I almost didn’t get this sent out today.
Admittedly, I allocated much of the time I generally spend writing these each week to doom scrolling Twitter (I can’t bring myself to say “X” seriously) and reading fatalistic and depressing takes on the loss my beloved Baltimore Ravens suffered this weekend.
What started as a few minutes in a group DM with some friends became far more time than I care to admit.
Because that’s what happens on social media.
You know this. We all do at this point. We’re all hooked on the content slot machines on the light-up rectangles in our pockets, and it’s sucking the life out of us. And yet we can’t quit cold turkey, because so much of our actual lives (particularly our work lives) take place on those rectangles and the apps inside.
So we put up with record high rates of anxiety and depression in young people because in some ways, we don’t really have a choice.
In an increasingly spread out, remote world, we have no where else to go but online.
Our only solution is to build alternatives. And great neighborhoods and cities are those alternatives.
Work, entertainment, socializing/community, shopping, and networking. Other than “mindlessly scrolling into oblivion” (which usually follows one of these five categories), this is the vast majority of what the digital world is for. And every one of those things can be facilitated through a better built environment. We can build places that give us real reasons to get off our screens, look up, and get out into the world. And we must.
The goal of “scroll-defeating cities” is not to put an end to the internet. Many great things (such as the friendships I’ve made with many of you) have and will continue to come from such an incredible technology, such as access to people, jobs, education, and so many other things we’d never have otherwise had access to.
But we’ve chosen to invest most of our ambition and building spirit into the digital world, leaving us hostage to an ecosystem that is proactively working to keep us addicted to it at the expense of our health, relationships and wellbeing.
And the only way out is creating an alternative that exists for more than simply a stubborn digital detox. If we tell people to “spend more time in the real world,” it won’t last very long if the real world kind of sucks. It must be engaging. It must provide a life worth living.:
Offices that aren’t soulless, but rather designed with beauty people so people want to come in to work
City-facilitated opportunities to meet and greet with local businesspeople and entrepreneurs
Restaurants that weren’t built for quick-and-easy, but with a sense of local pride and a desire to be a community asset
City blocks that invite a casual stroll without obvious risk of injury from an ignorant vehicle.
Things that are almost always guaranteed to produce better results in the different parts of our lives than praying for slot machine serendipity.
It may be too much of a stretch to actually gamify cities the way we have with social media - solving the ethical questions this poses is too tall a task for this newsletter - but even if we opt not to make cities literally addictive, the greatest places in the world are natural slot machines because they facilitate an organized chaos where you never know what you’re going to get.
New street vendors, buskers, and other variety are always waiting, and that makes every time you open your front door like "refreshing the timeline” of your own neighborhood.
But whether that happens comes from the choices we make in the built environment, in zoning, in tax incentives, and local investments. Let’s choose to declare a war on scrolling.