Bit City

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?

Voyerism/Engagement

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.

Narrowband/Broadband

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.

Narrowband/Broadband

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.

Narrowband/Broadband

The bandwidth-disadvantaged are the new have-nots. It’s simple; if you cannot get bits on and off in sufficient quantity, you cannot directly benefit from the Net.

Synchronous/Asynchronous

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.

Spatial/Antispacial

The Net’s despatialization of interaction destroys the geocode’s key. There is no such thing as a better address, and you cannot attempt to define yourself by being seen in the right places in the right company.

Electronic Agoras

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.