June 25, 2025
i’ve started using gpt to digitize my handwriting (the rate-limiting step for publishing here is converting my diary to digital format). if there are any errors, please let me know – i have no idea how accurate the transformation is!
Due to a fascination with the remains of industry, I walked along the southern bank of the Thames from Borough Market to Battersea hoping to see the redeveloped remnants of the Battersea power station. The beginning of the walk took me through older London, passing by the Globe. Old walls, churches and so on, narrow winding streets filled with tourists, then residents as I took a detour through Waterloo. The difference between Londoners and tourists is the speed with which they walk while holding their phones – locals usually have Google Maps open and attempt to find the next landmark; tourists walk at a breakneck speed fully into traffic while using their phone and I couldn’t unsee this.
Europe is positioned in some circles as idyllic, untouched by the tangles of optimization, advertising and dopamine which has wormed its way into America. In some aspects this is true; there are more social opportunities/events in European cities than their American counterparts. I walked past so many beautifully crowded patios & parks! But phones, optimization, etc. are worming themselves into the intermission – the in-betweens where we sit on trains or in a park, generally between events. I saw multiple pedestrians walk full-speed into crosswalks & nearly get hit.
Simultaneously, I’ve been mildly phone-less during this trip (I am very cheap) and can only use it when I have wifi, which I have not time to do on the train. I see fifty heads looking down.
Battersea is most reminiscent of American suburbs – a great expanse of empty land turned into the blandest unused buildings, concrete parks with no one to sit in them, and shopping centers galore. Walking around, there are no signs of life, just a suburb in development, an instance of the view that the ideal town layout as determined by efficiency. I could be in Northern Virginia and nobody would notice. My largest fear is that these sites present a local optimum difficult to break out of; that they replicate and reproduce in every geography until the built landscape resembles that of the suburban sunbelt.
This is not America winning; America was just first hit by the spirit of optimization. Phones optimize for maximum dopamine, getting our attention by feeding us addictive content at uncertain intervals. These developments are most profitable under the current economic schema, developed to get consumers in and out while exposing them to multiple opportunities to buy goods, stacking businesses to reduce rental rates to the bare minimum needed to turn landlords a profit, and so on.
All of this is entropy, reducing higher-developed states to input and output. Some are fans of this economic raw efficiency; I am not among them. The process of standardization that one can purchase the exact same burger in Amsterdam as in Tucson is a mistake, robbing the world of its glorious complexity. Free trade and the internet may have been mistakes, but as forces of entropy are, we’re powerless to stop them.