Permanent until someone builds the other one

Ask anyone in Cairo how you find a flat and you will hear the same answer, with a sigh attached.

You call a broker. He knows a man who knows the building. You pay a fee for being shown a place that looks nothing like the description, and then a second fee for being shown the one that does. Everybody complains about it. Nobody expects it to change.

That is the trick that size plays on us. When a way of doing things is old enough and wide enough, it stops looking like a choice somebody made and starts looking like part of the landscape. The institution, the famous brand, the network everyone is on, the exam that decides who goes where: they feel like they were always here and will always be here.

They were not, and they will not.

Every one of them was once the upstart. Somebody looked at whatever came before, decided it was tired, and put the effort into making a different version. The old thing did not fall over because people grumbled about it for twenty years. It fell over because someone stopped grumbling and started building.

The grumbling is the easy part, and there is no shortage of it. Every queue in this city has a person in it explaining exactly what is wrong with the system.

What is scarce is the person who takes the old model, keeps the useful parts, throws away the parts everyone hates, and does the slow work of making the new one real enough that people can move across.

Settled things only look settled from the outside.

They stay put until somebody minds enough to make the alternative.