Phoenix: Visiting the Future

A field trip to the front lines of change

I just read a great 25,000-word article in The Atlantic from George Packer, about how Phoenix, Arizona, is a preview of several intersecting trends emerging in the United States. This is a cool conceit: take some of the most consequential changes on the horizon, identify where they are in the most advanced stages, and visit the place with the most hits. It’s kind of like a form of gradient ascent, though you could also probably use something like Graham Molitor’s methods as a shortcut.

First of all, I’m really envious of Packer’s writing ability. I know writing is his full-time gig and he’s been at it for much longer than I have, but he turns out an article or more a month, including the research, and he also writes books on the side, and his writing is much better than mine. I write a lot¹, but it’s so slow-going and it comes out so practical and workaday. I’ve set a new goal this quarter to write three paragraphs per day, and I expect it will improve the quality of my writing, but I feel there’s a huge gulf between what I create and truly good writing. I’m confident this is a skill that should be learnable, but despite asking some writing coaches I really don’t have a sense of how to improve², so if you have any tips let me know³.

The piece starts out by situating Phoenix in history, not unlike part of a current assessment in a futures project. This goes back not only to the area’s recent explosive population growth but to the water infrastructure projects that made it possible over a century ago, and to the Hohokam Indians who lived there for a thousand years before almost entirely disappearing nearly 600 years ago (ie, not due to European contact, presumably a long-term environmental change to the region). This is actually why the city is named Phoenix - it’s rising from the ashes of a collapsed civilization. Left unsaid in the article is the fact that the phoenix rises from the ashes because it keeps self-immolating…

After this Packer tells his story through nearly a dozen interconnected vignettes that touch on various pieces of potential futures that are peeking through in present-day Phoenix, and the stories interplay and interweave. Here are the key themes he covers, my own perspective from visiting Phoenix a few times, and my thoughts on a couple of things he missed.

Heat

The most salient global signal of change right now is climate change, the most straightforward symptom of climate change is an increase in temperature, and Phoenix is a traditionally quite hot place, so it makes perfect sense that it would serve as an advance warning of what’s to come. As I write this paragraph, I’m sitting in my Portland living room which registers an unpleasant 84 degrees⁴, about 18 degrees cooler than the high temperature outside today⁵; tomorrow might be a degree or two warmer still, the kind of heat that can melt statues. But this is nothing compared to the kind of wet-bulb heat events I’ve described in fiction, or in modern-day Phoenix where you can get life-altering burns from touching the ground and the heat can kill hundreds in a given summer.

Packer mentions shade and shade infrastructure a few times. On my first trip to Phoenix years ago, shade seemed like the most valuable resource in town - driving around during the day, I noticed people outside were huddled like lizards⁶ in whatever shade they could find - the sides of buildings and bus stops, and almost no trees. On my most recent visit to the area (Scottsdale, 100 degrees in May), I started to see shopping centers and public spaces with the kind of infrastructure that makes being outside much more bearable.

All this points to air conditioning as a necessary part of surviving in coming decades in much of the country. Last month the New York Times published a scary article about an academic paper from last year⁷ showing by simulation that a five-day blackout during a heatwave (which could be as easy as heavy demand plus an accident, or a cyberattack, or sabotage) could send most people in Phoenix to the emergency room and kill 1% of the population. This should be sufficient motivation to build various forms of resilience into our electrical grids, and to invest in passive forms of cooling.

Water

The other environmental issue covered is water: Phoenix is currently running out, and much of the country is heading the same way. Further, some of the current trends, such as the rapid rise of thirsty data centers to meet demand for AI workloads, are accelerating the loss of groundwater. This isn’t just about turning the water off when we’re brushing our teeth; even if the rate of extraction is reduced, when aquifers dry up they can settle in ways that permanently reduce their capacity, and the increasing volatility in rainfall means more runoff and less getting soaked into the ground.

The big observation the article makes is that water is a collective resource, and is almost always handled collectively⁸. As politics becomes increasingly performative and individualistic (more on this below), it becomes more difficult to deal with these issues. The article identifies the likely trajectory of all this, with land sinking, roads breaking, and homes becoming reliant on imported water in tanks, likely starting on the edges of the metro and slowly working its way into denser areas (a common pattern for collapse). Again, as people react to these shortages, in ways that defy traditional political lines, the machinery that sustains life is no longer hidden and can’t be taken for granted; as these things become uncertain, real unrest becomes likely.

Housing, Immigration, and Education

The two issues above intertwine to exacerbate a problem with two faces. The whole country is building houses slower than needed because of zoning and related restrictions. Lack of water is currently an additional reason restricting building near Phoenix (again, in a preview of what’s likely in store elsewhere), and the cumulative impact is rising housing prices and an increase in homelessness. An increase in dangerous heat in a situation where many live outside creates a public health / humanitarian crisis.

In addition, Packer spends thousands of words talking about immigration and its political aftermath. Having lived in the Plains and the Northwest, one thing that struck me driving around in Phoenix is how a huge percentage of the houses are surrounded not by fences but by walls. Presumably this is due to the Spanish colonial influence, but I see it as a larger metaphor for how the issues of immigration and specifically border security feels fundamentally different in the Southwest. The proximity to the realities of illegal immigration and asylum seeking — the deprivation, the simultaneous ineffectiveness and dehumanization in our immigration policies, and the raw anger created by the sense that we fundamentally aren’t able to control who enters our country — makes it look like a completely different issue than it does here, 1,000 miles away, where people have the privilege of posting yard signs saying “no human is illegal” or “refugees welcome here” but having the whole matter remain abstract.

One more issue I hadn’t appreciated where Phoenix looks like a baseline future for much of the country is in education — Packer calls it “the Wild West”. This includes the University of Phoenix, for-profit and sketchy but accredited, the kind of school that will scam students but isn’t officially “a scam”; it also includes a huge number of private schools funded by vouchers siphoning money away from public schools. The article digs into the messy reality of these, including a private school providing great, classics-based education and a supportive environment to people including the children of undocumented immigrants. With Republican-led states continuing a shift toward similar policies (most notably recently, Florida and Oklahoma), these experiences provide a preview of potential outcomes and pitfalls. Last, Packer covers Arizona State, which has a less-than-amazing reputation⁹ but has been an important part of the area’s story for over a century and is currently leading out in online education and embracing the use of generative AI in education. He also covers the school’s work in building a civics program to train students to be strong citizens and leaders within a democratic society, and to debate within the broad American tradition, without becoming captive to partisan dogmas and control.

Democracy

All of the issues above are complex problems, but humans have done lots of really impressive things - invented language, built the Panama Canal and the pyramids¹⁰, rebuilt Europe after WWII, went to the moon¹¹, sequenced the human genome, and even taught whales to be spies. However, designing and executing these solutions require coordination and collective action, and in a democratic republic it’s not something one person can force¹². As part of the Article, Packer interviews four people running for Congress, most very unsuccessfully: Ruben Gallego, running for Senate as a Democrat focused on working-class pocketbook issues rather than culture war and identity politics; Bernadette Greene Placentia, a foul-mouthed long-haul trucker taking what Packer calls a “Sarah Palin” approach to shifting the face of the party; Jeff Zink, the January 6th participant and election denier working to bring MAGA to a heavily Latino district¹³; and, most notably, Jacob Chansley, aka QAnon Shaman, unable to vote for himself due to his criminal status, way more serious about the shaman thing than I would have guessed, and sounding like Now That’s What I Call Conspiracy Theories Volume 1-6¹⁴.

Packer profiles how many of the pathologies of the modern-day Right, from conspiratorial thinking about almost any subject to election denial in particular, and below the surface, the dark nihilism that Tara Isabella Burton warned about in Strange Rites¹⁵. Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, which converts money from rich conservatives into student culture-war agitation on college campuses and YouTube, is identified as the standard-bearer and chief driver of these ills. The article documents how this alt-right ascendancy with its new dogmas and shibboleths disrupted the lives of two old-guard Republicans: Rusty Bowers, the former speaker of the Arizona House who serves as the soul of the entire article, who was sidelined, harassed, and threatened when he chose the US Constitution over Donald Trump and Rudy Guliani’s plan for an alternate slate of electors in 2020; on the other side, the January-6th-attending (but not the Capitol part), self-proclaimed “election-denier lite”, county supervisor Peggy Judd, who bemoans the current environment of existential partisanship, but also refused to certify the midterm election and is currently faces felony charges for election interference while her husband dies of bone cancer.

Wrap

I think Packer missed a couple of opportunities to explore other ways that Phoenix acts as a harbinger of likely futures. For example, I talked about my experience with self-driving cars there - one of three cities hosting Waymo. Similarly, there are a lot of commercial space-industry companies in the area - the airport even has the awesome name “Sky Harbor”, though that’s apparently been the name for nearly a century. These are small omissions, and for all I know he wrote whole insightful pages about them that were cut because they didn’t fit as well as the other items. Overall, showing how these drivers of change interact and weave together to create a preview of the baseline future for the rest of us (which many would consider mostly a warning) makes this article an excellent example of journalistic futures.

One hidden theme weaving through the article I’d like to touch on last is how much our social fabric is currently maintained by non-government entities, from non-profits helping connect the homeless to services, to people acting alone to create relief stations for and giving advice to migrants, to undocumented workers who volunteer at their kids’ school. The importance of civil society outside the government has been a special facet of American life going back to de Toqueville in the 1830s¹⁶, but volunteering rates continue to decrease for a number of reasons. If government sclerosis prevents the solving of problems centrally, and fewer of us are independently giving our time working on them, the two options are to rely on philanthropy from the billionaire class or to become increasingly dysfunctional.

1. I’ve thought about describing myself as a “professional writer” because it’s easier to understand than “data strategist” or “healthcare futurist” or whatever I’m calling myself these days, but I don’t think it would come across that most of what I write is emails, policy documents, briefings, and similar artifacts.

2. If I wanted to be a novelist, it seems like there’s a whole industry happy to take my money and give advice, but much less so on essays beyond what people write in college.

3. Of course, it’s plausible that in 3 years AI will be a better writer than me and it won’t matter - I’ll just be recognizing and cultivating great writing rather than lovingly hand-crafting each word.

4. That’s about 29 degrees for people who use tools to measure things instead of their perfectly functional body parts.

5. We are part of the trend of the dramatic increase in homes with air conditioning in Portland, but we only have two portable units, so the strategy for the open areas is to let as much cool air in as possible during the morning and then seal everything up until it gets dark again.

6. To be clear, I’m not trying to dehumanize people who need to take the bus, I’m pointing out how extreme heat exposes our biological limits and turns us from disembodied minds to bags of climate-controlled meat.

7. The paper is also referenced briefly in The Atlantic article.

8. The writing on this topic reminded me of the work of Elinor Ostrom on commons management I read as an Econ undergraduate, not knowing how respected her work was in the Futures community as well.

9. The flipside of low standards, of course, is accessibility.

10. Oddly, this is a more controversial statement than it was when I was a kid and everyone knew Stargate was just a cool movie, not a documentary…

11. Also increasing in controversy…

12. There are only hints of this in the article, but there’s also the possibility of things breaking the other way, with climate disaster plus democratic backsliding leading to some form of eco-fascism.

13. In one of the wildest exchanges of the article, a supporter explains how Trump can’t be racist because he’s one of the most-name-dropped people in 80s and 90s rap music.

14. The conspiracy theories that have a soft spot in my heart are the ones from my childhood about really cool inventions that the government is keeping secret. In my case it was time travel and invisibility; in the shaman’s case, it (still) is free energy and antigravity.

15. Not that the modern Left is free from dangerous pathologies, but a) that would have required a visit to someplace like Seattle or maybe Minneapolis; and b) at the moment, it’s a fair assessment that the elements on the Right that threaten the constitutional order have achieved a much higher degree of institutional capture than on the Left (see Project 2025, for instance).

16. Democracy in America Book 2, Chapter 5:

Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds—religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive, or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.