How to Fix a Country in 12 Days

Over the past two weeks, Pennsylvania turned an infrastructure project into a sporting event. It livestreamed construction. It made heroes of tradespeople. It brought in local sponsors. It took the internet’s blessing and curse – its ability to firehose attention onto seemingly small things – and used it to its advantage.

ohn Podesta, a senior advisor to the Biden White House on clean energy, put it bluntly: “We got so good at stopping projects that we forgot how to build things in America.”

The smart plans are failing. We need a much dumber plan.

Let’s go over the top, embrace the reality of modernity, and do something useful with it.

Simply cutting out the process works in rebuilds. A concentrated group of people want their highway back more than they want a new thing, loss aversion and all that, and disaster brings the attention and will needed to push things through. Even California was able to rebuild quickly after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, reopening the Santa Monica F

We could bemoan the fact that things have come to this, or we could steal the tricks and channel all of that weird energy into something productive, something that makes peoples’ everyday lives better.

A big part of the reason America can’t build like we used to is that we’re victims to the tyranny of the minority. A small group of people with strong opinions, and a lot of free time, can block things that are supported by the majority of the population. The people who are willing to show up to community meetings have an outsized say in what gets

There is so much energy on the internet directed at so much dumb shit; I promise you, if we tap into even a moderate amount of that, we’ll get the eyeballs.