Chris Brown's new book: walking through dystopia
I welcomed Christopher Brown onto Techtonic this week to discuss, among other things, the house he built in the edgelands of Austin, Texas. The custom-designed structure is separated into two halves, each covered with a living roof of grasses and other plants:
Chris’s journey from dotcom tech lawyer to owner of this patch of East Austin greenery is covered in his new book A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places, which I heartily recommend despite (or partially because of) the difficulty of describing it.
Part autobiography, part travelogue, part nature writing, the book meditates on the effects of our growth-at-any-cost tech economy on the non-human species that live, and somehow survive, alongside us. This is familiar territory for fans of Chris's sci-fi novels, like Failed State, which warned of coming dystopia. Now here we are reading about it in non-fiction, present tense. Chris writes in Natural History, for example, about living next door to Elon Musk’s Tesla Gigafactory – something we talk about in the Techtonic interview.
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But there’s hope in this new book, too, telling stories of people – and animals, and plants, and ecosystems and communities – all finding a way to adapt to the ravages of the tech-fueled growth machine. Life endures, even if it has to bend a little – or a lot – in its resilience.
There’s no way back to Eden, Chris reminds us. For that matter, there never was an Eden, contrary to the colonial dreams on this continent starting 400-odd years ago. All we have is what’s in the land under our feet today: a marbled blend of beauty and pollution, majesty and microplastics. Our choice is either to act as stewards, putting in the work toward healing, or merely to succumb to the machine.
My conclusion is the same that I've voiced here in the newsletter, and on Techtonic, over the years: no matter what we intend to do, the first step is to gain awareness. Chris Brown reminds us of what we’ve inherited, and what’s at stake as we look to the future.
Listen to the interview
Here’s my Techtonic interview with Chris Brown:
• Download the show as a podcast
In our conversation Chris describes his walks into the urban wilderness, some of the more intense encounters he’s had along the way, and how he and other activists brought Tesla to the negotiating table to push back on the Gigafactory.
One other pointer I’ll highlight here is Chris’s email newsletter, Field Notes. Every week – I’ve subscribed for years now – Chris shares his experiences walking through the urban wilderness. Usually these rambles take place around his property in Austin, but occasionally he writes in from other cities – once from my own neighborhood in Manhattan – always with lyrical descriptions of his sightings and encounters with nature. I find it a helpful reminder that even in our tech-saturated lives, with screens and devices constantly asking for attention, there’s another source of life, all around us, that deserves to be seen.
An invitation
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Recently on the Forum
Here are a few recent threads on the Forum:
- Tech companies want a surveillance chatbot in your car: a roundup of recent Big Tech privacy intrusions in cars, and what's coming next
- Your Venmo transactions may be public – for surveillance: discussing revelations from TechRadar and Consumer Reports about Venmo and PayPal settings
- Evolv surveillance comes to the subway: charting the six-month arc (and the likely failure) of a surveillance platform in New York and other cities
- Fun Stuff and Good experience games threads both have new entries, too.
Until next time,
-mark
Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good
Email: mark@creativegood.com
Podcast/radio show: techtonic.fm
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