmanageable.</p><p>Not beliefs, exactly.</p><p>More like tools.</p><p>Because if the geopolitical analysts are right and some very large systems become less reliable, I cannot personally restart global fertilizer production.</p><p>If they&#39;re wrong, I also cannot award them a prize.</p><p>I