11. Borders and Bridges 🔗

1/ Tricky question: what is the opposite of a “border”? The typical fearful-right idea of a non-border is a vague fear of a massive flood of people, suggesting a dam-like containment of pressure. The idea of developing world “overpopulation” encourages this mental model.

2/ This sort of human flooding does happen on occasion, but generally it takes an unbelievable kind of pressure. The India-Pakistan partition is an example. 5 million flooded in 1 direction, 6 million in the other, with 1 million dead.

3/ But this sort of massive social disruption is rare. In practice borders are places where you disconnect from one social graph to connect to another. Usually via a social “bridge” like a migration “chain”.

4/ Humans are far more social than we realize. Migration is not isolated atomized things flowing anarchically along a pressure gradient. It is more like a careful, minimal kind of making and breaking of bonds.

5/ Even under extreme stress — climate, war, ethnic cleansing — humans try to move in ways that preserve as much social graph integrity as they can, and quickly create new graph connections to replace lost ones. It’s like osmosis or electrical charge conduction.

6/ In fact “flood” like refugee crises are generally trying to flee conditions that break bonds and atomize humans. The abstract flow gradient is from graph-tending to graph-preserving places.

7/ Since most of the land on the planet is claimed behind some border, border bound territories tend to be co-extensive with high integrity graphs. The “dam and flood” metaphor is really bad at capturing this. It’s more like piles of spaghetti in a 2-compartment container.

8/ A normal human border is not a dumb partition but a sort of graph theoretic transformation function where trade in graph capital happens, like forex transactions. You show social capital in one subgraph to show you can transition beneficially to another.

9/ So to answer my original question, the opposite of a border is a sort of graph-destroying, alienating, identity-erasing interstitial place. Social graph terra terra nullius. People abandoned by all social graphs. People fallen through cracks.

10/ You know the best place to find an unborder? It’s not at national borders but in the hearts of cities, which are full of what I call human graph garbage, in both computer science and social senses. People cut off from all social graphs.

11/ Around the world, refugee communities are known for stronger than normal graph integrity, not weaker. They may be geographically homeless but they are socially the opposite of homeless. They are like arks.

12/ That’s why they form ethnic enclaves with weirdly narrow versions of their origin cultures. There is a reason “Indian” food in the US is mostly Punjabi food. Or why half the Uber drivers in Seattle are Ethiopian or Somalian.

13/ My point with this thread is not to provide any specific commentary on the border crap going on now but to point out that the “order keeping out chaos” mental model of ethnonationalism is really really toxic and sociological nonsense.

14/ With climate change pressure this sort of thing is going to get far worse, not better. So if we don’t upgrade our mental models of migration, we risk destroying vast amounts of cultural capital trying to preserve itself.

15/ All the varied cuisines you can enjoy in any major city are just the tip of the iceberg of what gets saved/preserved/redundantly replicated through migration. This is planetary scale distributed computation on an unreliable hard drive.

16/ I think most countries in the world have some understanding of this: that for thousands of years the world has been based on a system of interdependent cultural capital insurance against local disruptions that relies on migration calculus

17/ I suspect American-born natives don’t get the enormous value of this system because they’ve so far enjoyed a history bereft of outbound migration memories/narratives. It’s only inbound Ellis island stuff which makes them feel benevolent.

18/ The 2 domestic migration stories most Americans know — Underground Railroad and Grapes of Wrath — just don’t convey the significance and richness of population movements in human history. Americans have never had to*leave* America in large numbers.

19/ To me this means this is not a nation of immigrants. It is a nation that is built on remembering only the “gracious host” side of one half of immigration: arrivals. The US has NO sense of departures.

20/ First-generation immigration stories are only half-told because they half-heard. Americans ask, “why did you come to America?” expecting to hear flattering things about their own society. They are rarely curious about the stories of departures. Why?

21/ I know why: the unspoken assumption is “well of course you wanted to leave because it’s a shithole country compared to Great America, who wouldn’t?”

22/ So curiously, even as immigrant stories get woven into the American story, it’s curiously half-woven. Except for Albion’s Seed people who supply an origin myth, no other story is welcome in the American grand narrative.

23/ So is it any surprise that American culture is curiously isolationist and not in any sort of real dialogue with other cultures? Even the tightest and most unavoidable of dialogues — with Spanish culture — is one sided.

24/ Hell, on the west coast, despite all the Spanish names and obvious signs that the base layer here is Spanish (there are is;ands near Seattle called San Juan islands for a reason), the remarkable mythology here is that Hispanics are the aliens.

25/ You don’t even have to go as far as talking about Native American cultures to note the fundamentally brutal erasure-oriented nature of American culture. Americanism in that respect is like a harsh young religion, like Christianity or Islam in their early centuries.

26/ You dont so much migrate to America as you convert under pressure, subtle or not, to Americanism. Often due to dynamics set in motion by American economic evangelism and crusading worldwide.

27/ This is a terribly impoverished way to inhabit the planet. For 300 years, the excuse was geographic isolation. Today that’s no excuse.

28/ I’m particularly distressed and sensitive to this stuffbecause I’m not a “crisis” migrant. My parents live in India, I’m free to go back and forth, stay as connected as I want, have the best of both worlds.I know what crisis-migrants lose because I still have it

29/ So when I see America being cruel to people who are at high risk of losing half of their cultural beings, it feels like a spectacle of willful cultural violence and really bad global citizenship.

30/ It feels especially selfish coming from a country that could wage 2 world wars and a Cold War at a safe remove and then reshape entire continents to its liking in the aftermath, without even gaining the label of “colonial power”

31/ For almost 100 years, America has been free to take the best of the rest of the world, be mostly insulated from troubles caused both by itself and other powers. Arrange a planet’s worth of raw materials, carbon-sink forests, markets etc for its benefit.

32/ And now it has the gall to act like the injured exploited party, take its resources and retreat behind its isolationist borders, loudly claiming it is the rest of the world that is “ungrateful”? Takes a very special, heavily edited sense of world history to do that.

22a addendum/ Basically every microstory of immigration is read in a self-serving, other-demonizing way by Americans, so of course the world looks like a demonic place delivering half-demons to the shores, some of whom are to be “saved” and “redeemed” by evangelical Americanism