To Be Determined

I’ve been running a ton recently, I’m training for the Austin Marathon. Race day is in about four weeks! The regimen has my cardio up to par with that of my high school self, when I played tennis about 20 hours a week. It’s been much more enjoyable than I anticipated, and the allure of each run at this point in the training makes me – a longtime user of the distracting crutch that listening to music can be – ditch my headphones entirely somedays. I only keep them in now for the audio callouts of my stats real-time. How far I’ve gone to the nearest 16 feet, how much elevation I’ve climbed, my pace – I can schedule when this is delivered to me in the middle of my workout with absolutely no effort on my end.

I’ve been running with $12bn and some change in my ear. There are 31 ~800kg Navstar GPS satellites orbiting about 20,000km above, chasing after me in my daily hustle. Another $10bn+ of R&D spend and a few million in software infrastructure gave me the small device that I strap to my waist that talks with the GPS receivers and broadcasts another signal to the yet smaller piece in my ear. I paid about $1k for it all, if that. And it does other stuff too. This is incredible to me, seems almost like a fantasy. All of this, just so I can hear that I need to pick up the pace by 0:15 in the next two miles. It’s an invigorating feeling, to reflect on how powerful and complex something that I treat so casually truly is.

Scale is the arbiter of reality here; the works in the sky that talk to me on my runs wouldn’t be possible without the billions of people that rely on them, nor without the success our species has in communicating and iterating on complexity through space and time. But scale – really “the commons” – harms so much sometimes. The life on the planet is dying in droves because of our reach. What systems can we employ to create this wonderful scale, while constantly checking ourselves of the negative externalities? I don’t think anyone has an answer. It’s a terrible problem to consider. I’ve been looking for trailblazers here, and Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics provides an interesting, if not already mainstream, place to start.