The Ise Shrine

The Ise Shrine is rebuilt adjacent to its current site every 20 years. It's on its 61st iteration as I write this. It's an example (another is wikipedia) of love as a renewable building material in Chapter 5: When Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production of Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody.

We don’t often talk about love when trying to describe the public world, because love seems to squishy and private. What has happened, though, and what is still happening in our historical moment, is that love has become a lot less squishy and a lot less private. Love has a half=life too, as well as a radius, and we’re used to both of those being small. We can affect the people we love, but the longevity and social distance of love are both constrained. Or were constrained–now we can do things for strangers who do things for us, at a low enough cost to make that kind of behavior attractive, and those effects can last well beyond our original contribution. Our social tools are turning love into a renewable building material. When people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of a scope and a longevity that were previously impossible; they can do big things for love.

It's encouraging to me when folks tell me that we have structural changes that increase the power of love. A part of that is that I deeply love systems. The function of institutions (I used to say government, but that's a synecdoche) is to make evil hard and good easy.