12.31, Monday 25 Aug 2003

Consider that land property originated in agriculture, or rather around the same time: investment for crops, building winter villages. Which concept then allows differential housing, static factories for large goods, hordes. What next? The ultimate expression of owned space: the city - where public space has to be labelled as public - reaches such a fine grain because of transaction fluidity that it essentially becomes unowned again. Because of mass production - or rather: standards, fungible interfaces (Fordism not for objects but for the interfaces of objects), low production costs even of short runs (digital printing today, nanotech printing tomorrow) - owning an object becomes divorced from possessing it: you possess the pointer to an interface. The ability to travel, the ability to consume media. We build a system of non-rivalrous goods layered on top of a scarcity-based, rivalrous market; we build an absence of property rights on top of property. Coffin hotels, MP3s, bank accounts hold pointers to money not money itself. The imperatives now are to enable pointers to the physical world (the semiotcracy), handles for pointers that hook into our existing abilities (supersenses), develop a language to talk about affordances/interfaces instead of objects (biology instead of the conduit metaphor). We live in a single world of property, scarcity and rivalrous goods; the future will be N worlds that exist on all points along these axes. The struggles between the physical world and cyberspace, layered on it, and our understanding of it are just the first step.

On Friday, I swam London. Jumped on buses, dodged knots of people, whenever I needed to cross traffic the green light was there. It was pinball. My route was not directed but constraints based, and suddenly the city became not a thing that swallowed me, but a thing I was embedded in, a part of: I rode it, was swept by it, propelled by it, rised up to and travelled the Fermi surface of London, the conducting layer, and the obstructing crystal became invisible to me.