That we are both simultaneously intelligent and absolutely stupid.

We built a modern technological society for all of humanity yet set it up to only benefit a handful of individuals and convinced ourselves that this is acceptable.

The handful of beneficiaries are intelligent enough to lead but dumb enough to think that this is sustainable. The rest of us are intelligent enough to live and work in this society yet dumb enough to never want to do anything about it.

I love that it shows that humans naturally wish to congregate and aid each other.

I hate that it allows the worst types of people to gain influence because humans in general are easily misguided and manipulated.

I love that we all have to be accountable to each other, give and take philosophy, which makes a society going. At the same time, I hate to be accountable to People who doesn’t give a shit about the rest of us.

Favourite: civic infrastructure. I turn a lever and safe water comes out. If my entire city uses the bathroom at the same time, nobody gets cholera. I’ll be warm this winter. I can bike on a flat path to a lake owned by the public, then charge my phone for it at free and browse hexbear instead of looking at that lake. When infrastructure works and meets our core needs it’s a miracle of collectivism.

Least favourite: Atomisation and the idea of isolated “first/second/third place”. There’s no reason a park can’t be as educational as a university class or as enriching as a wilderness or as productive as a homestead, other than we choose to develop it for one limited set of recreation use. Downtown cores don’t need to be hyper-commercial, hostile spaces that are unsafe to walk around but we develop them for the benefit of capital instead of pedestrians. The ideal garden city is intensely focused on critical geography and situating people in a larger socioecological project. The lines should be blurred between grey and green space, between commercial/residential/social, and between human/natural enrichment as much as possible. It’s all the worse when you bring in the separation of town and country with those rural communities alienated from civic infrastructure and cultural participation and the urban communities alienated from touching something other than grass.