An Ode To Bridges

iterated on sand castles: project link here

I walked past the Manhattan Bridge the other day. It made me stop and wonder. How many workers did it take to build the whole thing? How many setbacks? How did anybody get people to agree to actually go out into the water and lift each stone to its proper place? And It’s still standing. People drive across it every day without thinking about the decades of labor and trust required.

From this week’s reading/thought exploration, social media has proven to be less reliable than bridges. These apps are hardly bridges at all. They are connections that can be surveilled. Not just by Big Tech siphoning our data to sell to advertisers (though that’s not fun either). We surveil each other, scoping each other out. We have to evaluate each other and ourselves so we don’t waste time in an “awkward” connection. All of our time has to be optimized because we can store each moment, evaluate its effectiveness, and measure ourselves against The Market.

Every post is potential evidence. Every interaction is data. We perform for platforms, for audiences, for invisible moderators and visible mobs. We’ve become experts at concealing any part of ourselves that might be “too much” or “too sincere” or “cringe.” This is the opposite of the trust needed to build together. A lot of cringe goes into building bridges.

Yuval Harari talks about how cooperation through shared fictions—stories about nations, money, gods—is what allowed humans to dominate the planet. And he elucidates how the Big Stories work well, but there’s something he glosses over. Not all of the fictions were democratic agreements. They were imposed by whoever had the power to impose them.

The divine right of kings wasn’t a story all people necessarily believed. It was a narrative backed by swords. Today’s institutional narratives don’t hold up to scrutiny either—we just comply because they have the military, the police, the surveillance infrastructure. The “shared” part of shared fictions has always been more complicated than Harari makes it sound. Sometimes, it’s mutualistic cooperation. Other times, it’s mandatory compliance with better branding.

It’s hard to “imagine our way out” of this, as Harari notes. We’ve been shaped by all these systems throughout history. When your medium is designed for extraction and surveillance, it’s hard to imagine social interaction any other way. 

But Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings… Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” 

Different stories are possible. Building those stories takes so much work. Time and organizing and meeting people where they are. Building bridges—actual ones, metaphorical ones, mental ones. The Manhattan Bridge is not sexy (unless that’s your thing). It was dangerous, expensive, slow. But it required people trusting each other enough and trusting their institutions enough to keep working on something that will outlast them.

Real cooperation takes labor. Any possible social software needs to take this into account. A social media should factor in slowing down and shared tasks. I don’t think any single project can get this done willy nilly. But recognizing what we’re up against—the authority problem in our social fictions, the surveillance baked into our infrastructure—is at least a start. We can re-build.

And buddy, we’re gonna have to.