Autopia
The Gold Coast
1: A world unto itself | 2: Crumple zone | 3: Competition | 4: Coordination
Listen, this one’s long. I think it’s really quite good though, and well worth the time. Come back in chunks if you’d like.
Please consider viewing on a desktop — the photos are just better there. If you don’t that’s fine, we all got phones.
Chapter 1: A world unto itself
Choked sunlight blasts across the landscape, peering over the Santa Ana mountains and down into the LA Basin. Its smog-scattered golden haze obliterates the vast distances of Greater Los Angeles; the lumpy whaleback edifice of San Gorgonio Mountain looms above Anaheim despite being 90 miles away from Disneyland.
In the midground, the chemical plants that pipe towards Long Beach Harbor emit new strata of air pollution, which are washed away nightly by the marine layer’s slow, humid march inland from the sea. Pacific-cooled air generally pushes the smog layer eastward towards the Inland Empire before it’s finally exhaled onto the Mojave Desert through low passes in the mountains. But right along the strip of coast, i’s so easy to see Southern California as paradise, the sea breeze keeping the grass greener than the shadeless canopy of the inland concrete jungle.
The Palos Verde Hills that I stand on form a promenade at the southwestern corner of the LA Basin. Their ~1500ft rise off the valley floor provides an unadulterated panorama of the megacity. With the naked eye, one can trace the topographic membrane that the seals So Cal off from the world, enclosed to the east by oversteepened mountains and protected by its pendant of Channel Islands to the west.
In this fantastical kingdom of Southern California, American mythmaking perhaps takes its most alchemical form, dripping with self-referential enchantment. Lights, cameras, cars, grandiosity, glamour, earthquakes.
Be wary: I am but a lowly Midwesterner who is entranced by this self-contained universe. But for exactly that reason, I am qualified to conjure up dreams of this far off wonderland. I see palm trees whose fronds catch the golden sunsets; I picture the labyrinthine Hollywood Hills’ dusty mountainsides cross-cut by highways; I see traffic stretched out in all directions, each driver decorated by gold-rimmed aviators. Helicopters circle overhead and contribute their exhaust to the vibrating smog that limits visibility to only the nearest hills.
Simultaneously, I remember learning about its police violence in High School, I remember LA’s symbolic targeting by ICE in summer 2025, its visible and nearly-romantic levels of pollution that tint the sunsets rose hues. Each of these toxic and/or enchanted fragments swirl around each other to construct our shared imaginary of Southern California. The city’s enduring centrality in our American subconscious is testament that it really is on the edge. Foot on the gas, accelerating far too fast into the future. I love it precisely because it has no time for history or for its own topography. It will build anyway.
And I must report that most of these partial imaginaries find authentic purchase in So Cal, today. It is a land of individualism, cutting interpersonal competition, unimaginable wealth disparities, and dystopic urban sprawl. At the same time, it would be absurd to deny its greatest laurels. The epic Santa Monica Mountains dive beneath the sea into the Channel as its temperamental rivers viscously dissect expansive valleys. Springtime’s purple dusk is engraved by the Islands’ jagged horizon.
Spinning in 360° atop the Palos Verde hills, there is no evidence that there is an outside world. All imaginable landscape features exist in front of your eyes. It is this glorious, ludicrous playground:
Sadly no icebergs or glaciers are present at this moment, though San Gorgonio did host humble glaciers during the Pleistocene.
One who spends enough time here should be immediately and roundly forgiven for forgetting that the map does continue beyond Banning Pass (its eastern gateway, near San Bernardino). This regional amnesia is a keystone of the beautiful paradox of So Cal — which begs our understanding as fellow Americans…
I recognize that there are many worldly folks in Greater L.A. I just intend to play in the abstract here. Even my most precocious friends in Redlands (Inland Empire) love the metropolis for its sense for grand, absurd fantasy.
For all its stereotypical self-importance and artifice, So Cal truly is a world unto itself. Its miraculous geography echoes & fuels the bold human geography that spread to fill its every contour.
This is its imaginary, the artificial image of Los Angeles that we all (to varying degrees) picture in our cultural minds’ eye. It is far from complete when the humble realities of most Angelinos are revealed, since they are not the ones refracting this imaginary through fame or celebrity. Very few live in the Beverly Hills or Malibu, it turns out. Through even that simple namedrop, we are still reminded that these imagined universes from television and film are, indeed, embodied, material geographies.
The constant interactions between the material and imagined landscapes of Greater LA is my personal fascination. Each time I return, I feel this place representing so much of our moment’s treacherous footing. I and some friends believe that LA distills the oversaturated, chaotic beauty of this technologically-augmented party at the end of the world. This city’s branded by all the burn scars that proclaim the thing as being a real rager.
So these valleys came to embody the 20th century’s most rose-tinted frontier and fucked up frontier. Its cutthroat businesspeople and land developers grew up far from the Halls of Congress (actually about as far away as geographically possible). Mulholland’s retrieval of water at the turn of the 20th century permitted this growth and founded the modern city firmly in the graces of mankind’s uncompromising ingenuity in the face of mother nature.
The burgeoning population oiled the wartime economy by building planes and boats for the Pacific Theater in WWII. Throughout the smoldering Cold War, great minds flocked to the good weather of Cali to join the ranks of its magic-making in film backlots or Tinder (both Hollywood staples). Thus began the concrete’s fire-like spread across Greater Los Angeles — the paving of all things. Moviemaking, Lockheed Martin, sinuous interstates, free international trade, individual identity…
All these emblems of American exceptionalism were in many ways, born from and manifest in the decentralized urban geography of Southern California. However, from the powerfully-unionized docks of Long Beach to the austere halls of Anduril, unfettered freedom is truthfully very far from defining the terrain of Los Angeles, despite what the movies led me to believe.
Newcomers never stopped coming, scaling the hills, building houses on stilts, gridding out the desert, carving cul-de-sacs from the sagebrush. As it flourished, Los Angeles fostered a uniquely creative spirit, its cultures reflecting a horizontal city rather than a vertical one, the width of new frontiers offering the opportunity to escape from top-down cultural hierarchies.
In Los Angeles, all was change and novelty for a century, and the city’s history was seen to be of little use to its future. There would be no end to it: Los Angeles, the city fated to be eternally at the edge of forever.
Lunenfeld
I walk across the pristine, sheltered grounds of Trump’s “National Golf Club - Los Angeles.” Its sprinklers utilize water funneled in from >300 miles away in the Feather River Basin, pumped up mountains and through multiple fault planes.
Above is Myanmar, 2025. It’s slip sense is the same as the plane that the aqueducts tunnel through.
And in Kumamoto, Japan, earlier this year. These are highly relevant videos. In Southern California, the return interval has been just long enough to hastily build out a 15 million person economic centerpointe.
Across the channel between Palos Verde and Santa Catalina island, massive cargo ships crawl towards Long Beach harbor. They burn vestigial oil, their captains crossing their fingers as they hope for the blockade of Hormuz to end.
They are ships from Asia, bringing us all our coveted stuff. Only a quarter mile from the President’s greenways, the huge Palos Verde landslide creeps into the sea, taking dozens of homes down with it.
Above me, wrapping around the summit of the hills, noticeable stepped terraces encircle the peninsula. Each record the chronology of Palos Verde’s lurching march out from under the waves — they are all shorelines that were eroded flat by the former ocean’s edge. Now, these ghostly terraces are thrust up into the air to be adorned by pristine housing developments, in regular hoists like those captured in those earlier videos. These houses on PV are built only for the richest of us, perched up above all the smog.
Los Angeles is a geography of simultaneity. It is exceedingly easy to notice the signatures of the past while actively watching the future reform in front of your eyes — sometimes through gradual, creeping changes, but often in sudden and calamitous lurches.
Chapter 2: Crumple zone
Thanks to our fateful search for hydrocarbons, we have come to know far too much about LA’s dramatic geographic microcosm. Peering beneath the valley floors, we witness a gory collision scene. For reasons I don’t understand well enough to narrate, the San Andreas Fault — that great and famous signature of California — has some kinks in its path. It occasionally switches paths, jumping over to the east or west to find an easier portion of the plate boundary to lacerate.
Most recently, the plate boundary seems to have frayed eastward to connect to a spreading rift that’s opening between the west coast of mainland Mexico and its Baja California Peninsula. This linkage has started to shear Baja California northwesterly, captured in the overall motion of the Pacific Plate, moving off to be subducted underneath the Aleutian Islands and Alaska. This animation helps visualize the formation of the San Andreas Fault and its smearing effect on western NA, extending the basin and range and rifting Baja from its its former homeland, Mexico:
If I were in the business of making crude geopolitical analogies, I’d say some stupid shit like the US were stealing Mexico. No, we’re looking across the horizon, across the international dateline:
Above is the Pacific Plate’s greater project: dragging itself relentlessly towards the Aleutian, Japanese, and Kamchatka subduction zones to sink down and return to be melted in Earth’s mantle. It is humbly recycling itself for the future. It’s gotten far too cold and heavy after staying on the outside of the planet for about 190 million years. Imagine a lava lamp’s convection to understand what I mean — their name is surprisingly accurate in this tectonic context of Earth’s gummy Mantle.
Anyhow, that jump east to meet the Salton/Baja rift means that the San Andreas’ “Big Bend” has aggravated the Pacific Plate’s northwesterly motion. Things are not working in a convenient mechanical way. In the crook, rocks shatter and jostle as they try desperately to navigate the sharp corner.
Not only do new shear zones tear from side-to-side (where lateral motion strikes), but different actors in the zone might also bump into one another. This is called transpression - the combination of translational (lateral) and compressional (uplift/thrusting) motion vectors. This is the case where the Pacific Plate pulverizes this part of its plate boundary around the kinked San Andreas.
Generally, maps depict the dominant translational story of the San Andreas fault and its delimitation of the North American from the Pacific Plate. Adding the compressional component, under the surface, reveals the Pacific Plate’s structurally-shattered eastern edge.
Disregard much of what is symbolized on the cross sections: the names of formations, the oil wells, etc. Notice the jumbled and brutalized subsurface. Colors should connect, be relatively horizonal, and so forth. These beaching structures are the thrusted blocks that clamber on top of one another as the compressive kinking of the San Andreas forces everyone to huddle more and more tightly together.
The diverse geographic microcosm of Greater LA is one built on top of much carnage. There is a long history of dispossession — from Indigenous Tongva, Chumash, Cahuilla, to so many more-modern stories. These initial sins committed, first by Spanish Missionaries, extend into the present through the interrelated struggles of Black Angelinos, the late 20th century’s arrival of Mexican immigrants searching for opportunity, and today’s flattening austerity.
This fragmented history, mirrored by the wreckage depicted in its faulted bedrock, seems to be precisely what lends this city its centrality to the present moment. It has been the flashpoint for many urban rebellions, scandals, natural disasters, and natural disaster films. It oozes oil, shudders frequently, and sits on the edge of the continent. Where better to march forward into the unknown at the End of History than the broken, hurried leading edge of The West. This is the literal farthest frontier before the cardinal directions wrap back on themselves.
How did we get all the way out here? What fostered this atomized, glittering, unstable, over-engineered paradise?
Chapter 3: Competition
Vietnam raged in the background as American society reckoned with its heavily- normative culture, lithifying after our victory in WWII. A period of material abundance and opportunity followed that manifest in part as intractable societal norms about family & gender. It got too stuffy, it seems, and the kids understandably wanted to escape their cul-de-sacs and emotionally distant parents to hang with more open-minded friends.
So many of them fled west to stake claim in a New West — one not populated by dusty ranchers but instead by sunburnt idealists. San Francisco became the hub of this ephemeral migration that seasonally swelled during the summer of 1967.
The potent psychic energy of this self-liberated zeitgeist still echoes through the AI-permeated and hollowed-out streets of SF, but not in the ways we might hope. Lots of things have changed in only a couple years. The pioneering technologists of this foggy utopia on the edge aren’t held in such high regards anymore. The Founder Class, composed of by the likes of Zuckerberg, Pichai, and Altman, are now frequently found meditating at the numerous spiritual retreats along the Big Sur coastline.
It is easy to imagine them talking to one another in therapy-speak, mumbling through guided ketamine trips as they re-connect with simple truths about human relations. These interventions then spur new HR training courses and LinkedIn workshops for the middle managers. It seems that through the framework of self (re)discovery, they are able to put aside the deeply-suppressed guilt they might have about their role in architecting our personalized echo chambers.
They have lost touch with the worth of their employees and must be guided (via shaman) back towards their long-gone selves. If you’re more in the know, you might be invited to Thiel’s secret clubs where they roleplay as philosopher kings, pondering about the impending dark ages that AGI will — definitely — bring very soon. They promise it’s coming.
Many people across our country revere these people, or at least lend them the benefit of the doubt; “we use his technology every day — who am I to question his success?” New founders on this block carve even more rarified personas, casting themselves in a nearly-divine quest for emergent machine intelligence. By a terrifying number of people, these characters are revered. They are envied. They are endlessly imitated. But they are clearly very lonely, just like us, crammed into all our algorithmic corners.
People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model – but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes about 20 years of life – and all the food you consume during that time – before you become smart.
Sam Altman, 2026
As autumn rounded the bend in ‘67, some of those ~100,000 starry-eyed bums in Golden Gate Park went home. They returned to affordable homes, hegemonic American power, and hereto-unmatched real wage growth. Things were still quite profitable and the share of wealth between the upper VS middle/lower classes were still holding in the wake of FDR’s New Deal.
Most hippies moved back home to boundless opportunity, but some of them had stayed in the Bay Area. They were well-educated and came to imagine new decentralized communications networks as a way out of the hermetically-sealed cultures of domination that they had rebelled against in the late 60’s. A new age was on the horizon, and the minds settling in the South Bay / Silicon Valley were both prophets and engineers heralding this new age.
Even if the social order of technocracy threatened the species with nuclear annihilation and the individual young person with psychic fragmentation, the media technologies produced by that order offered the possibility of individual and collective transformation.
[These] dual emphases also allowed young people to imagine the local communities they built around these media not simply as communities built around consumption of industrial products, but as model communities for a new society.
Turner
Eventually, the Berlin Wall fell, and the World Bank declared that the endgame of capital had been achieved: democracy (where beneficial), free international trade, deregulation, privatization. Neoliberalism had arrived. We had apparently distilled the ingredients necessary for a modern, efficient, profitable, fitter, happier, and stronger world.
The aging hippies’ technological optimism was authentic — a reasonable reaction to the mechanistic and powerful military-industrial economy that had coalesced on the tailwinds of Hiroshima and metamorphosed into the brutal Communist containment conflicts of the Cold War.
That steamrolling and hive-minded culture of the 40’s and 50’s had shattered, gutted in hopes of empowering individuals, cultivating the free-spirited, and enabling their personal liberation through limitless self-expression.
The digital age had arrived, and with it, revolution became synonymous with self-determination. Power would no longer be vested in collective labor power — it would be expressed by the self and not be infringed upon by any censor. Alternative communities (in the forms of cults & social networks) exploded to absorb the closeted uniqueness of a pent-up American populace.
California epitomized this new age of personal liberation: fitness, freedom, cunning, innovation, use, expansion, pollution, firestorms,,,,,,,
If the present era can be construed as Anthropocene, the twentieth century in Southern California constituted an Autopocene, the structuring of urban and suburban development, and of the very landscape itself, around the capabilities (and limitations) of a society on wheels.
Southern California first invented, then promulgated car culture. Its foundation was the freeway system, built horizontally, not vertically, offering a model of the automobile not merely as a simulacrum of freedom but as its ultimate instrument.
Lunenfeld
As the internet-navigated terrain of decentralized networks entangled America, my generation has been raised in their webs; we are taught to spin our personalized niches into them, to follow our lofty dreams, to move abroad and forsake family. We have become nomads and van lifers who write essays for people on worldwide social media networks, constantly competing for relevance in this multi-billion-user meritocracy.
Our cult of identity undergirds the eastern shore of this epic Pacific Ocean. California’s coast is, by all measures, the spiritual center of the neoliberal economic order. Pointing out that its psychic epicenter (Silicon Valley) lies only 6 miles from the San Andreas Fault as it cuts, divisively, clear through the Bay Area, is a metaphor that any passerby could articulate...
This modern economy of alienation, consumption habit data harvesting, inescapable advertising, and technological worship was born on this rocky, shapeshifting coastline.
There is an undeniable affinity between these fragile social designs and the unstable Earth that they were concocted atop. All of our flowery nostalgia about the 1970’s progressive tides have been misremembered. The libertarians won, and we live in the individualistic world laid out by their blueprints, these networks architected by the most wealthy for little mutual gain for their users to enjoy. Cyberspace, at first held such promise and hope but now parasitically drains our souls and information.
I too mourn some imagined idea of historic community and wring my hands about how difficult it is to find places to meet new friends. My attention’s totally shot, just like everyone else. While being caught up in those failures of the hyper-online era, I have also been intoxicated by this self-aggrandizing mystique that seeps from the California Coast. It is a myth both deeply antisocial and, sometimes, so genuinely inspiring in its focus on unlimited expression. Such is the ‘liberatory’ allure of the frontier.
My travels to Greater LA’s peculiar megalopolis started with getting hired as a Cartographer at Esri. Being inducted into this YoungProfessionalTM hall of mirrors was so automatic, so programmed by my upbringing and college expectations about our grand meritocracy. At times, I have even internalized the soul-sucking hollowness of the consulting economy’s focus on innovative, cool new gadgets. I push back on this fervently, and try to hold on to the genuinely helpful components of GIS tech; I care about the applications that make people’s lives measurably better. How could I have completely resisted corporate’s pull when being wooed by polished HQs lined by palm trees and Redwood saplings? They even water them with recycled sources! 🌍
And yet in these maximally-branded glass-and-steel motherships, I have met some of the most beautiful souls. Amazing people have passed through this transient geography, and hopefully with their help, we can all transform the disjointed and lonely reality that surrounds us.
All the fractures in our cultural landscape come to the surface here, laid bare by heavy erosional pressures.
He can’t characterize this landscape yet, it’s too new, but there’s something in its complexity, its anarchic profusion of forms, that is mesmerizing to watch. Nothing has been planned. No two things are the same. And yet everything has an intense coherence.
Robinson
Chapter 4: Coordination
One can sense the powerful tenure of certain American cities — New York, Chicago, New Orleans. They have limited time under the spotlight before their leadership is inherited by the next rising center of power.
In this essay, I suppose I’ve merged two metropolises. San Francisco: the ideological nexus, with Los Angeles: the unambiguous avatar for the most idealistic & despotic outgrowths of The Bay’s technocratic ideology.
Combined, the Central Coast of California nevertheless form a globally-unique political geography. Combined, they unequivocally represent the world we dreamt up during our country’s brief, hegemonic reign. The material and cultural geoengineering of Southern California is — by far — the purest incarnation of the American century:
Endless sun will be enjoyed by all!
Miraculous vehicles will transport us between our nodes in the network!
Natural forces & cycles will be suppressed in the name of productive activity!
Self-expression is the path to liberation!
This supplication has been chanted for decades across The West, subconsciously or otherwise. Most of us know in our hearts that it is an empty worldview, used up and discarded since the 80’s or 90’s. We now live in its barren carcass. The oracle Kalshi predicts our future, being LinkedIn ensures our income, Facebook catalogues the last ‘Third Spaces,’ and political education [non-cynically] happens primarily on the internet — for better and worse. It’s a new era, and it kinda fucking sucks.
And we still kinda remember the aspects of collaboration and innovation that brought American modernity it’s enviable success & stability. There are things for us to carry forwards and reconfigure; don’t mistake the righteous cynicism for being completely jaded on the American project. I was born here; I’m wrapped up in this this whole project, goddammit... Give me a second - we’re getting to the point…
Our country’s 4-part former manifesto seems to be dissolving line by line these days. A rewrite is becoming more and more unavoidable:
A hotter and brighter sun will rise each day.
The miraculous infrastructural liberties we enjoy are directly tied to strategic energy supplies / chokepoints.
Flash floods and earthquakes cannot be suppressed forever.
Self-expression as the sole tenant of liberation is utterly destructive.
Now our task is to start bridging its chasms, creating durable networks that concentrate power for common benefit. We just spent the last 40 years being convinced that independence + distinction were the most important pursuits in the free marketplace.
The business genius of Silicon Valley’s decentralization was the fracturing it enacted. It created new value signifiers, new consumer segments. It demolished solidarity, split everyone’s souls across different subreddits and programmatically-delimited markets. It’s culminated in complete economic austerity, compelling its dejected victims to lash out.
The angriest among us are already lighting the signal fires for our notice:
Their martyrdom may not be the “right” strategy, but most regular folks immediately understand why the arsonists are forced to the act.
And that new empathy has only recently emerged…
Chapter 2 painted a picture of violent collisions embodied by the dramatic and warped physical geography of So Cal. Features are being faulted, overwritten, and consumed underneath massive structures. And undoubtedly, it is a collision zone defined by gargantuan economic and geologic physics.
Viewing that collision in X-ray, in tandem with the lateral movement accommodated by the San Andreas & her sister faults complicates the simple story of violence. By combining the cross-sectional and aerial perspectives, we can glimpse a much grander narrative.
What we may be misinterpreting in Southern California as a story of tectonic mutilation actually records a detailed history of accommodation — of partitioning mutual strains.
These unique structures (the San Gabriel block, the Santa Monica anticline, San Jacinto, etc.) make room for one another. They reorient themselves in service of a larger common goal. Each have accepted their being caught up in the bigger project of the Pacific Plate. The kinked bend of the San Andreas must be rounded on their collective journey northwest, off towards the Aleutians and Asia — to be subducted / recycled.
This is a literal reading of the rocks and their shared journey; it is a literal reading of their coordinated motions, even if I deliver it in poetic inflections.
Just as naturalists point to the forests as their classrooms, I am confident that these geologic stories have something important to teach us. It has only been about 50 years since Plate Tectonics was begrudgingly welcomed into the comfort of scientific consensus. We have only very recently been able to wrap our heads around the grand motions of this Big Rock. But in our socially-shattered times, I think So Cal’s rocks have much to tell us about overcoming structural problems.
It is the setting of Blade Runner, after all.
As a brief tangent… The sun-bleached verticality of the San Gabriel Mountains have burnt over so many times this last century that it is likely that their slopes will never regain permanent vegetation or tree cover. The startling erosional rates clocked by So Cal’s winter rainstorms are controlled by the San Gabriel’s highly-friable, faulted-to-hell bedrock, ensuring its denuded landscape far into the human-populated future.
We will have to witness a bare San Gabriel range, indefinitely.
And yet the vision of the city as an ecological wasteland under a punishing acid rain seems closer than ever, if only because a city still reliant on gas-burning cars (LA created the Autopocene, after all); watered by sources hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away; prone to devastating and ever-worsening wildfires; built atop a desert landscape crisscrossed by some of the most famous earthquake faults in the world, which sits next to a sea that is inexorably rising, cannot help but cause even the blithest of Southern Californian to worry.
… the warning offered by Roy Batty of a future that hasn’t befallen the city — yet —still resonates. The doomed replicant tells the blade runner that everything that has happened to both of them — and by implication, to us all — can be lost “like tears in rain.” It is the responsibility of those who live in and love this planet’s great cities to ensure that the edge of forever is a plane and not an abyss.
Lunenfeld
And I write this now 7 years after Ridley Scott’s cyberpunk dystopia was slated to materialize in our timeline.
Among the precarity of Southern California exists vibrant and vivacious people. Chicano working families, historied Chinese neighborhoods, hubs of Black art, and Viet enclaves each act as the connective tissue of the present’s kaleidoscopic cityscape. These broad-stroke stereotypes just serve to paint the unimaginable diversity of this moment in America — especially in So Cal.
In the past, native peoples wove long-standing cultures into the chaotic geologic scenery. The Chumash peoples of the modern Santa Barbara → Oxnard coastline still punctuate the landscape, but their longstanding success might help us imagine a more balanced future… (serving an allegorical point more than anything)
A massive Redwood trunk floats down the southerly California Current, bobbing past the 600-mile serrated coastline between Eureka and Santa Barbara. Two years ago, it was uprooted by an earthquake offshore of Cape Mendocino where the San Andreas slips underneath the sea to bound the Juan De Fuca Plate’s southern edge (where it subducts underneath Oregon and Washington). As it the drifter rounds Point Conception, its softened wood is illuminated by a rowing team piloting a Tomol close to the rocky shore. Torchlight from the boat dances against the wavy, long-travelled maroon trunk, a visitor from an even-more unstable part of the plate margin.
They had just sailed across the straight between Swaxil (a village on modern-day Santa Cruz Island) and the delta of present-day Ventura. Their families have lived here for more than 13,000 years. As ancestral humans traversed down the beaded coastline of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California, from Pleistocene Beringia, their folks stayed here.
They’ve stuck around here for probably more than 12,000 years. They rode out the earthquakes and the damp closeout of the last Ice Age. They knew greater winter floods than we’ve ever seen. But awash in all those hazards, they emerged as one of the most successful groups on the planet, building ocean fairing Tomols from the driftwood to knit a network of ocean-fairing communities into the landscape.
They waterproofed the sown planks with natural asphalt that leak from the Ventura anticline, a bowing fault structure defining the topography there. It is fitting that while being heavily polluted by the 14 million-head city next to it, the Santa Barbara Channel still represents one of the most productive marine ecosystems in North America.
This is equally confusing and remarkable because of the sheer abundance of such a fundamentally-broken geography so insistent on remaking itself.
This idealized historic scene is far too anachronistic for our modern technological tastes, [nobody’s looking for a society devoid of tech anymore]. Still, the Chumash’s prosperity provides a framework that we must start to iterate on. Within that imaginary, the unique and shifting bounties of this temperamental Earth are accommodated. The features of California’s coastal tectonic battle had been fully integrated into a prosperous and epic culture.
Southern California’s dual economic + geologic precarity epitomize the sign of these modern times: this intricate facade of control will shatter at any moment. Likewise, even when it shatters, that doesn’t mean the landscape is wiped clean.
Reframing LA’s emblematic scenery’s geologic dismemberment in the context of a larger mission helps us see that things can be and are being reconfigured in front of our eyes. We, very evidently, all have a lot more common than America’s most competitive geography had led us to believe.
A shared mission, a motion vector, will help us imagine accommodating each others strains’. These senses of cooperative motion — tectonic or otherwise — are what must learn to divine from this unsteady landscape. It has to be a model that can capture the imaginations of a whole new generation of diverse Americans, bridging the myriad historical divisions that were cut across our terrain.
This Golden Coast is rusting.
Where the spotlight focuses next is up to us.
But just like ever, Greater LA finds itself on the edge of the future; this great sprawling city is, eternally, a preview of a future America. We can and must learn to set this fractured societal bedrock into motion and mobilize together to construct a future that looks fundamentally different from the present — yet in many ways, so recognizable.
I can’t say I want to be anywhere close to the coast when a segment finally snaps. But one thing I can say for sure is that those folks out there are going to be able to handle it.
Photos captured in situ Aug 2023, Apr 2024, Mar & Sept 2025, April & June 2026; writing from Aug 2026.
Maps and cross sections are adapted or sourced from the brain-destroying exploration geology wizardry of Davis & Namson Consulting Geologists.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Gold Coast” mapped the startlingly-accurate postmodern malaise that’s captured America (in many ways, engineered in the academic-industrial complex of Orange County and its surround).
The forgotten history of the Summer of Love’s convenient marriage with Capital was documented in “From Counterculture to Cyberculture,” by Fred Turner.
Much of the alchemical geography of Los Angeles was taught to me by Peter Lunenfeld’s “City at the Edge of Forever.”
Thanks and love to Esri friends & other folks in So Cal.