I

“I wasn’t even trying, like, I wasn’t spending any time or effort trying to manage risk on FTX,” Mr. Bankman-Fried said in an interview. Echoed a co-head of digital asset trading in Citigroup about FTX, “The thing that I picked up on immediately that was causing us heartburn was the complete lack of a risk-management framework that they could articulate in any meaningful way.”

Bankman-Fried has been quoted as saying he was “risk neutral.” Yet he conceded at his trial when asked, “Mr Bankman-Fried, did you make any mistakes along the way?”: “By far, the largest mistake was we didn’t have a dedicated risk management team.”

II

But how could FTX not have risk managers? To live is to manage risk.

Risk and risk managers existed long before risk management frameworks had been formalized. Think of how Christians operated in the 300 years between the time of Jesus up to formalizing the Scriptures in 4^th century AD at the Council of Nicaea. Can we think of Bank-Friedman and his FTX colleagues in the same way as these early Christians? What kind of really-existing risk management occurred (occurs) in the absence of risk management scriptures?

No wonder the guardians of current frameworks might want to convince us the FTX debacle has nothing to do with them.

I

If there were ever a term in need of greater specification and detailing, it’s “interconnected” (as in: “interconnected critical infrastructures”). Why?

Our research on a Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) of the US Coast Guard (USCG) found at least five major kinds of “interconnected” at work having sharp differences in the VTS’s real-time operations:

• Interoperability: Like the textbook interoperable energy utility (where electricity is crucial for the natural gas operations and vice versa), the VTS manages both vessel traffic and the
  regulated waterways that the vessels use (where managing the water ways affects management of the vessels and vice versa);

• Shared control variables: Water flows are a major control variable not just for VTS navigation purposes, but also for other infrastructures (most notably large water supplies and hydropower systems). This means that unexpected changes in how one infrastructure manages water flows can affect the management of the water flows by the other infrastructures (indeed, inter-infrastructural coordination around shared control variables was reported to us);

• Combined cycle of infrastructure operations: The USCG has a range of missions and operations, two of which are the VTS and the SAR (Search and Rescue) units. VTS combines with SAR to represent stages of this infrastructure’s operational cycle—normal operations and disrupted operations (VTS) along with failure and recovery (SAR). Not only are normal operations of the VTS already inter-infrastructural (by virtue of the shared control variables), but also the USCG’s Command and Control mission, including that for SAR, has an incident command facility and function for inter-infrastructural coordination during system failure and recovery;

• Variety of real-time configurations of interconnectivity: The VTS manages by virtue of resorting to a variety of interconnections with the vessels concerned. When VTS management of a common pool resource (the waterways) on behalf of inter-related users is disrupted or fails (e.g., because of defect in VTS communications), the interconnection configuration defaults over to the reciprocal one of vessel-to-vessel communication; and

• Inter-organizational linkages: USCG operations, including a VTS, are not only linked with other infrastructures through reliance on the Global Positioning System (GPS), but the Coast Guard’s position within the Department of Homeland Security makes it strategically located with respect to focusing on GPS vulnerabilities and strengths when it comes to the nation’s cyber-infrastructure.

Why do such differences matter?

II

Once different interconnectivities are taken seriously enough to compare and contrast, we better understand how major approaches to risk management of critical infrastructures can be mis-specified or downright misleading.

For example, what could seem more reasonable than a focus on system chokepoints and the most obvious way to do that is by focusing on where major infrastructures intersect or are adjacent to each other, right? Wrong.

It’s wiser is to focus on how spatially adjacent or collocated structures and facilities are actually managed within their respective infrastructure systems. It is possible that a system’s chokepoint may be elsewhere than at the site of collocated facilities, and that the element collocated could be lost without its respective system flipping into failure.

Just because elements from two or more infrastructures are spatially adjacent does not automatically mean those infrastructures have “to coordinate” unless, say, shared control variables, like electricity frequency and water flows, are involved.

1. Recasting infrastructure scale: distinguishing between international and global

2. Legal certainty in the Anthropocene

3. Infrastructure control rooms as crisis leadership

4. Infrastructure reliability as an intervening variable in the trade-off between equality and efficiency?

5. The infrastructure crisis no one talks about: suicide for fear of death

6. These two infrastructure systems are not to be confused for one another.

7. The interference of advanced telecommunications with major weather and climate forecasting: This is not a trade-off!

---

1. Recasting infrastructure scale: distinguishing between international and global

Most scholars attending to the material dimensions of politics either tend to focus on the local, looking at particular infrastructures such as a road, a dam, or a power grid, or at the global, often assessing the capitalist reordering of the world, but overseeing or ignoring the international (Salter 2015, xiii). This oversight, we argue, is not accidental, as infrastructures bring to the fore conceptual problems of space, scale, and agency that constitute the international as a distinct lens for academic inquiry, delineating it from the global, national, or local. . . Infrastructures, we argue, have a generative role in constituting the international as a distinct realm of inquiry that is different from the local and the global. However, we also show how the contemporary infrastructural boom blurs the very same distinctions that infrastructures once helped in setting up. . . .

In other words, infrastructures are at the heart of contention between dynamics of crafting the unevenness between societies that constitute the international on the one hand, and contributing to boundary erosions, driven by an expansionist capitalist logic, on the other hand. https://academic.oup.com/isr/article/26/4/viae046/7831266

An example?

The astonishing thing about the Chinese Communist Party is that it really doesn’t want to rule the world, nor even to be a second hegemonic pole countering the first one. What they want is to rule China – plus the places they feel they’ve lost, like Hong Kong, Taiwan – and to trade freely with other countries. They would genuinely like a multipolar world, in which they would share power with their trading partners, but the problem is that they have only one way of achieving that, which is to use their tech sector, in concert with big finance, to create something like the Bretton Woods system within the BRICs. This would involve fixed exchange rates, essentially a common currency backed by the yuan. It would be a major project, equivalent to the New Dealers planning the world order in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference. The rest of BRICs are not ready for it, as we can see from the huge tensions between India and China. Much of the global south is not ready for this kind of multipolarity either. . .But if they don’t start pushing in that direction, then they will be stuck with a bipolar US–Chinese world, with all the risks that this entails. https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/quantity-to-quality?pc=1643

Or in recasted terms: thus, the international dilemma of big tech and global finance.

---

2. Legal certainty in the Anthropocene

If I were asked to fill in the blank of “When conditions of uncertainty, complexity, conflict and incompletion are increasing, also increasing are pressures for _____________” I’d write: “legal certainty.” Others would instead, I believe, opt for something like: better political arrangements.

Which raises a question: How are the quests for politics and legal certainty inter-related?

II

By legal certainty, I mean not just contracts but licenses, public tenders, procurement agreements and the like. These exist in the domain of reliability professionals in critical infrastructures who don’t operate at the level of macro-principles for legal certainty nor do they operate at the street-level with respect to an individual license, tender or procurement issues. Their domain instead spans (1) from having to modify broad contract principles in light of inevitably different contexts (2) to those systemwide patterns and practices that, while they do not match macro-principles, nonetheless are emerging across a range of spatial and cultural contexts with respect to more reliable licenses, tenders and procurement.

Now, of course, each node–macro, micro, localized design scenarios, and systemwide patterns and practices–can be labelled “political.” That would, however, miss the point here: Differentiating the nodes and domains necessarily differentiates “politics”.

III

So what? At least one point becomes clearer when legal certainty is the pathway into discussing politics under turbulent times: Cities and municipalities, not just nations and the planet, become an obvious unit and level of analysis. It’s cities and their infrastructures that work to ensure legal compliance and bear legal liability in many of the contract specifics just mentioned.

Again, so what?

Take degrowth. Currently, the focus is on the economics and politics of degrowth at the national and international levels. Instead ask: What are the implications for legal certainty in cities that are environmental innovators through their infrastructures in the face of unpredictable change, including but not limited to degrowth strategies?

The answers (plural) would point to track records (plural) upon which then to assess the more fine-grained politics involved, let alone required.

---

3. Infrastructure control rooms as crisis leadership

When it comes to the crisis management literature, leadership is largely top down (officials direct) or bottom up (self-organizing crisis response), where networks are said to be vertical (hierarchical and chain of command) or horizontal (laterally interacting, official and unofficial).

We add a third category: control rooms. And not just in terms of Incident Command Centers during the emergency but already-existing infrastructure control rooms whose staff continue to operate during the emergency.

Paul Schulman and I argue infrastructure control rooms are a unique organizational formation meriting society protection, even during (especially during) continued turbulence. They have evolved to take hard systemwide decisions under difficult conditions that require a decision, now. Adding this third is to insist on real-time large-system management as the prevention of major failures and thus crises that would have happened had not control room managers, operators and support staff prevented them.

More, a major reason for this high reliability management in a large socio-technical system is to ensure that when errors do happen, they are less likely to be because of this management than to have been forced by other factors, particularly exogenous shocks. High reliability management seeks to isolate the field of blame and root causes, not least of which relate to “bad leadership.”

---

4. Infrastructure reliability as an intervening variable in the trade-off between equality and efficiency?

I

A good deal has been written arguing that economic efficiency and equality in economic well-being can move in the same direction (e.g., healthier people are more economically productive). The dominant view, however, remains the two are in The Big Tradeoff: more equality means less efficiency.

All this is curious from the perspective of the social sciences: Why would anyone take a movement in efficiency (or equality) to be caused by a movement in the other rather than caused by some intervening variable affecting both efficiency and equality independently?

II

More institutionally-informed economists say they do talk about intervening variables, at least in the form of secure property rights that underpin gains in economic efficiency. Yet those are no more second-order considerations. For when economists talk about the necessity of “secure property rights,” they rarely see any need to underscore a hugely reliable contract law, insurance and title registration infrastructure in place and “always on.”

Could it be, for example, that consumption is less unequally distributed than income precisely because critical infrastructures have been more reliable in the delivery and distribution of goods and services than they have been in the creation and generation of income opportunities for those doing the consuming?

---

5. The infrastructure crisis no one talks about: suicide for fear of death

I

What else can we do, senior executives and company boards tell themselves, when the entire business is on the line? In this emergency, we have to risk failure in order to succeed!

But what if the business is in a critical service sector? Here, when upper management seeks to implement risk-taking changes, they rely on middle-level reliability professionals, who, when they take risks, only do so in order to reduce the chances of failure. To reliability-seeking professionals, the risk-taking activities of their upper management look like a form of suicide for fear of death.

II

When professionals are compelled to reverse practices they know and find to be reliable, the results are deadly. Famously in the Challenger accident, engineers had been required up to the day of that flight to show why the shuttle could launch; on that day, the decision rule was reversed to one showing why launch couldn’t take place.

Once it was good bank practice to hold capital as a cushion against unexpected losses; capital security arrangements now mandate they hold capital against losses expected from their high-risk lending. Mortgage brokers traditionally made money on the performance and quality of mortgages they made; in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, their compensation changed to one based on the volume of loans originated but passed on.

Originally, the Deepwater Horizon rig had been drilling an exploration well; that status changed when on April 15 2010 BP applied to the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) to convert the site to a production well. The MMS approved by the change. The explosion occurred five days later.

In brief, ample evidence exists that decision rule reversals that required professionals in high-stakes situations to turn inside out the way they managed for reliability have instead led to system failures: NASA was never the same; we are still trying to get out of the 2008 financial mess and the Great Recession that followed; the MMS disappeared from the face of the earth.

Forcing cognitive flips on the part of reliability operators and operators—that is, exile them to conditions they do not know but are told they must nonetheless be skilled for—is the surest way to throw acid into face of high reliability management.

III

“But, that’s a strawman,” you counter. “Of course, we wouldn’t deliberately push reliability professionals into unstudied conditions, if we could avoid it.”

Really?

The oft-recommended approach, Be-Prepared-for-All-Hazards, looks like the counsel of wisdom. It however is dangerous if it flips mandates around to requiring emergency organizations to cooperate around many more variables, using information they will not have or cannot obtain, for all manner of interconnected scenarios, which if treated with equal seriousness, produce considerable modeling and analytic uncertainties.

---

6. These two infrastructure systems are not to be confused for one another.

A huge category mistake is committed when conflating (1) the unfolding and interrelated consequences on life, property and markets of, say, a hazardous liquids pipeline explosion on populations and property and (2) the explosion’s consequences for the interconnected critical infrastructure system (ICIS) for those hazardous liquids, which includes not just these pipelines and associated refineries, but also–just as significantly–the electricity and water infrastructures that the former depend upon in real time.

So what? To equate “the system” with the impacts of the spread and interaction of knock-on population-and-property consequences of failure (Cf) is to identify the chief problem as one the lack of systemwide management of Cf. It is as if many official units (jurisdictional, administrative) were not or are not doing their job.

Yet the ICIS is in fact manage in real time by the control rooms of the respective infrastructures (which in turn are regulated systemwide by fewer regulators of record). That is, “coordination” can be taking place within the ICIS around shared overlapping system control variables, albeit not (or to a lesser) extent in the “system” of interconnected impacts (Cfs) from the explosion.

---

7. The interference of advanced telecommunications with major weather and climate forecasting: This is not a trade-off!

The wireless industry quickly agreed to 5G standards and started building out infrastructure, requiring more spectrum real estate to support the growing demand. This led to a campaign by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to. . .sell bands of frequencies between 24–25 GHz to companies invested in 5G technology.

Terrestrial radio systems emitting 5G signals into this defined spectrum range, so close to the bands allocated for weather sensing (23.8– 24GHz), are a formidable threat to weather forecast and warning services. This is due to the much louder nature of 5G waves compared to those emitted by the atmosphere, and the relatively quiet movements of water vapor molecules that satellites observe. According to federal agencies and meteorologists worldwide, if the 5G signal remains contained between 24–25 GHz, it can coexist alongside existing meteorological operations. However, if it becomes louder, it will bleed over into the weather sensing space, drowning out any noise—invaluable for climate models—emitted by water particles. . . .

A 5G station transmitting at nearly the same frequency as water vapor can be mistaken for actual moisture, leading to confusion and the misinterpretation of weather patterns. This interference is particularly concerning in high-band 5G frequencies, where signals closely overlap with those used for water vapor detection. High-band 5G operates at much higher frequencies, typically in the millimeter-wave range (24GHz to 40GHz), allowing for faster data speeds but also presenting challenges in signal propagation. These high frequencies are absorbed more readily by atmospheric gases, including water vapor, resulting in significant signal attenuation. Consequently, the potential for interference with weather sensing is heightened in high-band G due to the proximity of its frequencies to those critical for water vapor detection.

https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/spatial-computing/604501/unpredictable-atmosphere/

Of course, economists will insist this represents a trade-off. It is no such thing. At least, not as long as society mandates high reliability both in advanced telecommunications and in advanced forecasting of weather and climate.

---

I

The policy narratives of interest to me are those that accept, rather than deny, the complexity and unpredictability of the immediate task environment. In this view, when a complex or unpredictable issue comes to be viewed as intractable, the challenge is to recast that issue more tractably without simplifying it. Does the recast but still complex narrative stick better? More formally, does the recast narrative–as if seen for the first time or afresh–open up options more tractable to policy analysis and management?

This means I am deeply sympathetic with approaches that take (1) complexity and its cognates seriously, (2) differentiate these in ways that do not deny their complexities, uncertainties and conflicts, but then go on to (3) reconfigure them as different policy narratives more amenable to conventional analysis and management (no guarantees!). The litmus test for a recast narrative is: Does it fit together this way as well?

II

An example is a recent article that, in order to get a better handle on public ignorance, parses it out into three components: radical uncertainty (including unknown unknowns), radical dissonance (disagreement and polarized conflict), and asymmetric knowledge (including power relations). I quote:

. . . political systems are complex systems inevitably exhibiting incomplete, imperfect and asymmetric information that is dynamically generated in society from actors with diverse life experiences, antagonistic interests and often profoundly dissonant views and values, generating radical uncertainty among political elites over the consequences of their decisions. Radical uncertainty, radical dissonance and power asymmetry are inescapable properties of politics. Good performance significantly depends on how political elites navigate through radical uncertainty to handle radical dissonance.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10659129241244715

For the authors, this task environment endorses an equally complex policy narrative. They “recast the problem of ignorance” by linking it to democratic performance: “The real problem of a democratic system is not about aggregating and measuring preferences with a view to a correct outcome, but it is about how democracies handle this dissonance, which always leaves some, if not most, preferences, ideas, values and norms unfulfilled at any given time”.

III

The question I have is, Does this democratic narrative stick? While the authors mention a case (a drinking water fiasco in Flint Michigan), the efficacy criterion of “Does it stick?” requires a review of multiple cases of this narrative and variation across cases.

“Does it stick when fitted together this way?” is an empirical question. It is also an eminently sensible one to ask of a planet of 8+ billion people providing opportunities for empirical generalizations based in large numbers.

Furthermore, the petitions held within the NRC [Ghana’s National Reconciliation Commission] archive highlight the agency of Ghanaians within this process. Far from ideas about good governance being enforced on Ghana from abroad through the implementation of a truth commission, the petitions submitted to the NRC demonstrated that many Ghanaians had developed ideas of what constituted a good and bad citizen based on their own lived experiences. The NRC archive represents a vast and rich collection not just of Ghanaian experiences of human rights abuses in the postcolonial era, but of attempts to produce and reproduce a moral economy which counteracted those abuses. These petitions, when viewed as a genre, outlined a consistent and coherent perspective on what good and bad citizens do.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220094241263787

We forget at our peril that new policy narratives–in this case about citizenship–can be assembled from under-acknowledged policy genres–in this case petitions to truth commissions. So what? For one thing, such a petition becomes a very public practice to complexify citizenship.

–Like so much of the talk about “power,” luck is the unexplained variance left over after used up all that we know to account for what seems to occurring at edge of what we know or can know.

–Should it need saying, this notion that one’s sense of randomness is created by thinking at the limits of cognition contrasts with the commonplace that pre-existing random variation, a.k.a. indeterminism, constrains our thinking and behaving.

–If we accept its definition—“the Precautionary principle that the introduction of a new product or process whose ultimate effects are disputed or unknown should be resisted”—then the precaution is based on what is known/unknown by way of effects understood today. Where so, there appears to be little or no possibility—no second chance—of any “afterwards” that demonstrates when and where the initial precaution was irreversibly in error.

–The opposite of a frightening uncontrollability or uncertainty isn’t controllability and certainty but restfulness, i.e., being indifferent to and not caring about either set of binaries.

–The father of artist Max Ernst is said to have painted a picture of his garden but was so upset at having to leave out a tree for compositional reasons that he had the tree cut down in order to match the picture. I have worked with project designers, engineers, ecologists and economists, who saw their worlds represented the same way. I still feel shame at having had village trees cut down for the planned road that never came.

–Some of those “. . .but-we-must-do-something-now!” are conveyed with the same urgency the Yankee poet felt when commemorating another Civil War battle.

–We should keep in mind the example of Phalaris, 6th century BCE tyrant in Sicily. He ordered the inventor Perillus to design a huge bronze bull in which to roast his victims alive. Their screams would, the tyrant hoped, sound just like the bellows of a bull. Phalaris was so impressed with the contraption that he promptly tried it out on Perillus, as the first victim.

–Have you ever attended one of those presentations where the engineer proposes all-benefit-and-no-cost designs and technologies of such fantastification as would bring a failing grade to an undergraduate in policy analysis?

–The only difference between the advocates of financial economism and Professor Sir Anthony Blunt, art historian and KGB agent seeking to undermine capitalism, is that Blunt didn’t have as good a roadmap to economic subversion as the Efficient Market Hypothesis, Value at Risk Model, and other such weaponry driving the last financial crisis.

–There’s also no small irony in the fact that the advocates of innovation privilege the role of error in their drive to innovation at the same time they dismiss as “patches and workarounds” the real-time operational redesigns of infrastructure operators necessitated by those innovations.

–System failure is the place where everything is actually connected to everything else, since each thing ends up as a potential substitute for anything else. “Need unites everything,” Aristotle put it, and need is greatest in collapse.

–That Christ was the first Christian doodler and painter—think John 8:6-8, where he bends down to draw something in the dirt, and Veronica’s veil upon which he wiped his exact image—doesn’t makes him good-enough in either, even if, or some say, he was as good as you’re going to get—and even then, just only maybe.

–Remember when it was a Good Thing that a growing middle class led to strong states. Now, the rise of a global middle class is massive extractivism destroying the planet.

–“Indeed, as the authors themselves recognize, the setting of carbon prices is highly uncertain. Evaluations can range from $45 to $14,300 per ton, depending on the time horizon and the reduction targeted. With such variability, there is no point in trying to optimize the cost of carbon reduction intertemporally.” (https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/energy-dilemma)

–Who would have guessed their answer to 21st century modernity is Slav revanchism and Han imperialism?

–With advances in neuroscience coming so fast, the Bayesian brain—we’re hardwired to predict the future by updating estimates of current probabilities—is beginning to look like Descartes’ understanding of the pineal gland as the soul linking mind and body.

–Janet Flanner, the journalist, reported in 1945 from war-struck Paris: “Everything here is a substitute for everything else.” Think: Cigarettes could be traded for food, food could be traded for clothes, clothes could be traded for furniture, and so on. It is in disaster where everything is connected to everything else; that’s why the only thing complete is “complete disaster.”

–It’s an odd kind of a-historicism to deny utopian possibilities because we live in an ceaseless present that forecloses on anything like a future.

–E.M. Forster in Howards End: “The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful life is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.” Under what conditions is this progress?

–“It is an interesting fact about the world we actually live in that no anthropologist, to my knowledge, has come back from a field trip with the following report: their concepts are so alien that it is impossible to describe their land tenure, their kinship system, their ritual… As far as I know there is no record of such a total admission of failure… It is success in explaining culture A in the language of culture B which is… really puzzling.” (Ernest Gellner, social anthropologist)

–The language of risk is now so naturalized that it seems the obvious starting point of analysis, as in: “Ok, the first thing we have to do is assess the risks of flooding here…”

No. The first thing you do is to identify the boundaries of the flood system you are talking about as it is actually managed and then the standards of reliability to which it is being managed (namely, events must be precluded or avoided by way of management) and from which follow the specific risks to be managed to meet that standard. (Note a standard doesn’t eliminate risks but rather identifies the risks that have to be managed in order to meet the standard.)

–“Encounters: Emerson feeling very transcendental in front of the Pyramids, fell into with a little American chap, with insect net, who gave his name as Theodore Roosevelt.” (Guy Davenport, essayist)

Pot, F. (2024) “AI for good work,” in Ponce del Castillo (ed.) Artificial intelligence, labour and society, ETUI.

I

If I were asked to fill in the blank of “When conditions of uncertainty, complexity, conflict and incompletion are increasing, also increasing are pressures for _____________” I’d write: “legal certainty.” Others would instead, I believe, opt for something like: better political arrangements.

Which raises a question: How are the quests for politics and legal certainty inter-related?

II

By legal certainty, I mean not just contracts but licenses, public tenders, procurement agreements and the like. These exist in the domain of reliability professionals who don’t operate at the level of macro-principles for legal certainty nor do they operate at the street-level with respect to an individual license, tender or procurement issues. Their domain instead spans (1) from having to modify broad contract principles in light of inevitably different contexts (2) to those systemwide patterns and practices that, while they do not match macro-principles, nonetheless are emerging across a range of spatial and cultural contexts with respect to more reliable licenses, tenders and procurement.

Now, of course, each node–macro, micro, localized design scenarios, and systemwide patterns and practices–can be labelled “political.” That would, however, miss the point here: Differentiating the nodes and domains necessarily differentiates “politics”.

III

So what? At least one point becomes clearer when legal certainty is the pathway into discussing politics under turbulent times: Cities and municipalities, not just nations and the planet, become an obvious unit and level of analysis. It’s cities that work to ensure legal compliance and bear legal liability in many of the contract specifics just mentioned.

Again, so what?

Take degrowth. Currently, the focus is on the economics and politics of degrowth at the national and international levels. Instead ask: What are the implications for legal certainty in cities that are environmental innovators in the face of unpredictable change, including but not limited to degrowth strategies?

The answers (plural) would point to track records (plural) upon which then to assess the more fine-grained politics involved, let alone required.

–In this moment of deglobalization, you can bet globalization is underway or even accelerating in some places: What do you think all those petro-dollars are doing? You can also bet deglobalization was well underway at the height of globalization in other cases: What else did all those empty containers returning back to China indicate?

Globalization or deglobalization is not the other’s counterfactual, but rather counter-archives of what was and is happening. Such is differentiation when insisted on from the get-go.

–Yet you still read about big-pot cities chronically underfunded and over-burdened, home to division and decrepit infrastructure, struggling with unplanned and the intractable inequality. And yet these cities are meant to find that wherewithal with which to replace their legacy structures, turn themselves into engines of innovation, and seize municipalization as the social movement.

In these critiques, cities are render destitutes of their small-bowl differentiation.

–So what?

Well for one thing, take that aforementioned inequality. Like congeries, inequality is a plural noun based in differences.