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mobile phone box has been replaced by portable technology [but this isn't the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
"""