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If cities were 100% accurately represented by video games, Miami would of course be *GTA: Vice City*, a story of simplistic corruption garishly lit and stuck in 2002 forever. It's traditional to hate on Miami, right until you make some crypto money and decide to move there into a condominium with a stunning view and an equally stunning lack of maintenance or foresight around rising water tables.

Seattle, on the other hand, is *Cyberpunk 2077*, a city run by cybernetically enhanced corpos who get to work by walking past endless discarded refuse and homeless tent cities heated with literal barrel campfires - on my way to the airport yesterday we drove through some thick fog, which the Uber driver explained to me was just "a fire under the bridge" with the same level of casual interest he would apply to a sale at a JC Penny's.

Traveling between these two cities imposes arbitrage costs on your consciousness itself, extracting profit from your inability to look away from what seems like an obvious oncoming disaster. What happens when the ocean goes up another foot, and nobody can get flood insurance? you ask yourself, as people around you wave you off. How come such a progressive city can't serve its people's needs, or at the very least pick up their trash? you wonder, while running past a well worn armchair next to the freeway that, rain or shine, serves as someone's impromptu throne.

While the humanity in you rages against the system, the hacker in you realizes that knowing the past and processing it to produce the future can be as useless and predictable as an earthworm's digestion. Hackers live in a realm between spaces and times, looking at the hidden connections and occasionally playing a chord on the threads.

-dave