| 
All of the following
are from Mitchell's 1994 book "City of
Bits"
The emerging civic structures and spatial arrangements
of the digital era will profoundly affect our access to
economic opportunities and public services, the character
and content of public discourse, the forms of cultural
activity, the enaction of power, and the experiences that
give shape and texture to our daily routines.
~~~The Net ... will play as crucial a
role in 21st-century urbanity as the centrally located,
spatially bounded, architecturally celebrated agora did
in the life of the Greek polis and in prototypical urban
diagrams like that so lucidly traced out by the Milesians
on their Ionian rock.
~~~The tilt toward electronic
asynchrony will have increasingly dramatic effects upon
urban life and urban form ... The distinction between
live events and arbitrarily time-shifted replays becomes
difficult or impossible to draw.
~~~The bondage of bandwidth is
displacing the tyranny of distance, and a new economy of
land use and transportation is emerging - an economy in
which high-bandwidth connectivity is an increasingly
crucial variable.
~~~No network connection at all-zero
bandwidth makes you a digital hermit, an outcast from
cyberspace. The Net creates new opportunities, but
exclusion from it becomes a new form of
marginalization.
~~~Robotic effectors combined with
audio and video sensors will provide telepresence.
Intelligent exoskeletal devices (data gloves, data suits,
robotic prostheses, intelligent second skins, and the
like) will both sense gestures and serve as touch output
devices by exerting controlled forces and pressures; you
will be able to initiate a business conversation by
shaking hands at a distance or say goodnight to a child
by transmitting a kiss across continents.
~~~Once we have both a "real"
three-dimensional world and computer- constructed
"virtual" ones, the distinctions between these
worlds can get fuzzed or lost ... Through video
projection of computer displays onto real desktops, or
through superimposition of computed stereo displays onto
actual scenes, the proscenium dividing the
"real" world from the "virtual" can
be made to disappear. You can find yourself on stage with
the actors, trying to distinguish the scenery from the
walls.
~~~The network is the urban site before
us, an invitation to design and construct the City of
Bits ... This will be a city unrooted to any definite
spot on the surface of the earth, shaped by connectivity
and bandwidth constraints rather than by accessibility
and land values, largely asynchronous in its operation,
and inhabited by disembodied and fragmented subjects who
exist as collections of aliases and agents. Its places
will be constructed virtually by software instead of
physically from stones and timbers, and they will be
connected by logical linkages rather than by doors,
passageways, and streets. How shall we shape it? Who
shall be our Hippodamos?
~~~Network pimps will offer ways to do
something sordid (but safe) with lubriciously programmed
telehookers. (This is an obvious extrapolation of the
telephone's transformation of the whorehouse into the
call-girl operation.) Telemolesters will lurk. Telethugs
will reach out and punch someone.
~~~The boundary that has traditionally
been drawn by the edge of the computer screen will be
eroded ... You will be able to immerse yourself in
simulated environments instead of just looking at them
through a small rectangular window. This is a crucial
difference: you become an inhabitant, a participant, not
merely a spectator.
~~~Continuous care - involving constant
monitoring and regular medication - might also be
provided remotely ... Houses and beds can contain sensors
for tracking the conditions of their occupants and
telecommunications for transmitting the information to
distant monitoring sites. Electronic scales can log body
weight. Noncontact, microwave vital-signs monitoring
systems can measure heart rate, respiration rate,
temperature, and blood pressure. Smart air- conditioning
systems and inquisitive toilets might automatically take
samples and perform analyses. Implanted wireless devices
might be used for remotely controlled release of precise
amounts of medication. Houses seem destined to evolve
into increasingly sophisticated components of health care
systems.
~~~Merchants will find that they can
dispense with sales floors and sales staff altogether and
just maintain servers with databases ... Consumers might
either "window shop" by remotely accessing such
virtual stores, or they might delegate the task to
software shopping agents that go out on the Net with
shopping lists, inspect the specifications and prices of
the merchandise on offer, and return with reports on the
best available matches and prices. Closure of a sale can
immediately trigger a delivery order at a warehouse,
update an inventory database, and initiate an electronic
money transfer ... Retail location becomes a matter of
being in the right directories ... The stock is bigger
and the selection larger than in the mightiest big-box
off- ramp superstore. The things that remain in physical
form are warehouses ... and delivery vehicles.
~~~Rooms and buildings will henceforth
be seen as sites where bits meet the body - where digital
information is translated into visual, auditory, tactile,
or otherwise perceptible form, and, conversely, where
bodily actions are sensed and converted into digital
information. Building these programmable places is not
just a matter of putting wires in the walls and
electronic boxes in rooms (though that is a start). As
the relevant technologies continue to develop,
miniaturized, distributed computational devices will
disappear into the woodwork. Keyboards and mouse pads
will cease to be the only bit-collection zones; sensors
will be everywhere. Displays and effectors will multiply.
In the end, buildings will become computer interfaces and
computer interfaces will become buildings.
~~~Many of our everyday tasks and
pastimes will cease to attach themselves to particular
spots and slots set aside for their performance -
workplaces and working hours, theaters and performance
times, home and your own time - and will henceforth be
multiplexed and overlaid; we will find ourselves able to
switch rapidly from one activity to the other while
remaining in the same place, so we will end up using that
same place in many different ways. It will no longer be
straightforward to distinguish between work time and
"free" time or between the space of production
and the space of consumption. Ambiguous and contested
zones will surely emerge.
~~~Life in cyberspace generates
electronic trails as inevitably as soft ground retains
footprints; that, in itself, is not the worrisome thing.
But where will digital information about your contacts
and activities reside? Who will have access to it and
under what circumstances? Will information of different
kinds be kept separately, or will there be ways to
assemble it electronically to create close and detailed
pictures of your life? These are the questions that we
will face with increasing urgency as we shift more and
more of our daily activities into the digital, electronic
sphere ... Electronic data collection and digital
collation techniques are so much more powerful than any
that could be deployed in the past, they provide the
means to create the ultimate Foucaultian dystopia.
~~~Computer viruses and worms are
maliciously constructed agents- fanning out, like
Fagin's boys, to cause trouble. Will there will be a
criminal underclass? ... Since agents are easy to
reproduce, cyberspace may be flooded with billions of
them; how will population be controlled? How will the law
deal with agents that perform important tasks on behalf
of distant, perhaps oblivious originators? Even if our
agents turn out to be very smart, and always perform
impeccably, will we ever fully trust them? And how will
we deal with the old paradox of the slave? We will want
our agents to be as smart as possible in order to do our
bidding most effectively, but the more intelligent they
are, the more we will have to worry about losing control
and the agents taking over ... The burgeoning,
increasingly indispensable, programmed proletariats of
cyberspace cities now live invisibly on disk
drives.
~~~My software surrogates can
potentially do much more than provide origins and
destinations for messages: when appropriately programmed,
they can serve as my semiautonomous agents by tirelessly
performing standard tasks that I have delegated to them
and even by making simple decisions on my behalf ... A
more maliciously conceived one might be programmed to
roam the digital highways and byways, looking for trouble
- for opportunities to corrupt the files of my enemies,
to plunder valuable information, to eliminate rival
agents, or to replicate itself endlessly and choke the
system. Fritz Lang got it wrong: the robots in our future
are not metallic Madonnas clanking around
"Metropolis," but soft cyborgs slinking
silently through the Net. The neuromans of William Gibson
are a lot closer to the mark.
~~~Does the logic of network existence
entail radical schizophrenia - a shattering of the
integral subject into an assemblage of aliases and
agents? Could we hack immortality by storing our aliases
and agents permanently on disk, to outlast our bodies?
(William Gibson's cyberpunk antiheroes nonchalantly
shuck their slow, obsolescent, high-maintenance meat
machines as they port their psychic software to new
generations of hardware.) Does resurrection reduce to
restoration from backup?
~~~Anticipate the moment at which all
your personal electronic devices - headphone audio
player, cellular telephone, pager, dictaphone, camcorder,
personal digital assistant (PDA), electronic stylus,
radiomodem, calculator, Loran positioning system, smart
spectacles, VCR remote, data glove, electronic jogging
shoes that count your steps and flash warning signals at
oncoming cars, medical monitoring system, pacemaker ...
and anything else that you might habitually wear or
occasionally carry - can seamlessly be linked in a
wireless bodynet that allows them to function as an
integrated system and connects them to the worldwide
digital network ... you will have acquired a collection
of interchangeable, snap-in organs connected by exonerves
... your nervous system will plug into the worldwide
digital net. You will have become a modular,
reconfigurable, infinitely extensible cyborg.
~~~Electronic organs, as they become
ever smaller and more intimately connected to you, will
lose their traditional hard plastic carapaces. They will
become more like items of clothing - soft wearables that
conform to the contours of your body; you will have them
fitted like shoes, gloves, contact lenses, or hearing
aids. Circuits may be woven into cloth. Microdevices may
even be implanted surgically ... You will also begin to
blend into the architecture. In other words, some of your
electronic organs may be built into your surroundings ...
"inhabitation" will take on a new meaning - one
that has less to do with parking your bones in
architecturally defined space and more with connecting
your nervous system to nearby electronic organs. Your
room and your home will become part of you, and you will
become part of them.
~~~We will all become mighty morphing
cyborgs capable of reconfiguring ourselves by the minute
- of renting extended nervous tissue and organ capacity
and of redeploying our extensions in space as our needs
change and as our resources allow. Think of yourself on
some evening in the not-so-distant future, when wearable,
fitted, and implanted electronic organs connected by
bodynets are as commonplace as cotton; your intimate
infrastructure connects you seamlessly to a planetful of
bits, and you have software in your underwear. It's
eleven o'clock, Smarty Pants; do you know where your
network extensions are tonight? ... metaphysicians will
be tempted to reformulate the mind/body problem as the
mind/network problem.
~~~In the world that we cyborgs inhabit
... the electronic retinas of our video cameras produce
shifts and fragments. Rooms and buildings now have new
kinds of apertures; the scenes that we see through the
glass are rescaled and distant, the place on the other
side may change from moment to moment, and the action may
be a replay ... Once, places were bounded by walls and
horizons. Days were defined by sunrises and sunsets. But
we video cyborgs see things differently. The Net has
become a worldwide, time-zone-spanning optic nerve with
electronic eyeballs at its endpoints.
~~~Networks at ... different levels
will all have to link up somehow; the body net will be
connected to the building net, the building net to the
community net, and the community net to the global net.
From gesture sensors worn on our bodies to the worldwide
infrastructure of communications satellites and
long-distance fiber, the elements of the bitsphere will
finally come together to form one densely interwoven
system within which the knee bone is connected to the
I-bahn.
~~~The most crucial task before us is
not one of putting in place the digital plumbing of
broadband communications links and associated electronic
appliances (which we will certainly get anyway), nor even
of producing electronically deliverable
"content," but rather one of imagining and
creating digitally mediated environments for the kinds of
lives that we will want to lead and the sorts of
communities that we will want to have. |
|
