It could be seen like this:

You're not paying $600 a year for coffee, you're paying it to rent a space for a few hours every day in a central socialising space. https://twitter.com/ibnPhilip/status/1290310434680176640

The megachains for coffee already recognise this. However, the tragedy of the commons means that they have to pretend their primary purpose is selling coffee, so customers have to buy something to "rent" the space. I.e. = no homeless etc.

People's real problem is probably less to do with spending a lot on coffee, but the lack of *free* public spaces - short of the library, city spaces now almost always require some sort of expenditure, and are designed to keep you on the move.

Why?

Firstly, seating is made uncomfortable to ward off the homeless. Likewise, few green spaces or sitting areas outside of public parks.

Secondly, the liquid nature of the modern metropolis leads to a breakdown in public trust, so we rely on things like money to create boundaries.

But there's also another reason: our cities are not built for _Keyif_.

Keyif is a Turkish word (although it may have roots in Arabic or Persian) that captures the wistful feeling of simply sitting around and doing nothing as life goes by.

So, what we've done is essentially monetise most our public spaces, not just because corporations are greedy, but because we haven't figured out how else to share public spaces with strangers that have 0 accountability to each other outside of formal laws.

This means: norms, customs, mannerisms in interaction, i.e. a *culture* that can only be established by people who inhabit a space together long enough to form something like this.

We don't have a culture, so we use money instead.

For those in the charter cities space, it may be useful to consider this in your wider philosophy around urban design, citizenship and the development of customs and norms conducive to free public spaces.

How this can be accomplished, I am not entirely sure.

This is actually why China's social credit system came about. China experienced migration of hundreds of millions from the countryside to urban areas *in a few decades*.

Europe underwent this process over a few centuries.

Faced with the mass influx of foreigners, leading to the inevitable breakdown of norms and customs of the cities and significant friction between the various Chinese people (who are, contrary to popular belief, not a monolith), there was significant pressure on govt to act.

What arose was the social credit system as a method of policing and creating a new social contract. This system is not a centralised system implemented and controlled from the top, but is a ramshackle hodge-podge of various standards and implementation across China.

More importantly, it is local and regional officials largely responsible for it, and face significant pressure from the local citizens about the standards that they want/don't want enforced.

So, one can say that in the process of industrialisation that leads to the liquidification of urban community in favour of what we may call liquid modernity, China's response was technology, i.e. the social credit system. Their unfathomly rapid modernisation necessitated this.

The western response was, as mentioned earlier in the thread, *money*. Our liberal norms neuter technological responses. Instead, money arbitrates the social contract in the polis. If I spend on something, I'm less likely to break the rules likely to incurr my loss of that thing.

Money as a method of enforcing the social contract may be the essence of the 19th-20th capitalist society, while technology like surveillance and social credit scores are the methods of social contract enforcement in the 21st century capitalist economy.

What now? We have two different means of enforcing social contracts in the modern polis. Are there better ways of managing the liquid nature of our world? Is there a way to build real trust and norms without it being some sort of homogenous culture found worldwide?

Can cities retain their distinctive cultures and manners in such a place? In a way, the bland airport-style architecture found across the world's major cities today is an expression of our innate desire for shared customs and norms.

If London and Shanghai are closer than London and Newcastle, I'd want them to look and act similar. The economy responds to consumer demands in this subtle manner.

I don't have answers. It seems to me that so long as the world remains connected as it is, it necessitates a homogenous culture that can be found in all connected major metropolises.

Maybe a megapolis, not as a territorial entity but as a *network* of nodes across the world sharing one culture, and even a shared enforcement system for this culture is inevitable, and necessary if we ar to achieve truly shared urban norms and customs again.

Maybe technology will, at some point, render the territorially autonomous nation state obsolete and the world is divided between mega city-state leagues versus hinterlands.

Maybe it will reverse itself, and the connectivity we saw between the 1980s-2020s was a momentary blip in the course of history. But this doesn't solve the liquidity of society internally, ie the rural-urban migration dynamics of internal territories.

Maybe we need more time for techno industrial society to complete its transformation (it hasn't, not yet), so that migration from rural to urban stabilises and we can begin to establish proper norms.

The end of this thread is quite unlike the middle, let alone the beginning. But I think it's all connected.

What are your thoughts?