 architecture is destiny. The stuff we build, especially the stuff that lasts a long time, dictates where we go, what we do, how our lives are shaped, what we think is possible. It's easy to think about this as something like the Great Wall of China. Tired of being invaded by Mongols over and over and even having their country run by Mongols for a while, the Chinese built a Great Wall and the Mongols stopped coming this way but then they bounced off the Great Wall and started heading west, so Europe was hit by the Mongol hordes. But I also mean the architectures of our governance systems. I'm recording this as we enter an election cycle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and clearly one of the big issues at hand is the makeup of the Supreme Court and if two, three, four, five Supreme Court justices get put on the bench in the next four or eight years, that is a really big deal for our social architectures for some time to come. Let's take a step back for a second and understand this a little more deeply. Here's a picture of Dubrovnik, a city, a walled city, clearly built to keep outsiders out, but it has a lot of architectural effects on the inside both in terms of the cozy architecture but also sometimes accessibility as technology changes over time. There's plenty of implications for this much stone and brick and concrete poured in place. We spend a lot of time designing our shopping places and there's lots of different ways to do that. On the left, a shiny mall with all the modern appliance, all the modern features in China and on the right more of a covered garden, a covered market from England with a lot more openness and you could also go to bazaars and street markets and all sorts of other things going on these days. We spend a whole lot of time architecting our cities and putting in technologies of control like the stop sign. We then add all sorts of surveillance and over time as these things don't work all that well we just layer them on. So eventually we have the stop sign with a camera watching with a radar gun with an automated system that'll send a ticket to the address listed on your driver's license or your license plate. We also design cities in interesting ways. Here's the city of Poynton in the UK before it implemented something called traffic calming and here you have all the stop signs not necessarily the radar guns but you have the typical infrastructure of moving around in a city and this is what it looked like after they implemented traffic calming. The stop signs are gone, the stop lights are gone, the vehicles were all flowing through the center of town but also foot traffic increases and life comes back to the city. So those different ways of architecting something people thought they knew how to do really had a big effect on the sense of life and the life of the city. We spend just as much time architecting how we teach our children and here is a graph that shows all the different steps that people go through that all of us pretty much have gone through with a few small exceptions and here are the institutions that mark those stages. So No Child Left Behind is one of many different bodies of laws and regulations that govern schooling. We teach toward the common core standards, we have standardized tests like the SAT and many others, we issue diplomas, etc. Until very recently this was the common architecture of the classroom. We had kids separated from one another in little desks facing forward with the teacher as God in front, mercifully this is all changing but this whole process of modernizing education has been savagely interrupted by school shootings and a whole series of other events that have led to school surveillance application guides and many other things including a little bit of bittersweet humor about what the NRA would have us do with schools and the effects of surveillance in schools. Now schools can be an endless source of interesting architectures when about the time of the US Civil War we had thousands and thousands of one room school houses across the country that were actually doing a great job of teaching Americans. We now have large high schools, mega high schools, elementary schools who kind of centralized the whole system but at the other end of the spectrum is this other architecture that doesn't look like an architecture. It's something called unschooling, something I'm a huge fan of and it doesn't mean all the kids are feral out in the title pools every day but it does mean that the world is your classroom and that kids can actually be involved in the real world as opposed to dropped into Petri dishes called schools that more and more resemble penitentiaries. We spend a bunch of time architecting our cities. This is an early plan of Philadelphia. Strangely, maybe ironically, Philadelphia didn't extend much past the first seven or eight blocks from the Delaware River for a long, long time. The rest of it was just marked out as where we wanted the city to go and eventually those streets and parks got built but the western part of Philadelphia was a swamp and West Philly was completely a swamp that had to be drained later. The insane asylum used to be where City Hall is now right at the center of Market and High Streets. We put signs all over these cities to try to govern, to architect what people can do and what people can't do. Some of these signs don't last thankfully but unfortunately they're for quite a while so the Jim Crow laws were kind of architecture to try to preserve a lot of the aspects of slavery before slavery was smashed by the U.S. Civil War but in fact our actions after the Civil War were pretty crappy so slavery and many guys has just kept on living until we dealt with it again a hundred years later more or less. We can see those flames still burning brightly today. Religions have architectures whether it's the Ten Commandments or the Seven Sacraments and if you look around at all the different religions of our time and think about the sacraments and rituals and laws and beliefs of every one of these religions and how many people fall under them it's amazing and in some religions the religion actually dictates what you do day by day, moment by moment, some much more than others. We also do that for companies and some companies are far more authoritarian and hierarchical than others. Workplace democracy is a small outlier more often than not we have deep layers of management and hierarchies of authority and roles and people are busy you know wiggling their way up those corporate fish ladders but we're beginning to experiment here also with ways of letting go of control but these are these are very serious architectures that dictate what people do over their entire lifetimes. For the geeks we also have technical architectures and when the internet showed up there's a diagram of the early ARPA net the predecessor to the internet on the right from 1969 the phone companies were busy building the advanced intelligent network or AIN that's a diagram for the AIN on the left and they were going to charge us differently for video calls than for texts which emerge later than for other kinds of traffic like phone calls all of that kind of got eaten by the internet architecture the internet turned out to be sort of like either a flesh-eating virus or like ice nine from Kurt Vonnegut's Cats Cradle whatever it touched turned into internet I think much to our benefit and I'm in the camp that we should keep the internet free and open and that was a good thing that the advanced intelligent network was actually very very stupid I'll point here tip of the hat to David Eisenberg's essay from way back when the rise of the stupid network if you follow Lawrence Lessig and his brilliant writings about all this he tells us over and over again that code software is also law because what's happened now is we've passed actual laws and regulations that make the code law so that programmers sitting in their cubicles writing things into code are actually creating new laws it's all kind of creepy and it's all happening right now so when I say architectures I mean it very very broadly I mean clearly the built environment the child a great wall of China how we design malls cities streets intersections all of that classrooms schools everything I also mean laws and regulations all the different things we pass to tell people what to do and what not to do in fact I would say that we pass laws and regulations when we fail to have good discourse that a lot of things could actually be resolved between people rather than passing laws but we don't and then we have software and standards that the software is adhered to sometimes these architectures are just legacy architectures that are very hard to remove like DOS or windows or or other sorts of things sometimes they're cleverly architected standards that open up whole new possibilities and then maybe largest of all is this notion of norms and culture sometimes we don't know why we do things it's just a taboo it's just a belief it's just a way of looking at things that last and last and last so the most dangerous of all these architectures are what I call the hidden architectures of mistrust the things that are buried they're right in front of us but we don't notice them so in the classroom there's a clock and the bell rings pretty much every hour on the hour that is to move us around from room to room but what that bell is saying is basically we don't care what you're into or what you're up to right now this whole mechanism has to move ahead one slot we have to get you to your next class right now so drop everything and move on that's part of the hidden architecture of mistrust the problem is we take these things for granted we assume over and over again that there can't be another way to architect those situations so when I say that architecture is destiny designers create those architectures and I mean every kind of designer urban designers graphic designers institutional design curriculum design interface and software and experience design all these designers are basically creating these architectures that we live inside so architecture is destiny design creates architecture and intent informs design now I'm assuming that most people out there have pretty good intent so I don't mean good intent or bad intent I actually mean the beliefs that shape our intent from the back of our brains the belief systems that say that spare the rod and spoil the child or penny saved as a penny earned or trickle down economics or or or and there's there's just thousands of these in fact the whole topic of intent and beliefs is subject matter for further recordings like this one if you like this one there's a lot more at Jerry mckalski.com and there's a prezian building on trust that'll contain more of these nuggets that's all part of the relationship economy thank you very much for listening and subscribe to this YouTube channel if you like this tell your buddies thanks bye