mercurious

Informal notes from “Internet as Playground and Factory” #IPF09 Conference at The New School

Image from Constant’s New Babylon: the hyper-architecture of desire [google book] By Mark Wigley¹

Expanding upon a micro-thought from a panel discussion

“#IFP09 thankyou Thomas Malaby for showing me Constant’s New Babylon: a post-monetary configurable architectural mesh http://bit.ly/2Rv1Gr” – @aquarious

The tweet above implicates multiple layers of private property that mesh the various networked but self-fashioning aspects of a typical public realtime hypertext exchange these days. The layers of exchanged property include Twitter (messaging), Bit.ly (shortlink), Facebook (social web), Google Books (content publishing) and related software (browsers, apps, OS, etc.) to render social media towards public communications.

These private and corporate accumulations of virtual cultural capital derived from user contributed content add value well beyond their physical capital which comprises the workforce, server farms, bandwidth, energy and even brand identity, all subsumed as value commodities optimized for self-fashioning and auto-meshing. The notion of this hypertext broadcast evokes the antagonism between the private property of the communication transported by publishing tools and the public nature of the participants and their expressions. The binary boundaries of labor theory models have been blurred between distinctions of…

• public/private
• property/commons
• production/consumption
• exploit/contribute
• work/play
• oligarchy/democracy
• self/group
• asymmetrical/egalitarian
• physical/virtual

Indeed, new language is required to express the hybridity and mutation invoked by the social forces of emergent design technology.

History has presented us with examples of imaginary objects and structures that prefigured our contemporary conditions. In pondering Constant Niewunhuys’ New Babylon as the ultimate imaginary object of urban architectures, there is also Bush’s Memex as the ultimate imaginary object of knowledge consoles. These future-minded design studies arrive out of creative practice and military research disciplines, respectively. But they share a common perspective on the destiny of humankind as a networked and reciprocal society.

Indeed, the Memex already serves as a de facto historical artifact of a proto-hypertext pre-digital device to foreshadow the Internet. By synthesizing the virtual of knowledge networks towards a metaphorical or rhetorical architecture eventually built as the Internet, perhaps the digital memex, maybe the virtual New Babylon, a layer of self-fashioning protocols and exchanges emerged that sit between physical transit and everyday life. Vannevar Bush imagined his Memex microfilm knowledge console as the liberation from libraries, towards exchangeable and reconfigurable knowledge media. He extended self-enrichment through participatory scholarship with the promise of technology to overcome the limitations of physical media and the requisite bureaucracy to manage it. He imagined the basis for the internet before the digital computer and the network were fully conceived and implemented. Meanwhile, before the digital network engendered hyperconnectedness and hyperfragmentation as intrinsic structures and conditions of hypertext knowledge distribution systems, Constant Niewunhuys appears to have applied a parallel idea of hyperarchitecture to the basis of a futurist society built upon a “unitary urbanism.”

The post-monetary vision of Constant’s New Babylon envisages an architectural mesh of “infinitely reconfigurable spaces”² where a post-capitalist society of self-fashioning actors thrive beyond commodity exchange in the conventional sense. We wonder if the physical architecture of humans will eventually evolve into this rhizomatic, multi-layered, multi-dimensional, network of cellular or atomic structures that represent and disseminate information or embody and interconnect human habitats across the Earth in a uniformly neural network pattern. This pattern resembles the visual forms of the digital network, our understandings of neuroscience, biochemistry and atomic physics. Is it the eventual but wholly natural state of human society?³

The cellular design affords the infinite and reconfigurable mobility of capital and commodity exchange of all sorts across the boundaries of time and place. Humans may eventually construct a habitat that resembles a web of interconnected self-regulating, post-national, post-regional communities who thrive on unfettered commodity exchange, beyond scarcity, beyond the immaterial. Labor and value creation in this kind of a post-monetary urban planning concept depends on an individual’s accumulation of knowledge credentials, artifacts of cultural production and the distributed economics of emergent peer-to-peer micro-transactions — peer production.

“After rehearsing these few salient features of today’s art criticism, I must say on the contrary that for our situationist comrades, for Constant and myself, the three-dimensional explorations in question here can in no way be an object of enthusiasm, as they are but scattered elements on the path toward a future construction of ambiences, a unitary urbanism.” – Guy Debord⁴

Leave it to Guy Debord to take all the fun out of sci-fi fantasy.

Footnotes

1. via Google Books [↩]
2. Thomas Malaby at #IPF09, The New School [↩]
3. Think Powers of 10, by Charles and Ray Eames, which illustrates a repeating pattern of nature’s architecture from atom to cosmos. [↩]
4. Constant and the Path of Unitary Urbanism on Google Books [↩]