@overflow 🏳️‍⚧️

A follow-up post is here. Sorry about the copy of it that I deleted, thinking it was a draft.

Okay I know exactly what to use a long post on cohost for: it's to describe my search for the highest-numbered US street address. That is, in a street address like "50000 Main St" , how high can the number get, as an integer, without letters or hyphens or anything else?

I first started to ponder this useless question on a road trip when seeing all the 5-digit address numbers in central California. You don't see those much on the East Coast. So I started wondering how high the numbers can get.

The address in the header image is not the final answer.

I first started looking on long roads in California. El Camino Real seemed like a natural choice. That one fizzled: it starts over with every city it goes through and only gets into the four digits. Sparsely-populated state routes at least got into the 5-digits, like I'd seen, but I couldn't even remember what road I'd been on.

I considered other places where it made sense for the addresses to keep increasing, and one that I found was the Florida Keys. For some reason they're numbered with the lowest numbers on Key West, increasing toward the mainland. Here's 107900 Overseas Hwy, Key Largo, FL. I could do much better, but that was a good starting point to show me that 6-digit addresses exist.

A detour into fake addresses

I tried the strategy of just typing numbers into Google Maps and seeing what autocompleted. That led me to be distracted by Stratford, WI, where the street numbers get very large, very confusing, and (sad to say) very fictitious.

Here's an example. Are these houses really numbered in the 213-thousands?

When you actually look at the addresses they put on their houses, no, they are not.. Someone just hecked up the street number database that Google uses for this town.

If you type an address into Google Maps, Google will happily try to "find" it for you. It's not going to stop and tell you that it isn't real. And a lot of non-real addresses are in the data they show you.

Fake addresses can get really large! Many of these seem to be "addresses" of vacant lots that don't have a real address yet. Here's 9999999 N Argonne St in Denver, and if you send mail there I don't think they'll receive it.

A 250-mile road in Washington

If I'd stuck with my original plan of finding a long road with consistent numbers, I might have found Olympic Hwy in Washington. In fact, I just saw these addresses with my own eyes on my way back from my friend's wedding in Olympic National Park!

The addresses, sensibly, have the mile number followed by 3 more digits. Here's 243406 Olympic Hwy, which you can confirm visually if you're willing to squint.

County roads in Oklahoma

It turns out you can do better than a system where the addresses are numbered by mile numbers plus 3 digits: a system where the addresses are road numbers plus 2 digits. As long as the road numbers get really high.

And a place where they do that is the grid of county roads in Oklahoma.

Rural roads in Oklahoma are numbered from north to south and from west to east. The highest-numbered north-south road is D4819 Rd, on the east edge of the state, or actually in the Cherokee Nation.

That road should give us addresses numbered 4819xx, but there's a particular lack of buildings there. And the roads aren't remotely on a grid around there. But where a nearby road meets 1082 Rd, I can find 481485 E 1082 Rd.

They don't have Street View there, but the address system is so predictable that I believe it without visual confirmation.

481485 is the highest address I could find by following hunches like this. To find higher numbers, I would have to crunch some data.

Florida, where things don't have to make sense

It turns out you can just download a list of addresses in JSON form, from openaddresses.io. I downloaded their US data files and wrote a script to search all of them for high-numbered addresses.

And this took me back to Florida, land of American excess.

One address I'd overlooked was the Official Florida Welcome Center, on I-95, whose address is 751829 I-95.

Okay their full address is "751829 I-95 7 Miles North of Yulee on I-95 South, Yulee, FL". I guess they need the clarity if you're trying to find them. I bet at least once, someone trying to deliver them something has driven right by, because they drove north out of Yulee, on I-95 North.

But that's not the highest either.

My mistake before was that I looked for roads that would make inherent sense to have high numbers. But you can find some very high addresses on some very short roads.

The semi-explanation I've pieced together is that Florida has some long mail routes, numbered by the state, that have increasing address numbers based on the major road they're near, even if they're not on it:

• 4xxxxx addresses are near State Route 200
• 5xxxxx addresses are near US-1
• 6xxxxx addresess are near State Route 108
• 7xxxxx addresses are on Interstate 95
• 8xxxxx addresses are near US-17
• and 9xxxxx addresses are near a particular part of State Route A1A

and that last one got me the highest addresses I could find that are definitely real.

I found the 942631 in this post's header image, and then right after that I found 960194 Gateway Blvd, Amelia Island, FL:

but that was soon dethroned by this swampy residence at 961146 Buccaneer Trail:

You can look closely and see that they wish they were still number 4650.

The answer is 961687

And what I believe to be the single highest street number in the US is this strip mall, numbered 961687 Gateway Blvd. I can't confirm it with a street-level view, but it's on the same short street as 960194 was, so I believe it.

Anyway, Canada has us beat

I only looked for street addresses in the US. Other countries have different address schemes that could make the question make less sense. But Canada has the same kind of addresses we do.

As I started originally posting about this on Twitter, I got a reply from roncli early on, pointing me to 986039 Perth-Oxford Rd, Tavistock, ON. I have no idea what he did in particular to find it.

That house may be the highest-numbered house in North America. I wonder if they know.

Are there 7-digit addresses?

It's interesting that both the US and Canada's addresses stop just before a million. 7-digit addresses can't be real, it seems.

There are some that show up in the OpenAddresses database, and I had to pass them by because they seem as fictitious as the Wisconsin and Denver ones we saw before. It appears that there are no real 7-digit addresses in the US.

Addresses Georg, who lives in Hinton, WV and has eight 7-digit addresses on 3rd Ave with no evidence of physically existing, is an outlier and should not be counted.

I think my favorite thing about Cohost is that we have divested ourselves of the two most toxic beliefs of social media.

1. That this is a "safe space" where we can't openly talk about difficult things like fascism and sex. Distressing somebody else on here by posting something they don't personally wish to have seen isn't seen as a moral fault or communal responsibility to discourage.

2. That posting here is somehow an important liberatory revolutionary act or that you are ever morally obligated to be constantly posting or reposting specific content.

Before the Arab Spring, I think people mostly didn't see Twitter or other social media sites as being crucial battlegrounds or tools of revolution. It was a place to post jokes mostly. And then there was the Arab Spring and this big analysis circulated widely that the people used Twitter as this incredible decentralized way to spread information and organize the uprisings.

And then suddenly everyone got this idea in their head that Twitter is some crucial tool of revolution. Now, many important social movements and uprisings have used Twitter in important ways, don't get me wrong, it certainly has been useful. But I think that this impression ended up spreading to being how people felt about all of Twitter.

Even when people weren't livetweeting protests, people came to feel morally obligated to look at social media constantly. This mentality of "if you aren't talking about this and sharing this post you're a part of the problem" as though your audience of 350 people makes you an NBC news anchor in terms of influence. And it became this vicious cycle. The more you post, you will naturally gain followers. Anyone who posts regularly simply will gain followers. But the more followers you have, the more pressure you feel to be on the hottest beats and retweeting the best most important articles and threads to Signal Boost and to weigh in on everything to influence your audience in a revolutionary manner. Thus, you post more, and gain more followers. Random people with absolutely no involvement in any actual political movement or organizing or anything will become Influencers entirely because they post a lot. Thousands of people who think they're fucking Leon Trotsky writing in exile from Mexico now because their ACAB meme got a lot of RTs from people who already agreed.

And it didn't matter what the purpose of your account was, you had a Platform and therefore you had to use it for good. But what social media is really good at is making everyone feel like they have A Platform. Whether it's 300, 3000, 30,000, or 300,000, you have Fans who look up to you and you have Influence. You might as well be Jennifer Lawrence, and saying "gay rights" is going to change the world. You feel powerful and important, and that further feeds into your compulsion to be posting and seeing this as a revolutionary act, an important act, something you have to do.

I started thinking about this a lot after Brian David Gilbert posted the song There's A Rock in My House. "When I stop looking at the rock I feel like I'm a bad person for doing so."

It connects back to the question that Chris Stedman asks us in his book I.R.L.. Has social media become your religion? Looking at current events on social media, retweeting Important Articles and Important Takes, tweeting your hopes and wishes for political change and affirming your faith in your specific political ideology, trying to be constantly aware of everything happening and putting so much mental energy into thinking about how you wish it would change... It's basically a form of prayer. It's not actually going to materially impact much. Making yourself constantly aware of the play-by-play updates of every single armed conflict does not materially affect the outcome. And like a toxic cult, there is no boundary between "ritual time" and "normal time." You do not conclude shabbat services with kiddush and stop praying. You feel the constant need to be on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Mastodon and constantly participate in the ritual.

In fact, it's become evidently clear that "the world is watching" doesn't really influence the actions of powerful people that much. They've realized they can do whatever and we can't really stop them by looking. Maybe it used to work when the world was only paying close attention to so many things at once. Now it's just been normalized that the entire world constantly has its attention split between everything all at once and isn't really able to adequately focus on anything at all.

During the Summer of 2020 during the many uprisings, a lot of people were unable to take to the streets themselves due to their health, COVID, or just not living where the action was happening. They felt helpless and unable to contribute. So what did they all do? They tried to be as constantly minute-to-minute aware of everything that was happening in every uprising and constantly retweet all of it always "so that people know" "so that the protestors can get updates on where the cops are" etc.

But every random account retweeting everything was not really making a meaningful impact. The locus of change was not in the retweets. It was in the protests themselves. It was only controlled and filtered information sharing directly between people who originated the information and people who needed it which was useful. Everything else was prayer. I mean it was cool to know about statues getting toppled all over the world but the people toppling statues were not the ones looking at their phones non-stop. They were outdoors, toppling the status.

I'm not saying that nothing said on Cohost will ever be important or that mass media doesn't affect society. But social media is not the locus of change. You will not post social change into the world. Whatever influence you can have on the world purely through posting is limited if it is not paired with actual political organizing outside of social media. It is collective organized action which affects change, not disorganized chaotic shouting into the void mostly to people who agree with you.

Mastodon really suffered from this problem because the very act of being on Mastodon had this mission to it like it was your job to make Mastodon succeed and kill Twitter to make the world better and so it was our ethical responsibility to make sure that the platform could be used for something like the Arab Spring, especially because in theory being decentralized meant governments couldn't censor anything happening on there. But that wasn't the reality. The lack of centralized searching and smaller userbase meant there was never a critical mass of people who used the platform living physically near each other enough that they could use the platform as a tool for social change, and finding each other was a challenge too. It just reinforced that physically being near each other is actually really important for making a difference in specific locations.

Combined with mastodon heavily believing in toxic trait #1 as mentioned above meant that people were constantly fighting over if we had the ethical obligation to not post about fascism and sex to create a safe refuge for mentally ill people with anxiety; or if we had the ethical obligation to make a space where we constantly alerted each other to fascism being on the rise and very very bad because somehow this would stop fascism in absence of any actual calls to action or organizing against them.

But copost? The vibes are immaculate because it's just a website. You can certainly use your blog to write political essays, I certainly do, and maybe those essays will be good or influential, but we all understand that we aren't going to post our way into liberation. It's just a website. It's nice and pleasant to use. It's a good place to share my writing. But the meaningful political action I do isn't blogging it's the stuff I do with my union.