Wednesday Morning Rant

If you've spent time in one of America's decaying and formerly-great cities recently, you may have noticed how bifurcated they are. The great cities are in fact two cities within the same space. There is the nice city, and the awful city. They are the same city in fact, but not in spirit. They occupy the same acreage, but at different elevations.

On the surface, the cities are hellholes. Walking down the streets, you will be treated to the stench of urine and learn to dodge aggressive vagrants and various drifts of refuse both human and artificial. You will see plenty of graffiti-covered plywood and the deep filth ground layer by grimy layer into the sidewalks while wondering if your car will still be there when you get back.

Then you go inside, enter an elevator and increase your elevation.

Once you go above the fifth floor, the city changes. The elevator was a portal into a parallel universe. Gone are the filth, piss, aggressive bums, drug detritus and the various flotsam and jetsam of the surface. When you look out the window - so long as you hold your eyes level or cast them skyward - the outer world reflects your interior surroundings. These are third-world cities, devoid of a middle class. They are glittering islands of wealth and power erupting from a sea of crime, filth and poverty.

Outside of the binary cities, it is yet another world - and one about which the men of the fifth floor know far less. It is even more "other" than the urban jungles between the towers. It is utterly alien. They fly over those areas, hopping from one fifth floor directly to the next. They look at the patchwork of fields, towns and minor cities as if looking out upon the surface of the moon, an interesting and unsettling curiosity of no great importance to their plans. They - like Google executives discussed in their 2016 post-election company meeting (approx. 33:20) - see "diversity" in places just like their own. They aren't "coastal elites" because they have offices in Chicago, Austin, Ann Arbor and Boulder.

The world of the fifth floor is insular, and they think everything is like their world because they never move outside of it. The further they are from the world of the surface - in industries like tech, media, government, etc. - they more they believe their own assertions and magnificence. Why don't the rubes get it? Why do they think things are bad? Can't they look around and see that things are great and primed to get even better? Why don't they believe what we believe?

They are so isolated that they know nothing of the world outside their shining towers and carefully manicured suburban campuses. They do not work among the rubes. They do not socialize with the rubes. They do not live amongst the rubes, and so cannot figure out why their plans fail and why people don't believe them. Some are evil and know it, but most simply live in a world where it is all true and they are confused as to why others can't see what they see.

One of the more valuable things they can probably do is to simply leave the fifth floor. They need to "touch grass," as the kids say - take the elevator to the surface, get off the internet, go outside and see what it's like.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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