[FRIAM] NO LANL IN SANTA FE! Wednesday, 12; 00 outside SF City Hall; bring friends

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Just a preamble: I remember moving to Santa Fe and hating Cerrillos Rd with all it's little businesses, the trashy look, sections of ill- and un-used properties, peppered with upscale stuff in some spots. I'd moved there from Dallas, TX, where they'd rather tear down an old building than repurpose it. I recognized the "planned" look of Dallas because I grew up in Houston, where zoning laws are relatively loose. 

But Cerrillos is what taught me the meaning of "organic". So, as an (also vague) attempt to answer the question, the only way one can "design" an ecosystem is by first studying the already extant ecosystem and nudging it in multifarious ways. The primary problem with organically grown systems is the lack of executive function ... a high-order feedback (like a cerebral cortex) ... to establish and maintain constraints like water limits, geographical sprawl, pollution, etc. So, the FIRST part of the plan would be to constructively aggregate the extant businesses into some sort of scaffolded hierarchy starting with tiny businesses (businesses run by people with ZERO spare time, of course), up through boutique businesses (coffee shops, breweries, fashion, etc.), up through larger scale businesses, etc. ... all the way up to behemoths like LANL or the State of NM.

The second part of the plan would be to adopt some trial (non-local) constraints like water limitations and experiment with feeding that back down the hierarchy (layer by layer *or* cross-trophically, jumping over layers) and then following the effects back up the hierarchy. As trials, there must be challenge tests, ways to decide whether to abandon or iteratively modify the constraints and their up- and down-ward signaling. So, this second part of the plan might *start* by formalizing those tests (in an "agile" style).

Any interference/manipulation by a behemoth like Amazon or CMU would require them to *facilitate* the hierarchy, as opposed to *disrupting* it. (As I think someone in this thread has already mentioned, but I don't have the bandwidth to farm the posts for who said/implied it.) Following co-evolution and multi-objective optimization, the constraints have to be at least partially *endogenous*. The executive has to be pretty tightly coupled to the rest of the system. Any attempts at decoupled, directed evolution of the ecosystem will be fragile to disrupting enterprises. But if the disruptions are small/local, then the network of feedbacks can adjust, limiting any species collapse in response to that disruption.

That's how I would "define the function" of the behemoth.

On 1/14/20 1:03 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> I know the members on this list mostly don’t have powers of implementation, but as idle intellectual exercise, if you/we were portfolio managers, or really avant-garde regional planners, what would your design look like to get through critical mass thresholds to tip an interior, water-limited, relatively low-population region into some kind of self-maintaining decent standard of life and opportunity for whoever lived there stably for a long time.  (And how many can that be, in water-limited regions?)  Intel made a significant impact in ABQ, but putting a semiconductor fab in a desert is about as unsustainable a business decision as I can imagine.  What resources exist currently?  If you were designing the institutional ecosystem, and knew you needed some economic social function but couldn’t find an actor to fit it, could you define in somewhat operational terms what that function would need to be, and how much of the remainder of the context could you populate with specific actors and a plan to get them into place?
> 
> I know this is much too loose and long-term to deal with immediate practicalities of interacting wtih the SF city council, but we often speak as if long-term future visioning efforts could in principle yield something useful.

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