Network Effects

Auckland’s school year starts in early February and Frida started middle school (Year 7) last week.

On the first morning of school there was a welcoming assembly. A growing crowd of kids in grey uniforms and red bucket hats gathered in the auditorium, accompanied by their anxious parents. The parents sat on the risers or stood along the edges. The kids sat cross-legged on the parquet floor.

I watched my youngest child among them — classmates chatting easily with friends as teachers tried to manage the crowd. Scoot forward. Closer together. Make room. Eyes on me. Now welcome.

I was reliving my own first days of school. Two middle schools. Three high schools. Waking with a pit in my stomach. Sitting alone in the cafeteria. The first days are the hardest ones.

When the child next to Frida said hi and Frida smiled, I felt an unbidden surge of relief. In that moment, all I wanted was for her to have a friend.

As much as this transition has been about risk — about new challenges and opening possibilities at an age when the aperture often narrows — there are moments when I’m reminded that my happiness depends on something far simpler.

Are my children happy?

Someone told me recently that as a parent you are only as happy as your unhappiest happiest child. There’s some truth in that.

If, during this transition, I sometimes get overly focused on what it means for me — the risks I’m taking, the story I’m trying to write — there are sharp reminders that this move is not only about my life’s twists and turns. It is also about how my children will remember this time, and what it may come to mean for their futures.

We are asking a great deal of them.

As it turned out, I had no reason to worry about Frida. Everyone in her class was new. By the end of the day she was happily reeling off a list of names.

I could perhaps learn from her.

New Roots

My days are now spent applying for jobs and networking. While teachers are in high demand in New Zealand and my wife quickly found work, the market for fifty-year-old transportation policy wonks is less clearly defined.

Each day I’m reminded how fortunate I was to spend my career working on strategic planning at Volpe. There, I operated within a dense web of relationships and reputation. Here, in a new country where I have neither history nor standing, I’m looking for my next break.

Networking has begun with the slenderest of threads — my daughter’s best friend’s father’s friend from college, my sister’s former roommate, someone who once worked with someone I know. I take what I can get and hope each introduction leads to another.

At Volpe, I could rely on an earned reputation to act like gravity, drawing connections and work toward me. Now I have to generate my own momentum.

In the planning literature, displacement can produce what psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove calls root shock — the trauma that follows when a community’s social networks are abruptly severed. I chose this move, but chosen uprooting still shocks the system.

Like a plant lifted from established soil and set down somewhere new, I am re-establishing my root system. The old network no longer feeds me. The new one has not yet taken hold.

I’ve been thinking a lot about networks lately — their benefits, the dependencies they create, the costs of staying in degraded networks, and the costs of leaving them.

Resisting Enshittification

In 2023, Cory Doctorow coined a term to describe the slow decay of internet platforms: enshittification. His argument is straightforward. Platforms begin by serving users. Once they have captured a sufficient network, they shift toward serving advertisers. Eventually, they extract value from both — degrading the experience while relying on the fact that users cannot easily leave.

His theory succinctly describes my experience of the internet over the last decade.

In 2016, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I left Facebook. By then the feed of friends and family had thinned, replaced by ads and suggested content. The network still existed, but the value I drew from it had diminished. When Zuckerberg’s assurances about privacy collapsed under scrutiny, I decided I didn’t want to participate in that bargain. I cancelled my account and did not look back.

In 2023, something similar happened with Twitter after Musk’s acquisition. Changes to moderation and amplification reshaped the platform’s tone. Many of the people I followed drifted elsewhere. Once viable alternatives emerged, I left again. I still miss Twitter at its best — the wit, the immediacy — but that version of the network was already becoming exhausted.

In 2024, it was my wife’s turn. Bezos’ decisions around the election were enough for her. She cancelled our Prime account. That one hurt. I had grown accustomed to the convenience.

Platform exodus sometimes feels like the most accessible form of liberal protest in our terminally online consumerist society. Occasionally I tease my wife when she discovers the odious political views or personal behavior of another billionaire — we can’t boycott everyone.

By now you can probably see where I’m going. In 2025, enshittification was no longer confined to platforms. It crept into the physical world. DOGE came along and enshittified my job. Leaving no longer meant deleting an app; it meant stepping away from a career. And as the political climate darkened and civil liberties were threatened, even leaving the country became imaginable. This time, the costs were immeasurably higher.

No Exit

Of course, exit is not the only option. Albert Hirschman argued as much in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. One can stay and try to use one’s voice to reform a failing system. At some point, staying begins to feel like consent, and exit becomes the clearest refusal. And yet departure is never neutral. When we leave, we withdraw not only our consent but our participation. We may preserve our integrity, but we also concede the field.

It is possible to imagine a world in which everyone revolts — refuses, quits, strikes, drops out. In early Rome, the plebeians practiced secessio plebis: when the abuses of the patricians became intolerable, they withdrew en masse from the city. Without labor, without soldiers, without an economy, the ruling class was forced to negotiate.

I know this is a fantasy. Collective exit at that scale requires coordination, sacrifice, shared risk — conditions that rarely align. Quitting, more often than not, is a privilege. Those of us who took the DOGE buyout knew it was both a tragedy and a privilege. And yet I return to the thought experiment. What would make departure contagious? What would make staying feel intolerable? Where do we draw the line?

I sometimes joke that unemployment has radicalized me. But beneath the joke is something more serious. If the threats we face — political, economic, ecological — are as grave as they appear, then timidity will not meet them. Perhaps what is required is not simply rational argument but a different posture altogether: a willingness to risk comfort, reputation, even belonging.

For better or worse, networks nourish us and bind us. Increasingly, they exploit our attention, our data, our labor. Yet leaving them — whether a platform, a profession, or a country — takes courage and carries a cost.

And yet courage, for me these days, looks smaller than that. It’s sending a networking email to a cold contact. Asking a stupid question at a PTA meeting. (Like “What’s tea? Do you actually serve the kids tea?”) Writing a Substack where I try to be honest without jeopardizing my job prospects. There’s a fine line between being a revolutionary and being unemployed. As the late great Todd Snider sang,

Now I've got a brand new dance
I need one more shot
I just need one last chance
You know I won’t get caught
I wanna make my last stand
This time I can’t be bought
But then again, on the other hand
How much have you got?”

More Photos

The new train station in the CBD and some pretty scenes from my suburb of Remuera