warning: underground cable

A utility pole in Lincoln Park, Chicago. In the alley behind Big Apple Finer Foods. I always enjoy seeing the different fonts and symbols AT&T and the other telecommunications providers use, and how the designs change over time. These white stickers seem to have replaced bright orange ones.

old and discarded, old and restored and for sale

Televisions. Manhattan. October 2011.

Typewriters. Philadelphia. October 11. Neither of these devices were produced to connect to the Internet. The typewriters don't even have a screen, let alone a touchscreen. With as much time as I spend on various computing devices--primarily a laptop, a desktop, and a mobile phone--it is difficult to consider typing on a typewriter or consuming popular culture from a television and not through online sources. And both of these technologies are not even that ancient; the typewriters will certainly still function when all of my current computers have ceased working.

 

brown pipe

along the Schuylkill River. This tube will soon hold up a traffic sign.

portable cellular antenna site in the redwoods

Between Porter College and Kresge College, University of California, Santa Cruz, June 2010.

Peter Sloterdijk, data centers and the spaces of networked, psychedelic capitalism

What was 365 Main's Oakland data center near Jack London Square, now owned by Digital Realty Trust. 2nd St. and Brush St., Oakland in January 2010. (photo by author; map here).

Peter Sloterdijk: In your exploration of the "architectures of foam," you write that modernity renders the issue of residence explicit. What do you mean by that? 

Peter Sloterdijk: Here I am developing an idea that Walter Benjamin addressed in his Arcades Project. He starts from the anthropological assumption that people in all epochs dedicate themselves to creating interiors, and at the same time he seeks to emancipate this motif from its apparent timelessness. He therefore asks the question: How does capitalist man in the 19th century express his need for an interior? The answer is: He uses the most cutting-edge technology in order to orchestrate the most archaic of all needs, the need to immunize existence by constructing protective islands. In the case of the arcade, modern man opts for glass, wrought iron, and assembly of prefabricated parts in order to build the largest possible interior. For this reason, Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, erected in London in 1851, is the paradigmatic building. It forms the first hyper-interior that offers a perfect expression of the spatial idea of psychedelic capitalism. It is the prototype of all later theme-park interiors and event architectures. The arcade heralds the abolition of the outside world. It abolishes outdoor markets and brings them indoors, into a closed sphere. The antagonistic spatial types of salon and market meld here to form a hybrid. This is what Benjamin found so theoretically exciting: The 19th-century citizen seeks to expand his living room into a cosmos and at the same time to impress the dogmatic form of a room on the universe. This sparks a trend that is perfected in the 20th-century apartment design as well as in shopping-mall and sports-stadium design-there are the three paradigms of modern construction, that is, the construction of micro-interiors and macro-interiors. (p. 128)*

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Sloterdijk identifies the place in the middle of the 18th-century where capitalist society embedded itself even more into the urban fabric. This "psychedelic capitalism" identified itself through an exhibition space that would twist and morph into the generic, everyday shopping mall--before that mall became so bland to be unseen and thus naturalized in the landscape as the place where shopping happens, the type of building had to be created.

If the Crystal Palace transformed society, as a space that moved social and economic relations inside, is there a subsequent contemporary example that has equally transformed our networked society? Is it still the shopping mall, or could it be a data center? Data centers house the Net, hosting websites, storing email, and the like. They do not provide interior spaces for individuals to shop or socialize, but they do organize and produce the flows of information around which society, to a large extent these days, functions. The shopping mall now competes with online retailers, the salon where people would gather to socialize now competes-and has probably lost-to online social media such as Facebook. But the design of the data center is in no way celebrated and is rarely even acknowledged in the urban landscape in the way Sloterdijk talks of the Crystal Palace. As is evident in the picture above of a data center near downtown Oakland, the design seems intended to reinforce the secure, citadel-like, veiled anonymity of the building and, consequently, the activities that go on inside. There is little in the way of hyper-interiors in a data center. The interior space they produce is located on the computer's monitor or the smartphone's touchscreen, accessible only to the individual holding the device. The space itself fades into the urban background, visible only when you are looking for it.

The utility of urban space to declare the motives and intentions of "psychedelic capitalism" in its current incarnation still exists, just look at any spectacular skyscraper development, but perhaps the organizational space for our society today is embodied in the largely anonymous data centers that are scattered about the landscape, providing the data for our ubiquitous connectivity, but, spatially at least, fading into the metropolitan background we move through daily.

*from an interview with Peter Sloterdijk at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 17 February, 2009, where Sloterdijk asked himself the questions. Transcribed in Harvard Design Magazine 30, Spring/Summer 2009. 

yellow pipes

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)