Pylimitics

The local was washed away in the spew. You know the spew. It’s the relentless flood of information overwhelming us online. So much email the majority is automatically deleted. Same situation with text messages. Social media is even worse — there’s so much nobody can keep up with it, even though thanks to the automatic filters and algorithms, nobody even sees more than a tiny fraction. Even that feels like the entire spew — but it’s not. It’s a garden hose. The spew, if you were to experience it in all its scope, is more like an industrial firehose. Or one of the spillways at the base of the world’s biggest dam. Or Victoria Falls. You can’t cope with it, even with the filters and digital tools at your fingertips. Even though those tools are themselves pretty powerful, they’re like pitting your laptop against a datacenter running a billion dollars’ worth of NVIDIA GPUs. 

The spew is a flood, and like a flood, it’s washing things away. It’s not a physical flood, of course, so riverbanks and houses and bridges and trees aren’t destroyed. But things have been and are being destroyed. One of them is the local. And the local actually is a physical thing, or at least a collection of physical things. A kind of network. The local is the bygone process of buying strawberries. In June you’d know where the local farms had tables or sheds beside the road, and that’s where they’d put their crop of strawberries. When they were gone, they were gone until next year’s strawberry season. The local is the bygone process of job applications. You’d read the help wanted ads in the local newspaper. If you saw a job you wanted, and thought you might get, you’d call, write, or show up at their door to apply. If you were a widget polisher, you weren’t competing against every widget polisher in the country, or the world, looking for the same job. You were competing against the widget polishers who read your local newspaper. 

The local was part of the company wanting to hire a widget polisher, too. The widget manager could place a help wanted ad and expect a reasonable number of people to apply. Not too many to keep track of. Not so many that automatic systems were the only way to cope with them. And the local meant that the company might well be in a city where widget polishing was an important industry, and there would be a lot of intrinsic knowledge about widget polishing — not just inside the company, but in the people who lived there. 

If you grew up in the widget polishing hub, but knew what you really wanted to do with your life was not polish widgets but, say, drive a yellow taxicab with a medallion, the first step in your career path would be to go to the place where those jobs were. New York City, perhaps. Or you might visualize a future in the movies. You’d find a way to get yourself to Hollywood. 

Once you arrived in the right place; the hub of the kind of activity you craved, you’d go about trying to meet people already doing the jobs you wanted to get. Eventually, if you were lucky, you’d enter the business you wanted, probably because of some of the people you had met. You met them locally. When you pulled up stakes and went to New York or Hollywood or Chicago out of hope and ambition and optimism, you brought your own local with you. You merged with the new local. You met new friends, found new sources of strawberries, subscribed to the local newspaper, maybe even eventually rooted for different sports teams because now they were your local teams. 

It’s possible I’m just an old man yelling at the future here; I’m not saying we should turn the clock back even if we could. If we lose all the modern infrastructure that resulted in the spew, it will not be a good thing; it will be a byproduct of something like a civilizational collapse, and I’m not advocating anything like that. But you can that there is a hunger in many people for the local and what it once was. There is a lot of activity aimed at reinvigorating the local. Town markets. Festivals. Meetups. The local has to do with physical things and physical locations. 

Here’s a pair of ironies that feel like they might be significant somehow. The local is an intangible network you have to connect with in the physical world. The spew is a physical network you connect with without doing much of anything. When we began abstracting the world digitally, only a few people foresaw enough to warn us, and of course they were ignored. But the local might be reemerging. Whether the spew recedes, well, who knows. You’re not going to get any prophesies of doom from me.