Nell WatsonThe Neighbourhood
Every dot below is a household, blue or orange. Nobody here hates anybody. Each household asks only one mild thing: that a few of its neighbours be like itself — and if not, it moves somewhere nicer. Press play and watch what "mild" builds.
What you just watched
This is Thomas Schelling's segregation model (1971), one of the founding demonstrations of agent-based social science. The unsettling part is the arithmetic: a preference as gentle as "I'd like a third of my neighbours to be like me" — a wish nobody would call extremism — reliably sorts the grid into stark territories where most households end up surrounded almost entirely by their own kind. Slide the rule down to 20% and it still happens. No household chose the outcome. Every household chose only its own comfort.
The lesson generalises far beyond housing, and it is one of the load-bearing ideas in how I think about technology: systems produce outcomes that no participant intends, which means blame is often the wrong instrument and design is the right one. Feeds, defaults, recommender loops, agent swarms — each is a neighbourhood like this one, quietly compounding mild preferences into structures nobody voted for. If you want a different pattern, you rarely need different people. You need different rules of moving.
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