In the following post I discuss potty topics. Consider yourself warned.

I recently heard Parag Khanna on the A16Z Podcast and I was sufficiently interested that I bought and read “Connectography.” In this post I’ll give an review of the book qua book and also cover an outline of its big ideas.

Note:

In subsequent posts I explore some of those ideas further:

• [Connectography and Refactoring][cf]

Connectography

It’s the Hegelian in me: I love a Europe-coming-to-know-itself through history (and economics) master narrative book. I’ve found the most predictive book for the last 15 years of economic and global theory has been (Marxist) Hardt & Negri’s Empire. Empire predicts a move to a global communist panacea only after global capitalism (i.e. multinationals) guts and obviates the nation-state. Accordingly to understand capital’s progression to this end, we should listen to the most passionate global capitalists.

In the early part of the aughts I found the leading writer on the topic to be (capitalist) Tom Friedman, NYT Op-Ed columnist and author of The World is Flat. While Friedman always had big ideas, I found his over-emphasis on who he knows and anecdotes a bit sloppy and frankly, taxing. Like Hegel, Friedman’s work benefits from being read at a swift clip: he’s meant to be enjoyed like the Romantics: with loud thundering emotions and sweeping torrents of vision.

Khanna offers an update on Friedman’s work but with considerably more economic data. While Friedman was occasionally insufferable in mentioning where he had lunch and with whom, Khanna’s core critical ideas occasionally get lost in maps or exhaustive detailing. Given a choice, I’ll take Khanna’s approach and take the data versus the Friedman’s social itinerary, but we lose sight of many of his core pillars in the sea of details about Malaysian trade agreements.

The big ideas I extracted from 390 pages follow:

[Khanna suggests][prev] that the over-large nation-states of the 19th and 20th centuries - many of which were created by the fiat and bureaucracy of the British Empire or other colonialist machinations - be “refactored” in line with the “SOLID” software design principles. In this post I take the SOLID principles and try to transform them into the language of national identity establishment.

SOLID and Refactoring

In my [previous post about “Connectography”][prev] I noted that one of Khanna’s Big Ideas is that:

Many nation-states are held together by fiat or tradition but have no real internal attraction to one another: we should let these break apart or break them apart e.g. Iraq, Yugoslavia.

As a programmer I knew exactly what Khanna was saying. How many times did I, as a beginner in object-oriented programming, allow a class to stand unchanged because its functions had “always gone together?”

I began steering away from those negligent practices when I learned the [SOLID principles][SOLID] listed by “Uncle” Bob Martin. These five simple dicta set a new bar for how (new) code ought look. But how to go about fixing the historical messes? For that, I read Martin Fowler’s book [Refactoring][] where “refactoring” is described as:

…a controlled technique for improving the design of an existing code base. Its essence is applying a series of small behavior-preserving transformations, each of which “too small to be worth doing”. However the cumulative effect of each of these transformations is quite significant.

Source

Having learned from both of these inspirations I was able to methodically pull apart complexity and limit its creeping in. So in software, so, too, in nations.

One of the points Parag Khanna brought up in “Connectography” is that mobility is a key to keeping influential cities thriving. The pointed example he pitches (around page 122) is that of the city of Detroit (a city I love) which, at one time, was the wealthiest city in America. As the automobile industry slackened, the talent largely stayed put hoping that patriotic sentiment (“BUY AMERICAN”) or trade protectionism would restore their coffers and their civic trajectory. That, of course, did not happen. Hondas and Toyotas were bought by the boatful and the future for Detroit diminished with each bill of lading.

But is there a lesson for us that we can take from this error? Let’s take a look at the systems they had built in the early 80’s in Detroit:

• early robotics-based industrial work
• industrial development practices expertise
• labor facilitation expertise

In 2016 all of those skills are valuable expertise that are, in essence, locked in an old industry and which will share the fate of it (lest they find a way to unbundle themselves).

But what might have history looked like if the experts had realized that their host incubator was not necessary to their success earlier?

• …WHAT IF those engineers who built the assembly lines had encoded better logistics systems in software (to rival Germany’s SAP)
• …WHAT IF those engineers who built auto-assembly robotics had roboticized the port of SF, the port of Oakland (there might be dock work in SF), been influential in the upgrades to the Panama Canal, Corpus Christ’s port, the Nicaragua canal?
• …WHAT IF….that expertise had allowed the first generation of port (re-)builders to win contracts in central America in the late 90’s instead of Chinese competitors in the 2010’s?

If that were the case I could imagine many snowy Monday mornings in Detroit leading to direct flights to Managua, Corpus, or linking to a hop to Shanghai. And the reverse could be true as well: Detroit could have become the home of process optimization, industrial flow analysis and the flights (and capital, and residents) would be flowing in to offset the decline in automotive manufacturing dominance.

Based on my reading of Khanna there are two principal institutional changes that could have helped and one cultural change. Ease of mobility, ease of spot education, and the unwinding of American exceptionalism. I’ll start with the last first, after the jump.

When I reflect upon the root causes of

• Some of my most momentous choices
• The events we call “chance” or “coincidence”
• My greatest regrets

I discern again and again some socio-cultural force that I’ve never been able to identify. It has loomed there, just out of sight, just beyond description for as long as I’ve had the ability to do serious, adult-grade self-examination and feel serious, adult-grade remorse.

The words that I had to describe the mysterious force seemed to miss the mark. It wasn’t just “violence” or “homophobia” or “misogyny” or “jealousy” or “competition” or “bullying.” It was tinged with “rage” and “depression” and “isolation,” too. The force also made known to me that it wasn’t going to be a transient moment or series of moments like “heartbreak” or “grief.” It let me know that it was a system that would outlast any one man’s emotional state and would rule us until we stepped into our graves.

When I’ve talked to close friends about pivotal moments where it was there, whispering cues offstage, I’d often find them dismissing it as a regional quirk, hangover of patriarchal Abrahamaic religious indoctrination, or post-Boomer narcissistic greed-culture tenet. But to classify it didn’t provide me relief or insight. Still unresolved, recently I’ve found myself triggered when hearing of friends’ kids encountering it. But I still could not name it until Lauren found its secret name and told it to me.

This force that made so much of how and where I grew up hard to survive and intolerable to me as an adult is called: domination-based masculinity. And here’s the rub, it’s been ruining all of our lives for a very long time.

Named by Mark Greene, this short video shows how it works.

pic.twitter.com/o2RmmBPzp5

— Mark Greene (@RemakingManhood) July 31, 2021

The upshot is that boys are policed from a very early age to “be tough” and “not like women” thus femininity and emotional availability are disparaged. In an effort to scourge the hated woman-ness out of themselves, boys are taught that scourging woman-kind (physically, emotionally, sexually) is a behavior that can be used to augment their masculine esteem.

I was walking down Broadway the other day and a trio of teen boys were talking and walking when one of them copped his best New York accent — something between the average resident of Pachogue, Long Island and Tony Soprano — and said “I got a guy.” His friends laughed, and the rest of their interaction carried on.

I think “having a guy” reveals something profound about New York City. Here we are, piled upon each other in great density. How is the customer to be served when those who can provide service e.g.:

• Those on the floor at a department store
• Those behind the glass cases at a jeweler’s
• Those across the counter at a fast-food joint
• Those pulling box after box of shoes “from the back”

face a staggering volume of customers?

The paths forward are:

• Premium service
• The living Hell of Clerktown™
• Having / Being a Guy ¹

I have always admired the English culture of organization, communication, and frankly, civilization. There are some definite low-points (Boer War, Partition of India, Partition of the Mideast, Partition of the Kingdom’s Islands), but there is some attention paid to how things “ought be done for the welfare of all.”

For example, pregnant women get an adorable pin (UK: “badge”) consistent with the look and feel and design aesthetics of the Underground that say “baby on board” which lets everyone know, “Hey, give up the seat” — even in the weeks and months when it’s not quite so obvious. Experiencing the anti-case in NYC and France, it’s a good idea.

I also admire that the English take the tube’s visual monopoly as an opportunity to extol civic virtues.

Like most American children, I was taught cursive writing around 4^th grade. I was then obligated to write in it, and my poor teachers were forced to read it, through the 8^th grade. As students entered high school, we were deemed intelligent enough to decide which handwriting scheme we preferred. All of that, of course, was becoming moot by the rising prevalence of electrical typewriters and computers. But when my school-supply-kit-issued Bic ball-point pen reached paper, I opted for print letter-forms.

But somewhere in my 20’s, I rediscovered cursive and now primarily write in it with a fountain pen (when I’m not at a keyboard). And when I saw linguist John McWhorter take cursive to task in a recent Times article, I saw both a pragmatic (wrist pain and hand cramp) and an aesthetic reason that it should remain in curricula.

I think the best American novels that I have ever read are the following:

1. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952); The Post-War Generation’s Great American Novel
2. Underworld by Don DeLillo (1996); The Boomers’ Great American Novel
3. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1997); Gen X’s Great American Novel
4. James by Percival Everett (2024); The Millennials’ Great American Novel

But what makes a book especially American and why these?