Thread by @JuliusGoat

2. VALUE

So, the street in front of my house is a part of a system of streets—a *natural human* system, a delivery system for the natural values provided by human community.

Every system has observable qualities.

armoxon.com/2020/10/street…

If one is curious about a system, I think it’s useful to observe and catalogue that system’s qualities.

So I think I’ll do that.

Remember, this system in which I take part is natural. If you trace it back far enough, it’s established on natural resources and values that nobody bought, nobody sold, nobody made. Wide river or vast reservoir or shoreline, rich topsoil, natural minerals, teeming forest.

And so a natural system of humans sprang up, which believed it would need a human where my house is, and I became that human. I give my house value and meaning, and also my street. And I give my neighbor’s house value and meaning, and they similarly enrich mine.

This value the streets provide: it’s shared.

Shared.

Your street exists, right now. Maybe you can look up from your screen and see it, maybe not, but it’s there, ready to offer gifts of transportation and interconnectivity from your house to the borders of your country and beyond.

Do this: close your eyes. Picture your street.

Now: picture the potential for transportation it provides. What does that potential look like? I mean the physical thing. Does it have physical form? Is the form you chose a metaphor?

If you’ve seen the potential for transportation that all the interconnected streets provide, let me know. I never have.

This shared value the streets provide: it’s invisible.

Invisible.

It’s the context from which everything else springs. Any trip I take, no matter how far I go, begins with my street, and continues as it does because of the existence of other streets. If the streets weren’t there, I’d be far less likely to get there, or to even know they exist.

I may go to many different places, but what places I go, and how I get to those places, is largely determined by the placement of streets. So this is another way that streets resemble the whole of a natural human system, which provides all the context for all my potential action.

This shared, invisible value the streets provide: it’s foundational.

Foundational.

And: imagine my neighbors weren’t there. Imagine mine was the only occupied house on the block. My residence on an otherwise deserted street would start to seem like a bizarre curiosity, or at least the emptiness of all the other houses would seem to me an ominous sign.

It would be difficult for me to sell such a house—far more difficult than it would be for me to sell the exact same house in a fully occupied neighborhood.

This leads me to an odd conclusion: my neighbors lend *more* value and meaning to *my* house than I do, even though they don’t live in it.

And even as we lend our street meaning, all the other people in the city lend *more* meaning to us and our street than we lend to them, even though none of them live on *our* street.

And this favorable unbalance exists in the relationship between each of those other people and their own streets, and all the other streets—including mine—that are not *theirs.*

So, in fact, the more I’m able to grow from this foundational soil of shared value, the more I owe to it.

A city of a million can do more than a city of a hundred. Isn’t that odd? The more there are to share, the more the system generates to be shared.

This shared, invisible, foundational value I derive from my street—it’s generative.

Generative.

There is no procedure set for this value, this meaning. There’s no account into which this value and meaning will be deposited, no wait time for the receipt.

It’s just there, automatically.

We can’t not get this value. They can’t not give it. How could you live in a city and not live around its streets, or benefit from their existence?

And the people who live in the city don’t live there in order to give our street value. It’s not done through any intentional act on their part. As long as we live here instead of somewhere else, the streets will go on delivering us the value of living here.

And if we go somewhere else, the streets there will deliver similar value in the same way. We seem to have a shared life in some mysterious way, which finds its center-point simply by existing. The value and meaning we give to each other is connected in way that is inextricable.

This shared, invisible, foundational, generative value I derive from my street—it’s automatic and inextricable.

Automatic. Inextricable.

How interesting.

Remember, this natural system in which I take part is human. It involves humans. Humans have taken something that naturally occurs, and they built something around it. In so doing, they’ve taken what was natural and made it something else.

It’s new, my street. When the construction crew showed up, they put a street where no street had previously been.

However, my city was founded around 1840 or so, long before construction crews knew how to pave for cars; long before cars, in fact.

Many streets in my city—the very streets that lend my street more value than my street lends them back—have been there for quite a while, and were, at some point, modernized.

And: Streets need to change over time, to be improved. Sometimes a new street must appear to meet a new opportunity, or that opportunity will never be realized.

My city was wiser than that. My city maintained and improved its streets, and so became a modern city.

The shared, foundational, generative, automatic, inextricable value that comes to me from all my city’s streets, delivered all the way down to my street … it can be changed, enhanced. It’s configurable.

Configurable.

My city decided to modernize its streets—a reflection of their already-existing value, an investment in the continuance of that value. A belief that there would be, in the future, people to use those streets, enjoy that value, and naturally provide value through their presence.

And so, any number of people did the dance that people do, when they temporarily manifest the collective will of a group. Representatives chosen, decisions made. Then the city planner, then the foreman and workers, then the residents and shops.

And so there they are, older streets made modern, climbing up and down hills, winding around parks, tracing the courses set down by others, long before I was born.

Taken together they connect a community; lend value to all the other streets just as the other streets lend value to them.

They lend value to *my* street.

My street wouldn’t ever have been built, if the older streets, modernized and improved, hadn’t been there to suggest the possibility of my street.

The people who put those oldest streets there didn’t do it for me. Yet I am here.

There was no intentional act at the time to enrich me specifically. Yet I am enriched.

In some way, without intending to, I’ve inherited the value of those streets, laid down 150 years ago. And there’s literally nothing I can do to divest myself of that inheritance. It comes to me as naturally as the rain that falls on the roof—my roof.

Is it *my* rain?

I suppose you could look at it that way.

The shared, foundational, generative, automatic, inextricable, configured value of my street … it’s inherited.

Inherited.

The configurations made to this natural human system of streets affect me based on where I live, not on what I think the streets should do.

If *the city decides* I am the highest priority and my street is of greatest worth and should receive only the best, they I will receive only the best. And, if *the city decides* that I am nothing and my street is worthless and deserves nothing at all, I will receive nothing.

So this inheritance has nothing to do with intention. I receive it even if it accrued years, decades, centuries before I was born. Nor is the value I gather from that inheritance something I can separate from myself.

I receive it so effortlessly, it would be possible for me to receive it without even being aware of it, as a tree received nutrients from its roots without a thought to fungi connecting it to its forest, the way its leaves receive rain without a thought to anything like a cloud.

To recap: My street is part of a natural human system in which I partake, established by a will in which I partake, to deliver value.

This value is shared, invisible, foundational, generative, automatic, inextricable, configurable, and inherited, delivered to me not because of anything I did; delivered all because there was a need for a me, and I have become that me.

How interesting. armoxon.com/2020/10/street…

And I wonder: how have we configured our streets? How are we configuring them even now?

And I wonder: what else might I have inherited through this configuration?

What other good?

What other *harm?*

What I like about the street metaphor is, it's not a metaphor.

armoxon.com/2020/10/street…