Cities and Superstructures

July 14, 2025

Introduction

There are patterns I see:

• Small tribes against wilderness
• Primitive agricultural settlements with walls near a river
  • Settled vs nomadic frontier tribes (Eurasian steppe, American frontier)
• Small agricultural states with some manufactures, villages distributed based upon land
  • Some cities grow due to being transportation nodes
• Development of roads, increased agricultural automation, consolidation of farms (Grapes of Wrath, American 1900s)
• Increased communication, increased transportation (planes), increased homogenization between regions due to similar education system and internet
• Creation of chain companies that consolidate previously local restaurants, supermarkets, venues, etc.
• Movement away from small cities due to lack of local opportunities, growth in rent costs in major cities
• Displacement from big cities (too expensive), growth in surrounding towns that are somewhat connected (likely by rail)

Predictions

I think the decline of small cities will continue. Medium sized cities will become an extension of the large city, connected by rail or driverless car. To some extent they are already but driving is not as price-efficient or time-saving.

There’s still a good amount of people who want to move to the major cities for better quality of life so that their structure and growth will continue for a while.

Superstructures

Now in the world there are levels upon levels. Bacteria form the first level, plants form the next, animals take from the previous two, and humans above all so far. From there: cities, states, countries. But today our interconnected society has created a structure of millions to billions; it is a being coming to life and that has no name. Numerous contradictions exist in this Superstructure and it is unknown whether it will survive as it depends upon humans but it suppresses their reproduction.

Within each State are patterns that extend to the boundary of the State: ways of living, houses, manufactures, fonts on signs, foods, supply chains, technologies, ways of thinking, the education system, and language. It was not always this way for communication and transportation technologies were not once so advanced. There truly was regional diversity.

Like how wasps build a nest or snails build a shell, the inorganic masses we’ve constructured around ourselves are essential to ourselves yet not exactly of us. For no one would call a pile of rocks alive, yet when it is put to use by some being it becomes an outward presentation of such internal state. And when the people who had originated them become no more and others cannot understand it, it becomes a fossil.

Now in the context of the State some are the body and some are the mind. Like how Aristotle says that which exercises its mind is the master, the body which enacts such tasks is the slave. The mind distributes itself over various cities: Washington DC concerns itself with political matters, New York with financial, Los Angeles with propaganda, and San Francisco with digital communications.

The mind creates patterns and puts them across the administrative district. A grocery store such as Target exists in the minds of the builders at their headquarters, this shared mental hallucination is solidified into being, and this template is then duplicated across the land. Thus it can be said that many exist in the ideas and minds of others today. Whether they can perceive it depends upon the individual.

Motives

Can it be said that this structure has motive? We see that it has a hierarchy. They do not seem to be inborn classes, nor is anything for sure guaranteed. It roughly seems that there are different patterns and tracks that people find their lives on and that mobility is more like a funnel, and that staying on a certain track makes it more likely that you’ll remain on it if not just due to sheer social inertia.

If there is to be motive, then it can only be for its own survival. The upper classes run the country by nature of their control over the infrastructure needed, such as the actions of companies, the financial system for allocating labor, the communications system for directing people’s attention. There seems to be no central authority anymore, but in halls and whispers different groups come together to create things.

At the very least, it seems to be a synergy between education, industries which can vacuum up large amounts of wealth at a distance without capital expenditure (tech, finance, maybe law to an extent) to distribute them to small populations, media and search (Google, news, etc. to make talented people in other countries aware of this), and transportation (none of this would work without cheap plane flights).

Because if it were not for those industries, the United States would just be a regular country: one fairly advanced, but one that would primarily draw from its own population. There have been attempts by other countries to ape some similar form: Turkish in Germany, Pakistanis in Belarus, or most recent Ghanians in Serbia, but they have primarily been at the lower end of industries and may come with non-negligible social costs.

People often comment on the petrodollar or the US military guarding shipping lanes or the need to prevent a regional hegemon appearing by doing offshore balancing as a naval power or international alliances. In my view, these are parts of an inherited system that are an accelerant to the above industries rather than something that tries to maintain its power by itself.

By having military presence, this creates a beachhead for the technology-media-education industries. But even if none of the above existed, the synergy I’ve described isn’t threatened. It is threatened by: nationalism, the restriction of movement of people, the use of legislation or military force to change the schools, search engines, alternative payment systems or legal systems, a technological lead. Since this is a very passive process as opposed to military occupation, it’s unlikely that sudden bursts of nationalism will come to upset it.

It is not just international nationalism but also domestic nationalism that threatens the hold of these classes. Domestic nationalism in the United States would seek to undo the foundations of these classes. In technology, competitors who create a lower and lower price erode the profits. We see that if the government moved toward the direction of making things free for the people, then private interests would be lessened.

We also have to contend with the fact that the USG does not run these companies in that they have in some way become independent and of their own world, though they may attempt to at times legislate.

If society is turning into this form of leading, imitation, and subsistence operational roles, I think the questions that remain are this:

• Will this structure maintain itself?
  • Yes, there is always a demand for people to live in better places, for more knowledge and education and direct tutoring, for access to the machines that make money. So it will take a very long time before the center dissipates compared to the periphery, even if the periphery harms itself greatly or becomes ill due to the actions of the center.
• What would the goals be if you are in the education-technology-finance complex?
  • The goal of survival requires a large technological and financial lead. If someone could sell comparable quality goods at lower cost, then there would be risk. Moreover, the American ability to package goods and market them is unparalleled in addition to the generation of new ideas and paradigms.
  • Primarily, this is understanding and the capability to understand, i.e. human capital. Anything that would impair the movement of human capital toward these industries is thus not in the interest of the leading classes of the United States. This includes COVID, plane crashes, visa restrictions, decrease in remuneration, or bad news about the country itself such as random shootings. However, there would still be enough indigenous talent for these industries if needed.
  • For the educational institutions, positioning their school as attractive for global wealth is a primary goal. Whether the public schools receive funding or are underfunded does not matter because they may be in districts with children and people of different values. If nationalism became more prominent and foreigners decided to invest in their country’s schools, then the influence of these schools would decrease.
  • We see that for all of the above industries, a large amount of quality buildings (regardless of education), image curation, and media are significantly important.

Contradiction: the price of the USD makes immigrating to the US even more difficult