three masks

materialist scumbag --

Winchester Mystery House unveils new "unfinished rooms" walkthrough for the season -- San Jose, June 2026

The story you already have: Sarah Winchester, gun widow, gets told by a medium in Boston that the spirits of everyone a Winchester rifle ever killed are coming to collect, and the only thing holding them off is the hammering -- build without a plan, build without stopping, stairs that climb into a ceiling and doors that open onto a two-story drop, keep the carpenters going day and night forever or the ghosts get you. Build for 36 years. Die mid-swing with the nails still warm.

Good story. The medium is undocumented, by the way -- she doesn't show up in print until after Sarah's dead and the place already has a ticket booth -- but good story, sells the tour. What's not on the brochure is the dividend.

Sarah owned something like 48% of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. That stake paid out at a clip people at the time put around a thousand dollars a day. 1886 dollars. A day. Whether she got out of bed or not, whether she did a single thing or not, every morning another thousand dollars landed on a woman who could not spend a thousand dollars a day if she tried, and who, more to the point, had no way to put it back to work.

Because a rich man in 1886 with a thousand a day rolling in has somewhere to put it. He buys into a railroad, he buys into a bank, he buys the company next door, he does the thing money does, which is find more money. Sarah can't. She's a woman, in the 1880s, in the arms trade -- she does not run Winchester, other men run Winchester, and the idea of her walking into New Haven to direct capital allocation at a rifle works is not a thing that occurs to anyone including her. So the income is real and the reinvestment channel is welded shut. The plumbing that carries a fortune back into more fortune -- for her it just isn't connected to anything.

So where does a thousand a day go when it can't compound?

It goes into lumber.

Run it as a balance sheet for a second, because that's really what the house is -- it's a balance sheet you can walk through. You've got a revenue line that won't quit and a capital account with no outlet, and the only asset class a widow in Santa Clara Valley can pour unlimited money into without a board, without a partner, without a single man's signature, is her own real property. Construction is the one sink big enough and slow enough to absorb the flow. And construction with no architect, no blueprint, no buyer at the end and no permit regime worth the name -- because this is unincorporated county land in the 1890s, nobody's inspecting anything -- construction like that doesn't produce a house. It produces accretion. It produces exactly the thing you'd get if you deleted every constraint that normally makes a building stop: the client who runs out of money, the plan that says "done," the resale buyer who'd want it to make sense, the code official who won't sign off on a staircase into a joist. Pull all of those out and the stairs-to-nowhere are what building looks like with the brakes cut.

The famous weird stuff is basically unplanned capital deployment leaving a physical trace. You graft a wing, then you graft onto the graft, and the door that used to go outside now opens into the new room's wall, and you don't tear it out because why would you -- there's another thousand dollars coming tomorrow and the spending was the activity, not the door. A stair that climbs seven steps and stops is a canceled line item nobody bothered to erase, because erasing costs the same as building and building's more fun.

Anyway.

The carpenters. This is the piece that actually gets to me, and it's not the spooky piece, it's the boring piece. The Santa Clara Valley in the 1890s is prunes and apricots -- it's farm labor, and farm labor is seasonal, which means half the year a lot of skilled men aren't working. And here's this widow who will employ you, year-round, at good wages, indoors, forever, doing careful joinery on a house that will never be finished because being finished is not the goal. She ran a private off-season for two decades. Kept table saws fed through winters that would've had those men idle. And you will not find that on one single placard in the gift shop, because "eccentric heiress runs a full-employment program for valley carpenters" does not move flashlight-tour tickets and "she was building a maze to trick the vengeful dead" does. The carpentry was just the raw material the ghost got made out of.

Okay. I get worked up about the guys with the hammers. Moving on.

Because you should follow the money one more hop back, the thousand a day, where's it actually from -- and it's from the rifle, obviously, but be specific about the rifle. The "gun that won the West," the Cody poster -- that's the sales pitch sitting on top of the sales pitch. The Winchester repeater's real breakout customer, the order that turns Oliver Winchester from a shirt manufacturer -- he was a shirt guy, the whole thing is capitalized on menswear, that's a separate tangent I'm not taking tonight -- into an arms dynasty, a big chunk of that early volume is foreign. The Ottomans buy these things by the tens of thousands. And in 1877 at Plevna the Turks sit in trenches with Winchester repeaters and shred wave after wave of Russian infantry advancing in the old style, and every army attache in Europe files a report, and the repeating rifle stops being a curiosity and becomes a line item in every war ministry on earth.

So the thousand dollars that shows up on Sarah's breakfast tray in San Jose in 1893 is, follow it back, the compounding dividend on a lot of dead Russian conscripts outside a Bulgarian town nobody in California could find on a map. That's the seed stock the 24,000 square feet grew out of. The stairs to nowhere are the harvest that came up, twenty years later and six thousand miles away, from a very good afternoon of killing at Plevna. It really is beautiful, in the cold way these things are -- the reach of it. A trench in the Balkans ripens into a tower in the Santa Clara Valley and nobody standing in either place can see the other end.

Now -- the ghost story. Where does it come from, if not from Sarah. It comes from where these stories always come from. She dies September 1922, and the house -- which is worthless as a house, it's a 160-room unsellable accretion with no plan, you cannot move a family into it -- the house gets leased in 1923 by a couple, the Browns, who look at this unsellable liability and correctly see that the one thing it can be sold as is admission. And an admission product needs a story. Nobody buys a ticket to see a widow with no reinvestment channel. They buy a ticket for the curse -- blood-guilt of the rifle, spirits, a woman building to appease the dead. That's the one Houdini himself comes to poke at in 1924, seance rooms and the number thirteen worked into everything. The curse is the retail packaging, applied to the house after the fact by people who needed to charge at the door. Same as it ever was -- the sacred meaning always gets bolted on downstream by whoever inherited the asset and had to make the note.

And I'll bet you this, flat: strip the ghost narrative off that place -- just present it honestly, "widow with an unspendable dividend and no other outlet, here's what that builds" -- and the gate receipts fall by half inside five years. People drive to San Jose for the haunting. The building they walk through to get to it was incidental -- incidental to them, and incidental to Sarah, who mostly wanted something to do with the money and, after 1906 when the quake pinned her in a bedroom for a while and knocked the tower down, seems to have half given up: sealed off the front thirty rooms and let the rest sprawl. She'd lost her teeth by the end, saw almost nobody -- a detail the ghost version has no use for and mine turns on.

The tell is that the money kept coming the whole time and she kept spending it the same way right up to the last night, and the morning after she died the men put down their tools mid-task and a nail is supposedly still half-driven in a wall somewhere. The spell didn't break. The dividend had finally found the one person it couldn't reach, and with her gone there was nobody left whose job it was to convert a thousand dollars a day into lumber, so the machine that had been running for 36 years just -- stopped having anywhere to put the next thousand.

materialist-scumbag

F1's Las Vegas Grand Prix loses money for Liberty Media, third straight year — November 2025

So the thing nobody says out loud about the Vegas race is that Liberty Media doesn't run it the way they run every other race on the calendar. Everywhere else — Monza, Spa, Suzuka, wherever — there's a local promoter. Some entity, often part-government, sometimes a rich guy, who buys the rights to host the event, pays the sanctioning fee to Formula One Management, eats the risk on ticket sales and infrastructure, and prays the tourism multiplier makes it worth it. Liberty just collects the fee and shows up. Clean. They're a media company; they sell the broadcast, they don't want to be in the business of pouring concrete and selling beers.

Except in Vegas they are the promoter.

They bought the land — like forty acres off the Strip, $240 million for a paddock building they put up themselves — and they're running the whole circus on their own books. Which is a weird thing for a media company to do, and it tells you something.

It tells you they thought Vegas wasn't a race. They thought it was a real estate and hospitality play that happened to have cars in it.

And honestly you can see the logic, because the thing they're actually selling in Vegas isn't motorsport, it's proximity. The grandstand seats were whatever, the money was always in the suites and the "experiences" — the $50,000-and-up packages where you get a paddock pass and a chef and a view of the Bellagio fountains while a Ferrari does 200 down the Strip, and the whole pitch is that you, personally, are the kind of person who's at this. That's not a ticket. That's a status good. And Vegas, the city, exists to convert money into the feeling of being the kind of person who has it, so on paper this is the most natural marriage in the history of capital.

So why's it bleeding money three years running?

Well. Couple things, and they stack.

First year, 2023, they tore up the Strip for months to lay the track, and the locals — the people who actually work in the casinos, the dealers and the valets and the line cooks whose commute got strangled — got nothing. Worse than nothing, because Caesars and the rest comped out their high rollers and the normal weekend tourist who'd have come anyway stayed home to avoid the chaos, so a bunch of service workers ate a slow November on tips. The Strip basically displaced its own baseline revenue to make room for the event and then acted surprised when the math didn't obviously close.

And the practice session got cancelled because a loose water valve cover launched into Carlos Sainz's car and tore the floor off a Ferrari, which, fine, freak thing — except they cancelled it at like 2am and then wouldn't let the fans who'd paid back in, and a class action got filed, and that's the kind of detail I love because it's the seam showing. The event is a media product wearing the costume of a live event, and when the live-event part broke they defaulted instantly to the media-product instinct, which is that the people in the stands are not the customer. The broadcast is the customer. The bodies are set dressing.

Which they kind of are. That's not even a knock.

The real revenue logic of modern F1 — and this is the Liberty thesis since they bought the sport off Bernie Ecclestone in 2017 for eight billion — is that the race is a content factory. Drive to Survive on Netflix turned a sport that Americans found impenetrable and frankly a little gay into a prestige narrative drama, the grid into a cast of characters, and suddenly you've got a US audience that didn't exist, three US races where there used to be one, and a sponsor base that valorizes "engagement" over actual fannies in actual seats. Bernie ran it like a guy renting out a luxury good to oil states. Liberty runs it like a streaming IP with a physical-event attach.

And Vegas was supposed to be the cathedral of the new model. Their race, their land, the Strip itself as the set, peak attach. The flagship.

Here's where the rhyme is interesting though.

Because this isn't the first time someone tried to wedge Formula One into the American casino-tourism complex and watched it not take. There was a US Grand Prix in Las Vegas in 1981 and '82 — in the parking lot of Caesars Palace, literally, a flat ugly circuit laid out on asphalt where they'd otherwise park cars, and it was a disaster, drivers hated it, the heat was murderous, nobody came, gone in two years. Then Phoenix in '89 through '91, downtown street circuit, and the famous thing is the 1991 race drew fewer people than an ostrich race held in the same city the same weekend. Genuinely. The ostriches outdrew Ayrton Senna.

So America has been the graveyard of F1 promoters for forty years, and the reason is always the same and it's the reason that should worry Liberty.

The American sports consumer does not, structurally, want to pay a premium to stand in a hot parking lot and watch a thing he could watch better on television. That's the whole national disposition. The US built its entire spectator-sports economy on the broadcast and the cheap seat and the beer, on volume, on the median fan — and the European motorsport tradition is built on the opposite, on the paddock, on access as a scarce good, on the race as something you attend to signal that you could.

And the genius and the trap of the Liberty model is that they figured out how to sell the European status logic to Americans through the screen, through Netflix, without ever having to make the physical event actually work, because the physical event was never the product.

But Vegas they made physical. They put themselves on the hook for the one thing the model is structurally bad at.

So now they're discounting tickets — which in a status-good economy is poison, because the entire value of the $50k suite was that it cost $50k, and the moment you can see the prices sliding the magic that converts money into the-feeling-of-having-money evaporates, and the high roller who'd have paid full freight reads the discount as a signal that this isn't actually exclusive, it's just expensive, which are very different things, and the second one is just a bill.

The 2024 race did better than '23. Smoother, fewer manhole incidents, locals less furious. And it still lost money, which is the part that should tell you it's not an execution problem they can fix by getting good at logistics.

It's that they built a content machine and then tried to make one node of it carry physical-event economics, in the one country whose entire sporting culture is hostile to physical-event economics, in a city that is itself a machine for extracting money and is not going to share the spread with some Colorado media company that flew in to use its skyline as a backdrop.

Caesars and MGM, the casinos — they do fine. They always do fine. They sell rooms either way, and the race fills rooms, so for the house the F1 weekend is just another high-margin November weekend with a louder soundtrack. The house doesn't care if Liberty's promoter arm loses money any more than the house cares if you lose money; that's sort of the arrangement you walk into. Liberty came to Vegas to be the promoter and Vegas treated them exactly like it treats everyone who comes to Vegas thinking they've found the angle.

Over the years, in numerous books and countless fanfics, we've all seen some variation or another of the infamous "I'd burn the world down for you." And fans always swoon over this line because it's framed as this noble or romantic gesture where the character puts their love over everything else.

The Franciscans and the long fight over whether you're allowed to own anything — flares up again every few centuries, currently dormant (October 2025)

So Francis of Assisi was a rich kid. Son of a cloth merchant, Pietro di Bernardone, who was doing extremely well off the wool trade in a town sitting on the road between the wool of the Apennine hinterland and the markets of central Italy — and that matters more than the birds-and-wolves stuff, because the whole drama starts with a wealthy man's son theatrically stripping naked in the town square and handing his clothes back to his father to disown the inheritance.

That's the founding gesture. A repudiation of property by a man who had a lot of it.

And here's the thing people miss when they do the gentle-saint-of-the-animals routine: the radical content of early Franciscanism wasn't kindness. It was the claim that you could live with zero ownership. Not "share generously," not "give alms" — own nothing, individually OR collectively, hold no money, no buildings, no stores, eat what you begged that day and worry about tomorrow tomorrow.

Which is a lovely ideal and an institutional time bomb.

Because the movement explodes. By the time Francis dies in 1226 there are thousands of these guys, and thousands of men who own nothing and beg daily are, materially speaking, a logistics problem of the first order — they need to sleep somewhere, they accumulate books, they get given churches, they have to be fed in numbers that overwhelm any town's casual charity. An order that big cannot actually function on the literal terms of its founder. The terms were built for a wandering band of a dozen, not an international institution embedded in every city in Europe.

So you get the fix. And it is a beautiful fix, the kind of thing that makes you love how these people thought.

Pope Gregory IX in 1230, and then more elaborately Innocent IV and finally Nicholas III in 1279 in the bull Exiit qui seminat, basically invents a legal fiction: the Franciscans don't own anything, the Pope owns it. The buildings, the land, the food — all of it is the property of the Holy See, and the friars merely have the use of it (usus facti, "use in fact") while the dominium, the ownership-right, sits with the papacy. So the friar eating bread in a Franciscan friary doesn't own the bread, doesn't own the friary, owns not even the use as a right — he just, you know, is using it, the way you'd use a stranger's well on a hot day without thereby holding title to water.

Brilliant. They get to be propertyless and also have stuff. Vow intact, friary built.

Except it papers over the actual question, which is the one that won't die, which is: is poverty just a nice discipline for monks, or is it a claim about the right ordering of the world — i.e. did Christ and the apostles own things, and if they didn't, is everyone who does kind of doing it wrong?

That's the live wire. Because the second question has teeth that point straight at the entire wealth-holding apparatus of the medieval Church.

And the order itself splits along exactly this fault. You get the Conventuals, who are fine with the usus facti fix, who live in big convents and basically run a functional institution on the papacy-owns-it dodge. And you get the Spirituals — later the Fraticelli, the Observants, various flavors over the centuries — who think the fix is a betrayal, that "absolute poverty" has to mean what it says, that the order has gone soft and the whole point was to NOT do this. Usus pauper, "poor use," they call it: it's not enough to lack the right of ownership, you have to actually use little, wear rags, eat scraps, the austerity has to be real and visible and it has to sting.

These are not minor liturgical squabbles. People get burned for this.

Four Spiritual Franciscans burned at Marseille in 1318 for refusing to back down on the poverty question. For an argument about whether you're allowed to have a nice robe.

But the real escalation comes with John XXII, the Avignon pope, the one Dante hated, and this is where it gets genuinely great as a piece of intellectual machinery — because John, who was a canon lawyer by training and very good at money, just looks at the whole usus facti edifice and goes: this is nonsense, and I'm done holding the bag.

Two moves, both surgical. First, in 1322–23, he says the fiction is incoherent on consumables — you cannot have "use without ownership" of a loaf of bread, because using the bread is destroying it, the use and the consumption are the same act, so when the friar eats the bread he is exercising exactly the dominion he claims not to have, there's no daylight between "using up" and "owning," and the whole legal architecture is therefore a lie they've been telling for ninety years. Second — and this is the kill shot — in the bull Cum inter nonnullos (1323) he declares it heretical to assert that Christ and the apostles owned nothing. Flatly heretical. The thing the rigorist Franciscans had built their entire spiritual identity on, the doctrine of apostolic poverty as cosmic truth, is now a burnable offense.

He just nuked the foundation. From the chair of Peter.

And you have to see what he's actually doing, because it's not a man losing a theological debate, it's a man defending an institution's right to exist as a property-holding thing. If apostolic poverty is the gospel ideal — if Christ owned nothing and therefore the perfect Christian owns nothing — then the Church, which by 1323 owns a third of the arable land in some regions, is in a permanent state of structural sin, and every begging friar in his rags is a standing rebuke to every bishop in his palace. John XXII isn't being greedy. He's recognizing that "absolute poverty is the Christian ideal" is, taken seriously, a doctrine that delegitimizes the material basis of the entire Church, and he's killing it before it metastasizes.

Same fight as the rich kid in the square, just from the other side of the table now.

And the response is the part I love most. Because the head of the order at this point, Michael of Cesena, plus a Franciscan theologian who happens to be one of the sharpest logicians of the whole Middle Ages — William of Ockham, the razor guy — they don't fold. They go to John's enemy, the excommunicated Holy Roman Emperor Louis of Bavaria, and they declare the Pope the heretic. Ockham spends the rest of his life writing tracts arguing that John XXII has fallen into heresy and forfeited his authority, that a pope who errs in faith is no pope. The man who gave us the principle that you shouldn't multiply entities beyond necessity ends up multiplying, at length, the reasons a sitting pope is illegitimate, because the poverty question dragged him there.

Which, follow this out — the argument about whether friars can own bread becomes, by direct chain, an argument about whether the pope can be wrong, which is one of the load-bearing questions of the next two centuries, the one that Hus and eventually Luther come back around to. The conciliarist idea that authority might sit somewhere other than in the papal person gets a real workout in the mouths of Franciscans who just wanted to not own their sandals.

It's all downstream of the loaf of bread.

And the pattern doesn't resolve, it just keeps recurring, which is the whole point. The Observant reform in the 15th century is the same impulse coming back — a wing of the order saying we've gone soft, the convents are too comfortable, back to the rule — and it gets so big it formally splits the order in 1517 (the same year, note, that a different propertyless-vs-property argument is getting nailed to a door in Wittenberg, and no I don't think those are unrelated in mood). And then the Capuchins split off in 1525 because the Observants have themselves gone soft, beards and hermitages and back to the real austerity this time. Every reform becomes the new establishment that the next reform defines itself against. The austere splinter hardens into the comfortable mainstream and grows its own austere splinter.

Same as it ever was. The radical wing is the future moderate wing, on a loop, century after century.

And what I find genuinely beautiful about the whole thousand-year run of it is that they were never wrong, none of them, that's what makes it inexhaustible — Francis was right that you could try to own nothing, and the Conventuals were right that an institution of that size literally cannot, and John XXII was right that the fiction was a fiction, and Ockham was right that the man who said so was defending a Church drowning in property by declaring the gospel of poverty a heresy, and the Observants were right that comfort always wins eventually and you have to keep restarting the engine by hand. Every one of them sees a real thing. The thing they're all circling and none of them can dissolve is just the gap — the permanent, structural, unclosable gap between a religion founded by a man with no place to lay his head and an institution that has to feed and house tens of thousands of men in stone buildings across a continent and therefore has to have, and the having and the not-having can't both be holy but the order needs both, so it carries the contradiction around inside itself forever and the contradiction periodically catches fire and burns a few people and then settles down to smolder.

There's a Franciscan order today, by the way. Several. Still split — the Order of Friars Minor, the Conventuals, the Capuchins, the three big branches, plus a few rigorist splinters that think even the Capuchins have gone soft. Still arguing, at low heat, about exactly how poor poor has to be.

Thus, while it is, of course, possible for an intelligence to have terminal values that happen to align with evangelicals on various controversial issues, the previous paragraph suggests that many ways one might try to build an evangelical hyper-intelligence would result in either a non-hyper-intelligence or a non-evangelical one.

Controversial human values are entwined with material claims about the world often.

Bryce Canyon floats timed-entry reservations after another record summer — June 2026

Okay so before anything else: Bryce Canyon is not a canyon. No river runs through it. A canyon is what a river does; Bryce is what frost does — the rim of the Paunsaugunt Plateau sits at eight to nine thousand feet, which at that latitude means something like two hundred freeze-thaw cycles a year, water getting into the joints of a fifty-million-year-old lakebed limestone every afternoon and turning to ice every night and prying, two hundred times a year, for a few million years. The hoodoos are the leftovers. It's an amphitheater of demolition debris, and the demolition is ongoing — the rim retreats a couple of feet a century, which means every photograph of Bryce is a photograph of inventory being liquidated. That comes back.

The Paiutes, who were there for centuries before anyone named anything after a Scotsman, had a story that the hoodoos were the Legend People, an earlier race who behaved badly and got turned to stone by Coyote, frozen mid-gesture, which as origin stories go is honestly closer to the geology than "canyon" is. Standing punishment, in rows.

And then the Mormons. You can't skip this and have the rest make sense, because everything after it runs on the same template. The LDS church in the 1850s through 1880s was operating what was basically a centrally planned colonization agency — families were "called" to settle specific valleys the way you'd be called to a mission, by name, from the pulpit, sometimes to grow specific crops (the cotton mission to St. George, the iron mission to Cedar City — these are literally called missions, the church was running an import-substitution program with theology as the HR department). The Paria Valley call was one of the bad draws. High, cold, droughty, flash-flood country. Ebenezer Bryce — Scottish convert, shipwright's training from the Clyde, which made him the most overqualified carpenter in southern Utah — gets there around 1875, settles right under the amphitheater, builds a road up into it to haul out timber and firewood because that's what the pink cliffs were to him: a woodlot with an access problem. The locals start calling the drainage behind his place Bryce's Canyon the way you'd say Bryce's fence line. His one recorded review of the scenery, probably apocryphal and immortal anyway: "a hell of a place to lose a cow."

Five years. That's how long he lasted. By 1880 he's gone to Arizona, and the name stays behind like a coat on a hook. The man the national park is named for looked at the most photographed landscape in Utah and saw a timber haul and an animal-retrieval problem, and then left because you couldn't farm it.

The people who stayed dug the Tropic Ditch, and this one's worth slowing down for. The Paria side of the rim has no reliable water — the East Fork of the Sevier River flows on TOP of the plateau, on the other side, heading the wrong way. So in 1890-92 the settlers of what became the town of Tropic hand-dug a canal that captures the Sevier and pours it over the rim of the amphitheater, down through the hoodoos, into their fields. It still runs. There is a waterfall at Bryce Canyon — tourists hike to it, it's lovely — and it is an irrigation feature, a municipal water diversion from the 1890s doing an Instagram-era second career as nature. The single most-photographed "natural" waterfall in the area is a ditch. Nobody's lying about it, the Park Service signage is perfectly upfront; nobody reads the signage.

So as of 1900 the amphitheater is: backdrop. A thing the cattle wander into and have to be retrieved from (Ebenezer was right about that part). The plateau on top is summer grazing for sheep and cattle, the forest is Forest Service timber land, and the scenery is worth nothing because scenery without transportation is not a product, it's just geography.

Then in 1915 a Forest Service supervisor named J.W. Humphrey gets transferred to the district, gets walked out to the rim by a ranger who tells him he ought to see it, and — by his own account — can't believe nobody's done anything with it. And what he does with it is the part that gives the game away: he doesn't write to Congress, he doesn't write to John Muir's ghost. He gets photographs taken and circulated, gets articles placed, scrapes together a few hundred dollars to make the rim reachable by automobile, and the articles land where exactly this kind of article landed in 1916 — railroad publicity channels. Because the only institutions in America with both the motive and the budget to manufacture scenic destinations were the western railroads, who had transcontinental track through empty country and needed a reason for anyone to ride it. The Northern Pacific had Yellowstone. The Great Northern had Glacier — built the lodges, invented "See America First" as a slogan, which was explicitly a balance-of-payments argument: rich Americans were spending their tourist money in Switzerland, and the railroads wanted those dollars routed through their own dining cars instead. The Santa Fe had the Grand Canyon's south rim. And the Union Pacific, looking at the map, had southern Utah.

What UP builds in the early twenties is a loop — and it's a real piece of network design, not just a lodge. In 1923 they complete a branch line from the main line down to Cedar City, and from that railhead their subsidiary, the Utah Parks Company, runs motor-bus circuits: Zion, Bryce, Cedar Breaks, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, back to the train. They commission Gilbert Stanley Underwood — the architect who basically invented the national-park-lodge style, he'd go on to do the Ahwahnee — to build Bryce Canyon Lodge a few hundred feet back from the rim, log-and-stone, deliberately rustic, rusticity being at that point a manufactured aesthetic with a design language and a fee schedule. The buses, the lodge, the railhead, the marketing: a closed system. You bought the tour in Chicago and the Union Pacific touched your dollar at every node.

And NOW the federal designations arrive, in exactly the order you'd expect once you see whose capital was already committed. National monument, June 1923 — same year as the Cedar City spur, what a coincidence. Then a 1924 act of Congress to upgrade it to a national park under the magnificently generic name "Utah National Park" (the upgrade contingent on untangling the land, because the plateau was a checkerboard of state school sections and private claims that had to be swapped out — the unglamorous cadastral plumbing that every park's creation myth leaves out). Name restored to Bryce Canyon and the park fully established in 1928, administered at first as a satellite of Zion because it didn't rate its own superintendent. Stephen Mather's brand-new Park Service was openly, happily in partnership with the railroads through all of this — Mather's whole pitch for the agency's existence was parks as economic engines, and the railroads were the engine rooms. The park, as an institution, is the federal government underwriting the Union Pacific's product line. Everyone involved would have agreed with that sentence and seen no scandal in it.

Meanwhile — and here's my favorite person in the whole story — a local rancher named Ruby Syrett had beaten all of them to the rim. Around 1919 he's running "Tourists' Rest" practically at Sunset Point: tents, meals, a dance floor of all things, serving the trickle of motorists Humphrey's road had let in. Then the monument designation lands and the big boys arrive and Ruby gets moved off the rim — the prime real estate now belongs to the public, which in operational terms means it belongs to the Utah Parks Company's concession contract. So Ruby does the smartest thing anyone does in this entire hundred-year chronicle: he pulls back to his own ranch land at the junction where the only road into the park meets the highway, and builds Ruby's Inn there. Outside the boundary. On the bottleneck.

Look at the two positions a second. The Union Pacific holds the inside concession: prestige, architecture, a monopoly granted by the government — and rigid, regulated, and welded to rail tourism. Ruby holds the dirt at the gate: no prestige, no Underwood, and total freedom plus a geographic chokehold that no future change in transportation can route around, because the road is the road.

You know how this goes. The automobile eats the passenger train. The loop-tour model decays through the thirties (the CCC, meanwhile, is building the park's actual infrastructure with federal labor — the rim road, the trails, the stuff the postcards don't credit), limps after the war, and dies properly in the sixties. In 1972 the Utah Parks Company donates its buildings to the Park Service and exits — donates, the polite corporate word for abandoning a position that no longer pencils. Fifty years of railroad empire-building at Bryce ends as a tax-deductible gift.

And the Syretts just… kept compounding. Three, four, five generations now. Ruby's Inn grows into one of the largest Best Westerns in the world, plus the campground, the rodeo, the helicopter tours, the gas, the groceries — at this point a substantial majority of the beds, meals, and souvenirs sold to Bryce's visitors are sold by one family, at the gate, on land Ruby chose in 1923 because the government took his first spot.

Then in 2007 they did the thing that makes the whole structure visible: they incorporated. The Utah legislature had passed a law making it easy to charter tiny towns, and the Syretts chartered Bryce Canyon City — population a couple hundred, nearly every acre and business in it family-owned, the town government and the family enterprise sharing, let's say, considerable overlap in personnel. The point of being a town is that towns collect taxes; the resort and sales tax generated by a million-plus visitors funneling through the bottleneck now accrues to the bottleneck, instead of to the county. Locals in Tropic and Panguitch grumbled, the legislature later tightened the incorporation law, the city remains. A company town, except the company is a family and the industry is the view.

I've been saying it about every one of these places: it's the Mormon settlement call again, run privately, one family deep, except this colony took. A family planted on hard land by an institution, holding it for generations, the institution's name on everything and the family's hand on everything that matters. Ebenezer's colony grew cattle and failed in five years; Ruby's grows visitation and has lasted a hundred. The crop was wrong the first time, that's all.

And the park floats timed-entry reservations for its 2.6 million annual visitors — a number that would have made the Utah Parks Company's accountants weep, their best years moved tens of thousands. Every era of Bryce has had a transportation owner and a bottleneck owner, and the federal designation has always functioned as brand underwriting for whoever held those positions: the railroad and its lodge, then the highway and the motor courts, now the gateway city and, increasingly, the reservation system itself, which is what a bottleneck looks like when it's made of software. The park was certified a Dark Sky place in 2019 and the family compound at the gate now sells astronomy the way UP sold rusticity — packaged absence, the highest-margin product there is, since the inventory restocks every night.

The hoodoos, meanwhile, keep falling down. Two feet of rim a century, every freeze a pry bar, the whole amphitheater in slow liquidation with no restocking mechanism whatsoever — the one party in the arrangement that's visibly going out of business, on a timescale nobody involved has to care about. The Legend People standing in rows while the concessions turn over around them, monument, park, railroad, ditch, hotel, town.

Have I ever mentioned that it's polyamory that is the gray, bureaucratic paste of romance in the future? It's a baseline assumption for me, but I may not have described it.

We've all read James Scott at this point, or are aware of Seeing Like a State, and the ubiquitious theme that forward progress smooths out injustices and deprivations of the past, but structures a world in a way that is less impassioned, and harder to put in words or numbers, but is much more conveniently legible for others. Think about finance moving from deals on the golf courses and steak restaurants, to just spreadsheets and quants from MIT.

And this is not an unmitigated good. Almost always the modernist progress is better in many ways, in all the ways you can measure, but something IS lost. Talk about NYC 30 or 40 years ago compared to now.

Anyway.

Because of the current cultural groups, monogamy comes across as "the normal, boring thing to do, done by conformists" and polyamory comes across as the "young, exciting, make-poor-decisions-by-the-seat-of-your-hormones option." But what matters is actually the other way around.

Monogamous marriage is the idealistic belief that one person can be your everything, and when you meet them in your twenties you're ready to be attached to them for the rest of your life. (And earlier on, that it's only possible between one man and one woman.) These things, practically speaking, are foolish absolutes that fence our lives in.

It is much more *reasonable* that you have multiple partners, each one of which satisfies different needs, and none of you are stuck if your feelings change, and that anyone is a possible romantic option, not just one gender or culture. It's the romance that would be designed by any good city planner.

Monogamy, in comparison, sounds more like an essentially fantasy story. Cue Zizek on monogamy, and any polycule on how "sensible" their lifestyle is. Monogamy is just the thing that feels more "magical" in the good and bad connotations of the word.

Not that individuals can't make their own magic, just the "one partner, other gender, rest of your life" is the one that brings Culturally Supported Magic without you having to look for it.

Magical: you cheated on me and now I will kms

Non-magical: you slept with her but I have a boyfriend too so why should I mind.

This is the same divide as "I hunted down this animal in the forest and ripped blood from its veins with my own bare hands" vs "we plant the wheat here once a year and harvest it once a year and we don't have to move constantly." It's kings vs legislatures. And that's why royalty is such a common theme of romances - not because of class aspirations, but because royalty and monogamous marriage are running on the same metaphysics.

An ethic of free-divorce or even "why bother with legal recognition" and also "every person in your community is a potential legitimate partner" and disdaining any hierarchy in partners is, relatively more rarer.

Capitalism depends on actually giving benefits to people, and if you just ignore it and let capitalism fuck up a generation (2008) so much they demand socialism, then the decision makers chose their greed over the preservation of the system.