My Vision: A New City

In Paul Graham’s famous essay Cities and Ambition, there’s this idea that some cities are centers for some type of ambition, and when you come to one of those cities, you can feel the message the city is sending to you. For example, the message that you can feel in New York is “You should be richer,” while Berkeley’s is “You should live better,” Pa... See more

Technology is changing one of the most powerful forces in shaping society: ambition. What the most ambitious people choose to do with their lives has a profound impact on society, the economy and culture. It’s changing, fast.First, that digital technology is the most recent in a series of ‘technologies of ambition’ that have enabled ambitious peopl... See more

“The ultimate question that I have: how can we create cities that are big enough to give people economic opportunity, but small enough to give people love and others in their lives that touch their hearts?”

My humbler assertion is that 2020 has punctured my confidence that the internet cannot encroach on the benefits of urban density and proximity. Going forward, many fledgling companies may agree, as they find that the city in the cloud essentially acts as a more accessible version of the city on the Earth, eerily reproducing its forces of agglomerat... See more

However, when it comes to the current internet we have, the city where we live digitally, I can’t feel any message of ambition. Yes, Amazon told me, “You should buy more stuff,” Facebook told me, “You should talk to your friends,” Netflix told me, “You should have more entertainment.” But the Internet itself has no strong message, but a lot of nois... See more