Originally published on February 21, 2019
I grew up in a hyper local environment, in small town Columbus Junction, Iowa, population 1,899 (with its two suburbs, Fredonia, and Columbus City, the population of CJ is closer to 2,300). My dad was the town veterinarian, my Grandpa the banker, and my Great-Grandma the lunch lady. Everyone knew everyone. Give me a pencil and a few old copies of the Gazette and I could likely triple Dunbar’s number with just relationships I had in Columbus Junction, and I could possibly meet Dunbar’s number with relatives in Columbus Junction’s county, Louisa, alone. Localism like the kind I grew up with has been under duress for a long time in America. While reductionist philosophers in their Ivory Towers may eschew local connections, I believe that a large part of the alienation Americans feel today is not because they are not dynamic enough in seeking opportunity, but rather because they are not rooted enough in a community.
Capitalism works like water working its way from the top to the bottom of a worm farm. It follows the path of least resistance, but eventually ends up at the local maximum (in the case of the ant farm, the bottom, and in the case of capitalism, value creation). Working from a neoliberal framework, it seems reasonable that artificial restrictions on trade and a lack of global freedom were the only restrictions holding our economy back. It follows then, that local economies have been gutted and localism is on a fast pace for extinction.
Laissez-fair capitalists and the more strident leftists make this same argument.
What they seem to ignore is the path dependence of the current state. Where we are now is not natural and only occurred because of top down intervention. While neoliberals and misguided conservatives fight to maintain the status quo where everyone is miserable, they forget that path dependence created a completely unnatural, inorganic state. They are not fighting to preserve capitalism, or free trade, but rather an antiquated system more closely akin to fascism than either spontaneous Hobbes-ianism or utopianism.
The status quo defends zoning and implicitly the absurd and unsustainable levels of municipal debt that created those sterile, inefficient, carbon-spewing miserable places known as suburbs. It defends the interstate highway system (a top down edict that likely destroyed hundreds of billions in value that would have been priced if not for land seized by eminent domain). The status quo defends rule by regulation. As my brother, the eminently quotable and mysterious @_s7ODD says
Simply put, the globally-connected, locally disconnected status quo is no result of Hayek-ian, bottoms up organization, but rather the direct result of government intervention at scale. The proposed solutions from both sides (spend trillions more for oil, re-create Venezuela but in the US ) are bad. Aegrescit medendo, to quote Virgil because I wanted to look smart.
But even as the powers that be (read: mostly power hungry sociopathic congressman and people convinced that crony capitalism is real capitalism) try to institute their perverted definition of neoliberalism, capitalism is inexorably finding its way to the bottom of the ant farm. And the more organic, developed state of human relationships is local. The next wave of Silicon Valley startups is following the return to localism.
These startups include:
NextDoor, home to the same hilarious local color our ancestors would have engaged in. Twitter is enabling spread out communities to coalesce around shared noble ideals, like Iowans’ love for Busch Light and Casey’s Pizza.
The French startup La Ruche Qui Dit Oui is bringing back local food, with taste. I would be surprised if, as we learn more about the gut-brain axis, we find that eating local food with local microbes isn’t extremely beneficial.
Meanwhile, Shopify and Etsy enable people to produce and sell their goods directly, without the required corporate reduction in personality, and AdTech, which originally hurt many small businesses, is now evening the playing field for companies who can, with smart Instagram marketing, have better signal fidelity over a wider range than at any point in history.
In my next Blog I’ll talk about how a cycle between localism and market expansion may provide the best overall return for world well-being while avoiding the risk of ruin.