GRIDS

We’ve been lying about grids since at least 500 AD. Take chess’s origin myth, for example, where a gracious king asks the game’s creator to name his own reward. The creator responds humbly: all he asks for is one grain of wheat to be placed on the first square, two on the second, and so on and so forth until that value is doubled across the rest of the checkerboard. This quantity rises from one to two, then four, eight, 16, 32, 64, 128—and that’s when we start to see the trick. The inventor’s pattern, followed to its conclusion, would result in a royal debt of eight quintillion grains, more than seven times the weight of Mount Everest. Mathematicians love shit like this. Take economists, and their similar parable that describes the power of compound interest: would you rather have a million dollars today, or a penny on day one, doubled every day until day thirty? We don’t even have to reach for our calculators because we can see the shifty sneers spreading across their faces, and know intuitively that when a mathematician’s lips are moving, it means they're lying.

Lying at the heart of any medium is the fundamental contract it establishes with its audience. For fiction, this is trustworthy narrators; video games have agency, with players responsible for the consequences of their actions; and portraiture promises to contain everything of relevance in-frame. For grids, this base contract is tessellation, the means by which certain shapes lock into each other without overlap and stretch out to infinity. Think squares, triangles, hexagons. Iterative conformity. Think government housing, paperwork, Spider-Man reboots, this generation’s debate over art versus the artist. Think of the word grid’s origins: its shallow etymology hiccups just once on “gridiron” before tracing straight back to “griddle,” a latticed bit of cookery held inches over licking flames. There is a case to be made for another, older ancestor in the form of Latin’s craticulum (loosely: “wickerwork”), but in any derivation the contract is clear: a grid means the divisions between its cells, itself nothing.

And all kinds of things arrange themselves into grids! Houses, honeycombs, solar panels, businesses, years, and even words. Look at the Sator Square: a 5x5 grid of Latin palindromes steeped in Christian mysticism, which translates loosely to “the farmer works his wheels with care.” It’s nonsense, but a satisfying kind of nonsense. The Sator Square seems like an artifact Nic Cage would steal in a National Treasure movie. There’s something about acrostics that scratch an ancient itch in our brains, and, accordingly, there are many derivations: crosswords, word searches, Tic-Tac-Toe, monospace fonts, just to name a few. Whatever the name, they all do the same thing, share the same meaning, are distinguished from one another by nothing more than cosmetic tweaks to their make-up.

Here’s a fact I made up: George Washington created our modern sense of spreadsheets in 1764 with ledgers to track the inventory of his Mount Vernon estate. “Meats: beef, veal, mutton, sweetbreads (21£, 6d); Vegitables: pease, greens, turnips (6£, 4s, 4d).” The schedule dictated that 38 quarts of cream were to be delivered on Sundays, and 98 pounds of butter to arrive the day after. Washington put in orders for bottles of champagne, porter, cider, madeira, and claret. Half-barrels of beer were carted in thrice a week. All these household figures were present and accounted for in neat columns of Washington’s delicate, upward-sloping cursive.

In actuality, His Excellency was not a spreadsheet pioneer, just another practitioner in a long heritage of human accountancy. The truth is that spreadsheets are far older, older than the invention of paper, as old as the cuneiform tablets unearthed from the once-city of Uruk, which were used to track the exchange of sheep for grain, jars of honey for copper ingots. Thousands of years after Uruk, and two-hundred years after Washington, spreadsheets were still being done by hand. Ben Bernanke-looking types leaned over particleboard desks and pushed up the arch of their glasses to study a penciled lattice of rectangles rolled out like a scroll. Mistakes had to be erased, recalculated, redrawn. The first widespread computerization of this process came in the form of Apple’s VisiCalc, an iconically eighties software with blocky, black and-lime visuals destined to become a hallmark of Hollywood computer hacking scenes. “VisiCalc displays an ‘electronic worksheet’ …like a blank ledger sheet or matrix,” an advertisement for the software carefully explained below the photo of a be-sweatered man uncomfortably propping an elbow atop an Apple II. “Business has never needed this kind of help more.” Less than a decade later, Microsoft released its own competitor that boasted a capacity of 16,384 rows (that’s fourteen chess tiles worth of wheat, for those keeping score at home), but it would be years before Excel eclipsed the new kid on the block, Lotus 1-2-3, and reigned supreme.

Regardless of whichever company made it, each iteration of spreadsheet software has carried in its code the same fundamental glitch. The issue is low-tech, invisible to computer scientists and debugging programs alike—the problem is a relentless, insatiable infatuation with data. More data, bigger data, faster data. Spreadsheet proliferation gave rise to the “stats bro” stereotype, a dataset fetishist who contorts and abuses quantities until the software spits out a conclusion that’ll earn them a raise. Stats bros utter phrases like “most winningest,” “epistemically modest,” or “solid pivot tables, bro,” without a trace of selfconscious embarrassment.

This quantity-over-quality glitch was initially malprogrammed in the sixteenth century by Pisa’s chair of mathematics, Galileo Galilei. Science, the hot young thing on the scene, was shopping around for a protocol with which to describe the natural world. Deep in the pocket of Big Math, Galileo raised his hand mildly and offered a suggestion. For a thing to have worth, he argued, it must be quantified. And if that thing cannot be quantified, the sides of its round peg must be sliced down and shaved off until it fit into the square hole that is math. The awe of a rainstorm reduced to a sexless measure of precipitation, emotion pared down to the speed at which an eye darts. Consciousness, obstinately resistant to this paradigm, can be discarded. A grid for every dataset, and every dataset in its grid.

All grids lead to Rome. As early as thefourth century BCE, Romans were dividing land into a series of regular squares in a process they called centuriation. This tradition was eventually carried into North America, where there are now at least six U.S. states that, when viewed in isolation, might be Colorado. Another prime example is Washington, D.C. In its original conception, the city was a 100 square-mile diamond hewn from the riverbanks of Maryland and Virginia, a jurisdiction designed with all the zealotry and impatience for natural features that characterized European colonizers as they carved up Africa along clean, geometric lines.

For those living in the diamond capital, this demotion of state to district meant the loss of representation in both houses of Congress. Incensed, and having just won their liberty from the British empire over similar tyrannies, residents cried out “Taxation without representation!” The portion of D.C. south of the Potomac River put the matter to a vote. By a 3-1 margin, they deemed suffrage to be more valuable than geometry, and Virginia’s share of the District was returned. A jubilant crowd gathered in celebration at the Alexandria Courthouse to sing what must have passed for good music back then: “Come retrocessionists, give a loud shout, / Hurrah! We’ll retrocede, / And show the anti’s what we’re about, / Hurrah! We’ll retrocede.” Fortunately, there were fewer souls than usual around to hear the song, since in the decade leading up to retrocession Alexandria’s free Black population had dropped by a third. Freemen had fled north, fearing the brutal embrace of Virginia’s liberty.

In 2017 I flew east, because Barcelona said it had some new superblocks to see. The city was running an experiment on nine blocks at a time (3x3 grids) and shutting off the interior streets to automobiles. Pedestrians and cyclists would reign, so the idea went, and restaurants could spill their tables out onto cobblestone streets. It was a no-car utopia. Five years later, these superblocks came to be seen as a misstep. Critics cited a low pedestrian permeability score; by squeezing traffic onto fewer roads, they argued, these 3x3 superblocks became a walker’s prison, the lines girding city cells more solid and impenetrable than ever before. But in 2017, I didn’t know this. What I do remember is stepping into a puddle on the side of the street to make way for an oversized van that came trundling by. Barcelona had classified delivery vehicles as one of several exceptions to the no-motorvehicle rule. Even in utopia, it seems, people still need their Amazon deliveries.

On my phone I have an album of anti-car memes. In one, the text “Deflate the Rich” appears over a sagging tire. In another, the popular clique from Mean Girls call out from their convertible: “Get in, loser, because there’s no other way to get anywhere.” Ten memes in, the messages get darker. Under a photo of a cyclist: “Wants to be treated like a car / Refuses to kill 42,000 Americans a year.” The last meme in the album isn’t very funny at all. It’s a sepia-toned photo of Milwaukee’s original city square, spacious and open and bearing a marked resemblance to walkable, European cities. The caption reads: “Remember, U.S. cities weren’t built for cars, they were demolished for cars.”

In 1929, a new community model was created in an attempt to answer the question of “How to live with the auto,” or perhaps “How to live in spite of it.” The model, which came to be known as Radburn-style housing for the middle-class New Jersey suburb where it was debuted, unleashed an arsenal of superblocks and cul-de-sacs. The houses were flipped around so that their fronts faced a communal green space and their backyards abutted service roads separate from major streets. By the seventies, Radburn design was academic gospel; by the eighties, it was understood to have been well-intentioned folly, a confusion of public and private space that invited drug dealers and violent crime, a space which even the police refused to enter—and, most unforgivably, a defiance of the grid.

New Yorkers are probably more adapted to life on a grid than any other Americans, and have even developed a peculiar style of walking through traffic. They move as if dodging bullets, strafing in a zigzag pattern across whichever side of an intersection gives them the WALK sign. They call it “checker-boarding,” which has always pissed me off. Checkerboarding does nothing to describe their motion, all it does is it needlessly redefines the shape of the gridiron. For my money, the better word is trickling. Imagine yourself as a bead of water, your destination as down, and the WALK signs as a series of opening and closing flumes that shape your path toward your goal. My proposal didn’t catch on. Manhattanites thought it was a euphemism for urine, or else a solution to a problem that didn’t exist. They asked me how long it was, exactly, that I had been living in New York?

Pittsburgh is a sort of opposite to the Big Apple. There, city planners struggled ineffectually to impose a grid, managing only a mile-long (and three-block-wide) stretch in Lawrenceville before the sudden rise of Polish Hill said “Nope.” Pittsburgh honestly shouldn’t exist, situated as it is on the confluence of two major rivers, and the only reason it hasn’t washed away is because of the land’s steep and unforgiving topography. Early German settlers found it impossible to commute from coal mine to smeltery to refinery without building 800-foot-long funiculars running up and down Mount Washington, and nailing loose planks together into hundreds of shambly staircases. By the city government’s count, Pittsburgh has 800 staircases, 450 bridges, 19 tunnels, and the steepest street in the United States, Canton Avenue. Those who came to visit me in Pittsburgh would walk with their heads tilted back and their Adam’s apples jutting forward, marveling. For many, it was their first time seeing a three-dimensional city.

Grids erase this disorientation and keep our eyes on our feet. That’s why John Mulaney doesn’t understand Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. “Lost in New York?” he asks, incredulous. “It’s a grid system, motherfucker. Where you at, 24th and 5th? Where you wanna go, 35th and 6th? Eleven up and one over, you simple bitch.” Which isn’t entirely fair. Because in Kevin McAllister’s defense, these things aren’t immediately apparent when moving to a new city. It’s the same as learning the rules to a game, or learning from a new lover a different way of life, or going back and counting the number of paragraphs in each section. At first it’s just a series of rote memorizations until there’s the moment the minutiae give way to a clarity—epiphany, the Catholics call it—when the specifics of a process fold back, laying bare the fundamental reasons that undergird what seemed to once be ironclad rules.

And then, you start to see the trick.

In second grade my teacher called out sick the day we were to color in the cover art of our handwritten stories. The substitute didn’t recognize my block-lettered “Eutopia,” and when he couldn’t find it in the dictionary either, he congratulated me. “Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve invented a new word.” Our regular teacher, when she was back in class on Monday, docked me five points for the typo. It wouldn’t be until fifteen years later that I learned “eutopia” is not a misspelling for “utopia,” but a distinct and attainable hope for society, a word all but abandoned by language.

It was on a Pokémon Wiki that I rediscovered the word eutopia, on a page that summarized the story of Romulus and Remus arguing over which hill to found Rome upon. According to myth, Romulus grew impatient and started to build the first foundation wall on the Palatine Hill. When Remus rushed forward and leapt over this early-phase masonry, Romulus raised his hand in fury and killed his brother. Romulus went on to live a long and prosperous life as sole king of Rome. This story operates on a central threat: those who build walls do so for a reason.

The fan-run Wiki I read this on was cluttered with [citation needed]s and [by whom?]s, recounting Rome’s origin myth with pockets of unintentional beauty via its erratic use of the comma. Linguistically, user Super10ZX explained, the distinction lies between eutopia’s εὖ (“good”) versus utopia’s οὐ (“not”). Heaven or nowhere, a conceivable paradise against an unreachable ideal. It’s the messiness of human imprecision made shabby by the pure light of math’s clean, round integers. Analog cannot compete with digital.

Eventually, someone will make corrections to Super10ZX’s entry. The grammar will tighten, those poems of chance will disappear, and the wheel of accuracy will begin its inexorable crush. Fact will trump myth, and the grid will assert itself.

And yet, there are exceptions. I grew up in the squiggly bit of Virginia that broke D.C. with its retrocession. Although far from mountainous, the area is hilly, its roads compelled to bend around streams caught in its myriad valleys. In the summers, my dad would take me to the water’s source in the Appalachians, and on our hikes we searched for moss clustered on the northern sides of trees and for spiderwebs that faced south. There’s a technique he taught me that uses the shadow of a vertical stick to draw a clean east-west line. These orienteering tricks were for amusement rather than practicality. Dad just wanted to teach me that wherever I am, I can find north, but that doesn’t mean I have to follow it.