Chapter 5: Soft Cities

The online environments of the future will increasingly resemble traditional cities in their variety of distinct places, in the extent and complexity of the “street networks” and “transportation systems” linking these places, in their capacity to engage our senses, and in their social and cultural richness. But no matter how extensive a virtual environment or how it is presented, it has an underlying structure of places where you meet people and find things and links connecting those places. This is the organizing framework from which all else grows. In cyberspace, the hyperplan is the generator.

Chapter 4: Recombinant Architecture

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.

Chapter 4: Recombinant Architecture

When telecommunication through lickety-split bits on the infobahn supplements or replaces movement of bodies … and when telepresence substitutes for face-to-face contact … the spatial linkages that we have come to expect are loosened … Urban compositions can begin to float free from one another, and they can potentially relocate and recombine according to new logics. Perhaps it is not too romantic to imagine that unique natural environments, culturally resonant urban settings, and local communities that hold special social meaning will increasingly reassert their power … Increasingly, [buildings] must function as network interfaces – loading docks for bits. They must be equipped with electronic sensors and effectors, onboard processing power, sophisticated internal telecommunications capabilities, software, and capacity for getting bits on and off.

Chapter 4: Recombinant Architecture

Shall we allow home-based employment, education, entertainment, and other opportunities and services to be channeled to some households and not to others, thereby technologically creating and maintaining a new kind of privilege? Or can we use the infobahn as an equalization mechanism – a device for providing enhanced access to these benefits for the geographically isolated, the homebound elderly, the sick and disabled, and those who cannot afford wheels? … Going out, going to work, going to school or to church, going away to college, and going home are economically significant, socially and legally defining, symbolically freighted acts. To change or eliminate them, as electrocottages and cybercondos promise to do, is to alter the basic fabric of our lives.

Chapter 4: Recombinant Architecture

Instabilities and ambiguities in space use … challenge traditional ways of representing social distinctions and stages of socialization … Categories lose their clarity, and rites of passage require redefinition, when the uses of built space are no longer permanently assigned and depend from minute to minute on software and the fleeting flow of bits.

Chapter 3: Cyborg Citizens

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.

Chapter 3: Cyborg Citizens

We are all cyborgs now. Architects and urban designers of the digital era must begin by reauthorizing the body in space.

Chapter 1: Pulling Glass

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.

Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs

The BBS is a first, faltering step toward the jammer’s dream of a truly democratic mass medium. Although virtual communities fall short of utopia – women and people of color are grossly underrepresented, and those who cannot afford the price of admission or who are alienated from technology because of their cultural status are denied access – they nonetheless represent a profound improvement on the homogenous, hegemonic medium of television … This medium gives us the possibility (illusory as it may be) that we can build a world unmediated by authorities and experts. The roles of reader, writer, and critic are so quickly interchangeable that they become increasingly irrelevant in a community of co-creation.

Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs

In the next century, growing numbers of Americans will work and play in artificial environments that only exist, in the truest sense, as bytes stored in computer memory. The explosion of computer-based interactive media seems destined to sweep away (at least in its familiar form) the decidedly non-interactive medium that has dominated the latter half of this century: television.