Rapid-Fire 2026
Quick, imperfect takes for the New Year
My writing on here has taken the think-piece form. I’ve loved using the writing process to learn, to reveal, to arrive somewhere I didn’t expect. But working through ideas also means a growing weight of topics I want dive into and share, but can’t give sufficient space to do them justice. Other priorities—launching an advisory practice, client work, and writing elsewhere—means I haven’t published in months, compounding the feeling of lack of productivity. This may be a familiar feeling for writers.
Perhaps I don’t need to go on a writing journey every time I publish. What follows is an experiment: a collection of quick, imperfect takes. Some of these will become longer pieces; I’d love to hear which ones resonate.
Abundance
Abundance is not “Plenty”. The word choice was intentional, and if that aligns with Joel Osteen, so be it
The most exciting & resonant version/vision of Abundance from the book is as a New Political Order, as a post-NeoLiberal proposition, and alternative to Trump’s transactional/zero-sum worldview
That version of Abundance can be summarized as something beyond the status quo, drawing from imagination, perhaps relying on something like faith in collective capacity
That potential for something beyond is central to any Dem proposition of countering Baumol’s Cost Disease with Wright’s Law, i.e. lowering costs via automation, robotization & efficiency, which means impacting traditional Dem base voters (service workers, unions)
The opposite of Abundance is not stagnation, but Sustainability (riffing on a discussion with Bryan Boyer)
Embracing Abundance runs counter to many embedded liberal/progressive instincts. For instance the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle mantra I was raised on in school may be pushed aside with automated sorting, resource extraction, and self-sustaining pyrolysis/waste-to-energy
Energy abundance (something like 10Xing current generation) is the cornerstone of any abundance vision
Looking beyond Abundance, to all the publicly-minded efforts, it’s possible to see the contours of a New/neo-progressivism movement
Autonomy/Mobility
(as I laid out a decade ago!) The AV-pedestrian problem has not been solved—game theory suggests the pedestrian will win out. The probable path for pedestrian-heavy, non-jaywalk enforcing places (i.e. great urbanism!) is stronger mode separation—limiting AVs to particular corridors and areas, and pedestrianizing more places. These perhaps lead, inexorably, to autonomous buses rather than cars in dense urbanism.
We’re living in the visions of autonomy from a decade ago—it’s just being driven by people (shopping, deliveries, ridehail)
Most current visions of autonomy imagine more of the same, easier, longer highway driving (Tesla Self-driving), and more ridehail (Waymo). The more interesting, and both most dystopian & utopian visions are around what new types of travel & paradigms autonomy enables—extreme commutes, mobile offices/homes/factories, bustling overnight freight, free & ubiquitous buses
AVs are the perfect entry point for implementing robust digital road pricing schemes
Power Broker(s)
The opening pages of the Power Broker paint a stark picture of Moses’ impact, most jarringly in the figure of 500,000(!) people displaced. The societal pendulum has effectively swung so far that we’ve collectively agreed that something close to zero is the right amount of active displacement—Of course, this ignores people displaced because of affordability! But to perhaps again achieve bigger things, we as a society need to get comfortable with 5,000 or even 50,000 people being displaced (with good landing spots!) to achieve great things
Robert Moses was the poster child for “deliverism.” Also, relatedly, a case study in power seeking power, and power corrupting
The biggest nagging hypothetical from reading the book is what would’ve happened if Moses had used his ‘prodigious’ mind & talents to building subways and trains
Renderings of the unbuilt Robert Moses NYC highways, clarifies how utterly destructive they would have been to the City fabric, and New Yorkers are very fortunate they did not come to pass. Other cities are not so fortunate
Much of our current stasis can be explained by planners and advocates overlearning the example of Westway’s demise, framing it as the old highway-building mode defeated by attrition and legal challenge, and saving the subways. It was a mediocre project that failed for the wrong reason. In most cases, funding for failed highway projects doesn’t get diverted to urbanism! (something worth reintegrating into federal transportation bills!)
Digital Government / Transformation
Nationally, there are no holistic government digital transformation efforts worth emulating. Only a few green shoots (incl. Boston MONUM, PA Permitting, Portland OCDS). None of these compare to digitization-as-mission international examples: Estonia, Ukraine, Singapore, Abu Dhabi - though it’s notable that these have particular contexts—digital defense, anti-corruption, and strong nation-state governance—that don’t port easily
DOGE taught us much more about (the lack of protection of) norms than either the need for ‘efficiency’ in government, nor technology’s ability to deliver it
The adage was that Europeans trusted governments but not corporations, while Americans trusted corporations, but not government. Much of that trust in corporations has evaporated too, and we’re now in a low-trust environment
Digital deliverism, that is showing that government is able to provide timely, meaningful digital services, is one path for rebuilding trust in government
Nearly all discussions of AI into government itself are focused on first-order implications—what can the AI systems do—rather than the much more interesting and important second-order and beyond: what does AI enable?
Given current conceptions of U.S. governance, it’s challenging to contemplate a government that heavily regulates social media and/or AI. But to that sentiment I remind that heroin and cocaine were, for years, legal substances!
Zoning
We should ultimately expect AI (specifically reasoning LLMs) to be able to interpret zoning regulations perfectly for any (singular) site, if fed the right text sources (just like any legal text)
However, to conduct analyses across properties and jurisdictions requires a standard data schema
Both camps of zoning criticism are wrongheaded: zoning shouldn’t be abolished nor should we primarily pursue “better” zoning. The aim for zoning should instead be to make it entirely invisible
At its core, Zoning is market shaping by local governments. This reality is very poorly understood by practitioners
Rail/Transit
General inability to build rail remains the poster-child for U.S. construction incapacity & inefficiency
Montreal’s success in efficient transit construction suggests the U.S.’s (and the English-speaking world’s) consistent 10X cost multiple over comparable metro systems is at least as much due to American incuriosity as exceptionalism
Countering this would require either importing talent & trainsets internationally, while unwinding Buy-American provisions OR concertedly developing a national industry
To develop U.S. transit/train/HSR construction would require a CHIPS- or RFC-style all-of-government market shaping/crafting effort
Developing that would be a worthwhile policy effort! With public value at least equal to the capital expenditure
Current Events
“Future Shock” remains the best description of our individual and societal state in the face of rapid technological advancement
The current President’s hold on our attention shows we’ve lost; a freedom from politics
Constant (& mostly manufactured) polycrisis robs us of pondering and shaping the future on any front, including technological
There's so much in here I would love to hear more about!