The 15-minute city is the new hot thing the elites are all talking about. Whether it’s in the New Yorker or in Davos, the 15-minute city has gripped the conversation by storm. An idea created by urbanist Carlos Moreno, the 15-minute city is one where a citizen can have all the services they need within a 15 minute walk of their home. They can enjoy work, school, restaurants, shopping, parks, cultural activities, and everything else without walking more than 15 minutes one direction from their home.

The 15-minute city is now used as an example of what could’ve been in America, an idea that would’ve been possible if not for the evil car corporations and the evil gas companies. Proponents of the idea argue that suburbs & urban sprawl are the antithesis of the 15-minute city, and inconvenience everyone.

But is that really so? Are the suburbs that inconvenient? No matter how much the zeitgeist pushes the idea that people enjoy dense, urban cores where everything one would possibly need is within 15 minutes walking distance, folks are moving out of these dense, urban cores into the burbs of major metropolitan areas across the United States. They’re moving to the outskirts of Austin and Dallas, of Phoenix and Boise. Why?

Of course, there are a variety of usual factors that are easily identified; affordability, larger homes, crime, etc. However, the allure of the 15-minute city should have people moving to urban cores in droves, right? Why are so many people happy and content with the suburbs?

Well, the suburbs are the new 15-minute city.

“But I can’t walk to a school, a movie theater, find ethnic food, or go to a park in 15 minutes of walking from my burb! Look at this poor planning!” - one would say, and they would be correct. But, they could drive there. With a car.

The suburb is the new 15-minute city because of the automobile. Pick a desirable suburb, and you can drive to all these places within 15 minutes. Sure there might be some traffic some days so it’ll take you 20 minutes instead of 15, but a few badly timed stoplights can impact your walking through an urban core as well. And often times, there are more amenities available to a suburbian resident driving a nice, air conditioned SUV on their arterial roads than a city dweller walking by foot.

For instance, from my location in the burbs, just within a 5 minute drive, there are:

• Numerous restaurants, including a variety of ethnic foods run by mom and pop stores as well as major fast food chains (McD, In-n-Out, Chipotle, Wingstop, Blaze, you name it), coffee shops, both independent & chains, breweries
• Costco, Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Lowes, Best Buy, various grocery stores and chains, pharmacies
• Schools - multiple elementary schools, middle schools, and one high school
• Specialty shops - Grill stores, internet cafe (yep!), Fedex & UPS
• Mall - million square foot plus mall with all the mall amenities, arcades, bowling, food court
• Movie theaters - multiple, don’t like one? choose another
• Local parks - miles of walking trails connecting to hundreds of acres of parks by greenbelts
• Gyms - multiple within a 5 minute drive, including public swimming pool and other exercise facilities
• University - yep, within a 5 minute drive

Within a 10 minute drive:

• Libraries
• Multiple world class hospitals featuring specialists
• Water park
• Golf courses (if you’re into that sort of thing)
• Industrial area with large multinational corporations
• Convention area and event spaces
• Local farmers market
• Large regional park
• Community college
• Casinos
• Nurseries (for plants)

Within a 15 minute drive:

• Major lake & state park with extensive hiking trails & aquatic activities
• Wineries
• Local farms selling local produce & specialties

And this isn’t unique to just my little suburb. Pick an address in the middle of many of the suburbs in the outskirts of major metropolitan areas and they’ll offer the same set of amenities within 15 minutes. Sure some might not have a mall within driving distance, or some might not have a casino or a convention center or a water park, but the basics will generally be there; everything you’ll need for the most part, within 15 minutes or less.

Even large cities are not 15-minute cities, except for the very very few:

For example, this excellent visualization of Seattle as a 15-minute city by Nat Henry demonstrates which blocks have access to what amenities: https://nathenry.com/writing/2023-02-07-seattle-walkability.html

Play around with the check marks, and see what amenities are available within 5 minutes! There are only a handful (I count 9 or 10) of city blocks that are within 5-10 minutes of supermarkets, libraries, parks, restaurants, coffee shops, and all three types of schools. Of course, Seattle is not the perfect urban core, but with all its best efforts only a few blocks offer to the pedestrian the same amenities as a sububanite with a car within the same time.

“But this is what we’re trying to change!” proponents say. Well, it’s obviously not working! People want their space, and with the suburbs, they can have their amenities too, and there’s no reason to make the idealized, fantasy 15-minute city exist. And even many urban living proponents, once they have children or enough money to afford a home, will end up buying a single family home on the outskirts and enjoy the amenities by car.

But isn’t owning a car expensive? Sure it is, but everything else is cheaper - the cost per square foot of any urban core in the US versus its suburbs is so drastic that the cost of a car pales in comparison. And many people like cars. They like their space, their backyards, their clean sidewalks, and their lawns. They like the ability to drive to a Costco within 5 minutes, pick up a bunch of toilet paper, and have it not get wet from the rain on the drive back.

The suburbs are the new 15-minute city. Sure, some suburbs kind of suck, but reasonably priced, well-accessed, safe, clean suburbs are available in much of the outskirts of tier 2 cities all throughout America. And people are moving to them; Plano, Scottsdale, Irving, Boulder. They offer all the benefits and amenities of a large city provides within a 15 minute drive, plus the safety, privacy, space, and affordability that people want.

We already have 15-minute cities; they’re called the suburbs.

“The dependency hell that modern technology has created for itself will be its major downfall. Complexity is liability, and modern software products and services have become too complex for their own good. After a certain while, things are too complex to maintain and have to be scrapped.”

People realize that the above is true; it’s not a secret or some smart insight, rather it’s the basis of what is technical debt. However, while we all understand it, we still dive deep into complexity and dependency without hesitation. For instance, look at the new hotness: AI companies which are nothing but layers built on top of GPT-3 or some other common AI model. And VCs are funding these new AI companies.

And that’s fine. The primary purpose of technology is to shift the production possibility curve upwards and to the right. Technology should be considered a consumable, instead of a liability or an asset; complexity can and should be built in with the expectation that the tech with which it is build is going to have a tangible deprecation curve.

Careers were built on tending horses, and then working the railroads, and then fixing carburetors, and now on electric charger installations, and with each iteration the complexity of dependent factors, whether it be supply chains or engineering effort or infrastructure, increases significantly. In the end, people are still employed, and the production possibility frontier is shifted upwards and to the right, fulfilling the role of technology in social development.

Recently there’s been a lot of hubbub about how AI art is not “real art,” or how it’s immoral. In particular, these discussions are happening on hubs where many artists share their products such as on Twitter. Popular arguments as to why AI art is not of artistic value are that they take no skill to produce, they have no soul, and that they are stealing the art of real artists and displacing them. Most importantly, artists fear the idea that AI can replace them - a fear that they don’t have to worry about yet.

First, let us define art in the context of this article. In particular, we are talking about art in the format of drawn images. In addition, let us separate the definition of art market for the sake of this article; the art market is separated in two segments, one being the art market in world of galleries, auction houses and museums and MOMA vs art sold through direct transactions from the artist to the client, whether it be at a small booth, commissions, or through employment contracts. We are talking about the latter.

There are several reasons why AI art will not be displacing these Twitter artists anytime soon, but the main reason is that it’s simply cheaper to just hire an artist to draw it out than to hire someone who can understand AI and deep learning to the level of putting out professional products according to spec. A company can pay for five to ten designers for the price of an AI expert who can fine tune the product to the level five designers can. AI is good at generating generic products, but fine tuning the prompts to match a product that requires specific details or uses cases takes manual effort. It would be far cheaper to just hire a designer to pump something out, especially as designers can be outsourced to third world countries where labor is cheaper than the cost of buying compute on GPUs.

Small time artists who sell at local fairs or conventions have even less to fear. Generic art does not sell well, and building a decent, high quality, AI pipeline to sell art at local exhibitions requires skill & equipment belonging to someone who would be capable of holding a day job or consulting gig that pays significantly more. An AI professional would not sell at a local arts & crafts fair; it simply would not be worth their time.

So don’t worry! Right now you’re fine! Instead of worrying about the future, treat AI art the same way software engineers treat AI tools such as GitHub Copilot. Even when cars replaced the horse & the carriage, people chugged along and became mechanics. When we switched from coal to solar, we told the coal miners to learn to code. Markets eventually work out in allocating labor with demand!

One last thing - the power of an artist’s work is their brand. Worry about the brand more than the content, and the content will sell itself!

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu was created by the Goddess of creation herself, Aruru. Enkidu was noble, with long hair and innocent of mankind. Enkidu ate grass in the hills with the gazelles and drank water with them at the water-holes.

One day a young man, a trapper, met Enkidu. And the young man feared him, for Enkidu could not be controlled. Enkidu ate grass with the gazelles and drank water from the water-holes with the lions, and the young man could not offer Enkidu anything of value to get him to stop messing around with his traps. So, he paid a prostitute to have sex with Enkidu. Afterwards, Enkidu found that he could no longer communicate with the beasts and could not eat grass. He had become a man, and has become socialized. He now worked for humans.

Later on, Enkidu would meet Gilgamesh, be best friends, and then get killed by the Gods for his shenanigans.

Enkidu’s tale represents the lost of nature in the face of civilization. By having sex and interacting with humans, he has lost his ability to eat grass and be in touch with the natural world. Engaging with society means that he has lost his natural abilities to act in his own best faith, and has become a resource, similar to the gazelles he used to live with and the grass he used to consume.

Social media and culture has done to the terminally online as what the prostitute has done to Enkidu - the terminally online are so oversocialized as to behave against their best interests and instead for the for the interests of those who have tamed them. They have lost the ability to touch and eat grass, just as Enkidu, and now work for the groups of people who they believe are their peers, yet who enslave them. Oversocialization is a modern form of control.

When you’re too online, remember to touch some grass (maybe eat it too) and hydrate, as Enkidu did.