2003-11-19 Me++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City Talk by William J Mitchell http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/williammitchell.htm * ["city of bits" is such a weird term. "city of atoms" would jump so many abstraction layers as to be meaningless. or maybe it's a declaration that abstractions really are leaky.] [weblogs "growing up" is really a det. into the environment. people are born as territories, then det., but constantly ret. and det. dynamics processes, funnels, worms consuming and excreting simultaneously.] communities grow around "points of presence" (essential resources) then "fields of presence" grow 1 dispersed infrastructure 2 portable devices eg. water hole turns into a field by pipelines (1) or bottles (2). these fields allow new patterns of behaviour. cave: loggia/ umbrella village well: piped water/ plastic bottles camp fire: electric grid/ batteries live performer: broadcast/ MPG player [i like his mention of corridors from this perspective] extended fields selectively looses spatial and temporal linkages. enables new social patterns. eg, dispersed village well disrupts gossip pattern. piped water distributes bathing which then recombines with domestic behaviour. "process is one of fragmentation and recombination" [this is *very* D&G] argument this evening: we're seeing a new wave of this process because of wireless information presence + portable devices the four towers where marconi sent his first signal in Ma USA -- this is architecture, he says, a fixed point of presence. portability & minaturisation: what used to be architecture is now an augmentation, an extension of your body (mobile phones). Joe Paradiso [damn, I ran into that name earlier today. where?] at MIT Media Lab- Push Pin Computing project many small short-range wireless devices with senses, self organise into an ad hoc network. you put them where you want. when small enough, you'll be able to throw them around like rice at a wedding. an ambient, distributed field. [interesting. at a certain point the field is so smooth that they're like bricks and it become architecture again. maybe?] * spatial effects [of wireless fragmentation+recombination] _ Private conversation space mobile phone box has been replaced by portable technology [but this isn't the same as a watering hole that is actually used to feed the pipes. but mobile phones don't grow from phone boxes, but wash them away] _ Information workplace mainframes used to be highly values, unique points of presence. the workplace was about the machine. the community was a computer priesthood with peer to peer learning. hacker culture. but then PCs were everywhere. "the distribution of capability". it was still a hybrid situation. tablets go further. now social/work spaces break down. computer rooms are empty, cafes etc are becoming the workplace. and he mentions that students are googling what he says and pulling back extra info [that's a good pattern] _ Transaction space space that's created in order to allow some kind of economic/social/cultural transaction. eg local bank. spatial patterns in a bank. being able to see the vault from the front door; the president looks out over main street; public space sits in the middle for transactions across the counter. ATMs changed that -- asynchronous (temporal bonds broken), then fragmented and dispersed the activity from the bank across the community: it recombined with grocery stores, transport terminals, etc. backoffice otoh didn't need to be near the tellers, so congealed into larger buildings. now online banking allows recombination with domestic space and work space. with wireless devices and banking: "completely smeared across urban space." "a spaceless kind of activity" * New overlay of activity of public space free wireless in Bryant Park converts the park into an overflow area for the library and local buildings. the work possibility also provides an excuse to remain in public space, even if you want to just watch people and hang around there. [very Goffman. like reading a newspaper when waiting on a street corner] [ooh, cool map of Dublin in b&w with areas marked in red that are visible publically with webcams on the www. it's a couple of years old] * summary _ new building types and urban patterns produced by frag & recomb _ Spaces become sensate, buildings and cities get nervous systems [and energy distribution systems, etc. sensate: essential for feedback loops] _ as technology gets better it disappears intro your pocket and into the woodwork _ physical and digital control systems converge [control systems as part of cybernetics. this this is physical space and cyberspace det into one another] (passwords on doors, and computers getting biometrics. access control, tracking. they migrate from cyberspace to real space.) [he's modelling physical space in terms of things we usually see in cyberspace. feedback loops being declared. web services etc. enabling recombinance.] space returns to the pre industrial condition where it responds to human needs of air, space, sociability (this is as technology disappears: the more high tech it is, the less high tech it appears). [he's talking about the complement to the semiotcracy, proto eyes in the social ocean. the two tides: cyber into physical + physical into cyber] * new ethical condition that emerges post-mcluhan global village not broadcast technology, but ubi comp "extended fields of presence create extended networks of reciprocity and domains of moral obligation" -- this is the ancient system of the golden rule -- reciprical obligation. the old view, up till the 20th century: "networks of reciprocity decay with distance" -- friends more important than cities than nation state ("it attenuates with distance"). ubiquitous networking means bulgarian virus writers affect computers on the other side of the world. threats also extend -- SARS, etc "No distance on the map will protect us" so the new view is that reciprocity networks no longer attenuate with distance [physical distance. distance is the halflife of meaning; if physical distance means nothing we have to redefine to human terms] [so what about the ethics? does this mean that cyberethics are going to start impacting real world ethics? i hadn't thought about that, only that cyberethics was its own thing and that interesting things happened when the two macroethics met. do physical world information objects start acquiring ethical rights? hm. is this what relativism was reaching towards, but didn't quite get? this is what the libertarian view doesn't agree with, because words and meaning are joined and fixed for them.] "The construction of discontinuous, asynchronous global agoras supports emergence and self-representation of grassroots global communities" eg, antiwar protests were organised electronically. [one manifestation of this: smart mobs] but the protests themselves happened: . spatially in the most traditional public spaces . temporally, rolled around the world with sunrise, gathering momentum as the news reports from previous ones grew [on a global scale the protest ceases to be an event and becomes timebound] [his last slides are clippings from newspapers from this morning about the Bush visit to London. the best illustration of how technology is changing him as a broadcast. he's no longer an actor, but part of the conversation. he was saying this earlier, about releasing his books so regularly. "real time scholarship" he called it. this is happening in string theory, where they publish electronically and it's enabling/causing fads of research that last only a year or so.] "The ancient right to the street is now inseparable from the right to the airwaves" * Questions q. on the golden rule. how does the merging of physical and digital space affect the human condition? one of the things of communities is about how well they get larger, how they scale. a Greek idea was that cities shouldn't be bigger than a certain number of people [the nod line]. one technique to get around this is the hierarchy of communities -- embedded. can this be used in cyberspace? organising it into subcommunities, etc? [ted nelson would be livid... you don't need a hierarchy offline. physical space dictates that.] q. how will cities reorganise as the technology disappears? they can become organised around more basic human properties [in the same way cyberspace is reorganising around human properties -- or is having to be, from an ethical basic] q. how does the automobile reconfigure the city? "the car as an interface to the resources of the city" "learns about the city as it traversed the city" "learns about you" -- forms a relationship between the two [this is interesting. no longer technology with the metaphor of agency, but technology as something in which a relationship takes place, or rather design becomes the task of configuring a space like a trellis to encourage the form of certain relationships -- of *designing* a medium, like designing air and vocal chords to afford the attenuation of sound to limit face-to-face vocal grooming to 1.6m, etc. second order design.] [hang on, all this about control systems etc. it's definitely cybernetics, but he's out of the 1970s second order cybernetics school. that's why it's about autopoeisis, ecologies and so on, rather than the metaphor of agency which is cogs and chains, feedback loops. so the internet (cyberspace) is an outgrowth of first order cyberspace; the new things people are saying now are finally catching up with the 1970s.] q. where do we look for the next paradigms and insights into paradigms, after urban life? he doesn't know :) ethical dimensions of global community, he things. and how can we deal with ethics + global communities in the way architects always have done, by making public spaces etc [but in cyberspace, is the unsaid bit] [i'll go with that. (at which point i have too much to say.)] [he mentions] the www as representing an ideal community by designing the protocols that let people join together. if TBL had been in the 18th century he might have designed the ideal city instead. [yes, so his is that second-order cybernetics worldview mentioned above.] in a world where anything can happen anywhere, a place with uniqueness becomes valuable. specialisation is seen in global networks [interesting, the anti starbucks tide]. [damn. i need to learn more about cyborg theory.] q. pay-for wireless networks change patterns, for the worse. is there an ethical imperative for free, open networks? charles moore- "you have to pay for the public life"- thesis: the best public space in N. America is disneyland. (being rather ironic there) [makes me think of anarcho capitalists privatising the pavements] * here's the summary from the Tate Modern page: """ William J. Mitchell, author of City of Bits and e-topia, discusses Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, the new and third installment in his informal trilogy. Examining the ramifications of wireless technology in everyday life, Mitchell describes our transformation to a state of intense, continuous electronic engagement. As physical space and cyberspace become further intertwined, Mitchell investigates the effects of wireless linkage, global interconnection, miniaturization, and portability on our bodies, our clothing, our architecture, our cities, and our uses of space and time. He argues that a world governed less and less by boundaries and more and more by connections requires us to reimagine and reconstruct our environment and to reconsider the ethical foundations of design, engineering, and planning practice """