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Terminal Condition. Spring 2012 Netlab Studio

Terminal Condition
Spring 2012

Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
Network Architecture Lab

Professor: Kazys Varnelis, Ph.D.
Assistant: Leigha Dennis

Description

This studio explores the re-construction of a large-scale infrastructural element in the city, specifically the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. A structure of 1.5 million square feet, passed through daily by hundreds of thousands of commuters, over seven thousand buses, and thousands of automobiles, providing parking for over 1,000 spaces for automobiles on top, surmounting a subway below, linked to the Lincoln Tunnel through massive ramps for vehicular traffic, and accommodating a significant shopping area, the PABT operates in a realm between building, city, and infrastructure. We are interested in this overlap as a venue for experimentation in programming and design.

As the largest commuter facility in the city, the PABT is a necessary part of everyday life for hundreds of thousands of workers in the city. The PABT was constructed in response to growing traffic congestion in midtown produced by the operation of eight independent bus terminals in the area a decade after the opening of the Lincoln Tunnel in 1937. Costing $24 million, the PABT bus terminal started operations in December 1950, consolidating eight independent bus terminals located in the midtown area. The building has been expanded twice to accommodate growing bus traffic: in 1963 a $30 million expansion added new decks and in 1979 a north wing was built at a cost of over $160 million, integrating with the original structure with a bridge over 41^st street through a series of massive X trusses designed by Port Authority chief structural engineer Eugene Fasullo.

Bringing over 50,000 sightseers to the city daily, most of whom stop at Times Square, the PABT has been a key player in midtown, caught up in a longstanding crime problem that only abated during the last decade. With a new, modern exterior and a tiled interior resistant to vandalism, the 1979 reconstruction was intended as an architectural solution. But the expanded space quickly wound up serving a growing population of hundreds of homeless people, drug dealers, and male prostitutes while the “Minnesota Strip” on Eighth avenue outside became a site where newly-arrived runaways of both genders, particularly from the Upper Midwest, would be pressed into prostitution. Soon, the brutalist trusses became seen as a symbol of the decay of the Times Square area. In response, the Port Authority invested significant funds in the redevelopment of the neighborhood and implemented crime prevention strategies. The building is now vastly safer, but with the successful redevelopment of Times Square, the PABT is one of the last vestiges of an older, less commercialized New York. Over the last decade, the Port Authority was working with the Vornado Realty Trust to construct a skyscraper over the north wing, which was built with the possibility of exploiting its air rights in mind. Plans for a forty-story office tower by Richard Rogers including a rooftop garden and eighteen new bus gates came to naught when the Chinese developer pulled out this past November.

In this exercise, we set out to develop new hypotheses for the future of the PABT which we see as needing to respond to a world in which mobility is as much a matter of portable networked telecommunications devices as travel. With the resurgence of bus travel, the Terminal has the opportunity to become an even more significant gateway into the city for both commuters and visitors. Containing significant retail space, the PABT is a major center of commerce in the Times Square area. How do we make a building that embraces civic, commercial, and infrastructural spaces while remaining secure?

Semester Plan

This studio understands the architect as a builder of not merely physical edifices but also social, conceptual, and technical structures. Our interest is to use architecture and the most advanced thinking in network culture to construct new and better ways of life. In doing so, this studio is engaged first and foremost with institution building and shaping of social behavior.

We will begin the semester with team-based based scenario plans. Students will identify the drivers in society, technology, economics, ecology, and politics likely to impact the building over the next generation. These scenario plans will be communicated through the technique of architecture fiction. A review exploring these scenario plans will be held in mid February.

Students will individually develop detailed proposals for the reconstruction of the building by mid-review in March. These proposals will take the form of books that define the mission and goals of the reconstructed PABT and a preliminary idea for an architectural program.

Cloud

As a Netlab studio concerned with the topic of mobility, this studio will be the first prototypical studio in the GSAPP Cloud. To this end, students will be expected to maintain Tumblr blogs of their research and to keep up with the online work of other students. All student work will be posted online and aggregated to the emerging GSAPP work site.

Program

Students will be responsible for devising programs for a 21^st century PABT. With the scenario plans from the first part of the studio in hand, students will be asked to identify the programmatic direction of the new PABT. Crucial to this will be a balance between city, building, and infrastructure. How can the building maintain its own identity while integrating better with the urban environment surrounding it?

In the wake of an era defined by the attention-seeking strategy of shaping, it is only appropriate to ask if architecture shouldn’t lose its singularity and obsession with performance. Can we develop architectural strategies aimed at producing less individualistic works that operate in a more ambient register, embracing formlessness instead of shaping, works that build intensity more subtly rather than giving it away all at once, works that question the boundaries between the city and the building rather than affirming them?

With regard to the site, students will be encouraged to consider the extension of the PABT into New Jersey through the Lincoln Tunnel and the dedicated Exclusive Bus Lane (XBL) that stretches from the New Jersey Turnpike onto Route 495, underneath the Times Square area through the underground subway station and the subway routes beyond.

Engineering

Students will work with roving engineers from ARUP during the semester to address the immense requirements of the PABT and the prospects for the construction of their project without disrupting the terminal’s operation.

Representation

Ultra-realistic perspective and Photoshop-based montages are banned in this studio. We propose that this sort of representation is inappropriate, corresponding to what Mark Fischer has dubbed “capitalist realism,” a condition in which we are offered nothing but the present the eagerly wait for the next thrill the system has to offer.[1] Evacuated of any critical intent, such work only cements the false notion that modern technology has made communication transparent.

But more than that, if all architects produce a form of science fiction, then to paraphrase William Gibson, we need to remember that as we construct futures, all we have at our disposal is the moment that we are currently living in.[2] The moment we construct a future it starts to age rapidly. Since the crash, along with the development of technologies that were formerly consigned to an endlessly deferred proximate future such as near-universal wireless Internet, locative media, tablet computing, and touchscreen interfaces, it seems that we have exhausted the era of the next new thing, of rapid technological and cultural development and obsolescence.

Thus, envisioning the future through architecture forces us to follow Alex Galloway’s suggestion that “all media is dead media,” to understand that appropriate representational strategies that might resist capitalist realist representations might emerge out of a new understanding of what Gibson calls a “long now,” a temporally stretched condition out of which we can freely recombine material and representational motifs.^{^[3]}

We will look at forms of representation immanent to our topic at hand, from schedules to traffic engineering plans, flowcharts, to exploded axonometrics for vehicle parts. Such diagrams not only offer rich territory to mine for representational strategies, their close study allows us to better understand the topic we are involved in. Precise, unshaded hidden line drawings, plan, section, elevation, and axonometric offer us a carefully and logically articulated system of delineation appropriate for a bus terminal.

Grading:

20% Attendance and Participation

Students are expected to attend studio sessions, be on time, and ready to discuss their work at every session. Students are expected to participate in group discussions, to cooperate with other studio members by offering criticism, advice, and good spirit.

Group meetings, regularly scheduled once per week allow us to share our research and constantly re-tune our method and approach to the material.

Students are expected to be at pin-ups and reviews on time with work ready to present. Students who are not ready at the beginning of the pin-up or review forfeit the right to receive criticism. Students are expected to contribute to pin-ups and reviews, both in terms of criticism and questions as well as by working in a team to ensure that rooms are ready to present in (adequate chairs, projectors, and so on).

40% Concept

Students will be graded on the originality and rigor of their concepts. All students need a coherent thesis in this studio.

Columbia teaches in English. There is help available for difficulties with the English language in the university, but lack of understanding is not an excuse.

40% Execution and Presentation

A good concept means little if it is poorly executed or presented. Presentation and execution are not trivial, nor are they mere “polish,” rather the choices made in presentation and execution should inform, and be informed by, the concept.

Students are expected to render and present their work clearly, succinctly, and elegantly.

Work should be thoroughly and represented.

[1] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative, (Hampshire, UK: Zero Books, 2009).

[2] Scott Thill, “William Gibson Talks Zero History, Paranoia and the Awesome Power of Twitter,” Wired Underwire Blog, posted September 7, 2010, http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/09/william-gibson-interview/all/1.

[3] Alex Galloway, “Cory Arcangel (Beige) and Paper Rad’s The Mario Movie" (2005)http://www.deitch.com/projects/press_text.php?pressId=29. Michael Parsons, “Interview: Wired Meets William Gibson,” Wired UK posted October 13, 2010, http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-10/13/william-gibson-interview.

Submitted by admin on 18 January, 2012 - 09:34

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2011 in Review:

With the New Year upon us, its time for me to review another year.

Last year at this time, I observed:

2010 marked the year in which "the next big thing" came to an end.

Nothing in 2011 changed that. Steve Jobs's death only underscored that an earlier era of network culture, in which technological innovation seemed commonplace, has definitively passed. This is not to say that innovation didn't continue. Little things made a difference in our lives, like Mog, an online music service that allows subscribers to download from a vast online catalog (it has about 90% of what I set out to find and has introduced me to a great deal of music I was not familiar with before) at 320k bps (a decent, if not perfect sampling rate).

If anything, technology had been where the next big thing took its last stand. In other fields, the next big thing is long gone. Architecture, which in the 1990s seemed to revolutionize itself year by year, has lain fallow in this millennium. Over at the Washington Post, critic Philip Kennicott calls this "a year like most others in this age of no discernible isms or movements, no dominant ideologies, no marching to a single manifesto." In music too there have been no major movements since electronica and grunge, some twenty years ago, which is not to say that there haven't been plenty of minor movements and plenty of albums that I enjoy listening to.

On the contrary, it seems like we are firmly in a long tail culture. For the younger set, now coming of age in our universities, this may even be the only state of affairs that has ever existed, with the prospect of something about to break big being unfamiliar, the idea that one had to visit the architecture bookstore every week for fear of missing out on something shattering utterly strange. As I concluded last year, admist all this micro-stardom, starchitecture seems exhausted. Oh there are few names who aspire to starchitecture status, but their hopes seem more desparate and futile with each passing year. In an era in which subjectivity itself seems to become a product of the network, perhaps starchitecture itself was nothing less than another case of the leaves on a trees being most brilliant in autumn.

When it comes to urbanism, the rhetoric about the Smart City reached a fevered pace in 2011, but it was only a sideshow to the biggest and saddest news, the earthquake that devastated Japan and unleashed the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. During the research for the Infrastructural City, the dangers of overcomplexity in the urban realm became clear to me. With the financial meltdown, so did the danger posed by sophisticated schemes to extract profit from the markets such as derivatives and high speed trading (the latter concern received more attention in the mainstream press last year andwas so well articulated by Kevin Slavin in his TED talk). The catastrophe at Fukushima, however, underscored the precarious nature of the technologies that keep us going and how quickly accidents can spiral far out of anyone's control, even in this age in which we feel ourselves to be the masters of technology. Closer to home, the threat of Hurricane Irene and the minor destruction that the Halloween snowstorm wreaked upon my neighborhood and the whole American Northeast (save New York, apparently protected by its status as a concrete heat island) demonstrated that proper planning for disasters is a necessary part of everyday life. For one, this is because of climate change. All but an extremist few accept this today. But it is also because of the less robust nature of our technologies and the rigidity that increasing urbanization brings. I am sure that we might have gotten sick of them, but my parents and I could have survived for weeks in fall and early winter off the apples from the old orchard we found on the property I grew up on in the Berkshires. Just try that in the heart of the global city today.

The problems that network culture breeds could be seen in the political landsape of the year as both the Eurozone and the United States were repeatedly brought to the point of crisis by vested interests who value their own positions above any greater responsibility to society. Make no mistake: this is not an anomaly, rather it is a fundamental, toxic byproduct of networked publics. In contrast, the Occupy movement posed networked publics as a critical voice, capable of effective and sustained mobilization without any visible figureheads. Just how this movement can transform into a broad democratic forum capable of effecting political change is still unclear. Paradoxically, perhaps in this case, that might be a position of strength.

On a personal note, it might cheer the architects among my readers to hear that my wife and I finally bought a house. It's not that I have faith in the markets. They are as likely to move downward as to move upward, but at some point you just have to accept that while you may lose money on such a venture, having a decent place to live and work in is more important than saving a few thousand. We bought our house in Montclair, New Jersey, a town that we have lived in ever since I started working at Columbia 5 1/2 years ago. Montclair has been a fascinating community for me: relatively diverse in income and ethnicity, linked to the city by relatively efficient bus and train lines and easily walkable in many parts. In addition, Montclair is denser than many so-called cities in this country and boasts a diversity of housing types. The fact of the matter is that regardless of what you may hear at conferences, census figures show that most cities are still shrinking (although in some cases, as in New York, we see land values that make life for this family of four cost-prohibitive). Instead of declaring all suburbs equal and damning them, we urgently need to find ways to build relatively dense, attractive settlements close in to the urban core. Settling in Montclair, one of the first suburbs, seems to me like a positive step in understanding how we may one day do so again.

Then there's modernism. We were lucky enough to find a relatively affordable modern house in town. Waking up there every day—even during the twin disasters this fall—has been a delight. We spent much of the summer on much-needed repairs: an exterior deck needed serious work to be safe and the house had suffered from botched attempts to stain its wood siding some years ago. Even in the last week of the year we found ourselves welcoming a new fireplace insert by Morso. It's been a great journey and we still feel a bit like Charles and Ray Eames, with the real construction of the house through our life in it still ahead of us.

What will 2012 bring? I wouldn't put my money on a complete collapse of civilization, but more of the same morass seems likely. Economies will lurch along, punctuated by perodic crises and moments of elation, allowing opportunistic traders to take advantage of the investments that so many of us in the States count on to see us through in our old age (even in Columbia, the only pension plan we have access to is the market, which seems clevely tuned to take advantage of us instead of building a retirement plan). Much as I'd love it to be otherwise, more natural disasters will take place. I am hardly a fan of the Obama administration (see Aaron Suskind's 2011 book Confidence Men for a litany of the reasons why) but the Republicans are worse (remember those horrific eight years of Bush? the US was the world's laughing-stock). Luckily, at present the Republicans seem likely to prove themselves true masters of statemate, unlikely to be able to choose a candidate that they can back (caveat: if Romney gets an early enough lead, he might be able to beat Obama). The Eurozone will continue its crisis. It won't collapse, but I expect Greece to default by April. Wall Street will struggle to mount a comeback that will be thwarted by the Eurozone crisis.

By the end of next year, things are likely to look somewhat worse. In last year's entry I mentioned Gopal Balakrishnan's article on the stationary state of economies during this decade. It's well worth a look. There are two things I'd like to expand upon. The first is that, as always, there is a degree of uneven development in all this. The major global financial centers, like New York and London, will do relatively well. The massive booms may be over, but they will remain lures for overaccumulated capital to burn up in through tourism, education, fashion, and real estate consumption. Urban elites will pat themselves on the back about the success of their cities, thinking that it is their innate hipsterdom, or perhaps their roles in building apps for smart cities or exhibiting mildly political, mildly amusing work in mildly cutting-edge galleries. In contrast, other cities—and even countries—that saw relative prosperity over the last decade but have since stagnated will wear down. You can see this throughout Europe these days. A few years on, the naïve optimism that there will be a quick end to this crisis has faded. The architecture of the boom, which was never meant to last anyway, will collapse under poor maintenance. We'll also begin seeing in China as that country's economy begins a moderate slowdown (watch for North Korea's role in all this as it could be a destabilizing influence, and hence lead to capital flight from the whole region). Shanghai and other big cities will do well as regional centers will begin to feel stress. That said, the Chinese economy is so different from the economies of the countries most of us are familiar with and the government will manipulate its own economy—if not the economy of other countries—as it deems necessary. The big news of the year may be more trouble in Russia and perhaps even elsewhere in countries such as the Ukraine. Spring fever, as we saw last year throughout the Middle East is catching, and networks make it move all the faster.

Throughout it, we'll live in a more Braudelian history, in which events themselves will be more clearly seen as "surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs." From any distance, such has always been history's legacy.

Submitted by admin on 2 January, 2012 - 02:33

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"There’s a photo of a guy who got tattoos to match those found on Otzi, aka The Iceman, who died more..."

“There’s a photo of a guy who got tattoos to match those found on Otzi, aka The Iceman, who died more than 5,000 years ago in the Italian Alps. Mike Goldstein, the guy who got the tattoo, said the series of 10 simple lines arranged in groups of four, three, and three served to remind him that you don’t have to be incredibly important during your lifetime in order to be important. “It reminds me that I can live however I want,” he says in the book. “I don’t have to work in an office or wear a tie, as are the expectations of our culture. I can walk across the Alps and die in a swamp, and that’s OK.”” - Boing Boing (via heterochronia)

Submitted by kazys on 15 December, 2011 - 09:02

If Facebook, Google Plus, and YouTube Were Built in 1997....

If Facebook, Google Plus, and YouTube Were Built in 1997....:

Three important contemporary web sites, recreated with technology and spirit of late 1997, according to our memories.

Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.03 and a screen resolution of 1024×768 pixels, running under Windows 95. We recommend using a Virtual Machine or appropriate hardware, connected to a CRT monitor. If such an environment unachievable, it should be possible to experience the piece with any browser that still supports HTML Frames. The transfer speed of our server is limited to 8 kB/s («dial-up» speed).

~ olia & dragan, December 2011

Submitted by kazys on 15 December, 2011 - 09:00

Driving in the Smart City

I recently had the opportunity to speak in a session on "Driving in the Smart City" at the Smart City Expo in Barcelona. Below is a recording of an expanded version of the talk that I gave.

As I said in the video, I don't have any specific expertise in the issue of driving in the smart city, but what I have to say in the talk is absolutely crucial to the issues covered in the session, the conference as a whole, and all forms of design.

My thinking about complexity and the dangers it poses for us has been evolving fast lately and I am convinced that this is some of the most important work I've ever done. The message is simple, but the implications are profound. To say "hope you enjoy" would not accurately describe my feelings. Let's try "hope you are moved to action, dialogue, or further reflection" instead.

A Manifesto for Looseness from Kazys Varnelis on Vimeo.

Submitted by admin on 12 December, 2011 - 16:37

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On Steve Jobs

I've gathered some reflections on the life of Steve Jobs over at Domus. See here.

Submitted by admin on 27 October, 2011 - 12:22

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On Siri and Disruptive Techonologies

By now you either have an iPhone 4s in your possession or you are fed up with all the press about it. I'm in the former camp, so this post is going to add more fuel to the fire for the latter.

The new Siri voice recognition technology on the iPhone 4s is truly remarkable, as if Steve Jobs had "one last thing" on his deathbed. It's a nice thought, but apparently Jobs really had been working on the iPhone 5. Moreover, Siri (about which you can read more at Wikipedia) was acquired by Apple in 2010 and is not so much an internal development as a spin-off of SRI International, a fascinating research institute that has some deeply weird undertakings in its history (remote viewing, psychokinesis, telepathy and so on).

But there's little question in my mind that Siri is a disruptive technology. Of course, its a phenomenally effective voice-controlled digital assitant on the iPhone. Still in beta, it isn't perfect, but neither is the iPhone's touchscreen keyboard. In my practical experience, it's about as efficient to use. If I could figure out how to edit sentences with it, I could imagine using it to post blog entries. Still, to have it give me the correct answer to my query as to what the time in Vilnius, Lithuania is is truly mindblowing.

Voice recognition was a "next big thing" for so long and had failed to deliver for just about as long. Maybe even a decade ago, we stopped believing it would ever come. But now, all at once, it's here. Siri is a disruptive technology.

As widely noted, Siri has been programmed with a sense of humor (see shitsirisays.tumblr.com) generally described as "sassy." It's a brute force approach, akin to a 21st century Eliza but it helps make the software more complete, delivering the illusion that the device is truly intelligent.

The big question is how much Apple exploits it. The iOS is fine, but my initial tests suggest that this should be everywhere from my desktop computer to my automobile (which has barely functional voice recognition) to railroad ticket kiosks to elevators (although how you would handle it if a bunch of people spoke at once is not clear) to the walls of my house (house, turn up the temperature, its cold). Given Apple's track record, however, I find it hard to believe they will license the technology to all comers. Still, even if they don't once something is out in the open, somebody else will figure out a way to make it so it's a matter of time before we are all talking to the world around us like deranged animists.

I've called this a disruptive technology and it is. The ecosystem of mobile networked objects is going to change radically. But its still unclear to me how this is going to impact the landscape of human interactions in the landscape. Certainly, if the technology spreads, it will crank us further into a world of ubiquitous computing. But time is going to tell on much of this. Stay tuned.

Submitted by admin on 17 October, 2011 - 14:08

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Timothy Leary’s Apple Macintosh LC III.

Submitted by kazys on 6 October, 2011 - 22:27

Economic Crisis, Cycles, and Measures to Fix It

Asian and European markets fell overnight, priming Wall Street for a drop that will put it in bear market territory. Meanwhile, a double dip recession in the US is increasingly likely, China is finally showing signs of its own, potentially cataclysmic debt crisis, and both the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis and the American debt SNAFU are looming storm clouds. Morgan Stanley and Bank of America seem to be in deep trouble.

In other words, we're looking at the perfect storm.

One of the factors exacerbating this crisis is the loss of traditional tools for dealing with the economy. Starting with the Great Depression, Keynesian economic policy gave governments a way of getting out of bad times and even of avoiding them entirely. The method was simple enough: use deficit spending in a down cycle to stimulate the economy by investing in the future, primarily by building infrastructure, then pay off that deficit by taxing more highly during boom times, thus slowing down the boom, prolonging the good times. The goal was to turn recessions into slowdowns. Only the lunatic fringe thinks that Keynesianism was socialist. Far from it: capitalists embraced it for producing a long postwar boom. In the US, the 1930s saw the construction of roads, dams, and bridges across the country. The dams of Tennessee Valley Authority and the Pacific Northwest made possible the refining of Uranium and production of aluminum, providing the raw materials that allowed the Allies to win the Second World War while the dams of the Southwest allowed Los Angeles and Las Vegas to grow. Detecting a recession in the mid-1950s, Eisenhower responded with the program to construct the Interstate highway network. It all seemed to work splendidly. In a December 1965 issue of Time Magazine, economist Milton Friedman stated that that "We are all Keynesians now," referring to the dominance of the model among economists (or at least such is the way the statement was read, see the Wikipedia link on the topic). The bottom fell out immediately thereafter—the consequence of a slowing economy and overcommitment to the costly Vietnam War and social welfare programs—and the US economy didn't recover for another twenty years.

The problem with Keynesianism, ultimately, is that it relies on political will to operate: deficit spending and taxing during boom times are matters for politicians to approve, not just for economists to formulate. Given that taxes are never popular, conservatives typically preferred to cut rather than tax more during boom times. As the event horizon for investors became shorter and shorter, the idea of paying off one's debts seemed nostalgic. In the US, only during the boom years of the Clinton administration was a concerted effort made to pay off the national debt. Facing a recession and desparate to keep taxes low while waging two senseless wars, George W. Bush's admistration played Keynesian economics badly, creating an unprecedented national debt for the US and hamstringing the Obama administration when it came to power amidst the worst economic crisis of the postwar era. Now mind you, this may be a deliberate strategy, called "starve the beast." But surely even the most maniacal conservative politician wouldn't do that, would they?

Notwithstanding Bush's political use of Keynesianism wound up in disrepute after failing to get the US out of the economic turmoil it faced after 1966. By the 1980s, monetarist economic theory, led by the same Milton Friedman, took hold in the US. Avoiding the political hassles of Keynesianism, it suggested that the economic could be tuned by the Federal Reserve Bank which would adjust interest rates. Keep them low when the economy needs stimulus. Raise them to slow it down. To curb the stagflation of the late 1970s, Paul Volcker, a Democratic economists appointed by Jimmy Carter, raised the federal funds rate to 21%, thus bringing down inflation dramatically. Soon after, the Republican administration used Keynesian economic policy—albeit giving the economy a boost in the form of tax cuts instead of infrastructural investment—to successfully get the US economy going again. The Republicans took the credit for all of this, but perversely, it was a Democratic Fed chairman and a form of Keynesianism that worked.

With the death of Milton Friedman and the relative success of monetary policy since then, Larry Summers (Obama's chief economic advisor, among other things) would state in his 2006 eulogy for Milton Friedman, "we are now all Friedmanites." Although the full text was "any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites," it seems likely that Summers expected that all Republicans were by Friedmanites as well.

But with interest rates impossibly low and the national debt impossibly high, we seem to be facing a 1966-like moment. Economists have run out of options for solving this crisis in capitalism. Political will for either more manipulation for the Fed (and really, what can they do at this stage with the federal funds rate flatlining just above zero? see here) or for more Keynesianism has evaporated.

Game over, you've run out of quarters.

Submitted by admin on 4 October, 2011 - 10:00

economy

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What is the Future of Network Culture?

One of the central tenets of the Network Culture book is that we live in an atemporal condition, a paradoxical time in which we no longer understand the world in historical terms. The sort of historical narratives that were crucial to modernism and postmodernism did not accompany us into the new millenium. My position on atemporality requires a long argument so you're better off reading the chapter in the network culture book if you want to find out more. Purposefully, however, atemporality (and the concept of network culture as a whole) is a broad generalization, ridden with exceptions and fault lines. Rather than flaws in my argument, I understand these as flaws in the system to be exploited in order to undo the worst parts of network culture. In the case of atemporality, the most pernicious parts are our inability to map ourselves historically in order to take stock of our condition and the lack of alternative temporalities together with the possibility of rupture.

Still, its becoming clear that there is a kind of early network culture that came before the economic crisis of 2008 and a late (or high? middle? its too early to tell yet, we'll call it late for now, in hopes of something better coming down the pike in a decade) network culture that follows. So, too, we could well also speak of a first phase, a proto-network culture that began in the mid-1990s and ended prior to the dot.com crash of 2000, the millenium, and 9/11.

Is periodizing network culture not a contradiction? Of course it is, in the terms I outlined above but only to a point. These periods are scarcely felt. They are not periods with which, generally speaking, we mark our time, but each marks an intensification of network culture, accompanied by a higher level of atemporality.

Proto-network culture is both postmodern and not. It is marked by the overwhelming sense of the end of history, of the millennium as postmodernism itself was. Yet it is also marked by the sense that postmodernism has come to an end. Symposium after symposium on the end of history and the end of theory consumed academe at this point. But the unimaginable future was nigh, no longer the product of the nuclear bomb (that future had not come to pass) but rather of the information bomb, the explosive promise of the dot.com boom. Soon, it seemed, a new economy would take hold. Everything would change. Everything did change, but it wasn't just a matter of the spread of e-commerce, broadband, and endless connectivity. The dot.com crash itself established the boom and bust nature of network culture, with its heady optimism about a revolutionary, but even more highly capitalized future and its ability to throw away that future seemingly overnight in a panic. If unable to consider the past, this phase of network culture, then, was still obsessed with a future, an endlessly deferred proximate future of technological promise.

Early network culture was marked by this constantly receding event horizon. The moment it was reached another, generally mobile technology promised a revolution in everyday life. Urban wireless networks, mobile broadband, smart phones, geolocative smart phones, tablets, and ubiquitous computing; each of these, their prophets suggested, would crank us into a world of unprecedented, shiny newness. Smart cities would be just around the corner, as bright and promising to us as Corbusier's Contemporary City must have seemed in the mid-1920s. But there was already a notion that everything had changed, that a new economy had taken hold, as demonstrated by the impossible rise of the housing market and the endless profusion of easy credit. We lived, it seemed to many, in a newly globalzied, urban wonder-world dominated by creative city-states, liberal science fiction wonderlands in which architecture and technology would be wedded together to create places that would be nothing less than a great deal of fun.

Its only with the collapse of the housing bubble, the onset of the prolonged recession and the proliferation of that last promised technology, the tablet, that network culture has entered more fully into a condition of not only a suspended past but also a suspneded future. The housing bubble itself was a crisis of the future. As history had ended, so now the future ended. Ezra Pound's old cry "Make it new!" could now only be uttered by tired characters in a thought bubble in a New Yorker cartoon. And just as the days after 9/11 gave us a war without end, we are now given a recession without end. The new stationary economy seems punctuated by mini-booms that will buoy markets and epochal crises (like the impending collapse of the Eurozone, the second leg of the Great Recession, and of course everyone's great terror, the collapse of the massive Chinese property bubble). But the Great Recession is itself no longer even something that finance fears. The canny will make billions as before. Everyone else will be poorer, their futures more exhausted, less full of promise than ever.

My interest in all this, as before, is to ask what sort of fissures the edifice of network culture might have. How do we find ways not to get out of the cycle but to get out of the system itself?

Submitted by admin on 30 September, 2011 - 16:11

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