Philip Sugg | Blog

When does a system of classification limit the imagination, and when is it liberating? Today in the course of reading about something else I stumbled upon the USDA classification system for soils, helpfully illustrated in a great poster:

As it turns out, the US Department of Agriculture maintains an entire taxonomy of soil types, not unlike the Linnean hierarchy for life. The soil version includes orders, groups, families, and finally the series. At the lowest level there are many, many series–perhaps not as many as there are living species, but still, for the majority of the population that has moved away from agricultural occupations, a staggering number of soils. From Wikipedia:

About 4,500 soil families are recognised in the United States…A family may contain several soil series which describe the physical location using the name of a prominent physical feature such as a river or town near where the soil sample was taken. An example would be Merrimac for the Merrimack River in New Hampshire. More than 14,000 soil series are recognised in the United States. This permits very specific descriptions of soils.

Take a look at the start to USDA’s description of the “San Joaquin” series:

The San Joaquin series consists of moderately deep to a duripan, well and moderately well drained soils that formed in alluvium derived from mixed but dominantly granitic rock sources. They are on undulating low terraces with slopes of 0 to 9 percent. The mean annual precipitation is about 15 inches and the mean annual temperature is about 61 degrees F.

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From the Chicago Park District:

The site consists of multiple parcels grouped into one, that previously housed a number of factories and processing facilities. These included Chicago Tube & Iron, Wilson Steel & Iron, and the former “World’s Famous Chocolate” facility. As these parcels housed industrial uses, environmental remediation was necessary to render the entire site fit for public park use. Remediation efforts began in 2019 and were completed a year later.

By accident, walking at lunchtime yesterday, I walked far enough south from my office to come upon this new rivewalk path, the “Southbank Riverwalk,” that follows the South Branch of the Chicago river for a few hundred yards. When I walked it, in the middle of the day on a weekday, it was almost as empty as an architectural concept drawing.

Cities spend a long time trying to push nature away, to turn the earth into abstract space fit for development. Few cities make this more obvious than Chicago, the most grid-like metropolitan area in the world. But when a city reaches a certain point in its development, the effort reverses; it becomes pleasing to bring nature back in.

The boardwalk lets its traveller float across nature; the walker gets close to the trees, bushes and ground, without scraping up against the surfaces of plant or earth. The boardwalk is the long, straight line that maintains the geometric and regular built world.

Indeed the nature walk in the city might be at its best when it uses natural elements, like trees, to frame all the familiar monuments.

I was sitting at my computer this evening googling about a half-formed question, something like “how much of the current U.S. and world economy is made up of goods versus services, how is a ‘good’ defined, and is there any sign that the U.S. service economy is losing ground in the post-Covid era?”–when it occurred to me (or rather, occured to me all over again) that all of the sources I found online were not very good. Now, if I brought a little prior knowledge and intentional effort the question, if I searched for respectable public institutions–like the Fed–that put their data online, I would surely find a start to these questions. But these are things that one would have to know. For the average person, you want to know the answer to something non-commercial, you just start typing questions as they occur to you, and you will probably give up clueless because online search these days is remarkably bad. It’s not that all of my questions had been targeted by low-quality content farm sites, but rather that a lot of the more mainstream sites that came up first–like a link to a LinkedIn post, or a Forbes article, or a Harvard Business Review blurb– were all generalist filler. And on down for several pages, with the occasional news article from a few years ago or a general Wikipedia topic ("Service economy") thrown in. Search is not very good in large part because the sites that count as “average” are mediocre at best.

I’ve been reading Jennifer Habel’s and Chris Bachelder’s book Dayswork. Actually, dipping into it, then falling away; losing interest for a while. then coming back. The episodic approach to reading works quite well for a book, written during the Covid pandemic, in an aphoristic format. Many of its passages could be tweets. The book has the feel of something written in a makeshift desk–maybe from a closet–when the writer is supposed to be doing something else (I don’t know, exactly, what the writing process was for Dayswork). But it also reads like a product of the distracted modern condition of reading. Judging by how active even many serious writers have been on X/Twitter over the past decade, I suspect that distraction is also the predominant condition of writing today.¹

The waves of “Melville revival” that brought him into the American canon have always had an obsessive devotion to the historical Melville; the quotidian, real person: adventurous, flawed, idiosyncratic. Dayswork contributes to the cult of the author. While the book does use Melville’s literary work as an anchor, it spends just as much time pecking at the minutia of the author’s life. The book spends a lot of time introspecting about other figures connected to Melville, some of them people he knew (his wife Lizze Shaw, daughters Elizabeth and Frances) and others later interpreters or admirers, like Elizabeth Hardiwick. One of the most frequently mentioned figures, “The Biographer,” is still commenting on Melville as of early 2024. The Biographer remains unnamed until the book’s end. He is Herschel Parker, a retired English professor and Melville scholar from the University of Delaware. Author of not just a Melville biography, but of a Melville meta-biography. And, most relevant to Dayswork, he also maintains an active blog in which–guess who?–Melville comes up a lot.

A useful but somewhat unsatisfying definition of “information” is that it is anything that reduces uncertainty.

For some time I have found myself thinking about the conditions under which the internet–I’’ll define it here as a worldwide information-sharing network–might wither away substantially, or even disappear from recognition.

Those thoughts have only accelerated for me as it appears that the internet, in its contemporary form, is becoming an ever-more parasitic on itself. ChatGPT, which was likely produced through large-scale bulk collection of as much of the internet as possible, is only the latest version of this trend. There is more incentive than ever to capture information on both the intake side–through super-dominant platforms that host the great majority of the world’s new information that enters the internet each day–and on the archival and retrieval side–where ever-more information is “read” by bots and metadata collection agencies. On the 2024 internet, web activity by bots and automated tools is almost evenly split with the traffic generated by actual humans.

Yes, this network of interconnected smaller networks known as the internet is likely to be kept around as long as possible, since it is has a lot of uses (many of them lucrative) to so many. This is the infrastructure internet, the network that connects things for its own sake, because it is always potentially useful to be able to send a message to a faraway place.

By objective measures the internet is still growing at a considerable year-over-year pace. But is the amount of information on the internet still growing?

I have come across a few different sources lately that debate the importance of the humanities. Among them:

1. Agnes Callard: “I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is”

2. The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education

The institutional situation is that a lot of these subjects still draw interest from undergraduate students, especially in their first year(s), before they have to pick a major. But fewer students choose to stick with the humanities: the most recent long-term report I could find said 25 percent fewer from 2012 to 2020, although there may have been a slight swerve upward since then. The overall trends are extremely worrying for the survival of many humanistic disciplines across the entire American university system.

The theories about the cause of the decline are everywhere, so prominent and repetitive that most are not even interesting to summarize. Everyone working on the inside of these departments has to decide for him or herself why the humanities are declining.

A few thoughts:

1. When the argument is about the societal importance of the humanities, there may just be a mismatch between what humanistic culture contributes to collective life (a lot, I think), and what is in the short-term advantage of any single student to study and pursue. That is, there may not be enough good cases for “risking” one’s own future to study humanities, even if everyone–including those who don’t study the humanities–are better off if there is a critical mass of people who do.

2. It could also be that the humanities are as much effect as they are a cause of a healthy society. That is, the humanities don’t make people or societies good, they follow when these things already are healthy and “good.” When people enjoy some stability, confidence in themselves, and sense of future continuity–it is at this point that many people choose to engage with ultimate, open-ended questions in literature, philosophy, art, etc. Or, when a culture becomes troubled, these subjects are still practiced, but they move out of institutions. This could be because the institutions contribute to the underlying problem, or because institutions like the university no longer understand open-ended inquiry as worth pursuing. Both seem to be occuring in our own time.

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I don’t use rideshare apps that often these days. Over the break I used the Uber app for the first time in a while. Little things had changed here and there in the UI–as they usually do with web tech–but I was surprised to see that they now offer a setting for “conversational level.” That is, you can set in advance how much your driver is supposed to talk to you. But conversation is not actually a function of the app that can be dialed up and down. It’s a thing your driver does, a service (or disservice) that for the moment, can still only be performed by the driver. You are not actually setting anything, just registering a preference that will be communicated to the driver along with your other ride information.

I don’t know why this bothered me, or even made me think. Maybe I don’t use enough person-to-person apps. Let’s be honest, for any app in the gig economy, the entirety of the software platform is really a way of turning a person (“gig worker”) into a set of menus and toggle switches (“grab [X] food at [X] and bring it to [X] by [X]”).

The NYTimes columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote something a few years ago about that US college admissions bribery scandal that stuck with me and seems apt here: people with enough money to be the buyers in the gig economy have become “socialized to easing every hurdle through an app.” He was talking about money (Manjoo: “who should I Venmo to fix this thing?”) but another consequence of an endless landscape of software-mediated transactions is that both parties are now obligated to relate to one another like software. As I reflect on it, I think what actually bothered me about the Uber app was just how small and incremental this “setting” is. How many more of these options will there be to tap, pulse, interrupt, and shake every imaginable extension of a person’s agency? And because the setting is basically a fake lever- there’s a real person on the other side of this software lever who still gets to choose whether to comply or not–you can program up an infinite number of them. They probably won’t have the effect you want, but it will have an effect, if only in aggregate.

I took this photo from Interstate 77, near Fancy Gap, Virginia, looking back southeast to where I’d come from. The mountains on the horizon are Pilot Mountain to the right, with its distinctive round knob, and Hanging Rock to the left.

I love the way the camera captures focus on the mountains while allowing foreground objects like the tree and the guardrail to blur. Here, like the human eye, the camera renders sharply what it cares about; detail reveals itself according to attention given, other objects become a sketch. The ridge on the left, in the photo’s middle ground, offers suspense by cutting in at a diagonal, revealing the height of the observer and threatening to close out the view. The sky, given substance by the cloud ceiling, makes a counterpoint to the textures of the ground, breaking only at the horizon to let in the colors that outline the mountains.

I also love the sense of space in this image, the way perspective and distance allows objects of dissimilar size to appear to be on the same scale. It is a lightly settled landscape. A town near the lower right can be made out, contained by the trees. The mountains are large, but still bounded, by the view. The landscape reveals the layout what would otherwise be too close, too “on top of me,” to see. A sense of recognitiion: “I was there, I am part of that–that only triggers when the observer is separated from the scene, and the scene tucks into the borders of a wider earth.

Three pictures that I wanted to post this fall, that I never got around to:

I don’t know why–I knew I liked them, and wanted to see them archived. Maybe I would find them the following season. But I also know that I liked these photos because they reminded me of an act of seeing, that the artifact stood in for how I related to something with my own eyes. The photos exist to point: to a moment of observational capacity, openness and fulfillment that is far less communicable.

I’ve been thinking again about what it means to be a naturalist; one answer I’ve arrived at is that a naturalist is someone who observes uncontrolled situations for their own sake. The qualifier uncontrolled does the work, for me, of a more traditional definition of nature: nature is not just that which is opposed to the human. I believe so strongly in this observational component, I am willing to bend quite a bit on my definition of nature. Streets are a fine place, as long as you look. The point is to look with such unrelenting commitment that your vision starts to get strange, to be OK with taking away (only, only!) the impression and go no further. To rest in what cannot be communicated.