Surveil the City

I believe there’s a real need for insane asylums, and we already built them. We call them cities.

I don’t believe in big cities. Not as a policy take, as a matter of what they do to a person. I think they make you insane. Pack a few million primates onto concrete, stack them in boxes, pipe in noise and light and strangers at every hour of the night, and something in the animal breaks. A city is unnatural in the plainest sense of the word. Nothing about it matches what a body spent a couple hundred thousand years expecting. And every grand plan to fix that, every walkable-this and fifteen-minute-that, is one more experiment run on people who never signed up to be the subjects. I hold no truths about city life. I don’t have the answer, I just don’t buy that anyone else has a fucking clue either.

Generally I believe in freedom. Hard. It’s close to the center of everything I think. But here’s the part city people won’t sit still for: being part of a city is a contract, and the thing you sign away is your freedom. You moved into a prison and the inmates built it themselves. You can’t fire a bb-gun in your own yard. You can’t burn a fire, keep a bird, park where you like, build what you want. There’s a rule for the height of your grass. That’s not oppression falling on you from above, that’s the deal. Density and liberty trade against each other, and the second you stack a million people that close together, you have chosen the rules whether you’ll admit it or not.

So here’s where I lose the room. If a city is already a low-trust prison of its own making, then a city deserves the surveillance state. Load up the plate readers. Put a shot-detector on every corner. Read every plate, log every gunshot, let the police see all of it so they can actually keep the place from eating itself. In a city, surveillance isn’t stealing your freedom. You handed that over at the door. Might as well get the safety you already paid for.

I know how that sounds. Anti-American, jackbooted, whatever word makes you comfortable. But the founding fathers couldn’t have imagined the modern city if you’d sat them down and sketched it for them. Their world was farms and small towns and a musket over the door, and they wrote freedom for people who lived spread out under open sky. Drop Jefferson into a city today and he’d swear he’d walked into an asylum, because he would have.

That’s about what a city is to me now. A view into insane culture, best taken in small doses, the way you’d tour a facility. I don’t even like going anymore. I see the decay. I hate the graffiti, I hate the filth, I hate all that concentrated human energy producing dirt and noise and not one thing that grows. Give me an unkept forest over the concrete jungle any day. At least the forest is going somewhere.

Here’s the irony I actually like. That same logic cuts the other way and sets everyone loose. If a city wants to govern itself by density, let it. Watch every corner, ban the guns, write a rule for the height of your grass, whatever the packed-in life demands. Be as liberal as you want inside your own walls. Just quit exporting it to the rest of us. Let the country be the country and let the city be the city. The whole war only runs this hot because we insist one rulebook has to stretch over a hunting cabin and a high-rise as if they’re the same place. Drop the universal law and most of the hatred drains out with it. The city gets its watchful eye, I get my forest, and nobody has to conquer anybody.

So load the cameras up and watch every inch of those places. That’s the city’s deal, not mine.