#39: Darkness on the Edge of Town
Happy new year! One of my favorite things about the end of each year is all the excited and/or terrified predictions for the next one. I read almost any list of predictions I come across, not because I believe they’ll actually happen but because of how they reflect the predictor’s worldview (most predictions for 2018 have to be unlikely in order to be interesting enough to publish). I’m not going to make my own predictions here because I'd have trouble taking myself seriously, but I am going to share my favorite prediction this time around, from James Bridle: “The complete collapse of consensus reality, which is already breaching at multiple points.” Now that could actually happen! And like any realistic prediction, it basically already is happening.
Bridle concludes his tweet with the hashtag #newdarkage, which raised the following question for me: If our enclaves and bubbles really did resolve themselves to such a degree that our society could be said to have entered another Dark Age, would we notice, and if so, how would we notice? Are we already halfway in one? The collapse of the digital commons got a lot of attention in the past year, most clearly indicated by fake news hysteria, the attack on net neutrality, everything Facebook does, and the growing awareness that a handful of companies (including Facebook) have captured most of the internet by now. But what about meatspace? Though we may pretend otherwise, we still spend most of our lives in the so-called real world, which in its turn is increasingly organized by software. Superficially, it seems like that domain is actually improving: People are moving back into cities, getting rid of their cars, riding bikes, and reading Jane Jacobs. Maybe the best antidote to a nascent Dark Age is simply logging off and hanging out in the park for a while.
Probably not. The best quote I encountered this year (which has appeared in this newsletter before) is Norbert Wiener's decades-old observation that “there are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy in a world in which the entropy as a whole tends to increase, and the existence of these islands enables some of us to assert the existence of progress.” Just because things are going great for you or me doesn't necessarily mean they're getting better, or worse. It just means that we all share less of our reality with everyone else than we think, and it's hard to say what's going on outside of our own islands. The most important contemporary urban trend is one that mirrors and predates what's happening to the internet: the continued rise of enclaves that filter and separate people in space. Apple's new headquarters was the past year's great architectural monument to the enclave, but in general their borders are usually softer (determined by economics or self-selection) and their relationship to their surroundings more subtle. If we're going to worry about online filter bubbles, we should pay more attention to their physical infrastructure too.
Reads:
Dan Hill, "The Battle for the Infrastructure of Everyday Life." A meditation on designing cities for the public rather than the individual in the networked age.
I never fully appreciated the power of autotune until hearing it transform "Smells Like Teen Spirit" into major key. Weird and amazing (thanks John).
This week every year, I follow the brilliant Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky State of the World discussion on The Well. This year's is still ongoing. I usually read Bruce Sterling's posts and skim past the rest.
Until next time,
Drew