Rule for #Detroit: Believe none of what you read, half of what you hear, all of what you see.

Venkatesh's piece made me think of a few pages on 17th - 18th century British shipyards that I once encountered via a David Graeber citation (I really wish we still had his voice in this moment!). Rao emphasizes the pull of the wage economy for workers (away from mercantilism). But, part of why the wage economy won was that, at times, its alternative was made illegal. The book cited by Graeber was Peter Linebaugh's 'The London Hanged' -- a few relevant screencaps of it attached here. In Linebaugh's book, he writes that in the royal dockyards, shipwrights had a prescriptive right dating to at least 1634 that allowed them to carry home "chips" -- bits of wood produced by their work. Those chips, per Linebaugh, were the primary form of their pay. There was a cash wage, too, but it was paid highly irregularly -- sometimes more than a year late. So workers used chips as fuel, for trade, and to build their homes. As mentioned in the attached passage, the character of the workers' neighborhoods reflected the size of the chips they brought home. Throughout the 18th century, the British Navy tried to limit or end the practice. There were strikes by workers to defend their right to chips, and women rioted when they were once barred their customary access to the shipyards to collect chips. Only in 1801, once the government’s finances had stabilized and wages were finally paid on schedule, were chips abolished and replaced with “chip money.” A customary right became theft. The wage economy didn’t only win by attraction. It got better, and its alternative was criminalized. Ironically, a new surveillance technology was part of that: the panopticon. In 1795, Samuel Bentham measured chips leaving the Portsmouth shipyard it, and the next year he became the Navy’s Inspector General of Naval Works. Samuel is the less famous Bentham brother, but he originated the panopticon. Jeremy made it famous in prisons. Samuel conceived it as a way to supervise workers, and he went on to propose bringing that to the dockyards. So, What are the "chips" of knowledge work? What are the byproducts of work that have customarily been ours because there wasn't really a way to separate them from us? Judgment and know-how that we take to a next job. Productivity and time saved by "working smarter, not harder". Our voice and style. AI could actually make these separable from us -- copies could be created and kept behind, and they probably become less valuable for us when they do. Not trying to rebut Venkatesh here necessarily, but I think the entanglement of push & pull is interesting, and we should expect both again.

It’s nice how they’re shutting down on-ramps to highways in downtown Detroit by positioning the trucks doing so as little surprises behind curves in the road. Kind of a spooky Halloween jump-scare effect!

Pâté en croûte over here.

Yup.

Oh that’s pretty good.

It's a skill issue. If we'd followed The Book of Tony Goldman here, real estate in downtown Detroit would be more valuable today and there probably would've been less objection along the way. Instead we took the Wynwood Walls and put them in a parking garage. Literally!

Ewald Circle Terraces are so cool.

No one read their copies of The Book of Tony Goldman.

Nothing wrong with that rent. Detroiters largely don’t want to live in apartments anyway — this is a single family home town. Question is why isn’t downtown viable yet? Neighborhood redevelopment is self-sufficient. Downtown still isn’t.

It was when I was a paralegal on Wall Street a year out of college and my friend and I went to Harry’s Bar and everyone was saying “holy crap, the economy is actually crashing.” So I moved to Hanoi for a while, waited things out.

Pâté en Croûte

I guess I kind of have to.