The second Situated Technologies pamphlet rolls

Aw, dig it: Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque’s Urban Versioning System 1.0 hits the streets, the second in the Architectural League’s series of Situated Technologies pamphlets.

I’m looking forward to it – to be blunderingly honest – with a mixture of delighted anticipation and dread. According to the League’s blurb, Versioning System

…asks the question: what lessons can architecture learn from software development, and more specifically, from the Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement? Written in the form of a quasi-license, Urban Versioning System 1.0 posits seven constraints that, if followed, will contribute to an open-source urbanism that radically challenges the conventional ways in which cities are constructed.

The dread comes from just knowing that Fuller and Haque are going to pre-capitulate, and in all probability state in far more concise a manner, a lot of the argument on open systems in my own book. This seems to be an occupational hazard for any would-be author of a book on urban computing in these verdant days of 2008. So it goes.

Anyway, that comes under the heading of My Problem and Not Yours. Go download the pamphlet now, or better yet, pick yrself up a hardcopy. What was ever cooler than a pamphlet?

I have seen the future of urban life

Every rock critic and critic wannabe – and trust me, there are a great many more of the latter – is familiar with that famous moment in 1974 when Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau breathlessly proclaimed that he’d seen “rock and roll’s future.” (Unfortunately for Landau’s credibility, the sentence ends “…and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”)

After something I saw last night, I now know just how Landau felt. And you know what? I bet I’m a lot righter than he turned out to be.

What I saw was this. It’s a visualization tool called Citysense, the product of SoHo-based startup Sense Networks. Sense Networks’ hyper-enthusiastic CEO Greg Skibiski spent about an hour walking me through Citysense, and the overall impression I was left with was that the future so many of us have been talking about for so long has all of a sudden arrived in the form of a live, running, working application.

What Citysense does is simple, yet profound. It gathers real-time positional fixes from mobile devices (so far, naturally, for San Francisco only), aggregates them and plots them on a map that is itself then pushed back to the mobile device. The result is a live “heat map” of human activity, displaying specifically which parts of the city people tend to use, and when. In a dreamy rhythmscape designed as if to give Henri Lefebvre a posthumous boner, you can see surges of activity washing over the city just like an algal bloom across the surface of a lake: morning commute, lunch break, quittin’ time, supper and the dispersal home (followed by a discrete, if just possibly indiscreet, coda of after-hours clubbing). It’s a textbook illustration of my dictum that nothing is as interesting as information about place in that place, delivered in such a way that it can be acted upon.

So far, so good…so what, right? You might imagine that such tidbits are of interest solely to geowankers, traffic engineers, outdoor-advertising brokers, and the kind of consultants that get called in to help decide where to drop the next Starbucks or Rite Aid. But here’s where things begin to get interesting, because anyone familiar with the whole rhetoric of “reality mining” that’s emerged from MIT’s Media Lab over the last few years will be comfortable with the idea that macro-level social and behavioral inferences can be derived from data of this sort. (This is not at all coincidental: Media Lab mining maven Sandy Pentland is a co-founder of Sense Networks.)

The use case that Citysense comes bundled with in this first iteration is, frankly, just a little bit silly; the idea is that you’d plan your evenings around the emergent nodal points, clicking through hot spots to the Yelp listing associated with each, or the relevant Google Street View. Just how many nights, though, am I going to be sitting at home at ten o’clock, wanting to hit the town but needing a mobile application to tell me where the action is? (And doesn’t any self-respecting 24-hour party person already just know, anyway?)

So where the promotional materials bill Citysense as “an innovative mobile application for local nightlife discovery,” and it’s currently saddled with the tagline “Live San Francisco Nightlife Activity,” it is clearly capable of so much more than that. The find-the-party scenario is pretty transparently just something to prime the pump, a stalking horse for all of the far more interesting things that people will figure out what to do with it.

For example, one of the first things that drops out of the Citysense data is a statistically strongly significant degree of correlation between certain populations and specified locations in the city – in effect, the existence of self-selected “tribes” defined entirely by their behavior in space and time (Skibiski’s word, and one whose resonances I’m not entirely happy with). When you have access to additional information characterizing these locations – you know: is this a sportsbar or a leather bar? a Muni Metro stop or a parking lot? the Zeitgeist or the Top of the Mark? the drunk tank or the emergency room? – well, then, it seems to me that you have the beginnings of a concordance to the city. You can begin to make proactive decisions about how to make best use of the urban manifold.

I don’t want to let go of any of the ethical or practical reservations I have about such inferences and actions taken upon them. For one thing, the mapping fails to account for the possibility of differential uses of space along the z-axis, treating it as merely a programmatic extrusion of the ground plane. And I particularly worry about creating spatiotemporal and experiential echo chambers worse than any political blog, in which nobody armed with Citysense or equivalent ever needs to confront the existence of anyone, -where or -thing not pre-vetted as being inside the user’s comfort zone.

Nevertheless, it is transparently self-evident to me that this is the way we’re going to do cities from here on out. And if you don’t think that’s pretty dang novel, just imagine what it’s going to be like when the spaces in question are themselves provided with APIs that pull usage data from Citysense and reflect it in some state of their presentation to the world – then the crazy feedback-loop urbanism really begins.

I’m seeing a big LED signboard tacked across the front of Zeitgeist’s doorway: “Garden now at 23% above threshold. Get your Tamale Lady orders in now!” And if that isn’t the future of cities, then I don’t know what is.

At forty

Today I celebrate the completion of my fortieth trip around the sun.

At forty, a white American male can be reasonably confident that he’s at, or even a touch beyond, the statistical midpoint of his life, that in some raw actuarial sense there are now more yesterdays than there are tomorrows. The relevant clichés suggest that this is a moment for taking stock, for putting things in perspective, and they are absolutely on point.

I suspect I’m like a great many of us, though, in that the culture’s usual metrics of success don’t really signify; so many of the things we are told a man is supposed to want for himself are simply not things I aspire to. So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about just what such an accounting might mean for me. And what I keep circling back to is that wisest and most beautiful of Nietzsche’s injunctions: “Become who you are.”

That’s the only metric or goalpost that makes any sense at all to me. Of course, in accepting it, I’m immediately thrown back on the problem of trying to figure out just who that person is.

I can sure tell you who I’d like for him to be: someone more trusting, more forgiving, more generous, more gracious and more present. Someone continually engaged in the repair of the world, continually alive to the profound love and friendship that surrounds him. Someone who spends more time on bicycles and less on airplanes. Someone who plays the game a little more lightly, as my friend George would say. (He’d be referring to Go, but I think it’s pretty wise counsel in general.)

All of this is aspirational, admittedly and surely. But you know what? There’s not a damn thing in that laundry list that isn’t achievable with patience, some discipline, and a little help from my friends. In fact, I find the prospect of trying to become that guy entirely agreeable. So here’s to everything we’ve shared up until now, here’s to the beloved that didn’t make it…and here’s to the road ahead.

I can’t wait to see how this story ends.

Furverts

I really, really don’t think this is what Deleuze meant by “becoming-animal.”