Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

Welcome back to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future and—I am excited to say—Premium Pulp Fiction. I’m your host, Douglas Stuart McDaniel, and before we go any further, I want to pause for a moment.
We’re recording this at the start of a new year, in a world that feels simultaneously exhausted and overheated. Wars that refuse resolution. Cities under pressure from climate, inequality, and political fracture. Technologies advancing faster than our capacity to govern them. Institutions losing credibility while still holding enormous power. For many people listening, this year didn’t begin with hope so much as vigilance.
That context matters.
Citizen One was never meant to be escapist. It exists because moments like this demand clearer thinking, longer memory, and a willingness to stay present inside complexity rather than retreat from it. The stories we explore here—about cities, systems, culture, and power—are not abstractions. They are the environments we’re already living in, whether we’ve named them yet or not.
So if you’re listening from a place of uncertainty, fatigue, or quiet resolve, you’re not alone. This space is for people who are still paying attention, still asking better questions, and still trying to understand how the future is being shaped in real time—often without our consent, but never without consequence.
With that in mind, let’s step into today’s episode.
Before I begin, I also wanted to share some important context with you. Citizen One is much more than a podcast. It is an emerging media brand where we explore stories at the intersection of innovation, culture, memory, and the past, present and future of cities.
But today, we’re stepping into a slightly different kind of narrative frontier. I want to take a moment to introduce Premium Pulp Fiction, our Citizen One literary imprint and publishing empire.
This episode is also a crossover—one that connects what we do here at Citizen One with a parallel storytelling project rooted in the same curiosity about systems, human complexity, and consequence, but expressed through fiction.
It’s called Premium Pulp — an independent traditional publishing imprint where quality, depth, and risk-bearing imagination come first.
At its core, Premium Pulp Fiction publishes speculative fiction, noir-inflected narratives, historical fiction, and narrative nonfiction concerned with power, memory, technology, and the quieter mechanics of how societies endure, adapt, and fail over time.
Beginning this year, we will be publishing a very small number of carefully selected titles, and unlike many modern indie or hybrid publishers, we fully finance standard book production. Our authors never pay for book production or global distribution; they also receive the resources to leverage an integrated marketing and publicity ecosystem built from a network of preferred, vetted, award-winning suppliers.
Over the last 15–20 years, most small presses have been forced into one of three survival models:
1. Author-funded or cost-sharing models
These include hybrid presses, “assisted publishing,” or thinly disguised vanity presses. Production costs are shifted to the author—sometimes partially, sometimes entirely—and the imprint’s role becomes administrative rather than editorial. Marketing support, when offered, is usually modular, outsourced, or pay-to-upgrade.
2. Grant-subsidized or institutionally anchored presses
University presses, arts-council-backed imprints, or nonprofit literary houses can sometimes fully fund authors, but they rely on external subsidy. Their marketing reach is often limited, conservative, or academically scoped, and publicity ecosystems are modest by design.
3. Micro-indies operating on sweat equity
These presses finance production out of pocket, but at minimal levels—basic editing, templated design, limited print runs—and expect authors to self-market aggressively. Publicity ecosystems are informal at best and nonexistent at worst.
What almost never exists anymore is a small, independent imprint that does all three of the following at once:
* Fully finances production (developmental editing through distribution)
* Retains editorial authority and risk (rather than transferring it to the author)
* Provides an integrated marketing and publicity ecosystem rather than ad-hoc support
That model used to be normal. It was called publishing.
While publishers exist across a wide range of sizes and models, the largest U.S. trade houses—commonly referred to as the Big Five—retain the scale, capital, and specialized editorial, marketing, and publicity infrastructure required to support broad distribution and coordinated campaigns at volume. Most small and independent presses operate with significantly smaller budgets and far fewer specialized departments, and as a result, authors are often expected to source, coordinate, or directly manage much of their promotional and publicity work themselves.
This context is what makes our approach genuinely uncommon. Premium Pulp Fiction is structurally closer to a miniature traditional house than to a contemporary indie press. We’re not simply financing books; we’re absorbing uncertainty so that editorial decisions can be made upstream, slowly, and with coherence.
Within that structure, the inclusion of a fully integrated marketing and publicity ecosystem is the clearest outlier.
Most small presses either:
* hand authors a checklist, or
* provide one or two vendor introductions, or
* rely on goodwill and improvisation
Very few embed authors into a preferred, already-vetted network of publicists, designers, media prep, trailers, and positioning support. Doing so requires long-term relationship capital, not just money.
So the honest framing is this:
Premium Pulp Fiction is not rare because it’s boutique. It’s rare because it reinstates a publishing contract that the market quietly abandoned—one where the imprint assumes risk, curates taste, and provides infrastructure so authors can focus on the work itself.
That isn’t nostalgia. It’s a deliberate structural choice. It’s structural dissent.
That structural choice shapes our focus: books built to last—structurally sound, intellectually grounded, and resistant to fashion. That orientation is not accidental. It reflects the belief that long-term relevance and endurance require more than a launch cycle or a marketing push; they require structural coherence, editorial intention, and depth of engagement that only emerges through sustained collaboration between author and editor.
Premium Pulp Fiction was founded to support work that understands genre as a working tool rather than a marketing label. We are interested in stories that know where they come from — noir that remembers its debts, historical fiction that treats the past as something lived rather than staged, speculative work that understands systems, worlds, and story ecologies before it imagines their collapse.
Handled seriously, genre does more than entertain. When handled carefully — structurally, morally, and contextually — genre becomes a way into complexity rather than a shortcut around it.
Our publishing approach intentionally mirrors that complexity. Premium Pulp Fiction operates as an independent traditional imprint: we fully finance book production for our authors, including editorial development, copyediting, cover design, layout and formatting, distribution setup, media kits, and book trailers. This allows editorial decisions to be made on the basis of quality and coherence rather than speed or scale.
That work extends beyond production. We focus on positioning, framing, and long-term relevance, with attention to how a book will read five or ten years after publication, not just how it launches. That longer view matters because a great story, like a great city, continues to live and change after its initial debut, shaping and reshaping its readership over time.
The kinds of work we seek include:
* Speculative fiction grounded in political, economic, and technological reality
* Dystopian narratives informed by history rather than abstraction
* Noir fiction attentive to power, corruption, and moral compromise
* Historical fiction concerned with memory, survival, and unfinished business
We value narrative control, structural clarity, and voice, and we welcome humor when it emerges from intelligence rather than irony.
Most importantly, we do not offer paid publishing packages. Premium Pulp is not a service press. We seek projects that benefit from close editorial engagement and long-term positioning rather than rapid release cycles.
This publishing philosophy—production financed in full, editorial risk assumed by the imprint, and a limited annual catalog—creates space for seriousness rather than spectacle. It allows fiction to ask big questions rather than announce its genre category before it earns the right. It aligns with the way Citizen One interrogates systems, but through narrative intelligence rather than analytical exposition.
Now, with that foundation in place, I want to introduce the first author signed under this imprint who exemplifies the kind of work Premium Pulp was created to support.
Van Shamrai is a Ukrainian science-fiction novelist whose work is shaped by lived historical pressure rather than speculative distance. His fiction emerges from a close engagement with political systems, social fracture, and the long consequences of collective decisions, drawing on both contemporary Ukrainian experience and broader European intellectual traditions. Rather than treating collapse as a sudden event, his writing traces how societies erode over time—through institutional strain, moral compromise, and the accumulation of unresolved choices.
His characters move through worlds governed by constraint rather than convenience, where survival is inseparable from memory, responsibility, and inherited obligation. The speculative elements in his work are never decorative; they function as extensions of real historical and civic forces, rendered through disciplined worldbuilding and a restrained, unsentimental narrative voice.
We will be publishing the English-language edition of Scions of the Last Hope, scheduled for release in late spring.
Scions of the Last Hope reflects those priorities. It is speculative in a way that respects political and historical gravity, attentive to systems as lived environments rather than convenient backdrops, and resolute in narrative voice and consequence. Its world is not a metaphor. It is an environment shaped by pressure, inheritance, and moral trade-offs that resist simplification.
Premium Pulp Fiction is not here to rescue publishing, nor to compete with high-velocity content engines. It is here to practice a standard of editorial responsibility that treats fiction as intellectual work, moral architecture, and imaginative infrastructure — work capable of carrying complexity without surrendering it for the sake of market clarity.
That is why we exist, why we work the way we work, and why the English release of Scions of the Last Hope matters—not simply as a book, but as a continuation of the narrative practices Citizen One was built to explore.
Thanks for listening.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com

Cities are a form civilization often takes. They were never its starting condition.
Since my first travels to Türkiye several years ago—through Istanbul, İzmir, and Ephesus—and also across archaeological sites in Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia, Göbekli Tepe has remained on my research radar**. Not as an archaeological revelation or a sudden conversion to deep prehistory, but because, as a narrative architect, I’m drawn to how settlement systems form—especially the ones hiding in plain sight.**
Taş Tepeler has lingered in my mind in precisely this way, not as a city or urban form, but as a system of worldbuilding and story ecology that invites harder questions about how civilizations function beneath their visible forms: coordination, legitimacy, labor, belief, and power.
The logic that structures human worlds long before they crystallize into cities.
Taş Tepeler offers evidence of something more elusive and, in many ways, more instructive: civilization as coordinated life before urbanization. We don’t see clear evidence of dense settlement cores. No large concentration of permanent housing blocks. No streets, markets, or municipal hierarchy. None of the architectural signals we rely on to tell ourselves that “civilization has begun.”
And yet the civic coordination is unmistakable. Across multiple sites, deliberately distributed across the landscape, we see coordination that exceeds kinship or coincidence. A shared symbolic grammar appears again and again, not as local improvisation but as something collectively maintained. Labor is organized at a scale that no single community could sustain alone. People gather repeatedly—on rhythms that imply scheduling, expectation, and return—rather than accident or crisis.
Memory here is not stored in text or archive, but anchored in place.
That anchoring is not passive. It is actively staged.
There is so much exciting work going on now across the Taş Tepeler sites: archaelogical work, paleo-environmental research, cultural heritage management, and ethnoarchaeology. And recent excavations reveal narrative systems embedded directly into architecture: reliefs depicting sequences rather than symbols, animals and humans shown in motion and interaction, vessels and figurines designed to be handled, repositioned, and displayed. These are not static images. They appear to be prompts for retelling.
Some installations appear deliberately constructed to accommodate small groups seated together, facing shared visual fields—spaces where stories could be enacted, repeated, and remembered through gesture and movement as much as through speech. If this is not theatre in the modern sense, it is unmistakably performative.
In societies without writing, narrative is not entertainment. It is governance. Stories encode precedent, obligation, consequence, and identity. They allow rules to survive complexity without law codes, and memory to persist without archives.
Taş Tepeler suggests that long before writing externalized memory onto clay or parchment, humans externalized it into space, sequence, and ritualized performance. Authority does not reside in an office or a law code; it operates across time and distance through participation, repetition, and shared obligation. Nowhere is this clearer than in the way these communities treated their own past.
Structures were not simply abandoned when they fell out of use. They were deliberately backfilled—often with more labor than their original construction required—sealed with care, and preserved as memory rather than erased. Human remains were curated, repositioned, and integrated into walls and floors over generations. New structures were built alongside old ones, not on top of them, maintaining a legible landscape of accumulated history.
This is not disposal. It is archiving—performed spatially rather than textually.
The way human remains appear at Taş Tepeler adds another layer to this memory architecture. Rather than isolated grave fields, fragments of human bones and prepared crania recur in niches, built contexts, and fill deposits. This integration of the human body into the fabric of communal space is not random. It is part of the same durable system of place-based remembrance that we see in architecture, narrative imagery, and the sequencing of built enclosures — a set of conventions that carries memory across generations without text or archive.
What emerges is an early form of memory architecture: a system in which collective history is embedded into the built environment itself, allowing authority, identity, and obligation to persist across centuries without documents, institutions, or states.
Civilization here is not remembered. It is inhabited. These are not private acts or isolated rituals. They are public behaviors, negotiated in common, and sustained across generations.
That is what makes them _civic_—even in the absence of streets, councils, or walls. Settlement is not the outcome of farming. It is the social condition that makes farming useful.
While Taş Tepeler is not a city, it is civilization.
What Taş Tepeler suggests—quietly, almost reluctantly—is that civilization does not emerge first as a centralized object. It emerges as a distributed system: a network of meaning, obligation, and memory that exists before cities, and in some cases actively resists the gravitational pull toward them.
This is where the familiar chicken-and-egg question finally loses its usefulness—not just archaeologically, but conceptually. Did farming produce settlement, or did settlement produce farming?
Such a question assumes a linear sequence that the evidence at Taş Tepeler no longer supports. What appears instead is a feedback system already underway—one that begins with repeated aggregation, not merely subsistence innovation.
Across multiple sites, we now see clear evidence of deliberately constructed domestic space: oval structures carved directly into bedrock, with hearths, storage areas, food-processing installations, and long-term reuse. These are not seasonal shelters. They are houses.
They imply people staying put—day after day, year after year—well before domesticated agriculture enters the picture.
What sustains that settlement is not farming, but managed abundance. Wild cereals, legumes, nuts, and game are exploited systematically, supported by water infrastructure carved into bedrock at a scale that allows year-round habitation. In other words, people are not settling because they farm. They are reorganizing subsistence because they have chosen to settle.
Agriculture, in this light, is not the spark of civilization. It is one of several stabilizing responses to the pressures created when social life becomes durably collective.
This matters enormously for Citizen One—and for how we think about cities more broadly—because the project has never been about equating cities with civilization. It has been about understanding how humans coordinate at scale—how they hold together shared purpose, legitimacy, and restraint—and what happens when those systems harden into infrastructure, bureaucracy, and power.
Taş Tepeler reminds us that before civilization was something you could map, administer, or govern, it was something you had to sustain. Together.
I seem to arrive at most things this way now—not through epiphany, but through brief conversations that refuse to let go.
One of those conversations came by way of Irving Finkel, speaking casually on Lex Fridman’s podcast. Finkel is a senior curator at the British Museum, one of the world’s leading Assyriologists, and someone who has spent decades reading the residue of ancient bureaucracies line by line—cuneiform tablets, seals, inventories, contracts—the administrative afterlife of early civilizations. Fridman, a researcher and long-form interviewer known for giving specialists room to think aloud rather than perform certainty, let the moment pass without interruption.
Perhaps without realizing he was lighting a fuse, Finkel mentioned a small object from Göbekli Tepe: a green stone, seal-like, easily overlooked in a plate of excavation photographs. To him, it wasn’t just an oddity. It was a clue. **A raindrop.**
And from that raindrop, he suggested, you might reasonably infer a much larger, now-missing system—something like notation, something like administrative marking, something that begins to look uncomfortably close to writing, thousands of years earlier than we are usually prepared to allow.
He was careful not to claim proof. He wasn’t rewriting history. He was doing something far more dangerous and far more interesting: asking whether our categories are too small for the evidence we already have.
Even if no true writing existed here, the myriad administrative problems that writing later solves may already have been visible here.
That question has stayed with me.
Years of traveling through places like Istanbul—where time doesn’t move forward so much as stack vertically—and Ephesus, where public life, ritual practice, trade, and power were never separate systems but overlapping expressions of the same social logic, have trained me to be suspicious of clean origin stories. Cities don’t begin when textbooks say they do. They accrete. They remember. They metabolize earlier forms and pretend they invented themselves.
Working with Alex McDowell—one of the pioneers of systems-based worldbuilding across film, design, and urban futures—sharpened that instinct. Our collaborations focus on applying narrative worldbuilding methods to real-world future city projects and strategic urban systems, using story not as ornament, but as a tool for systems thinking: a way to test how social behavior, governance, infrastructure, and technology intersect under pressure.
In that context, imagining future cities is never about spectacle or prediction. It is about systems literacy. You begin by asking what must already exist—socially, psychologically, infrastructurally—for a place to function at all, and how those conditions evolve long before they become visible in buildings or policy.
That kind of work trains you to see futures not as inventions, but as extrapolations of present systems under strain. You don’t design them by guessing. You design them by interrogating the present until its hidden assumptions surface.
Once you learn to think that way, it becomes almost impossible to look at the past through clean origin stories. You start asking different questions: not when something appears, but what problem it was already solving.
Which is why Taş Tepeler matters—not as a mystery, not as a provocation for fringe speculation, but as a stress test.
We tend to like our civilizational beginnings clean and linear. Writing begins in Sumer. Cities follow. Religion formalizes. States emerge. History starts. It’s orderly. It’s teachable. It fits nicely into timelines and museum galleries.
Göbekli Tepe, and now the wider Taş Tepeler constellation, doesn’t so much argue with that sequence as quietly render it insufficient to explain one early history of human civilization.
Because once you accept what is already firmly established—that people in the 9th and 10th millennia BCE were capable of organizing large labor forces, planning and executing monumental architecture, carving complex symbolic and narrative imagery, and sustaining shared practices across generations—a position broadly supported by the ongoing Taş Tepeler research program in southeastern Türkiye²—then the sequence starts to feel less like a law of progress and more like a story we told ourselves because it was convenient.
And once that sequence breaks, a more uncomfortable question surfaces.
If humans were already capable of monumentality, coordination, narrative symbolism, and long-term planning before writing, before agriculture, before cities in any recognizable sense—or more precisely, before fully institutionalized agriculture and urbanism as we later define them³—then what else about “progress” have we misunderstood? What capacities did we assume had to be learned slowly, when in fact they may have been present all along?
This isn’t a fringe argument. It’s not an attempt to smuggle a Cappadocian Atlantis into the conversation through the back door. It’s what happens when material evidence accumulates faster than the conceptual frameworks we use to organize it.
Before any speculation, before any discussion of proto-writing or seals or perishable media, it’s worth being precise about what the evidence already tells us.
Taş Tepeler refers to a network of early Neolithic sites in what is now southeastern Türkiye, centered in the Şanlıurfa region and including Göbekli Tepe, Karahantepe, Sayburç, and several others. These sites are not isolated anomalies. They form a connected landscape—geographically, symbolically, and almost certainly socially—a characterization now explicitly adopted by the Taş Tepeler research initiative itself².
They date primarily to the 9th and 10th millennia BCE, within the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, long before the appearance of urban centers, formal states, or known writing systems as conventionally defined in the Mesopotamian record⁴.
What they contain is in its broad contours increasingly well-established. Large, intentionally planned communal structures. Finely carved stone pillars and reliefs produced with remarkable technical consistency. Repeated symbolic motifs that recur across multiple sites, suggesting shared meaning rather than local improvisation. And, perhaps most strikingly, evidence of coordinated labor at a scale once thought impossible for societies without agriculture or hierarchical governance.
At Sayburç, in particular, we see something even more revealing: not just symbols, but scenes. Humans and animals depicted in relation to one another, caught in moments of interaction and tension. These are not abstract marks. They are narrative gestures—fragments of stories fixed in stone—widely discussed in the literature as some of the earliest known narrative relief scenes to date⁵.
Taken together, this evidence forces a revision that doesn’t require speculation at all.
Complex social organization does not depend on cities.
It does not depend on kings.
It does not depend on writing.
What it depends on is shared meaning, reliable mechanisms of coordination, and durable ways of carrying memory forward in time.
Everything else—writing, bureaucracy, formal institutions—comes later, when those earlier systems begin to strain under their own success.
Taş Tepeler doesn’t tell us where civilization began.
It tells us what civilization already looked like, long before we decided to start the clock.
Administration Before Writing, Memory Before Text
Once you accept that Taş Tepeler represents coordinated social systems rather than isolated ritual curiosities, a different question begins to matter more than the one we usually rush toward.
Not did they have writing?
But how did they manage complexity over time?
This is where Irving Finkel’s provocation becomes useful—not as a conclusion, but as a diagnostic tool.
In the modern imagination, writing is often treated as a binary threshold: either a society has it or it doesn’t, and once it appears, everything else conveniently falls into place. Cities, laws, contracts, states. But that framing confuses the tool with the problem it was invented to solve.
Writing doesn’t appear because humans suddenly become smarter.
It appears because existing systems begin to exceed the limits of human memory, voice, and ritual repetition—a dynamic well documented in the emergence of administrative writing in late fourth-millennium Mesopotamia⁶.
And Taş Tepeler already shows us social and administrative systems brushing up against those limits.
To build, maintain, and reuse monumental communal spaces over generations requires more than inspiration. It requires continuity. Decisions remembered. Roles recognized. Permissions granted. Obligations honored. Authority made legible beyond the lifespan of any one individual.
In later periods, we see exactly how societies solve that problem. They externalize memory. They invent administrative technologies: tallies, tokens, seals, ledgers, and eventually writing. Finkel’s career has been spent inside those systems, reading the residue of ancient bureaucracies line by line. When he looks at a seal-like object at Göbekli Tepe and raises an eyebrow, he’s not chasing mysticism. He’s recognizing a familiar logic.
Seals, after all, are not art objects. They are instruments of trust.
They exist to say: this action is authorized, this exchange is legitimate, this person has standing. Long before writing records poetry or theology, it records accountability—a pattern evident across early Mesopotamian administrative archives⁶.
The uncomfortable implication is not that Göbekli Tepe had scribes quietly tallying grain in clay tablets nine thousand years ago. It’s that some form of administrative reasoning—some way of stabilizing social reality across time and distance—may have existed without leaving behind the kinds of artifacts we’ve trained ourselves to look for.
This is where archaeology’s material bias matters. Stone survives. Fired clay survives. Leaves, wood, fiber, skin, and bark do not. Entire systems of notation could vanish without leaving a trace, especially if their primary function was temporary: marking permission, recording contribution, ratifying ritual status, then being discarded once the event passed.
Even without writing, Taş Tepeler shows signs of administrative thinking. Repeated architectural grammar across sites. Standardized pillar forms. Consistent symbolic repertoires. Shared spatial logic. These are not improvisations. They are conventions. And conventions require enforcement.
Which raises a quieter but more revealing possibility.
What if Taş Tepeler didn’t need writing because it solved the same problem differently?
Instead of abstract text, it used space.
Instead of documents, it used monuments.
Instead of archives, it used ritual repetition embedded in stone.
In that model, authority doesn’t live in a ledger. It lives in place. Memory isn’t stored in text. It’s rehearsed seasonally, physically, communally. The enclosure itself becomes a kind of administrative device—a durable reference point against which behavior, obligation, and identity are measured.
This doesn’t make writing inevitable or early. It makes it unnecessary—until scale, density, and speed overwhelm those older systems.
And that, ultimately, is why the question of writing at Taş Tepeler is less important than it first appears.
Whether or not any form of proto-notation existed in 9000 BCE, the social logic that eventually produces writing is already present. Humans are coordinating large groups. They are managing surplus and labor. They are stabilizing meaning across generations. They are negotiating authority without kings, law codes, or formal states.
Writing, when it eventually arrives, will not invent civilization.
It will bureaucratize something that already exists.
Taş Tepeler doesn’t challenge the history of writing so much as it reframes it. Writing becomes not the spark of civilization, but the paperwork that follows once the fire is already burning.
And that reframing matters—not only for how we understand the deep past, but for how we imagine the future.
Because if civilization can operate—briefly, brilliantly, and at scale—without the tools we assume are indispensable, then the real question is not what technologies we add next.
It’s which systems of meaning, coordination, and memory we are quietly eroding as we add them.
Religion as Jurisdiction, Visual Narratives in Stone as Social Code
Once you stop asking whether Taş Tepeler had writing and start asking how it governed itself, the role of religion shifts almost immediately.
Not upward, toward belief.
But inward, toward function.
Modern language gets in the way here. When we hear “religion,” we tend to imagine doctrine, faith, metaphysics, gods demanding belief. But in early societies—especially societies on the cusp of sedentism—religion is less about what people believe and more about how they behave. It is not theology in the abstract sense. It is jurisdiction—or more precisely, one of several overlapping social technologies through which rules, limits, and legitimacy are made visible and enforceable⁷.
At Taş Tepeler, the evidence suggests a world where religion provided the rules for living close together before formal law existed. These were communities navigating new pressures: repeated aggregation, resource concentration, emerging inequalities, disputes over labor and status, and the growing challenge of keeping violence contained within tolerable bounds—pressures widely recognized in Neolithic transition research⁸.
In that context, religion doesn’t sit apart from politics or economics. It is one of the mechanisms that makes them possible.
The communal enclosures are not simply sacred spaces. They are stages where authority is performed and renewed. They are places where people learn—through repetition, spectacle, and shared risk—what is permitted, what is forbidden, and what carries consequences. The carvings are not decorative. They are reminders.
This becomes especially clear when you look closely at the iconography across Taş Tepeler. Predatory animals dominate the visual field. Leopards, boars, snakes, birds of prey. These are not gentle symbols. They are dangerous, unpredictable, and familiar to people who lived close to them. The message is not subtle: the world outside the enclosure is violent, and survival requires discipline—a reading consistent with prevailing interpretations of Göbekli Tepe iconography⁹.
But the violence is not glorified. It is contained.
The enclosures take the chaos of the wild and pin it into stone. They bring fear inside the social space, where it can be named, rehearsed, and controlled. This is not superstition. It is psychological technology: a means of shaping behavior, expectation, and restraint through shared symbolic experience⁷.
At Sayburç, this logic sharpens even further. The relief there does something unusual for its time. It depicts not just animals, but interaction—humans and animals locked in relational scenes. Tension is implied. Agency is distributed. The figures are not symbols floating in abstraction; they are actors in a moment.
That matters.
Narrative scenes are not art for art’s sake. They encode precedent. They say: this happened, this is how it went, this is what it means. In societies without writing, narrative is how rules survive complexity. Stories are remembered because they are embodied, visual, and emotionally charged—a function widely discussed in cognitive and archaeological approaches to early narrative⁵.
In this sense, Taş Tepeler may represent an early experiment in externalized moral memory. Not laws written down, but situations carved into stone. Not commandments, but scenarios. If you do this, this follows. If you cross that line, this is the cost.
Religion here functions less like belief and more like an operating system—while still accommodating cosmology, identity, and meaning alongside regulation rather than reducing them to a single cause⁸. It stabilizes behavior in a world where old hunter-gatherer norms are no longer sufficient, but formal institutions have not yet emerged.
This is also where status enters the picture.
Monumental building does not happen in egalitarian societies without differentiation. Some people organize. Some carve. Some provision. Some officiate. The enclosures formalize those differences without fully hardening them into class. Prestige is earned, displayed, and reaffirmed through participation rather than inherited through title—a pattern observed in multiple early sedentary contexts¹⁰.
But prestige is fragile. It requires constant renewal.
Archaeological work at Göbekli Tepe has documented modified human cranial fragments that strongly support deliberate post-mortem treatment rather than casual discard. In a peer-reviewed study, Gresky, Haelm, and Clare describe three skull fragments bearing intentionally produced deep grooves, cut marks, and at least one drilled perforation—evidence interpreted as a previously undocumented variant of Early Neolithic “skull cult” practice at the site.¹⁵
Beyond those modified crania, Göbekli Tepe has also produced a larger scatter of human bone fragments recovered largely from fill contexts—material that is archaeologically real, but contextually messy. It does not map neatly onto later cemetery logic, and it should not be treated as proof of a single standardized funerary program. The more defensible claim is narrower: the dead appear inside the same architectural and depositional systems that organize the living, and in at least some cases the human body was curated, altered, and reintroduced into communal space.
For the broader Taş Tepeler region, reports of skulls and human remains appearing in architectural contexts exist, but the evidentiary standard varies by site and by publication status. A conservative way to state it—without importing hype—is this: across the Şanlıurfa Pre-Pottery Neolithic landscape, there is credible evidence that human remains sometimes occur in built contexts (niches, deposits, fills), and that this pattern is best understood as part of place-based memory practice rather than “burial” in the later institutional sense.
None of these contexts, however, are conventional burials in the later sense; they are architectural depositions that seem tied to symbolic memory, spatial continuity, and communal identity rather than individual interment. This reinforces the view that memory, obligation, and social coherence were encoded in place long before formal funerary institutions emerged.
Religion provides that renewal mechanism. It turns coordination into obligation and obligation into meaning. You don’t just help build the enclosure because you were told to. You do it because it situates you within a story that outlasts you.
Seen this way, Taş Tepeler is not an early temple complex. It is a social laboratory.
Before Classes, Before States — Specialization, Inequality, and a Fragile Balance
Once religion is understood as a stabilizing system rather than a belief structure, the next pressure point comes into focus almost immediately.
Labor.
Taş Tepeler did not build itself. The stone was quarried, transported, shaped, erected, and maintained by human bodies over long stretches of time. That alone tells us something uncomfortable: these communities were already negotiating uneven contributions—a point widely acknowledged in discussions of monumentality and labor organization in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic¹¹.
This is where discussions of “class” often go wrong, because we reach for categories that arrive much later and apply them too early. There are no kings here. No palaces. No tax rolls. No written law codes enforcing permanent hierarchy.
But there is differentiation.
Skill differentiates. Time differentiates. Access differentiates. And once people begin to gather regularly in the same places, differentiation does not disappear—it compounds—a dynamic familiar from anthropological studies of early specialization¹⁰.
Stone carving at Taş Tepeler is not casual. The precision, scale, and consistency imply learned expertise passed across generations. That means apprenticeship. Which means time not spent hunting or gathering. Which means provisioning. Which means trust and obligation flowing in particular directions.
Specialists do not emerge in isolation. They emerge because a society decides—explicitly or implicitly—that some people will be supported to do things others cannot or will not. That decision is never neutral.
What’s striking about Taş Tepeler is how carefully that differentiation seems to have been managed. Prestige is visible, but it is not yet locked in. Authority exists, but it must be renewed through performance. No one appears to rule by fiat—an inference consistent with the absence of centralized elite architecture or burial differentiation at these sites¹¹.
This is an unstable equilibrium.
Too much inequality, and the coalition fractures.
Too little differentiation, and the system cannot scale.
Taş Tepeler appears to be navigating that narrow corridor with remarkable sophistication. The communal enclosures absorb surplus labor and convert it into shared meaning. Feasting redistributes calories. Ritual redistributes prestige. Narrative redistributes legitimacy—a pattern widely discussed in anthropological models of feasting economies¹².
But none of this is permanent.
The very success of these systems contains the seeds of their transformation. As gatherings grow larger and more frequent, as specialists become indispensable, as obligations stretch across wider networks, the old methods of regulation begin to strain.
This is where later societies will turn to writing, formal law, standing authority, and eventually the state—not because these are superior forms of organization, but because they are more scalable under pressure—an argument advanced by multiple comparative studies of early state formation¹³.
Taş Tepeler as Mirror — Why Ancient Story Ecologies Still Matter
At some point, Taş Tepeler stops being an archaeological subject and starts behaving like a mirror.
Not because it offers answers we can copy, but because it exposes how narrow our assumptions about civilization have become.
We are used to thinking of cities as machines: infrastructure layered on infrastructure, governed by law, optimized by technology, stabilized by administration. When those systems fail, our instinct is always to add more structure—more data, more enforcement, more abstraction.
But Taş Tepeler reminds us that the deepest work of civilization happens before any of that.
It happens at the level of shared meaning.
Long before humans formalized power into states or memory into text, they built places where stories could be held collectively—places where behavior was shaped not by enforcement alone, but by participation, repetition, and consequence.
What made them work was not technology, but narrative coherence.
This is where narrative architecture becomes more than metaphor.
Working with Alex McDowell has reinforced this lesson again and again: worlds do not fail because they lack innovation. They fail because their stories fracture—a principle McDowell has articulated repeatedly in systems-based worldbuilding practice¹⁴.
Taş Tepeler shows us a society grappling with that exact problem at the moment it first appears. Humans settling down. Aggregating. Specializing. Pushing beyond the limits of face-to-face trust. And instead of immediately inventing hierarchy or bureaucracy, they doubled down on shared narrative, embodied ritual, and visible memory.
They built civilization out of story first, and only later out of administration.
That inversion matters.
Because Taş Tepeler does not tell us to abandon writing, states, or cities. It tells us something far more unsettling: that these are secondary technologies, layered on top of older, more fragile systems of coordination that we barely understand anymore.
Civilization did not begin when humans learned to write things down. It began when they learned how to live with one another at scale without tearing themselves apart.
That experiment did not end in 9000 BCE.
It is still ongoing.
Footnotes
1. Finkel, Irving. Interview with Lex Fridman. _Lex Fridman Podcast_, YouTube, accessed Dec 13, 2025.
2. Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Taş Tepeler Project Overview. Şanlıurfa Archaeological Research Program, ongoing.
3. Özdoğan, Mehmet. “Neolithic Cultures at the Crossroads: Early Sedentism and Subsistence Strategies in Anatolia.” Antiquity 85, no. 328 (2011): 495–508.
4. Englund, Robert K. “The State of Decipherment of Proto-Cuneiform.” In The Origins of Writing, edited by Stephen Houston, 237–270. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
5. Özdoğan, Mehmet, and Necmi Karul. “A New Early Neolithic Narrative Relief from Sayburç.” Antiquity 96, no. 389 (2022): 1–15.
6. Nissen, Hans J., Peter Damerow, and Robert K. Englund. Archaic Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
7. Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
8. Hodder, Ian. The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006.
9. Schmidt, Klaus. Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia. Berlin: Ex Oriente, 2010.
10. Hayden, Brian. “Feasting Theory and the Emergence of Inequality.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 20, no. 3 (2001): 299–339.
11. Dietrich, Oliver et al. “The Role of Cult and Feasting in the Emergence of Neolithic Communities.” Antiquity 86, no. 333 (2012): 674–695.
12. Dietler, Michael. “Feasts and Commensal Politics.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7, no. 1 (2001): 65–114.
13. Scott, James C. Against the Grain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.
14. McDowell, Alex. “Worldbuilding as a Design Process.” Journal of Design and Science, MIT Media Lab, 2019.
15. Gresky, Julia, Juliane Haelm, and Lee Clare. “Modified human crania from Göbekli Tepe provide evidence for a new form of Neolithic skull cult.” Science Advances 3, no. 6 (2017): e1700564. (PubMed record: 28782013).
16. Anadolu Agency. “Neolithic burial traditions / skull modifications reported from Şanlıurfa PPNA/PPNB sites.”


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I recorded this episode on Christmas Eve, not out of allegiance to any particular religious institution, but because Christmas Eve still does something rare in the calendar.
It creates a pause that doesn’t belong to any authority. It marks an ending without demanding resolution. It gives many of us permission to stop moving for a moment and ask where we actually are.
This episode is about time — not as abstraction, not as philosophy, and not as technology — but as lived experience. Specifically, what has happened to our shared sense of time over the last decade, and why so many of us feel so displaced inside it.
The story inside this episode begins in 2016.
People remember 2016 as a particularly bad year, as if it announced itself. It didn’t. It arrived quietly and then began taking things away with unsettling regularity. Bowie. Prince. Cohen. Fisher. Cultural figures who felt less like celebrities and more like structural supports. By the end of that year, the calendar itself had become suspect. Loss no longer arrived with space around it. Events stacked. Grief turned ambient.
In hindsight, that’s why 2016 feels strangely nostalgic now. It was the last time loss still arrived with punctuation. People mourned together. The calendar still felt like a shared object, something communal rather than mechanical.
Everything after blurred.
COVID flattened time completely. Days lost texture. Weeks collapsed. Months passed without landmarks. “COVID time” entered the language because nothing else could hold the disorientation. When lockdowns lifted, time didn’t recover — it accelerated. Entire years compressed. Memory misfiled whole seasons. The world resumed motion without recovering rhythm.
AI followed close behind, not as spectacle or rupture, but as subtraction. Roles disappeared quietly. Skills aged overnight. Many people weren’t fired; they were simply no longer called. By the middle of the decade, millions were still standing where March 2020 had left them, while systems continued advancing without synchronization.
By late 2025, another phrase began circulating, first as a joke and then without humor: NPC. Not metaphorically. Literally. Background characters inside someone else’s machine. The comparison resonated because it mapped too well.
As time felt less inhabitable, people did what humans have always done. They looked backward. Ancient calendars resurfaced. So did old warnings about time itself. The Book of Enoch reappeared, not for its angels or apocalyptic imagery, but for its insistence that when rulers alter the calendar, disorder follows. Not because the heavens change — but because human reckoning does.
By December 2025, attention turned upward again. An interstellar object passed through public consciousness. Astronomers were calm. The math closed. There was no threat. The sky behaved perfectly, which somehow made it worse. Precision without meaning unsettled people already out of sync with the calendar.
At the same time, arguments about years returned. Snake. Horse. Collapse. Acceleration. These weren’t predictions. They were attempts to locate ourselves inside time again.
The episode closes by asking a quieter question.
If earlier countercultural movements, from Timothy Leary onward, tried to escape systems that felt dishonest or misaligned, what does agency look like now that there is no outside left to retreat into?
The answer isn’t withdrawal. It’s re-entry.
Calendars were never neutral. They were built to make time inhabitable — to space loss, to allow for return, to insist that beginnings and endings mattered. When they fail, people don’t abandon time. They rebuild it together.
That is the work waiting for us in 2026.
Not to outrun time.Not to optimize it.But to inhabit it again — deliberately, imperfectly, and humanly.
Thank you for sharing this pause in time.


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In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, I return, unexpectedly, to a place I thought I had metabolized years ago: Western North Carolina. The hills that raised me; the place where the word home was always complicated; the terrain where beauty and hardship braid together in ways outsiders never fully see.
This Citizen One episode begins with a simple message from an old friend:
“Doug… what’s your take on a tiny-home community? They’re trying to drop one behind my house on McDaniel Road.”
And suddenly the personal and the planetary collided. Because this isn’t just a story about a few prefab cottages on a ridge outside Lake Lure. It’s a story about the entire moral geometry of rural America—about extraction disguised as minimalism, about the language developers use to mollify the public, and about the quiet colonialism of modern “intentional communities” that arrive speaking the dialect of simplicity while practicing the economics of speculation.
What’s happening on McDaniel Road is the distilled version of trends I’ve studied on five continents:
* communities promised belonging, only to receive a branded approximation of it;
* locals promised affordability, only to face a market calibrated to outsiders;
* land promised stewardship, only to be asked to carry burdens it cannot bear.
Tiny homes are not the problem.The operating system beneath them is.
In this episode, we dig into the difference between attainable and affordable, between community and inventory, between ownership and subscription living masquerading as freedom. We examine why developers champion sustainability while clear-cutting fragile soils still unstable a year after Hurricane Helene—a storm that inflicted billions in damage across the Blue Ridge, reshaped watersheds, and left entire mountain slopes behaving like unhealed wounds.
We examine how a company headquartered twenty minutes down the mountain can build a village whose economic logic actively excludes the very people who live there. How a promise of “simple living” becomes a land-lease model where residents own the house but not the ground beneath it—an elegant trap deployed globally, from Bali to British Columbia, turning the pastoral into a revenue stream and the resident into an annuity.
But the point isn’t to demonize a developer.The point is to map a system.
A system in which rural counties—already battered by climate events, limited infrastructure, and shrinking civic budgets—are expected to absorb hundreds of new units without sufficient wells, roads, emergency services, or new long-term revenue. A system where “eco-village” becomes a euphemism for Airbnb clusters. A system where crisis becomes an investment thesis.
We widen the lens further:
* In Santa Fe, twenty years of land speculation forced the city to confront the ethics of redevelopment on its own terms.
* In Oregon, co-op models give tiny-home residents actual equity instead of a lifetime lease.
* In Austin, a micro-home community builds not amenities but social fabric.
* In the Scottish Highlands, “eco-lodges” quietly erode generational land rights.
* In New Zealand, tiny homes had to be legally recognized as houses to prevent developers from evading responsibility.
Every example is a mirror.Every mirror shows the same thing:
When land stays local, communities grow.When land becomes a portfolio, communities hollow out.
This episode is not a sentimental elegy for a rural America that never really existed.It’s a field guide for a rural America that could exist—if we stop treating beauty as a commodity and start treating belonging as infrastructure.
We talk about density, hydrology, land-use ethics, fire access, stormwater liabilities, emergency-service constraints, septic load, flipped units listed at $423/sq ft, and the absurd contradiction of a developer marketing “freedom” while charging a monthly fee just to exist on the land.
But we also talk about grief.
About the quiet ache of watching your hometown become someone else’s branding exercise.
About the dignity of neighbors who show up to a meeting not as NIMBYs, but as caretakers.
About the moral illegibility of a world where a teacher cannot afford to live near her school, but an investor can afford three tiny homes he’ll never step inside.
Tiny homes are neither a solution or a threat.They are a diagnostic.
They reveal whether a community is building for its own longevity…or for someone else’s weekend itinerary.
And so this episode asks the real question—the one beneath all the zoning maps and floodplain studies:
Who does this land belong to?Who will it serve?And who will be standing here in twenty years when the soil shifts again?
This is not an episode about nostalgia.
It’s an episode about stewardship—about the responsibility we owe to the places that shaped us, and the obligation to name what is happening before the branding glosses over the truth.
If rural America has a future, it will not be built on the promise of “less.”It will be built on the practice of enough—enough dignity, enough foresight, enough courage to ask:
Are we building homes, or just inventory?
I’m Douglas Stuart McDaniel, speaking from Barcelona and looking back toward the Blue Ridge.
Welcome to Citizen One, Season 2, Episode 7.
McDaniel Road. Tiny Homes. Big Ideas. And the unbearably complicated question of belonging.


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In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, I take you deep inside the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona—a place that, for one week each year, becomes the beating heart of global urban imagination. It’s a strange crossroads: urbanists, technologists, ministers, consultants, researchers, civic reformers, start-up evangelists, sovereign delegations, and the wandering tribe of people like me who have spent too many years inside megaprojects to believe the sales pitches but still care too much to walk away.
This isn’t an episode about glossy renderings, futuristic mobility pods, or the usual chorus of keynote optimism. It’s about the thing humming underneath all of that—the Smart City Industrial Complex, and the uncomfortable contradictions powering it.
On the surface, the technology is dazzling. Digital twins modeling entire metro regions in real time. AI mobility engines reshaping how people move. Micro-grids learning from their own failures. Civic data platforms slimming down enough for small towns to actually use. Tools accelerating at a pace dictated by Moore’s Law, not by the slow cultural physics of cities—the lived, human physics that don’t double every 18 months.
But the real shift this year wasn’t technological.It was geopolitical.
For the first time, the Global South wasn’t standing at the periphery of innovation—it was authoring it. Kenya, Senegal, Vietnam, India, Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia, Colombia—each arriving not with borrowed blueprints but with sovereign visions rooted in their own cultural, economic, and ecological realities. Less optimization, more dignity. Less prediction, more participation. Less extraction, more agency.
And yet the structural tension persists—the one you can feel in your teeth if you’ve ever worked behind the curtain:
A global industry built on exporting efficiency too often ends up importing inequality.A planning apparatus fluent in the language of “inclusion” still stumbles when asked for accountability.A vision of urban progress remains draped—sometimes unknowingly—in the selective morality of empire.
So this episode asks the question no one wants to say aloud on the Expo floor:
Who gets to define the future of cities—and who gets erased in the process?
We trace the failures of top-down megaprojects across democracies and monarchies alike—projects that collapse not because of technology, but because no one bothered to ask people what they wanted.We look at the quieter revolutions unfolding in places like Medellín, Vienna, and even here in Barcelona—cities rediscovering that sovereignty begins with citizens, not sensors.
Because cities don’t need more dashboards.They need mirrors.They need memory.They need accountability baked into their governance, not patched in as an afterthought.
The next urban revolution will not begin in a command center, a render farm, or a procurement office.It will begin the moment citizens decide they will no longer be optimized out of their own streets.
Welcome to the reckoning, Citizen One.


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