HROG #1: Novel Cities, Soft City, And Radical Markets
I wrote “Hope Runners of Gridlock” for three primary reasons:
I enjoy novel cities.
I wanted to explore metamodernism and optimistic nihilism in character arcs.
I wanted to learn to write a novel.
I wrote a companion guide that expands on these topics that you can read alongside the Gumroad bundle.
This blog series details and expands the sections in the companion guide, and is comprised of three articles:
Novel Cities, Soft City, and Radical Markets [this article]
NOTE: These posts contain *SPOILERS*. If you want to read the novel, find links here.
https://blog.simondlr.com/posts/hope-runners-of-gridlock
Novel Cities, Soft City, and Radical Markets
Photo by Jack Cohen on Unsplash
Cities tell stories. They are the emergent outcome of all the people that lived in it: a map etched by millions of individual lives, making their mark in passing. It not only provides historical insight into a society, but it also provides for novel exploration of how an individual might be affected by their surroundings. A love story would be told differently in Hong Kong, Mexico City, Cape Town, and Los Angeles. To me, a great city in a story can be like a character: a backstory, motivation, and an arc in and of itself.
Without a doubt, writing an interesting city was at the top of my desires in writing this novel, and it all started with one small seed.
1 Origins
Browsing Twitter in July 2018, I came across a picture from a visual novel by Hariton Pushwagner, called “Soft City”.
From Soft City. Source: https://twitter.com/FedeItaliano76/status/1016703230057709568
In the dystopian depictions of a future city, there was one particularly striking scene: nondescript brutalist skyscrapers towering over endless traffic, with people seemingly weaving through the cars. It was almost as if they lived in it.
What if they did? An endless gridlock? The cars would be like a one giant pillow fort snaking through the city. That was the seed that eventually germinated on walks, flights, and that liminal space before sleep. I explored it, wondering: What would life be like? Why did it exist?
In the dystopian depictions of a future city, there was one particularly striking scene: nondescript brutalist skyscrapers towering over endless traffic, with people seemingly weaving through the cars. It was almost as if they lived in it.
What if they did? An endless gridlock? The cars would be like a one giant pillow fort snaking through the city. That was the seed that eventually germinated on walks, flights, and that liminal space before sleep. I explored it, wondering: What would life be like? Why did it exist?
During this time, I had read “Radical Markets” by Glen Weyl & Eric Posner, and particularly enjoyed the concept of Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax (COST) as a way to rethink property rights, especially for assets that “ought to be owned in the commons”. Also known as Harberger Tax.
The combination fit. The never-ending gridlock was static, and it was a commons that helped fund *something* through COST. If the world was dystopian, then perhaps it would be a way for people to leave. And then, the core fell into place: it would be a city that had to evacuate during a crisis and got stuck in a strange anomaly.
The anomaly, strangely enough, only took form in the last editing phase of the novel. It was previously a bit more nebulous, but by making it more concretely sci-fi, it more thoroughly gave credence to the existence of the gridlock.
From this baseline, the rest of the city and its economics grew. A particular fun exercise was to constantly extrapolate and play around with emergence. Eg, people not only living in it (which goes against the original intentions), but people also building structures over it.
From Top Gear’s ‘Campervan Challenge’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7g08nwEmyY
This extrapolation would eventually lead to thin structures rising above the cars: creating the Trunks & the Mid-Levels.
A big inspiration for the Mid-Levels came from its counterpart: the Mid-Levels in Hong Kong. True to its name, it’s multi-level living as the skyscrapers rise up on Hong Kong Island. A particularly unique structure is the escalators that wrap through the buildings up the mountain.
Later, after I had invented the Mid-Levels, I was fortunate to visit Cairo, and heard from friends there about how the city built bridges OVER the existing streets to decrease congestion. In some instances, it totally swallowed the existing street below, creating a new ‘underground’ in between skyscrapers. It was interesting to see parts of the novel corroborated in a modern city. Cairo’s vibrant city life, along with its unregulated building in its outskirts is a good visual metaphor for what I imagined Gridlock to look like in practice (particularly, the organic Mid-Levels).
Altered Carbon’s streets. Typical cyberpunk aesthetic also fits some of the imagined spaces in Gridlock.
The Trunks and the Mid-Levels are fertile ground for interesting explorations. One of my favourite scenes is the ramen bus, with the vines arcing down into the street below. With the birds flying through, I wanted to evoke some semblance of solarpunk. This city isn’t just cold, hard cyberpunk, but there’s also life here.
There’s a lot one can with intermixing of cars, buildings on top of cars, new undergrounds, and so forth. There was a scene I cut from the novel where Esper goes to take acid, where Esper ventures into a neighbourhood that was originally built to be a big pillow fort amongst the cars. It was built for the kids of the neighbourhood, to play in. However, as time went on, and the kids got older, the play turned into more sordid play and thus the neighbourhood eventually evolved into being a large playground for adults. I imagined it to feel like the pillow fort episode from Community.
As for the Penthouses. I think one thing that about this city design is that it admittedly follows a somewhat cliche trope: the rich and wealthy living above the poor. Although that’s the case, I imagined that the organic development seen in the bottom of the city would also occur up there. Case in point, with scenes of buildings being connected by bridges and criss-crossing lakes. Much of this vision was inspired by real-life cities like Singapore.
Perhaps one of my favourite extrapolations was the Grand Mansions, the ultra organic wonder-filled market. There’s no surprise that this was also inspired by Hong Kong: the old Kowloon Walled City, and modern places like Chungking Mansions.
The old Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. From: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/KWC_-_1989_Aerial.jpg
As with the rest of the Mid-Levels (in the novel), it started with people building in/over their cars, and it grew from there. Because the Grand Mansions was one of the earliest places that had structures like this: before it was formalised, it had remained a bit more chaotic. Thus: the image of a car in the gridlock still legally existing in the system with only its tires peaking out, is one of my favourites.
It is reminiscent of the large money stones of the Yap people. Its owners held wealth. At one point, a Yap stone was lost to the depths of the ocean when it was moved by ship. Although they couldn’t retrieve it anymore, its value still remained in the community. Everyone knew who owned it, even though transfers of wealth meant that the stone still remained at the bottom of the ocean.
Regarding the VR world, As a teenager, I enjoyed exploring places in games where you weren’t really allowed to go. This was particularly the case in World of Warcraft, where parts of the map had parts undone. That feeling of running into the simulated end is a close approximation of Flora’s experience as she edged into the borders of her virtual worlds.
Ultimately, the story of the formalization of the gridlock is also one we’ve seen in systems in the past. Ad-hoc, unregulated activity eventually giving rise to its formalized counterparts. Good examples of this occur when property owners are only allowed to build semi-permanent structures. Because the local executive does not enforce it, before you know it, it’s too late to destroy or remove. In fact: doing so, could be detrimental to the elected executive. Thus: it happens by accident, at the edges.
Overall, I’m a fan of the gridlock as a structure. It’s both organic, yet inert. It’s like how coral atolls are formed from coral detritus. Emergent. I enjoyed inventing businesses in it: like the ramen bus, or the library cars. There’s still a lot to imagine here.
I tried to avoid having it make 100% sense, to avoid hard sci-fi (not that big a fan), and to secondly, keep the aesthetic feeling of it closer to a fever dream. It just had to make enough sense in order to explore novel city design. The rest, as they, is an exercise left for the reader to imagine.
1.1 Portrayal of COST
COST is a cornerstone part of the novel: the always-on-sale gridlock. I wanted to ensure that COST is portrayed in a manner that fit its use. Hopefully that came across. I do think people might view it negatively, but hopefully people recognize that COST has its uses depending on the requirements of the particular system.
2 The Public Car Markets & The Hack
Oh boy. I spent a LOT of time trying to design this system in a way that it’s believably vulnerable. I kept asking myself: “... this is vulnerable to a hack, and it supports the economy of a large portion of the city: then why had this vulnerability not been spotted before?”
Luckily, the real life cyber security industry is often fraught with vulnerabilities that are hidden in plain sight for years: and this forms a part of Esper’s narrative, being able to see these holes in systems. Don’t brute force your way in. The Public Car Markets and the hack was originally more complex, but over time, I whittled it down to avoid bogging down the pace of the novel. It’s interesting, but in terms of the story, it just needed to be good enough, and provide the opportunity to find the important part of it: the bandwidth limiter, the secret.
Initially, the random number generator was separate from the Public Car Markets, and used for other things in the city, and there would be two councils [one purely for the random beacon, and one for the public car markets]. There was a whole section and discussion on trying to beat RANDAO through creating duplicate numbers and defeating bitwise exclusive xor. The section on duplicates and bitwise exclusive xor was simplified from a few paragraphs, to a sentence, to eventually just being cut from the novel. It wasn’t necessary to include the other options that the characters had in mind. RANDAO is now a part of Ethereum 2.0, so it’s actually a thing that is used/works.
As for the transaction ordering, I would say that this design is novel: defeating front-running in distributed systems by randomly ordering the transactions. Truth be told, I’m not 100% sure if this is actually feasible in practice. In a fully decentralized network, there might be incentives for node operators to stuff the blocks with junk in order to manipulate the randomness. But, it was good enough for me, and believable enough, given that the markets were there to provide a metaphor for power and control, and a lead to the truth. The concept of randomness being at the center of the city also aided the themes of absurdity and metamodernism [touched upon later].
Regarding the actual bug/hack. As mentioned: this actually comes from a famous vulnerability, called ‘heartbleed’: a perfect, believable example of how a simple vulnerability was hidden in plain sight. As it states:, it sends a ‘heartbeat’ to see if a server is online, and thus due to a missing ‘out of bounds’ check, anyone could, without detection, read parts of the memory of the server.
It also neatly played into the ‘heartbeat’ metaphor of the city, and the ‘heartbeats’ of the flickering red lights on top of skyscrapers. Those lights that warn airplanes.
The last note on the hack: the random number they discovered is an easter egg. It actually stands for something and won’t reveal it here. ;)
3 Bandwidth Limiter
The limiter, discovered in the Mech Institute servers, was a simpler implementation. Strangely, this is actually a new kind of problem in proof-of-stake networks like Ethereum 2.0, where a known IP address can be DDOSed in order to break it out of lockstep with a consensus algorithm. In this case, it was simpler, just DDOS telecoms infrastructure to restrict others from participating, allowing people to arbitrage. It would be noticeable if you knew where to look, which is why the limiter ran more frequently during times of market volatility, and why it is a key factor in Palma and Tenu’s decision to go against their family (volatility is due to death and chaos).
4 Citizens Assembly
The citizens assembly is something I think that should be adopted more widely across society: both nationally, and internationally. I’ve written before on the usage of citizens assemblies and randomness/sortition in electoral systems, so this was a fun addition to the systems of the novel.
I like it, because it’s a civic institution that gives a more formal, legitimate voice and opinion of society: alongside electoral systems or other governance systems. In short: citizens are randomly selected from a group of people and are asked their opinions. It gets buy-in from citizens, but is also a check on the legislative branch. The amount of citizens that were asked to speak was 385. Anything over 1 million citizens with a margin of error of 5% and 95% confidence level is basically statistically significant. So, if you were wondering: Gridlock is at least > 1 million citizens.
It also gives some flavour to the world of the novel, to have diverse opinions on the nature of the city. The book was originally littered with world-building commentary like podcasts and TV screens, but I funnelled all of these comments into the testimonies. Originally, the citizens assembly was more broad and included commentary on adding circuit breakers in the markets. But, I whittled it down for clarity to one simple question: to raise tax rates or not.
5 Mechs
The inspiration for the mechs primarily came from the fact when I started writing, I was big into the MCU and watching ‘The Legend of Korra’. In fact, Korra was also the internal visual inspiration for Flora.
There’s not much here in terms of novel sci-fi, except that it follows typical tropes of mechs. Perhaps, something, I’ve been hard-pressed to find visually is the long-distance mechs. I imagined them to be larger such that they also have the capacity to be a home for the controller.
From ‘Legend of Korra’
6 Systems
A lot of the joy of writing and storytelling is to invent and explore a new world. I feel fortunate to have been able to bring the city of Gridlock to fruition.
Cities tell stories, and I hope that Gridlock also did the same.
If you’ve read this blog post, and interested in reading the novel, find it here.
If there’s anything I left out regarding world-building, ask away in the comments!
Next up, I will talk about metamodern, optimistic nihilism, and character design.
