Astral Codex Ten

Naples

6 min read

Naples

Article

Naples is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 19, 2023 and April 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Naples … don’t [have a city region]”; “live Caruso opera in Naples”. It most often appears alongside China, England, France.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: May 19, 2023
  • Last seen: April 01, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
Capital. Cities can provide money directly to other regions, for instance as subsidies, loans, or development grants. I’m guessing that Bardou received some assistance from the French national or regional governments at some point. These five forces determine pretty much everything that happens in rural regions. We can distinguish at least seven types of these regions, depending on which forces act upon them. Seven Types of Rural Regions When the five forces act together in a reasonably balanced manner, this creates a type of rural area that Jacobs calls a city region. This is a confusing name, because it absolutely does not mean “any region around a city,” nor does it mean “suburbs.” We know this because Jacobs spends several pages telling us which cities have a city region and which don’t. For instance, Tokyo has a city region, the largest in the world as of 1984, but Sapporo, in northern Japan, doesn’t. Boston, Paris, Milan, and Taipei do; Atlanta, Marseille, Naples, or Manila don’t. A city region, in Jacobs’s terms, is the rural hinterland around a city that gets “radically reshaped” by that city’s economy. It contains a mix of productive farms, prosperous satellite towns, and factories that have moved out of the city, forming a symbiotic network of commercial and industrial enterprises. City regions “are the richest, densest, and most intricate of all types of economies except for cities themselves,” she writes. They arise thanks to the interplay between the five forces. In another of her wonderfully told examples, Jacobs summarizes a book about Shinohata, a real Japanese village (but with a fake name, for anonymity) on the outskirts of the Tokyo area. In the post-war era, Tokyo was expanding rapidly, and so was its city region, eventually reaching Shinohata in the 1950s. Before, most families in the village lived from subsistence farming and exported a little bit of silk to distant places. Almost no one moved out to Tokyo or other cities. But after 1955, the markets, jobs, technology, transplants, and capital from the city all came bearing upon Shinohata at the same time, totally transforming it. The growing city markets meant that most families could switch to new cash crops and make more money. New jobs were opening up in Tokyo for the sons and daughters of Shinohata, many of whom left — prompting the remaining farmers to buy labor-saving equipment, which made productivity soar. Soon, a large food processing factory was transplanted into the village, providing additional jobs and money and causing a variety of smaller businesses to pop up in the area. After a typhoon disaster in 1959, a recovery grant from the government — an example of city capital — was put to good use by providing much needed excavation work and infrastructure development. Shinohata is in Tochigi Prefecture, but I couldn’t figure out what its real name is. In any case, it is part of the vast Greater Tokyo Area, a region that combines the largest city in the world with large tracts of rural land, and occupies a disproportionate space in Japan’s demographics and national economy. Rural regions far from import-replacing cities are generally less lucky. Their plights take different forms, depending on which of the five forces dominates the others. An oversized market force creates a supply region: a place that exploits agricultural or natural resources and exports them to distant cities. These regions (the most common in the world) can be rich or poor, but they’re never economically dynamic — and they’re very sensitive to disturbances in the markets that they serve. Jacobs’s example is Uruguay, a country that grew rich selling animal products to European cities in the early 20th century, but then suffered immensely when the market changed in the 1950s, propelling the nation into a succession of economic crises.
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The Colors Of Her Coat
April 01, 2025 · Original source
As I read Hoel’s post, I thought of ultramarine blue. But also, I thought of the first phonographic records. In 1890, hearing Enrico Caruso sing Pagliacci might be the highlight of your life, the crowning glory of a months-long trip to Italy and back. By 1910, you could hear Enrico Caruso without leaving your house. You could hear him twenty times a day if you wanted. The real thing in Naples would just be more Caruso.
When I contemplate these questions, I encounter a paradox. I acknowledge that my inability to marvel at a live Caruso opera in Naples has cost me something deep and beautiful. But I cannot wish that the phonograph was never invented. Does the increased variety and quantity of music compensate for the decreased profundity of each musical experience? Surely this is part of it, but I would never accept this excuse in other areas that have not yet been cheapened. A thousand moderately pleasant one-night-stands cannot equal one passionate love affair.
None of these sound fully convincing. Instead, maybe we must admit that we are relocating novelty and adventure from individual engagements with art, to the arc of history itself. Our generation will never know the once-in-a-life pleasure of hearing Caruso sing in Naples. But we will get the once-in-a-life pleasure of speaking to a generative AI for the first time. We could protect the magic of the Jerusalem pilgrimage by banning air travel, but it would be a fake and flimsy sort of magic, a sort of enforced perpetual civilizational childhood. What about the magic of seeing the clouds from above? Or the moon landing?