Jefferson believes the U.S. must remain an agricultural nation of small independent yeoman farmers, a small farmer who owns his own land who owns the means of his own living, otherwise it will become corrupt. A society of wage earners was hardly different from a society of slaves. He believed that for the nation to survive there had to be a high degree of uniformity. He thinks diversity is the enemy. The natural course of life is acquiring a skill, land, professional, but you acquire your own subsistence. He directs that the U.S. should be surveyed in identical 640 acres sections and these would have subdivisions. This is why the U.S. cities look like squares of a checkerboard and people know each other’s property. His biggest concern was how do you have a country if you don’t have some degree of identity of interest? He thinks the U.S. should move through space to the west and by getting more land to remain a nation of farmers forever. Hamilton wanted the U.S. to be a diverse industrial nation. Freedom was realized in prosperity and individual diversity, not in land ownership. Human self is best when they compete and find what they are good at. He likes projects to build roads, damns, etc. He equated freedom with market opportunity and with social diversity with the ability to specialize according to your talents. He says diversity is coherence. He thinks the U.S. should ignore western space and move through time into the industrial future. Because of their differences, Hamilton and Jefferson hate each other.

Jefferson said technology corrodes nationalism. You lose the core values of the republic. My identity is dependent on others. I can’t exist as a student unless there is a teacher and my teacher can’t exist without me as a student. We are group dependent. However, things like fingerprints, DNA, and identification cards are unique to a person but make us easier to track. “The more individual you are the less free you are” (O’Malley).  Individualism equals state surveillance and control and the absence of freedom.  Modern life tracks peoples preference and makes them easier and easier to be who you are and harder to be someone different.  People cluster with people like themselves. We used that zip code website in class to explain this and it was very interesting. You type in a zip code onto this website and it shows you what people in that area are all like. We got to type in my zip code 23322 (Chesapeake, VA). When the information came out I was kind of baffled to see the results. I believed half of these things are definitely true about my area and the others were not. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought they were all true. The zip code region is a big area. Where I particularly live I may not see those present but across the water in an area with the same zip code I could see all of those being true. It’s very weird to see how accurate it could be. It also shows you where in other parts of the country people in that zip code are like other people in other zip codes.

If you are in a zip code where you get only stuff that you like and the catalogs that come to your mail are tailored to fix what you already like, it’s harder to find something in common with people in other places. For example, I can go grocery shopping in Chesapeake, VA and know where everything I like to buy is and buy it. I can then go grocery shopping in Fairfax, VA and be “in a different world.” The food at this grocery will not be what I’m used to seeing and will get in the way of my shopping and slow me down. This pushed me away from difference. Technology is destroying nations; it undermines mutuality. It’s hard to try to get along with other countries because were so use to saneness.