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7/ Since most of the land on the planet is claimed behind some border, border bound territories tend to be co-extensive with high integrity graphs. The “dam and flood” metaphor is really bad at capturing this. It’s more like piles of spaghetti in a 2-compartment container.
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8/ A normal human border is not a dumb partition but a sort of graph theoretic transformation function where trade in graph capital happens, like forex transactions. You show social capital in one subgraph to show you can transition beneficially to another.
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9/ So to answer my original question, the opposite of a border is a sort of graph-destroying, alienating, identity-erasing interstitial place. Social graph terra terra nullius. People abandoned by all social graphs. People fallen through cracks.
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10/ You know the best place to find an unborder? It’s not at national borders but in the hearts of cities, which are full of what I call human graph garbage, in both computer science and social senses. People cut off from all social graphs.
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11/ Around the world, refugee communities are known for stronger than normal graph integrity, not weaker. They may be geographically homeless but they are socially the opposite of homeless. They are like arks.
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12/ That’s why they form ethnic enclaves with weirdly narrow versions of their origin cultures. There is a reason “Indian” food in the US is mostly Punjabi food. Or why half the Uber drivers in Seattle are Ethiopian or Somalian.
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13/ My point with this thread is not to provide any specific commentary on the border crap going on now but to point out that the “order keeping out chaos” mental model of ethnonationalism is really really toxic and sociological nonsense.
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14/ With climate change pressure this sort of thing is going to get far worse, not better. So if we don’t upgrade our mental models of migration, we risk destroying vast amounts of cultural capital trying to preserve itself.
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15/ All the varied cuisines you can enjoy in any major city are just the tip of the iceberg of what gets saved/preserved/redundantly replicated through migration. This is planetary scale distributed computation on an unreliable hard drive.
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Replying to
I think it's this replication that people fear. Some have little faith in the ability of America's norms and institutions to accommodate migrants, and think people escaping disaster will replicate cultures that don't value democracy/individual rights.
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People everywhere have similar fears, and they are legitimate and often even justified. It’s the problem to be worked through. What is neither legitimate or justified is nativism: “my relationship to this land is sacred than yours so it is right that I unilaterally decide”