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When I started a real estate startup, it was because I had gotten the wall version of the Thomas Bros. map — of course! — and plotted LA’s median home prices, crime and school stats. My idea was, wow, wouldn’t it be great to give other people this kind of expansive knowledge about Los Angeles? If they could only understand what I see on this map! But of course, it’s not necessary to understand the entirety of a map if you have a tool that zeroes in on what you really want. Google doesn’t exist for you to understand the whole web, but to mine it precisely. Finding a home is hard to do the same way, but giving people a zeitgeist is always inferior to giving them a tool that lets them understand the least about something. It’s a hard lesson for an infovore to learn, I’ll say that. So, of course, now LA drivers know too much, while they themselves know very little. In the 2000s there were “hidden shortcuts” and alternate routes that were risky. Now, the risk is hedged and nothing is hidden. It is a marketplace of nearly perfect information, where saving a minute of someone’s life in traffic is treated with the respect it actually deserves. Yet now the big problem is that people have locked in their commute route years ago, and it gets slower and slower with no escape. They drive from their far-away apartment, guided by synthesized voices, past the landed aristocracy of Los Angeles with the favor of Prop. 13 whose lawn signs chide land-use refugees to drive like their non-existent kids lived there. Ultimately, the era of broad knowledge was also an era of choice. Both are leaving us at the same velocity. There is little need for a giant book of colleges when you can’t get into or afford the ones you’re interested in. Who cares about a directory of reviewed doctors when your crummy insurance will not let you see any of the ones you would choose? The time of the Thomas Bros. map was before the closing of the urban frontier. Now, you just take the only thing on the shelf. |