I have been reading Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google this week and I am going to put up a post with my reaction sometime relatively soon. But suffice it to say that it should be mandatory reading list for everyone with a passing investment in where network culture is heading. At the Guardian the other day, Carr expanded on his argument by proposing that one consequence of the move toward utility computing would be a decline in white collar jobs. See here.

Carr’s observations dovetail with the Writer’s Strike… Hollywood is one of the few places in the country that still has a powerful and—on the ground at least—popular union system. I wish the union well, of course, but after reading Carr’s article I can’t help but think that this is a nasty byproduct of network culture. Maybe the studios—themselves big media dinosaurs—think that the only way they can come to terms with the changing conditions in the industry is to dig in their heels? Is this Detroit or Pittsburgh in the early 1980s? 

Whenever I walk from to Sunrise Mart for lunch, I make it a point to avoid the construction site on Spring and Varick.

After all, anything by Donald Trump and Bovis Lend Lease can't be good. In terms of quality or safety, New York's construction is little better than Los Angeles's, even if the buildings appear to be made of real materials such as steel instead of wood.

So, it is that a scant three days after I told my friend Mimi that we were not, under any circumstances, walking under the scaffolding at that site she sends me this item: Worker is Killed in Accident at Trump Soho Tower. Another outrage from the man who put "You're Fired!" on national television. Of course the global élite that will inhabit this structure one day will be to uninformed to notice, but just think of the quality of construction in the building. Nice place to live.  

In the "Terrazzo Jungle," a New Yorker article from 2004, Malcolm Gladwell recounts the history of the shopping mall and the role of Victor Gruen, the Viennese crusader for the shopping mall as a new form of urbanity in the 1950s United States. Gladwell points to a little known change in the 1954 Internal Revenue Code that allowed developers to write off their investments much more quickly, stimulating them to make ever bigger shopping centers and, in so doing, undoing America's downtown retail districts.