geographies of algorithms

60 Hudson Street, a key node in the global financial market, as well as the former Western Union Headquarters. 

Kevin Slavin's July 2011 TED Talk on the role of algorithms in the financial market and the direct correlations between these financial algorithms and our everyday lives is available to watch on the TED website. At 12:00 minutes into the talk, Slavin discusses the changing architecture of lower Manhattan. The carrier hotel where the regional and global communication networks come together is at 60 Hudson Street, the former site of the Western Union Telegraph Company's headquarters. Buildings near 60 Hudson are being retrofitted to house servers and other equipment for financial firms, since proximity to the network hub means financial trades can happen microseconds faster, which can mean more profit for the firms. Real estate near 60 Hudson St is spiking in value because placing a firms servers close to the colocation point allows them to run the financial algorithms through black box trading that are apparently 70% of Wall St. trades today (these figures come from a talk Slavin did at the Lift Conference earlier this year in Geneva). Through cutting a few milliseconds off of trading times--the lag time it takes for the digital information to physically reach Wall St itself--money can be made. This is a fairly particular real estate situation -- perhaps only applicable in Manhattan, London, and Tokyo -- but interesting none the less. At 7:50 into the Lift Conference talk, Slavin states that by retrofitting office buildings to hold servers, "buildings, structures are changing for the needs of algorithms that have no agenda or correlation to anything a human would be doing in that space." In the TED talk, Slavin elaborates on this new conceptualization of the landscape, discussing a recently-built fiber optic communication line between Chicago and New York that exists only to facilitate these algorithmic trades. These trading systems that have no tangible existence outside of the computers and communication infrastructure that houses them, let alone a connection to the everyday existence of humanity, are impacting the urban and non-urban landscape significantly.

The image quality in Slavin's talk is not that high. I thought I'd put up some photos of 60 Hudson Street that I took in March 2010 in case anyone was interested to see how the building looks from the sidewalk.

60 Hudson Street's main entrance.

"Learn how to blog" workshop flyer on the sidewalk outside the facility. The polar opposites represented here are great - a photocopied, physical flyer advertizing an online class to learn how to create digital content, outside one of the most important hubs for the global Internet in North America.

The remains of two Space Invader tiles--some street art based on 8-bit video games glued to a cinder block wall across the street from 60 Hudson.

 For a bit more discussion about 60 Hudson Street in the context of tracing the route an email takes across the United States, see Andrew Blum's piece "Netscapes" in Wired Magazine from 2009.

tall and narrow

Sea Isle City, Jersey Shore.

customer owned service

Sea Isle City, Jersey Shore. I hadn't seen a sticker indicating 'customer owned service' before. I suppose the owners do not want the utilities to mess with their wires. It is something of a reversal from the typical utility pole stickers, that seem to warn of arrest if anyone messes with the cables.

the production of the urban

Mobile communication technologies allow individuals to be connected to their social network nearly anywhere. But place still matters. No one lives in the ether of hertzian space. More-so, our lives are still demarcated by physical, tangible boundaries: doorways, traffic on the streets, private property, urban planning decisions to run a freeway through a neighborhood. That individual can be connected to the ‘Net’, but they are still stuck in traffic on the freeway, waiting to get home. The supposed liberation that was to arrive with always-on access to the Internet through a smartphone is convenient, but still tied up in the real spaces we live in and move through daily. Smartphones do not smooth out potholes on the street, nor do they fix a leaky roof (and if a hurricane knocks out the electricity, once that battery dies, the connectivity dies as well. Assuming the mobile network didn't get cut out by the hurricane at the same time the power went out). Mobile connectivity forces society to reconceptualize our relationship to space, to include the immaterials of Net-based information providing useful information (or not), to tie to the global, digital flows of the Net-based communication systems. Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space (originally published in 1974), offers a way to re-think the concrete physicality of the urban landscape into a multitude of flows working at numerous scales from the local to the global. He reconceptualizes the urban landscape into a space that encompasses the material and immaterial movement of energy and information around which our everyday lives under network society are produced.

Here is the quote:

Consider a house, and a street, for example. The house has six storeys and an air of stability about it. One might almost see it as the epitome of immovability, with its concrete and its stark, cold and rigid outlines. (Built around 1950: no metal or plate glass yet.) Now, a critical analysis would doubtless destroy the appearance of solidity of this house, stripping it, as it were, of its concrete slabs and its thin non-load-bearing walls, which are really glorified screens, and uncovering a very different picture. In the light of this imaginary analysis, our house would emerge as permeated from every direction by streams of energy which run in and out of it by every imaginable route: water, gas, electricity, telephone lines, radio and television signals, and so on. Its image of immobility would then be replaced by an image of a complex of mobilities, a nexus of in and out conduits. By depicting this convergence of waves and currents, this new image, much more accurately than any drawing or photograph, would at the same time disclose the fact that this piece of ‘immovable property’ is actually a two-faceted machine analogous to an active body: at once a machine calling for massive energy supplies, and an information-based machine with low energy requirements. The occupants of the house perceive, receive and manipulate the energies which the house itself consumes on a massive scale (for the lift, kitchen, bathroom, etc.)

Comparable observations, of course, might be made apropos of the whole street, a network of ducts constituting a structure, having a global form, fulfilling functions, and so on. Or apropos of the city, which consumes (in both senses of the word) truly colossal quantities of energy, both physical and human, and which is in effect a constantly burning, blazing bonfire. Thus as exact a picture as possible of this space would differ considerably from the one embodied in the representational space which its inhabitants have in their minds, and which for all its inaccuracy plays an integral role in social practice. (Lefebvre 1991, 93)

power lines, cloud

layered steel plates

near the University of Pennsylvania. August 2011.

Near Marshall, California on Tomales Bay is the Marconi Conference Center State Historic Park, on the site of Guglielmo Marconi's Marshall Receiving Station, where trans-Pacific wireless communication signals were received. This concrete block anchored guy wires that held in place one of the tall receiving antenna for the station. The antenna are no longer present; these concrete blocks are one of the few infrastructural remnants of the wireless station. Without the innovation of Marconi and other early wireless communication engineers, our contemporary world of instantaneous, digital and mobile communication would not be the same. This historic location is now a conference center, and any memory of its original use is relegated to photographs and written description. This photo taken by the author, January 2011. I plan on writing more about the space of Marconi's wireless infrastructure soon.

My two blogs, Pockets of Space and Everyday Structures, have now both been mentioned at Things Magazine in the last six months. As I wrote in April regarding Pockets of Space, it is always rewarding to have your work mentioned on websites you actually read, in this case the only meta-blog I regularly follow. Again, thanks for the mention at Things Magazine.

preparing the street for new fiber optic cables

Lombard Street in the low 20s, Center City Philadelphia. Near the AT&T communication facility at 500 S. 27th St it appears that AT&T and Verizon-in the center of the photograph you can just make out 'VZ' spray painted in orangeis going to be cutting up the asphalt to put down new fiber optic communication cables. The neighborhood is full of these markings from AT&T, Verizon, and Level 3; I am assuming new communication systems are entering Center City, emerging out of the AT&T communication facility at the corner of 27th Street and South Street.