The Cyborg Self and the Networked City William J

#707153 9/10/03 M707153.FINAL 12/2/03 9:42 AM Page 1 Me++ Me++ THE CYBORG SELF AND THE NETWORKED CITY WILLIAM J. MITCHELL The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Garamond 3, Magda Clean Mono, and Magda Clean by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mitchell, William J. (William John), 1944– Me++ : the cyborg self and the networked city / William J. Mitchell. p. cm. ISBN 0-262-13434-9 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Telecommunication—Popular works. 2. Computer networks—Popular works. 3. Cyberspace—Popular works. 4. Information superhighway— Social aspects. I. Title. TK5101.M555 2003 303.48¢3—dc21 2003053968 Radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Bertolt Brecht, “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication,” 1926 CONTENTS PROLOGUE 1 1 BOUNDARIES/NETWORKS 7 2 CONNECTING CREATURES 19 3 WIRELESS BIPEDS 41 4 DOWNSIZED DRY GOODS 63 5 SHEDDING ATOMS 83 6 DIGITAL DOUBLIN’ 103 7 ELECTRONIC MNEMOTECHNICS 113 8 FOOTLOOSE FABRICATION 131 9 POST-SEDENTARY SPACE 143 10 AGAINST PROGRAM 159 11 CYBORG AGONISTES 169 12 LOGIC PRISONS 189 EPILOGUE 203 NOTES 213 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 251 INDEX 253 Me++ PROLOGUE To honor an approaching centenary, I embarked on an electronic pil- grimage. Like Ulysses setting sail for Ithaca, I looked to the heavens for guidance.1 I entered “Marconi Station, Wellfleet, Massachusetts” into my automobile navigation system. GPS satellites located me, soft- ware computed the quickest route, and synthetic voice commands con- ducted me to a sandy cliff on the shores of Cape Cod. The motorists whizzing past on Route 6, listening to their radios and casually chatting on their cellphones, didn’t give it a thought, but it was on this windy site (most of which has now fallen into the ocean) that the wireless world began.2 Here, Guglielmo Marconi built four 210-foot towers, spun a spiderweb of wires in the sky, cranked up a kerosene engine to drive a 20,000-volt power supply, and ran a spark- gap rotor that could be heard for miles. On 18 January 1903 (the year in which the Wright brothers were to introduce the world to powered flight), he transmitted a wireless telegraph message across the Atlantic. Suddenly the continents were connected in a new way. A century later, global wireless systems brought me to the spot and kept me effortlessly in touch as I stood there. In my hand I held an inexpensive transmitter and receiver that was immeasurably more sophisticated than Marconi’s immense construction, and could instantly connect me to any one of hundreds of millions of similar devices scattered around the world. Furthermore, it could link me to the countless servers of the Internet and the Web. I pulled off the cover (no doubt voiding the warranty) to reveal a palm-sized, precisely made architectural model; the powerhouse had shrunk to a matchbook- scaled battery, the transmission house now resided on a chip, and the antenna tower was just a couple of inches long. It seemed that Brobdingnag had been rebooted as Lilliput—producing a dramatic inversion. Where Marconi’s human operators had been appendages to a motionless machine, the device that I now grasped was a liberating extension of my mobile body. SCALE The two parts of Marconi’s system had evolved in opposite directions. The network had scaled up. The single wireless link had exploded into a dense, global web of wireless infrastructure; if you counted all of its terrestrial, satellite, and spacecraft linkages, it was now humankind’s most extensive single construction. Simultaneously, though, the transmission and reception apparatus had dramatically scaled down; it had reduced from landscape element to fashion accessory. And this two-sided transformation, I reflected, was not just a technological wonder; it had changed the way we lived. Over the course of a hundred years—and particularly in the last couple of decades—the convergence of increasingly capable wireless technology with expanding network infrastructure, miniaturized electronics, and proliferating digital information had radically refashioned the relationships of individuals to their constructed environments and to one another. I thought of the cellphone conversations that had continued until the very moment the World Trade Center towers collapsed, of the desperate calls from the cabins of hijacked airliners hurtling toward their targets, and of the pagers that had carried on transmit- ting from beneath the rubble.3 We had become inseparable from our increasingly capable electronic organs; our very limbs had become fleshy antenna supports; our interconnections had ramified and inten- sified to an almost incomprehensible degree. From prenatal imaging and heartbeat monitoring to posthumous persistence of our digital addresses and traces, our bodies now existed in a state of continuous electronic engagement with their surroundings. Thing-to-thing relationships had similarly mutated. Digital networks had begun as collections of large, expensive boxes connected by cheap wires. But over time the boxes got smaller, cheaper, and more 2 ME++ numerous, while the wires remained much the same. Increasingly, then, it was the wiring of networks, not the boxes, that consumed space and cost money. With the extension of networks, telecommuni- cations providers worried about the “last mile” of cable to homes and businesses, architects struggled to jam cable trays and wiring closets into buildings, cables snaggled across floors in unseemly tangles, and many things that might benefit from network connections never got them because it was just too difficult to run the wires. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, though, inexpensive, ubiquitous wireless connections were linking whole new classes of things into networks— very tiny things, very numerous things, very isolated things, highly mobile things, things deeply embedded in other things, and things that were jammed into tight and inaccessible places. Most dramatically, wireless transponders that could identify physical objects had shrunk to the size of a pinhead and the cost of a few cents, and bil- lions of them were being produced and deployed. Now, nothing need be without processing power, and nothing need be left unlinked. The distinction between computer hardware and more traditional sorts of hardware was rapidly fading. MATERIALITY The trial separation of bits and atoms is now over. In the early days of the digital revolution it seemed useful to pry these elementary units of materiality and information apart. The virtual and the physical were imagined as separate realms—cyberspace and meatspace, as William Gibson’s insouciantly in-your-face formulation put it. This seemed a welcome release from the stubborn constraints of tangibility— until the dot-com bubble burst, at least. Now, though, the boundary between them is dissolving. Networked intelligence is being embedded everywhere, in every kind of physical system—both natural and artificial. Routinely, events in cyberspace are being reflected in physical space, and vice versa.4 Electronic commerce is not, as it turns out, the replacement of bricks and mortar by servers and telecommu- nications, but the sophisticated integration of digital networks with physical supply chains. Increasingly, we are living our lives at the points where electronic information flows, mobile bodies, and PROLOGUE 3 physical places intersect in particularly useful and engaging ways. These points are becoming the occasions for a characteristic new archi- tecture of the twenty-first century. The metaphor of “virtuality” seemed a powerful one as we first struggled to understand the implications of digital information, but it has long outlived its usefulness. Bits don’t just sit out there in cyberspace, to be visited occasionally like pictures in a gallery or poked at through a “window” (telling metaphor). It makes more sense to rec- ognize that invisible, intangible, electromagnetically encoded information establishes new types of relationships among physical events occurring in physical places. A bit is indeed a “difference that makes a difference,” but we should think of that difference as something concrete, with definite spatial and temporal coordinates—such as the opening or closing of some particular switch, door, or floodgate, the dispatch of a product from a warehouse, the starting or stopping of a motor, the change in color of a pixel on a screen somewhere, or the shift in position of a robot arm—rather than a change in value of an abstract variable or an alteration in the imagined mental state of some idealized message recipient. Bits organized into code now constitute the most powerful means we have for expressing intentions and trans- lating them into actions. INTENTIONS Conceived of in this tangible and architectural fashion, code makes it possible to specify the relationships between physical causes and effects in terms of symbolically expressed mathematical functions, rather than by constructing specialized mechanical linkages or hydraulic systems, hardwired electrical circuits, and the like.

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