I, Sandwich
Aemula Writer Spotlight - 1.29.26
Ten years after Andy George, the creator behind How to Make Everything, went viral for spending $1,500 and 6 months to make a sandwich from scratch, he returns to his sandwich-making career. This time, Andy takes his experiment a step further, deciding to make all of the tools necessary for making a sandwich from scratch as well. In this second installment of the sandwich series, Andy collects ores to forge knives, blows glass to make jars for pickling cucumbers, carves stones to mill grain, and even builds a homemade flintlock rifle to hunt a feral hog for bacon.
Andy’s 10-year journey to make a sandwich all on his own highlights the extensive interconnectedness of our global economy, providing us with a modern-day manifestation of Leonard Read’s famous I, Pencil essay. As both Andy George and Leonard Read show, the seemingly simple products we take for granted in our daily lives, such as sandwiches and pencils, are the result of incomprehensibly complex supply chain networks. Billions of individuals seamlessly self-coordinate to sustain our modern way of life.
In New York City today, you can exchange 49 minutes of your time, after taxes while working at minimum wage, to be able to afford a sandwich similar to the one Andy George makes in his video. Comparatively, Andy spent $7,560 for materials and ingredients and devoted 460 hours of his time.
While this is not a scientifically perfect comparison, the anecdotal evidence is representative of just how much we rely on one another. As a global economy, we are operating near the limits of efficiency in producing goods and services. Despite its complexity, this system is impressively adaptive and resilient. However, any disruption to this global machine could prove detrimental to our modern way of life.
Yet, we are witnessing a worrisome trend as we revert from globalization towards nationalism, and experience increasing political polarization domestically. In our age of information, we have more widespread access to knowledge and social connection than ever before in human history, but we are finding it increasingly difficult to communicate across ideological divides. We risk losing our ability to collaborate effectively at societal scale.
This may be getting too abstract, but hear us out…
We all work together to achieve things that no single person could possibly achieve. Humanity is a prime example of emergence, the concept that many simple things can work together to create something that exceeds the sum of its parts.
Our global economy is incredibly complex, but this complexity generates a growing excess of resources that increases the quality of life for people around the world. As we move forward, we are sure to experience increasingly complex problems. Innovation is not inevitable. We must constantly work together to solve new problems as they arise.
Our ability to problem solve is a function of our collective intelligence. People receive, process, and share information to collectively work on large-scale projects. We operate as one large neural network. The power of this network is only limited by the number of people and the ease at which they can communicate.
Our focus with Aemula is on communication.
To date, nearly all of [society’s] advancements in communication have been focused on increasing the speed at which two people can communicate. We can now transfer information at the speed of light. We are nearing the limits of efficiency in this regard.
However, we have neglected to devote significant resources to determining how to route information effectively. Yes, two people can communicate instantaneously, but how are we ensuring that the information is flowing to the correct people along the shortest path? Currently, that flow of information is restricted by our centralized distribution systems and controlled by conflicting incentives.
We believe information is our greatest resource. Currently, it is not being allocated correctly.
This is the problem that we must solve.
This week, we highlight writers discussing the cracks that are beginning to form within our channels of communication and how they are affecting our ability to work together at scale. We encourage you to explore their work and consider subscribing directly.
Conspicuous Cognition
Written by Dan Williams, an academic philosopher with a PhD from the University of Cambridge, a lecturer at the University of Sussex, and an associate fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, previously featured in our Spotlight, “The Truth”.
“However, the ultimate reason for Lippmann’s pessimism is less the undeniable fact of our epistemic interdependence—our reliance on testimony and an unimaginably complex and fragile division of labour—than the second filter mediating between the real environment and the pseudo-environments of journalists and citizens: interpretation.
The environment is not only ‘too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance’. Its vastness and complexity also mean that we must ‘reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.’”
The Power of Us
Written by Dr. Jay Van Bavel, a Professor of Psychology and Neural Science and Director of the Center for Conflict and Cooperation at NYU, and Dr. Dominic Packer, a Professor of Psychology and Associate Vice Provost for Research at Lehigh University, with Yvonne Phan, a researcher and science communicator serving as managing editor of The Power of Us newsletter.
The below post was drafted by Daniel Thilo Schroeder and Jonas Kunst, with edits from Jay Van Bavel, based on their recent paper.
“Democracy doesn’t require perfect truth—but it does require something more fragile: independent voices. The ‘wisdom of crowds’ depends on independence between judgments. If a single actor can speak through thousands of inauthentic accounts, the apparent consensus of the crowd stops being informative.
One pathway of harm is synthetic consensus: creating the illusion of a majority opinion. Swarms can seed narratives across niches and amplify them via coordinated liking, replying, and cross-posting until it looks like broad support. People update beliefs partly through social evidence—what seems normal, common, or widely endorsed. Synthetic consensus exploits that cognitive shortcut.
A second pathway is segmented realities. Because swarms can mimic local language, emotion, and identity cues, they can tailor narratives community-by-community, reinforcing polarization and making cross-group cooperation and consensus harder.”
Into the Machine
Written by Tobias Rose-Stockwell, a designer, technologist, and media researcher exploring the effects of social media on our morals, society, and democracy, with work previously featured in The Atlantic, Wired, BBC, and NPR.
“Democracy is a big coordination game. We need to know what’s happening in order to vote people into office that can solve our problems. In this way the democratic process is a sort of problem-solving machine — if you’re angry about something you see in your community, you should be able to vote for change. If that thing is fixed by that representative, great! Vote them in again. If not, vote them out and try again with a different guy.
For local issues this is pretty easy, because there are fewer mediated steps between us and the issue. Like the pothole on my street, the observable distance is still very low. School boards and city governments function pretty well because people can see what is wrong and which policies are failing.
But for national issues, most of our problems are not directly observable. We rely on mediators — journalists, scientists, pundits, influencers, politicians, and our smart friends — to help us figure out which issues we should pay attention to and how we should vote. The internet was supposed to help us here”
Are you writing on Substack? You can easily set up automatic cross-posting with Aemula to instantly:
Increase your earnings
Expand your audience
Verifiably own your work
Plus, you will have opportunities to access community resources and grants to support the content you want to create!
Link your Substack to your Aemula account using this link or reach out to writers@aemula.com to get started!
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