I may have this story wrong, so feel free to correct me, but not in the comments, which are turned off, but in such a way that I eventually see the light and do a correction down the road, likely with a link back to here.
The story I know is: Ford had a touring model of their Transit brand, van made in Turkey, for a Euro-based clientele, but only manufactured the cargo model in North America. Ergo a cottage industry sprang up in Cascadia and places to do aftermarket conversions on the cargo model, turning it into a touring model per various kits and guidebooks. DIY types took to this project like ducks to water.
My memory is a couple of my OST friends had the Turkish model, imported from Europe somehow, and they were tooling around in Sonoma County with that thing, likely helping inspire the whole wanderlust industry with their cutting edge example.
Is it time to enlist a gossip bot's aid yet? Placeholder for Perplexity.
Blue House was privileged to host a converted van of the Ford brand in its driveway recently. The vehicle was on a southbound vector. The crew well-understands my "bizmo" concept, which connects with "control room" in a dispatcher "AAA" model (repair and/or tow trucks get dispatched to roadside or other breakdown situations).
Said crew included a canine (dog), which is also baked into my model (nonhuman trafficking). My bizmo to Terrebonne scenario has Sydney (dog) scripted into it.
Most of my bizmo scenarios are storyboard phase, geared for One Band One Road situations in broad brush stroke accounts, fine tuning a job for those actually undertaking pilot journeys (tours of duty). I expect they'll use the Turkish Fords out of the box, versus converted ones, but again, that's not a decision bottlenecking on my desk. I'm not a bottleneck. I'm in an observation box, like the ones at the stadium where you get to watch with your friends.
What I actually expect is that the bizmo fleets will spread through nomadland by an organic process no one in particular is in control of. The same is true with the spread of new curriculum content, from Cascadia and elsewhere. The motherboard circuitry is already in place, but its future modes of operation are not directly inferable from its present state, per a new kind of science (chaos math).
Exaptations (cite Stuart Kaufman, Santa Fe Institute, ISEPP speaker) figure in: morphing maneuvers unanticipated by current affairs.
However, the unpredictability of details doesn't stop us from modeling in broad brush stroke. We expect faculty members here are there to venture down rabbit holes, or call them trailheads, that lead into our subcultural networks. This is already what's happening. Exchanges occur. They learn from us, we learn from them. A relationship emerges from the noise by reveruse diffusion, as anti-entropic computations kick in.
The bizmo fleets are oft tasked with paving the way (not literally necessarily, as the pavement may be in place already) for future trucking routes, much as small airplane routes are sometimes precursors of "higher bandwidth" versions, with wider body aircraft.
For example, I flew from Calcutta (Kolkata airport, Dum Dum, West Bengal) to Paro (Drukyul) on a propellor plane, and later, when the route had plumped up, along the same route in a BAE jet operated by Bhutan's royal government.We also took a Toyota hilux from Thimphu to Samdrup Jongkhar (and back), through Mongar etcetera, thereby previewing what futuristic bizmo might accomplish in some future chapter. Filipino-style jeepney networks likewise suggest where a future bus route might emerge.
Sometimes rivulets beget streams which may in turn beget rivers. Other times, the process goes in reverse, as when a once great river, with a wide delta, dries up completely, perhaps owing to heavy use upstream (I'm thinking of the Colorado) meaning it's supporting a maxed-out workload (Hoover Dam, drinking and irrigation water). Complementary patterning. Climatic change. Biospheric equilibration. You know the score.
