my friend, what do you think i do? i’ve devoted my life to tech. i run my own jitsi server, thanks, and don’t have anything particularly against zoom. it’s had its let’s-do-evil moments, but it’s decent relative to a pretty bad baseline, microsoft, google, etc. 1/

the only difference between the zoom example and the commute example is that you think (and i agree!) the costs zoom helps remedy were probably worth incurring, freedom to live anywhere breaks important connections but it’s better we have it than if we didn’t, 2/

while you think (and i also agree!) that the choices we’ve made with respect to a sprawled built environment within a particular region are not worth its costs and we ought not to have incurred them in the first place, we should have used land-usw regulation to prevent costly suburbanization. 3/

but in both cases, whether worth it or not, choices we collectively made in the name of “growth”, “dynamism”, or “development” entailed new costs, so developments we pretended were new, even more, growth were actually just remedies, ways to get back what became harder because of past “triumphs”./fin